Nissa, Ascended Animist
Compleated is the mechanic that lets you buy loyalty with blood, and this Nissa runs the harshest exchange rate in the cycle. The printed cost is seven mana; each of the two green Phyrexian mana symbols can instead be paid with 2 life, but every life-payment strips two loyalty from her starting seven. Cast for full green, she lands at seven loyalty; cast with both hybrids paid in life, she arrives at three, a shell of the same card. That single knob converts a rigid mana requirement into a sliding scale, and it feeds directly into the +1: the Phyrexian Horror it makes is an X/X where X is her current loyalty, so the tax you took to deploy her early is the exact tax on the token she produces. Deploy her honestly and the turn she resolves already puts an 8/8 on the board with a planeswalker behind it; cheat her in and you get a 4/4 and a wounded superfriend. The design lives in that recursion: loyalty is both the resource she spends and the size of the body she prints, so every point paid in life is felt twice. The -1 is workmanlike artifact-and-enchantment removal, and the -7 (a Forest-scaling team pump with trample) is the payoff that rewards actually reaching high loyalty rather than shortcutting to her. Compleation, rendered as a literal cost-versus-power dial, and few cards make the arithmetic bite this cleanly.
Rules text
can be paid with or 2 life. For each paid with life, this planeswalker enters with two fewer loyalty counters.)
+1: Create an X/X green Phyrexian Horror creature token, where X is Nissa's loyalty.
−1: Destroy target artifact or enchantment.
−7: Until end of turn, creatures you control get +1/+1 for each Forest you control and gain trample.
