Ral, Izzet Viceroy
The unusual thing about this walker is where it points the accounting: the middle ability counts instants and sorceries in your graveyard and in exile, which makes the number climb from every source that shuffles spells out of play, not just the ones that die on the stack. Most spellslinger payoffs care about casts; this one cares about accumulation, and it treats the exile zone as a resource to be filled rather than a place cards go to disappear. The plus loots aggressively enough to feed both halves at once: it stocks the graveyard for the removal math while it digs for the next spell to cast. Structurally the card wants a deck that has already committed to a high instant-and-sorcery count, then rewards the bookkeeping with a removal ability whose ceiling scales past what a fixed number could offer. The ultimate is the standard spellslinger emblem shape, a Guttersnipe-plus that doubles as a draw engine, but it is almost incidental; the middle ability is what makes the design distinct, because it invites a play pattern where you deliberately grow the pile before firing. Ral had been positioned as the Izzet spell-count planeswalker across several appearances, and this iteration is the one that fully leans into the graveyard-and-exile ledger as the axis rather than treating spell velocity as its own reward.
