Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer

The most familiar face on Ravnica has always been a blue-red Guildmage of storm and lightning, so a mono-black Ral is the first genuine surprise: a planeswalker who read the fine print on his own coin-flip fixation and decided the fixation itself was the card worth printing. That obsession lives in the ultimate, where flipping five coins to steal a variable stack of an opponent's turns hands the finisher entirely over to chance; the payoff scales from nothing at all to a full lockout, and the design leans into that variance instead of smoothing it out. Underneath the splashy exam sits a tidy black value engine. The +1 filters and stocks the graveyard, the first minus is disruption you aim wherever you like (a single opponent, the whole table, even yourself), and the second minus is a reanimation clause pinned to mana value three or less, which keeps the return honest: no marquee bombs, just the low-curve creatures the +1 was busy binning. What the card is really building toward is a loop between surveilling threats into the yard and pulling them back onto the battlefield, a self-contained recursion package that happens to be waiting on one lucky ultimate to end things outright. The lecturer framing fits: he is here to teach probability, and the seven-loyalty final grades on a curve of five coins.