Sorin Markov

The middle ability is the whole reason this planeswalker exists, and it does something almost no other card had attempted: it ignores the life total you walked in with and rewrites target opponent's number to 10. The size of that swing scales with how high they were sitting, which is the balancing act baked in. It punishes lifegain decks and rewards a board already capable of finishing, and it stalls completely against an empty board, because dropping someone to ten still leaves a long runway against most clocks. The plus is the workmanlike protection that keeps loyalty climbing while chipping two and refilling the same two, a slow drip that lets him hold the line behind a body. The ultimate is the genuinely menacing one: full control of an opponent's turn, which in practice means marching their own resources into the ground or executing a kill they cannot answer. Most planeswalker ultimates win the game obliquely; this one hands you another player's hand, library, and attack step outright. The lineage matters too. This is the first of the Sorin cards, the vampire lord whose later printings leaned toward lifegain and token-making; this earliest incarnation is the most ruthless, built around draining and dominating rather than building. It is the version that treats an opponent's life total not as a number to whittle down but as a number to overwrite.