Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded
The two-mana planeswalker that arrived a full year before Wizards committed to the format-warping math of cheap walkers, and it shows in the design: every loyalty ability here is a liability dressed as an effect. The +1 is rummaging with the worst possible variance, the discard chosen at random rather than by you, so card selection becomes card lottery. The -4 is a Fireball that scales off your opponent's hand, which means it does nothing against an empty grip and rarely closes a game on its own. The -6 is a one-turn Insurrection that, starting from two loyalty and gaining exactly one per turn while doing nothing to protect itself, asks you to nurse a fragile two-mana body to six (seven if you want it to live) before the payoff arrives. The throughline is a planeswalker that punishes its own controller at every step, a flavor-first build where Tibalt's chaotic, self-destructive cruelty is encoded directly into abilities that hurt to use. It is the rare walker whose ultimate is theoretically backbreaking and practically out of reach, and whose loyalty math actively discourages defending it. As a design artifact it marks the boundary of an era: proof that "two-mana planeswalker" was not yet read as a power-level red line, because the cost here buys abilities deliberately calibrated to disappoint. The flavor landed; the function never did.
