Vraska, Regal Gorgon

Of all Vraska's incarnations, this is the one built to win a creature fight rather than tax the opponent's life total with assassin's poison. The plus ability is the tell: a planeswalker that buffs your board and grants menace is not playing the control role its destroy ability suggests, it is leaning into the board. Most superfriends-style planeswalkers protect themselves by removing the threat in front of them; this one climbs to a comfortable loyalty while making one of your creatures harder to chump-block, so it can defend itself with offense. The minus-three is the insurance: clean, unconditional creature removal that resets the loyalty math when the plus has gotten ahead of the board. The ultimate rewards a graveyard stuffed with dead creatures, scaling an anthem off bodies you have already lost, which quietly reframes attrition in your favor: trading creatures early stocks the payoff later. That is a coherent Golgari shape, the guild's signature loop of using the graveyard as a resource rather than mourning it. At seven loyalty after a single activation, the destroy and the buff both feed a defensive posture that asks the board to do the protecting, an unusual bargain for a planeswalker this expensive.