Vraska, Scheming Gorgon

Six mana buys a planeswalker built around a single, lopsided premise: assemble a board, protect the loyalty count long enough, and the game ends on contact. The -10 turns every creature you control into a sudden-death threat: connect once with a player and they lose outright, with deathtouch papering over any blocking math. That is the payoff, and everything else on the card exists to reach it. The trouble is how far away it sits. Starting at five loyalty with only a +2 to climb, Vraska needs to tick up three times before an activation can even reach ten, which means the ultimate is a plan for the late midgame, not a threat the opponent has to respect a turn or two out. The +2 itself is a low-ceiling team pump, adding a single point of power across the board while it ladders toward the top; because a walker only fires once per turn, it cannot help push the finish through on the same turn the ultimate resolves, so it is purely a climbing tool. The -3 is the floor: clean, unconditional creature removal that keeps a board threat at bay while the loyalty accrues. As a black six-drop, this Vraska competes with finishers that end the game by themselves rather than promising to several turns later. The appeal is the ceiling, where one unblocked creature closes it, not the rate, where the activated abilities are merely fine. It is a finisher wearing a value walker's clothes, and it only sings when the board is already wide enough to cash the threat the turn it comes online.