As regular readers will recall, Chandra is one
of my favorite planeswalkers, and I am always
excited to see what sort of tricks she pulls out
of the bag. For a while it was pretty much just
variations on damage, but recently she's been
dabbling in red's increasing repertoire of
library-related things, and I indeed suspect
that this incarnation of her will get a lot of
use for its 0 ability. Even without taking into
account red's proficiency with madness and
flashback, we've all been in situations where
we'd trade every card in our hand for that many
plus one random cards, and over the space of a
few turns, it will have a deck-digging effect
that few things can match. Additionally, her
other abilities are far from bad: a pair of
temporary attackers looks like a small effect on
a six-mana card, but it's repeatable over turns
and comes at a time of the game when
traditional-style red strategies tend to
struggle, and as for her third ability, spending
her loyalty all at once to kill most everything
on the table is comparable to many of the recent
Wrath of God effects, with the threat of killing
smaller creatures and either going on the
offense with elementals or drawing a bunch of
cards as a solid alternate plan.
As far as art, my favorite version of Chandra is
still Pyromaster, from M14 and M15. I like the
way her hair looks!
