Kiora might not be the absolute best
Planeswalker out there, but she has been my
personal favorite recently. The ability to shut
down any permanent on the battlefield makes a
very useful defense mechanism in a color scheme
that's not great at that. Green usually just
tries to overpower things, and blue can counter
or bounce things, but for repeatable defense,
Kiora's pretty top notch. Then, once you do that
for a few turns, she gives you a pretty
unstoppable offensive force with her inevitable
army of Krakens. I haven't gotten her to
ultimate more than a handful of times, but I've
won every single one of those games.
While that's usually the way I try to use her,
don't forget about her -2 ability. Sometimes,
that extra speed and ramp from drawing and
playing another land gives you the edge you need
to run someone over.
The only place she loses something is in
multiplayer where her +1 ability can only stop
one person and her low loyalty makes it easy for
someone to have a way to kill her pretty
quickly.
The number five card of the year is Kiora, the
Crashing Wave which is a four mana Green and
Blue planeswalker with two loyalty. The +1
of preventing all damage to and from a target
permanent an opponent controls until your next
turn is a very solid stall against many decks
and will often be enough to help keep her in
play. The -1 of drawing a card and
allowing an extra land drop is just about enough
to warrant playing Kiora by itself as one or two
uses adds some card advantage and can
potentially be more depending on the game.
The -5 to add a 9/9 Blue kraken at each of your
end steps takes a bit of stalling to build into,
but once enabled is a serious threat for just
about any deck. Overall this is a powerful
and interesting card that adds a great deal to
Blue/Green designs, even if it doesn't have much
that is specifically Simic in nature.
For Limited the stall into the ultimate is a
very effective strategy that should be utilized
whenever a land shortage or inability to defend
Kiora isn't a factor. An easy first pick
in Booster even with the two opposing colors as
Green acceleration alongside Blue's evasion or
defenses is a viable pairing. In Sealed it
depends on the Blue and Green pools, but even
splashing one of the colors to gain the
potential
9/9 tokens as a win condition is worth the
effort.
In Multiplayer the stall is less effective as a
personal defense and more useful as a bargaining
chip with opponents to lock down one threat for
each of their turns. Negotiating a target
to make temporary alliances or enemies adds
another element to her gameplay, though keeping
it going long enough to get the 9/9 tokens out
may be difficult.
Have you noticed how many planeswalkers are on
the top ten list this year, and just in general?
Just putting that out there. Kiora's design has
an interesting tension involved: her +1 is only
situationally useful and her -1 extremely
tempting, but only one of them gets you closer
to that insane ultimate, one of the most
eye-catching ultimates I've ever seen. It even
does a good job of conveying her interest in the
inevitable forces of the ocean. Her stats are
pretty fragile to depend on her ultimate, but if
you consider that her minimum impact is an
Explore effect plus drawing some sort of damage
spell away from you, that's a pretty good deal.
