There are few phrases I would have less expected
to see applied to Liliana than "The Last Hope".
Maybe some really obvious ones, like "The Vestal
Virgin", or ones from the completely wrong
intellectual property like "Friend of the
Raptors", but even then I'm not sure. Regardless
of her title, she pretty much always delivers
the goods in gameplay. A loyalty-increasing Lose
Hope variant shuts a lot of decks down outright
and can kill a lot of additional things in
combination with other cards, and her -2 is pure
card advantage for anybody who owns any cards
from either Innistrad block. When you add an
ultimate as unstoppable and devastating as
Kiora's, it makes her into a powerhouse that's
certain to show up at tables across many of
Magic's formats.
The first thing that comes to mind with the new
Liliana is the other three-mana Liliana, Liliana
of the Veil from Innistrad. This certainly won't
command the same price tag as Veil did (it’s
weaker overall, arguably), but this doesn't mean
Liliana is bad; on the contrary, she's quite
solid.
Her +1 lets her kill weaker creatures, like mana
generators along the lines of Noble Hierarch or
Birds of Paradise, without much trouble, and it
helps protect her by weakening blows from larger
creatures. Her -2 gets you a creature back, and
it can also help load up your graveyard in a
format that cares about graveyards being filled
to the brim. Her ultimate is certainly
interesting: it can create inevitability, but
it's probably a “win more" kind of ultimate, one
that closes out the game better than digging you
out of a hole.
Liliana is pretty powerful overall; she’s not as
potent as her other three-mana incarnation, but
she’s well-positioned to contribute in Standard
and maybe Modern. Planeswalkers can be hard to
really evaluate, but I’m bullish about her
chances.
