Nissa is the penultimate compleated planeswalker in Phyrexia: All Will Be One, Wizards of the Coast has revealed through its Magic: The Gathering Twitter account. The compleated Nissa card, Nissa, Ascended Animist depicts the nature loving elf without hair, covered in bony (or dead wood?) spikes, with four arms, and – in the full art – surrounded by bloody tendrils.
The new card, Nissa, Ascended Animist is unusual, because it’s the only compleated planeswalker with two Phyrexian mana symbols in its cost, giving you multiple options on how much life and mana to pay for the card. Phyrexian planeswalkers enter with two loyalty less for each mana symbol paid for with life, so this Nissa can have a starting loyalty anywhere between seven and three.
If you pay the full seven mana for her, Nissa is very mighty, capable of making 8/8 tokens, destroying umpteen artifacts and enchantments throughout the course of a game, and even pumping up your whole board with her ultimate right away. Presumably that board will be a bunch of Llanowar Elves though, because you’ll likely aim to ramp her out. The savvy player will have to work out which abilities they need when, and whether they want a seven, six, or emergency five mana Nissa.
Interestingly, Phyrexian Nissa has been deliberately drawn with exactly the same pose as she had in Nissa, Who Shakes The World, a callback to her former, probably even more terrifying (if you played Standard at the time) card. It looks like the same thing’s been done withPhyrexian Vraska, who looks like her previous card Vraska, the Unseen.
Weirdly, Nissa was compleated ‘off-camera’, popping up in evil form right at the end of the Phyrexia: All Will Be One story, without a proper hint her compleation was coming. The whole story has felt a bit swift, with five deaths to get through in five articles or so, but Nissa’s fate seems particularly rushed.
This leaves just one Phyrexian planeswalker left to see. We’re pretty certain it’s Jace. And if it’s not Jace, it should be. Here’s the full list of compleated planeswalkers so far, if you’re wanting to keep count.