Heh! That works too... I guess my unoriginal mind leapt straight to taking the effectively mini planeswalkers and turning them into actual planeswalkers.
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This is the best I've been able to come up with so far for the Gatewatch:
Aegis (Gideon variant for Legacy's deck): Power: Reduce damage to hero character cards by 1 until start of your next turn.
Spitfire (Chandra variant for Ra's deck): Power: Spitfire deals all villain targets 2 fire damage and all hero targets 1 fire damage.
The Mentalist (Jace variant for Visionary's deck): Power: Play the top card of a character deck. Until next turn, treat all instances of a character name on that card as if it were "Jace". If it is a villain card, treate all instances of "villain" as if it were "hero" and vice versa.
Or
Power: Until next turn, one copy of Decoy Projection is in play. (I have no idea how to template this word-wise.)
(Honestly I kinda just want to give Jace Omni-X's power straight up, but that's no fun...)
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Because you can't create Sentinels character cards unless they have cheesy superhero codenames too.
Nissa I guess we could wait until Akash'Thriya's deck comes out? I can't think of any existing deck that would fit.
Liliana I can only think of as being a variant of Biomancer, TBH.
Ajani I have literally no clue; I don't really know him well enough as a character yet.
But honestly I am so not good with coming up with creative or rules stuff.
I like a lot of those! And it's not like there's no precedent for swapping a different person onto the head of a deck - i.e., the Kvothe Six-Strings Argent variant from Name of the Wind. Chandra and Ra both solve literally everything with fire, right?
I think Nissa could be a Naturalist variant (no idea as to power) and Liliana could be a Nightmist variant (Power: Liliana deals one damage to herself. Draw a card. Until the end of your next turn, whenever you discard a card, create a Zombie target with 2 health with "At the end of your turn, Zombie deals 2 damage to a target")
I did think about Nissa as Naturalist, but Nissa's nature connection is to plants and leylines, not so much to shapeshifting or animals.
Arlinn Kord would probably work better as a Naturalist variant, methinks. Also while we're on the subject of non-Gatewatch planeswalkers: Saheeli Rai as Unity and Tamiyo as Parse?
Liliana as Nightmist is interesting, though! (Also possibly a Gloomweaver variant because like actual zombies but I think I like Biomancer better if we go the villain route.)
So on the Magic the Gathering Reddit today someone asked for suggestions for "non-mainstream" games that Magic players could additionally pick up to help their Magic playing skills. I dutifully mentioned Sentinels because that's pretty much literally what happened: I got back into Magic because I decided I wanted to try to revisit my Magic playing days with the new skills and appreciation for lore I picked up from Sentinels.
In response three different people also chimed in with "Yeah, Sentinels!" comments, including one person who said "Sentinels is SO Vorthos" and praised the Letters Page, and another person who said they playtested for one of the older Kickstarted expansions back in the day.
(Also I was amused to note someone in the Gen Con Letters Page video wearing a shirt with a Planeswalker symbol on the back.)
Would have preferred not to necro a thread over this, but apparently unable to send this as a pm to the original poster, so instead I’ll address the group.
Having almost successfully resisted the impulse to necro a thread over this, I did want to point one thing out based on my own fairly extensive history with the game:
“While Vorthos loves the flavor and Melvin is all about figuring out mechanics.”
“Figuring out mechanics” is more accurately a descriptor of the stereotypical Johnny, though it’s more a thing he does to reach his goal rather than being the goal itself. The Melvin archetype is about someone who views the “crunch” of game design as an art in itself, which includes geeking out about rules, but also other aspects of the game which don’t pertain to art and flavor text (and card names, past the need for every card’s name to be unique, and creature type as an abstract rather than its mechanical significance… I think that’s basically everything, although there’s a gray area as to whether alternate card frames and typefaces and such would count as Vorthos things or Melvin ones). The archetypal thing that gets a Melvin excited isn’t a rules thing at all, but rather a set-design goal, which is the creation of “cycles” of related cards, usually one per color or perhaps one per rarity. (Also, rarity itself, and other aspects of being a collector rather than a player, also debatably fall under Melvinism.)
Sorry, just had to pontificate pedantically about a thing that used to be super important to me. Carry on.