Elspeth Tirel is an awesome card to stall the game with and used in various control strategies. It has been widely used in decks like Superfriends and the like. All three abilities are definetely interesting as they each contribute towards the board control strategy. You can stabilize by generating three chump blockers to protect her and your life total early on or have multiple targets to equip with cool equipment like Sword of Feast and Famine.

The life-gaining aspect of the card allows you to pair it with things like Test of Endurance in older or more casual formats. Also, Drogskol Reaver makes it a card-drawing engine. Sometimes it’s just enough life to win close damage races. This can definitely amount to a ridiculous amount of life if you can manage to protect the mighty planeswalker from attacks and gain life at the same time.

The ultimate ability (-5 loyalty) is rather powerful and generates about the same effect as a Planar Cleansing and allows you to keep around any tokens you may have accumulated. A great way to end a game if you are grinding the board and finishing your opponent off with token creatures.

When used in conjunction with cards like Parallel Lives, she become rather ridiculous generating 6 tokens on her -2 ability. She can also be played to destroy an opposing Elspeth, Knight Errant ( the more expensive and ridiculous version of the planeswalker). She is still a rather coveted commodity as players new and old are always trying to abuse her power and is vastly traded and sold despite taking a huge dip price-wise from her then 30$+ price tag. Pick these up right now as I do not see her going down in price, rather she will probably skyrocket sometime in the near future. Packs of Scars of Mirrodin are still widely available at the moment but will become rather rare in the coming months.

As far as white planeswalker go, she will probably be remembered as the one that cost the most mana but provides the broader range of effects. Gideon was the combat –oriented one and Ajani was the one most players associate to life gain. Elspeth is definitely a great utility walker for the white team. It’s always cool to experiment with planeswalkers whenever you can in order to find the kinds of situations you should be using her abilities in to better improve your gameplay.

Try her out, you will be pleasantly surprised.