After sitting with these thoughts a few weeks more, I think its less about Vondam, and more about Aristocrats
In addition to this extreme value engine, anything Anikthea copies will be a 3/3 creature with menace
Youll almost always have five Soldiers, so unleashing your air force is light work
Remember that at this time, Planeswalkers were still extremely new and Wizards didn't know exactly where they could go, thus the thought experiment of "can you make a two-mana value planeswalker?" These days, we have the hindsight of cards like Jace, Vryn's Prodigy and Wrenn and Six behind us, but at the time we didn't really have that frame of reference
What looks like a simple protection trick often becomes a win condition, catching opponents off guard in combat exchanges
Others are handmade. Predictable materials