Legend Aerie

This is the first in a VERY long series of looking at every set in Magic and the legendary creatures printed therein. Every legendary creature (that isn’t banned) can be used as a Commander, but should you? That’s what this is here for.

The first six releases from Magic did not contain any legendary creatures; the concept didn’t exist in the game yet. Arabian Nights could, and should, have had legendary creatures. It was based on, unsurprisingly, the story of Arabian Nights, and has cards literally named Aladdin, King Suleiman, Sindbad, and, of course, Dandan. But it wasn’t until the equally creatively named expansion Legends that the concept of legendary creatures was added to the game.

In the early days, legendary creatures had a special creature type: Legend. This would be changed later, but for now, we’ll be looking for Summon Legend creatures.

According to set designer, Steve Conrad, and Magic ombudsman to the masses Mark Rosewater, a lot of the cards in the set were inspired by characters from Dungeons and Dragons campaigns played by designers and testers. Other cards were named specifically to sound as epic and legendary as possible.

Total Options

When I look at how many legendary creatures are available, I will be doing my best to skip reprints. This obviously won’t be a problem here at the first set, but as time goes on, this can limit a set’s total options. Some sets, such as core sets, which were almost entirely reprints for most of Magic’s history, may get skipped entirely.

For Legends, there were 55 total Summon Legends. All of them are multicolored cards, which is important because Legends is the first set to contain cards that cost more than one color of mana. The first card in Magic that encouraged playing more than one color, other than the dual lands that could tap for multiple colors, was probably Kird Ape, which, while only a red card, encouraged players to also have lands that produced green mana to get its full potential. (Note: despite being printed back in the olden times, Kird Ape saw reasonable play in tournaments for a long time. Not forever, he’s been outclassed quite heavily now.)

Legends is also important because of the Elder Dragons. These are not only important for their place in the lore of Magic, but also in the progression of play of the game itself. Before Commander was called Commander, it was called Elder Dragon Highlander, because the original format required your Commander to be one of the five Elder Dragons printed in Legends. It would later be expanded to allow any legendary creature.

Power

Obviously, the legendary creatures printed have varying power levels. Some of them are, in fact, extremely poor choices if you want to have any sort of support from the Commander, instead of playing a 99 card deck with a lump of coal in the command zone. For this part, I’ll give a general 1-10, as an estimate for how useful a Legends legend can be to the success of a deck.

In general, Legends legends are quite bad. This makes the few successful options stand out even more. The low point of the good commanders is probably Adun Oakenshield. There’s a lot of much better options in that color combination, but getting dead creatures back to play them again is always a useful ability. Also good options would be Angus Mackenzie (very good for surviving while you set up your own powerful effects), Dakkon Blackblade (a big finisher for a deck that wants to control the board), and Rubinia Soulsinger (steal your opponent’s best creature).

But there’s two that stand out above the rest. Both of them have had another card printed based on the character (which I’ll get to a long time from now). One of those reprints is arguably just as good as the original, and the other is extremely not as good.

Hazazon Tamar is one of the earliest cards that let you absolutely spam the board with little tokens, and then buff them up and smash faces. Once they started printing cards that let you blink creatures (exile them and return them to play), you could start triggering his effect more than once, doubling or tripling your tokens. He costs a lot of mana, and there’s better cards printed now to do what he does, but a well-planned Hazazon deck can come out of nowhere.

The real powerhouse of Legends is…Ra-Ra-Rasputin Dreamweaver. He costs 6 mana, and you can use him to make 7 mana. Yes, you need colored mana if you want to play him a second time. But as time has gone on, there are ways to spend his mana for colored spells, ways to replay him cheaply, make extra copies of him to make even more mana, etc. If your opponent sits down with Rasputin, you’re probably in deep trouble.

Overall power of the set: 2/10, but the outliers are very far out there.

Memelord Potential

Just as important to winning in Commander is having fun. So in addition to looking at how powerful the legendary creatures are, I want to look at, again from 1-10, the average potential goofiness that is about to ensue from a Legends legend. Unsurprisingly, most of the time, the power level and meme level are going to be opposite.

Let’s cut to the chase. Before, I said that some of these cards are extremely poor choices. To be more specific: 11 of the 55 legendary creatures do not have any abilities. At all. This is known as being “vanilla”, and most vanilla creatures are pretty bad, since, you know, they don’t really do anything. They’re just a guy. Remember this, there will be two vanilla legendary creatures I’ll talk about a long time from now.

So 11 of the legends don’t do anything. 4 of them make mana (one of those is Rasputin); aside from Rasputin being broken, none of the others are inexpensive enough to feel worthwhile. Several turn off the the ability of certain creatures to not be blocked, an ability that Magic no longer prints, so the more the game goes on, the less useful it is. I could go over more specific cards, but I think you’re getting the picture. Most Legend legends are, if you look at what’s available these days, sub-par choices for a deck.

That being said, it’s not illegal to make a sub-par choice. A player who chooses one of these Commanders is doing so on purpose; you don’t accidentally get a $25 30 year old card and make a deck around it. The deck might not be a joke, but you should expect to see something fun and interesting.

This section of the review is slightly biased by me using two of these cards as Commanders. One is an interesting choice, and one is a straight-up meme.

Memelord potential: 9/10

Next time: I pick one of these legendary creatures and try to make it work as a deck. Will I pick one of the actually powerful cards, or construct for you a meme most foul? You’ll have to tune in and see.