Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1021: Legends

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

In this podcast, I talk all about the making of Magic's third expansion, Legends, which, among other things, introduced multicolor and legendary permanents.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today, today's podcast is inspired by a post I got on my blog. So someone wrote to me and said, I've been listening to your podcast since the very beginning, like 11 years. And in episode 6, you mentioned Legends and said, one day I will tell a podcast about the design of Legends. He goes, I've been waiting for 11 years. Where is that podcast? So it's been long overdue. It is time for the Legends podcast.

Okay, so real quickly, a little parameters. Legends is the third expansion. It came out in June of 1994. It had 75 commons, 114 uncommons, 121 rares. So a lot of cards.

And let me, I want to give sort of the parameters of where it came from and how it got made. That's today's story. Okay, so first I got to sort of give the scene of magic at the time, because this is important to the making of legends. So, Wizards of the Coast, in the summer of 1993, prints enough magic that they believe will be at least six

months worth of magic, or maybe a year. Anyway, they print enough that we got plenty for a while. So what we know of is alpha. That sells out, I think, in like three weeks. It sells out very fast. They then print what they think will now be at least six months worth of supply, which they dub beta, and that sells out in a week. So they scramble yet again.

They eventually come out with Unlimited. But while this is all going on it becomes crystal clear that Magic is a success. And what that means is while they can keep reprinting the same set at some point they need new content. And so now it turns out Richard had already started the

ball rolling in his area. So Richard had a bunch of play tefters and he had asked his play tefters, or I don't know if he asked them or they wanted to do it, I'm not quite sure the origin of it, but there were three different groups that each made their own set. So the East Coast Playtafters, Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, they made Ice Age. Joel Mick, Bill Rose, Charlie Cattino, Howard Kallenberg, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel.

They made what was called Menagerie at the time, but now we know as Mirage. And then Barry Reich made a set called Spectral Chaos, which never got released, but elements of it got rolled into Invasion. Anyway, I interviewed Barry about

Spectral Chaos. I interviewed Bill when we talked about Menagerie, and I interviewed Scaf when we talked about Ice Age. All those, if you want to hear stories about those, I have podcasts about all those things. Anyway, so those three teams were working on stuff. But nobody expected, like, no, I mean, it's hard to have predicted what the phenomenon that Magic became. Everyone assumed that the base set would be out for at least a year before they would have any need of more products.

So nobody was in a rush to get things done because they thought they had time. Well, once it became apparent that they needed to do something, there were a bunch of things that started happening. One is Richard was asked to make an expansion. So Richard made Arabian Nights, which was the first expansion, and that was done very quickly. It was only 98 cards, so it was just a small expansion. The East Coast playtesters were asked to sort of do something quickly,

so they did Antiquities. And also, just as Richard had asked some of his friends and people, his playt played after to work on sets, Peter Atkinson, who was the CEO of Wizards, one of the original founders of Wizards, he had asked a bunch of different people to make sets. The two ones, I guess, that end up— There's three sets that ended up getting made through Peter. One was Legends, which we'll talk about today.

One was The Dark that was done by Jesper Mierfors, who was the art director at the time. And one was Homeland, which was done by Kyle Namvar and Scott Hungerford, who were two people who were on, they did customer relations, and Scott might have been on the continuity team, which is what we now call the creative team. Anyway, so there were just a lot of people working on a lot of sets because they knew there's stuff they needed to get out.

So Richard did the quickest design in Arabian Nights. That came out first. And also Richard Dunn had Richard's name on it. The second set that got put out was Antiquities. That was done by East Coast Playzafters. It had an artifact theme.

Mentioned the Brothers War. You know, it did a lot of stuff. But the third set to come out was the first one that, of the friends that Peter Atkinson had asked to design the set. So he had asked Steve Connard and

Robin Herbert, who were two friends of his that he played video games with. Not video games. He did role-playing with. They played D&D together. And interestingly, I did work with Steve Conard. Robert Herbert,

I might have met in passing, but Steve Conard actually worked at Wizards for a number of years. We used to do this thing. The first place I ever met him was we used to do a thing called the Caravan Tour, where Wizards would drive around the country.

And then in different locations have usually somebody who worked, you know, one or two people that worked at wizards. And then usually they would get a local artist and they would go to game stores and they would play with people and sell magic. I actually, when the Caravan Tours was in Los Angeles, I actually participated. I went and played at the Caravan Tour against people and stuff. And that's the first time I ever met Steve Connard. So I got a chance to know Steve Connard. Like I said, he worked at Wizards. We overlapped at Wizards for a couple of years. Anyway, so I think the original plan for that slot had been Ice Age,

the large set that the East Coast Playt slot had been Ice Age, the large set that the East Coast Playtests had been working on. But when Richard first thought of large sets, the original idea for large sets was Richard thought that Magic would come out, and then after a year or two years, there'd be a refresh and there'd just be a new, Magic would just change what it was. And in Richard's original mind, it just had different backs. It was just sort of a brand new game, but connected.

So the idea is Magic the Gathering was just the first of the Magic games. And then maybe two years later, Magic Ice Age came out. And so in Richard's mind, because that was how he saw it working, he thought it was fine to have repeat commons in it. So Ice Age had a lot of commons that were in alpha. And because of that, once they made the decision to not have the same back on Arabian Nights, which was we're just going to have a different back,

they realized that it really needed to have new commons. And so Legends, I think it had a handful of repeat things, but only like four and they could reskin them as new things. So Legends got stuck in the place of Ice Age just because Ice Age needed more work to generate cards that they didn't know they needed. So Legends ended up in this slot. I think what happened was they did two small sets and they really thought it was time for a large set. It was a year later. It was one year, you know, and they really thought it was time for a large set. It was a year later.

It was one year, you know, Magic came out in the summer of 1993. It was now the summer of 1994. And I think they felt it was time for a large set. The only choices for a large set were Legends and Ice Age and Menagerie. It's later Mirage. But anyway, they ended up choosing Legends. and Ice Age and Menagerie. It's later Mirage.

But anyway, they ended up choosing Legends. Okay, so let's talk about what exactly Legends did. Oh, a little bit of trivia, by the way. I think the original name for the set was, this was Peter's name, was, what was it called? It was called The Legend Continues. It was Magic the Gathering, The Legend Continues. But it was too long, so they shortened it to Legends.

Now, in it, there are a bunch of innovations. I also will say, when you're the third Magic expansion, you get to do a lot of innovations, because there's a lot that hasn't been done. Arabian Nights was the first set to have sort of a creative theme to it. Antiquities, first set to have a mechanical theme to it. First set that has a story with it. Well, the big introduction in Legends, there's two big things and a bunch of smaller things. The two biggest things, number one is multicolor cards.

In Alpha and the first two expansions, all cards were monocolor. There were dual ends that could produce two colors, but there was no card that required you to have two different colors to cast. The idea obviously had come up. It wasn't something that other people hadn't thought of. In fact, Barry Reich in his Spectral Chaos, his big thing was multicolor. So obviously there was somebody else working on a similar project. I think Barry's wasn't as far along as Legends was. Plus, also I think that, you know, Peter

had talked to some of his friends. He wanted some of their stuff to get made. So Legends introduced Legendary. Although, let me explain real quickly. There were both Legend creatures and legendary lands in Legends. The legendary lands had the legendary super type, but the legendary creatures did not. Legendary creatures had legend, and legend was a creature type. But it carried all the baggage that the legendary super type carried on the lands.

In fact, the way that the legend rule originally worked was you could only have one of them in your deck. So if you were playing with one of the legends, either the legendary lands or the legendary creatures, and in the first set, there were only legendary lands and creatures. Later, we'd make other legendary permanents. Those hadn't happened yet in legends. You could only have one of them in your deck.

Later on, the Legend rule would change numerous times. Eventually, the rule then changed to, you could have four in your deck, but you could only play one at a time. And as soon as one was on the battlefield, no other one could be played. And then that changed

to, if you played a legend, the older legend went away. Then we went to the one, sorry, we then went to the one where each player could have

a legend on their own side. Then the legend rule changed to if a legend comes out and there's multiple of them, you, the controller of the two legends, can decide which one goes away. So the legend rules change a lot during that. So in

the set, legend was a creature type and not a super type. And at the time, with rare exception, creatures only had one creature type. So if you were a legendary creature, you were just creature legend. You had no other creature type. We've since retroactively changed legend to legendary on the creatures

and we have given some creature types to some of those creatures. The other thing that's interesting is the only multicolor and legend were one and the same, well, there were legendary lands, those were unique, and then the legendary creatures, all the multicolor cards in the set were legendary, and all the legendary creatures in the set were multicolor. So there was no multicolor in the set anywhere else other than on the legendary creatures. So it made them really stand out.

They were very splashy. So it was the first time ever you had multicolor and legendary all in the same thing. Now, I will say, looking back, the designs of the legendary creatures were nothing special. In fact, as someone who played competitively at the time, with a few exceptions, they were mostly considered to be kind of junky. mostly considered to be kind of junky. For example, there was a card, you know, when Alpha came out, there was a card called Crawworm, which was four green green for a 6-4 creature. And there was, I think it was an uncommon card, that required, I don't remember, it's easy scares them, I think

it's the card I'm thinking of. Anyway, it was a 6-4 Trampler. Exact same text as Crawl Worm, except instead of costing, like, one mana, it cost two different color mana, and there were multiple pips of one of them, I think. Anyway, it was just the... One of the things that happened, I'll get into this,

is the team that made the set were not really up on rules or templating, mostly because those things hadn't really been solidified yet, right? A lot of alpha was kind of you wrote the card to match the effect of that card. The 6th edition rules were years away. And so it was not as if it would be easy to write the rules anyway. But on top of that, mostly the way they wrote the rules were just what they intended the card to do. Not in game speak, just they said what they wanted the card to do.

And sometimes there was a clear and easy answer for what that was. Sometimes you're like, I don't know what that means. We will get to that in a sec. Okay, also on the set, other than multicolor and legendary things, what we now call world enchantments, at the time they were called enchant worlds. So these were enchantments that represented where you fought. And the idea of an enchant world was

the battle could only be fought in one plane. So if I played an enchant world, or a world enchantment now, that stayed until somebody else, including me, played a different world enchantment. And so the idea was, the way you got rid of a world enchantment was either with a spell that got rid of it, or with another world enchantment. Now there was a point in time where world enchantments were a big, big part of the metagame.

There was a card called the Abyss that made every player sacrifice a creature each turn. There was a card called Nether Void that made you pay more mana for each of your spells. Those were the two biggies. King Korn Crossroads saw some play. I played that one. Anyway, there were a bunch of them.

There were no enchant worlds in white for some reason. And there were enchant worlds at uncommon and rare. In fact, one of my banes is a card called Arborea. It's a green enchant world that as long as you haven't

played a spell, you can play lands, my opponent can't attack me. And it costs for some drawn out limited games. Okay. Oh, the other thing about, I should mention about this set was not designed to be a standalone.

There were no basic lands in it. So this was really just designed to be cards to play with your magic set. Now, as someone who played Limited with Legends, man, oh man, it was not designed to be played in Limited. The Arboria is a good example because, for example, other than other enchant worlds, there was no common way to destroy enchantments in the set. There was Boomerang, which would bounce an enchantment if they could play it again.

I think the lowest rarity card that could actually destroy an enchantments in the set. There's Boomerang, which would bounce an enchantment if they could play it again. I think the lowest rarity card that could actually destroy an enchantment was at remove enchantments at rare. So it just, it wasn't designed, even though we did play limited because we did, it really wasn't designed for limited. Limited wasn't in mind. It didn't have the component pieces it needed.

Anyway, world enchantments were a thing. Also, bands with others. So if you think banding is complicated, which I often talk about how much it is. So the way, I don't want to get into how banding works. I did a whole podcast on banding if you want

the nitty gritty banding. Bands with others says that I basically can band but only with Others says that I basically can band, but only with other creatures that share my Bands with Other category. Now, there was a card called Master of the Hunt that gave all your— it made wolves, and it gave all of your wolves Bands with Other wolves. So it allowed all your wolves to band together.

And there was a card that gave Bands with Others to legendary creatures. But it was banding except weaker and more complicated. Like, banding already... The one strength of banding was that it was relatively strong, especially on defense. So Bands with Others had, like,

all the complications of banding, plus more complications of banding, because it didn't quite work exactly like banding, and it was way, way weaker than banding. So we often talk about the worst mechanic of all time. Bands with others in contention for that. It is definitely... Banding at least had a few pluses to it,

and most of the pluses banding with others took away. Next is rampage. So Rampage was the other named keyword. The way Rampage works is, for every creature that blocks you beyond the first, you get plus one, plus one. The idea is, it's hard to block a rampaging creature. Now, in retrospect, I work Rampage was plus one, plus one for each blocker, rather than each blocker beyond the first. Uh, just as a general rule, uh, we don't like people doing extra math. And so X minus one

is a lot harder than just X. Um, and so Rampage actually was evergreen for a little tiny bit. Um, but it was just kind of complicated and didn't, didn't do enough stuff, uh, that we, it ended up, I mean, so Rampage shows up a little bit in some other sets, but not for long. It didn't stick around. The one other mechanic that shows up by name, although

only on two cards, is Poison shows up for the first time. So, technically, I guess Milling showed up in Antiquities because Millstone was in Antiquities. But this was the first alternate win condition that wasn't a core part of the game. Yeah, Millstone was an all win condition, but decking was already built into the game. I mean, Millstone made milling an actual strategy.

Most of the way you decked people before that was just playing more than 60 cards and drawing the game out. So that was, I mean, people did that, but it was not much of a strategy. I mean, it was a niche strategy. Anyway, Poison was quite exciting. I was very excited by it. The story on Poison is I saw these two cards. I was enamored with them. I love the idea of an alternate win condition.

Neither card were good. There was Pit Scorpion, I think it was one and a black for a one-one with poison. Poison one, basically. And then there was Scorpion Generator. I forget what it cost. It cost, I don't know,

it was four to activate. It cost like three or something. It was a generic cost artifact. You played it for three or four, and then for four and tap, you can make a one-one snake that had poison. So I made a deck in which it was blue, black, blue and black,

mostly because I put every possible clone I could put in it. So it's like make poison creatures, copy all my poison creatures, and then try to poison you to death. And man, oh man, that deck could not win. I played with it for months without winning. And my goal as a Johnny designer, a lot of time, all I wanted to do was I wanted to do it once. I just wanted to say I won with poison.

That's all I wanted to say. And I built a deck, and I tweaked it, and I played it, and played it, and played it, and played it. And it could not win. It was weak. It was weak by modern standards. And this is at a time where people had moxes and things. Anyway, I eventually, I actually played it for a while. I put it away.

And then every once in a while, I take it out again. Months, months, months later I would win a game. And I don't even know if I, I think I won one game and never played it again, because it was not a fun experience. But it got in with me a love for Poison that would, once I started working, would definitely, I would spend lots of time trying to make Poison a thing, which I eventually did. I mean, make poison a thing, which I eventually did. I mean, it was a thing, but making it a little more viable. The fact that there's a Pro Tour one with poison makes my heart happy.

Okay. Other things about Legends. So probably one of the most famous things about it was there was a mix-up. A very famous mix-up. So the way it works in the set, I talked about this when I talked about how we make sets, there's different sheets. There's the common and uncommon and rare sheet.

There were two different uncommon sheets, what they refer to as the A sheet and the B sheet, because there was 114 uncommons. And for some reason, they didn't stick that all in one sheet. It might have been because we were using 110 ups and not 120. No, no, we had to use 120. There were 121 rares. I don't know. For some reason, they made two sheets. I'm not sure why.

And the printers made a mistake. Normally, what's supposed to happen is you would print a whole bunch of the A sheets and a whole bunch of the B sheets and then shuffle them together and put them in the hopper for the uncommon, the three uncommon slots. But what happened was whoever was responsible didn't realize they had to do that, and so they weren't shuffled.

And what that meant was whole boxes would have either be A or B. And what that meant was if you opened up your entire box of legends, all your uncommons were from one half of the set. And so you had to go and trade. So remember, I bought a whole bunch of legends. I think I got four boxes. Three of mine were A and one was B, I think. I think that's right.

Anyway, or it might be reversed, but I did a lot of trading to get the cards I needed. And it was... Wizards had done a buyback program. Both Arabian Nights and Antiquities had had their own printing errors. Arabian Nights had some versions that were hard to read.

Antiquities sometimes had the same comments show up in the same pack. So anyway, you could mail in your booster pack and get, I think, a replacement booster pack. So Antiquities, not Antiquities, Legends was the first expansion that was a 15-card boosters. Arabian Nights and Antiquities were 8-card boosters. And so obviously Alpha had 15 cards, but we hadn't made another large set with 15 cards until Legends. And it was the first large expansion that was not a core set. It was not designed to be standalone. It was the first large expansion. It was not a core set. It was not

designed to be standalone. It was the first large expansion. There was enough in it, by the way, that it was complicated enough between Legendary and World Enchantments and Bands with Others and Rampage that there actually was a rules card that went into every

Legends booster. It is a white card with black writing on it. It's double-sided. Anyway, it's a remnant of the past. I remember when we were doing the Legends promotion, we had to open up Legends packs, and I remember seeing the rules card again. Anyway, okay. There was no basic land in Legends. It was not designed as a standalone. I believe it's the first expansion

that existed in a second language. There was Italian... There is Italian Legends boosters made. They were made. It happened after the English ones were made. It happened later. In fact, I think the Dark was the first set released in Italian, but then they went back and printed Legends in Italian.

And so, and there was a point in time where English Legends was gone, and so people would buy Italian Legends. Even that didn't last very long. So Legends won the best game accessory at the Origin Awards at Gamma that year. There wasn't yet... Now, I think there's a trading card game category.

I don't think there was one yet, so just one for accessory. So a little behind-the-scenes thing. So the most important thing to understand was that a lot of the inspiration for Legends came from just, like, Steve and team and Robin wanted to, like, they based a lot of what they were doing on the role-playing they had done, their Dungeons & Dragons role-playing. A lot of legendary creatures were literally from their game. And they were just trying to make something that was evocative. And they were just trying to make something that was evocative. Now, I think, so in the set, there are three color legends,

including the Elder Dragons, which EDH, Commander's original name was EDH for Elder Dragon Highlander. The ED of Elder Dragon, that's where Elder Dragons come from. Originally, by the way, in the very, very early version of Commander, you could only play one of the five Elder Dragons. That's where the name comes from. And I think in the set, there are only Shard slash Arc,

three color combinations. So three colors in a row. And there were only allied two color cards. I don't think there were enemy color cards or wedge cards. The idea being those are enemies, they don't work together. So it would take a little bit of time. Although, ironically, the dark actually had a few enemy cards in it.

But anyway, and they were done in a tree where there was a top of each tree that was the dragon. And then there was another legend. And then at rare and uncommon, there were different. There was the same number of each. Like at uncommon, there was the same number of two-collar cards and three-collar cards and stuff like that. There was in the set also a cycle, six

cycles based on the six chess pieces that ended up not making it. So, okay, so the story of development is Steve and Robin make the set. And once again, there's no templating. It's just kind of they say what they want the card to do in vernacular.

And so what happens was there wasn't even R&D as we know it hadn't really started yet. Wizards was in the process of hiring them. So they were actually out in Philadelphia. They were still at school. And so the East Coast Play Thefters, Scafalias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, they did the development. And it was done in a very short amount of time.

Nowadays, when we do development on something, or set design, there's a year plus that's worked on it. This was done, I think, in under a month, a couple weekends, I think. And it was a big challenge just because one team, back in the day, in the early days of Magic, the team that would design the cars kind of did the development. But in this case, Steve Conard and Robin, who did the design, weren't equipped to do the development. They had played Magic, but they didn't know it well enough to develop it. And so the East Coast playtesters were asked to do the development.

A lot of what happened was just raising costs. I mean, the two biggest things development did was try to figure out how the cards worked and then put a cost for it. And so that was, you know, that was the trickiest part about it is just what do they do? And I don't have one to read off of, but I've seen the sheet. And it might just be something like, you know, this creature enters the day and has a fight with everybody and wins. And like, well, what does that mean he has a fight with everybody? And back in the day, like fighting, the fighting mechanic wasn't yet a thing. So it's like, what does it mean that he fights everybody and he wins?

You know, and so they had to sort of go through and figure that out. And there was a lot of, because it was done so quickly, there's a lot of things that slipped through that I think with a little more... like, one of the things about early Magic is that there wasn't a lot of development or there was very short development time. And so early Magic had broken cards that I think with more playtesting, with a more

elaborate system, would have been caught. The other big thing is about early magic is now the people who there is years and years of, like, when you make magic or even just play magic over a period of years and just see the correct costing of things, you start to get a template for what things should cost. So right now, if I go to one of the play designers, and I give them a card of something they've never seen before, they have a much better ability to give me a cost that's in the ballpark.

Now, we will then play test it, and play testing will show, like, that first initial guess is not necessarily where it ends up. But we'll get much closer now than we would back then just because we have years of experience to look at. We have years of play testing, of actual card data, of actual cards played by millions of people to see, you know, how do things shake out. Because not only is there play testing within R&D, there is the world of play testing, right? The set comes out. People actually play it. There's a pro tour, you know, how do things shake out? Because not only is there playtesting within R&D, there is the world of playtesting, right? The set comes out. People actually play it.

There's a pro tour, you know. There are lots and lots of people that field test. You know, there's millions and millions of games played. And so there's lots of field testing. And we can learn what works and what doesn't. And so over time, we can figure out what was broken and what wasn't. And so, but back then, you know, they didn't know a lot to go on. Yeah, it was the third expansion, but I'm not even sure if those two teams... Well, the East Coast Playtesters at least had seen the second expansion.

They made it. But I'm not sure how much experience they had with the Rabid Knights. Probably they were the team that looked at it real briefly. But anyway, there wasn't a lot of built-in experience, and there's a short time frame, and there's a lot of really weird cards. So there are some broken cards in Legends. Actually, maybe not as many percentage-wise as there could have been. So Legends did introduce a lot of things.

For example, creature types introduced by Legends. For example, creature types introduced by legends. Bat, Beast, Berserker, Boar, Gnome, Hag, Whore, Kithkin, Kobold, Manticore, Nightstalker, Ooze, Phoenix, Satyr, Scorpion, Slug, Spawn, Spirit, Turtle, Wombat, and Yeti. Some of those would go on, like Beast would go on to get lots and lots of use. Other ones like Nightstalker, eh, not quite as much use. What else? There was a wall theme in the set, believe it or not.

The set has 11 walls and 10 cards that care about walls. So let's talk about the cycles really quickly. Some of the cycles you could see in Legends. One was the glyphs. Glyphs were enchant walls that helped your wall. I'm not kidding. There's a cycle of enchant walls. I made a deck of them, by the way.

As the John in me, I actually made a deck of could I make a wall deck and there were a few glyphs in it. Even in your wall deck, the red glyph gave you plus 10 plus 0, which if you're going to attack through walls with Rolling Stone was good, but not a lot of amazing lists.

There was a color wash cycle. So there was a cycle of instance that turned all permanents a certain color. I actually played some of those. You could play them in, there were a lot more color-hating cards in early Magic, and so the idea is you could play some of the color-hating cards

and turn your opponent's stuff into that color and stuff. There was anti-land walk enchantments. So this is a cycle of enchantments that turned off land walk. Like, in fact, there was one that stopped planeswalk. And I think maybe in the set there was one planeswalker. Like, it stopped something that only one other card even had. And the funny thing was, at the time, it wasn't like Mountain Walk or Forest Walk

were causing great problems in the game, but there were just enchantments that just, like, Forest Walk doesn't work. You can block Forest Walkers. There was a cycle of mana batteries. These were artifacts that you could sort of charge up to produce mana. So I think this was...

I mean, the moxes existed in Alpha, obviously. I think this was... I mean, the Moxes existed in Alpha, obviously. I think this was the first of sets released where... I mean, Antiquities messed around with colorless mana. There were batteries and stuff there. But it was always, you know, making colorless mana. This was the first ones that made colored mana. There were bands with other lands. Lands that granted bands with other lands. Lands that granted bands with other

abilities. Caracas, which, is Caracas the one that bands with? I know you can boomerang stuff. Caracas gets played in Commander quite a bit. Is that the one that gave? Or maybe I might be conflating them. Caracas is the legendary land. There was a

cycle of lands that granted bands with others to legendary creatures of that color. So yeah, I'm confusing them. Caracas is one. There also was a cycle of legendary lands, Hammerheim, Caracas, and stuff. And there was a cycle of elder dragons at Rare. Mythic Rare wasn't a thing yet.

That wouldn't happen for many years to come. Anyway, Legends definitely... There was a lot of excitement about Legends at the time. It did a lot of things that hadn't been done before and generated a lot of excitement. There was a lot of buzz around the Legendary Creatures at the time.

Interestingly, not a lot of them, through the lens of time, not a lot of them ended up seeing a lot of play. Luckily, Commander came along, and a few of them do see, through the lens of time, not a lot of them ended up seeing a lot of play. Luckily, Commander came along, and a few of them do see some playing Commander. And, like I said, one of the Elder Dragons, just by the way,

was Nicol Bolas. So, he is the second oldest villain in Magic. The Phyrexians got introduced in Antiquities, as did Urzin Mishra. I mean, technically Urzan Mishra were name referenced in Alpha, if you want to count them.

But anyway, Nicole Bolas shows up in Legends, and for some reason, he was the one that got stories made about him more so. The other one showed up in stories, but Nicole Bolas ended up becoming one of Magic's major villains. But anyway, that is the story of Legends. There's a lot of cool stuff in Legends. There's a lot of cool stuff in Legends.

There's a lot of neat things. I think Legends' claim to fame is it had neat ideas that would later be executed on better. I mean, Multicolor was amazing. I'm not sure it did Multicolor the best it could do. Legendary things. There's a lot of fan favorite from Legendary,

but as I'm talking about, none of those Legendary designs other than a handful, were sort of what Legends would become design-wise. And there's a lot of things, like Poison. There's a lot of things that the set introduced that it didn't quite deliver on, but would later go on to become much bigger. I guess what I'm trying to say is, there are a lot of really cool ideas in Legends.

Not all of them necessarily got executed quite right. But being first means something and introducing means something. And so Legends really holds, I mean, I have fond memories of Legends. I'll tell my personal Legends story before I sign off. So when Legends came out, there was a game store that I, I found a game store that carried Magic, and the person who decided to go all in on Magic, he bought on Legends. He bought a whole bunch of Legends. And so I was there when the store opened, because

you kind of had to be, and I bought, I think I bought two boxes of Legends, and then later that day I went back and bought a third box of Legends, and then even later that day I went back and bought a third box of legends and then even later that day I went back and bought a fourth box of legends um and so I I liked legends I in the day I was very I was uh very excited it's very funny it's I I can be very critical now with like 30 years looking back and this and that um but at the time in the day as a consumer I wasn't working you know I wasn't working for magic and I was just a Magic player. I bought a lot of Legends. I was very excited about Legends. And there was a lot of cool stuff in it.

One of these days, I will do a podcast talking about some of the cards from Legends. There are a lot of fun stories. I ran out of time today to do any of those. But really, telling the story of the set filled up the time. I promise, and it won't be 11 years, I will do a podcast at some point talking about some of the set filled up the time. I promise, and it won't be 11 years, I will do a podcast at some point talking about some of the cards from Legends. There's a lot of fun stories. But anyway, guys, I am in the parking lot. So we all know what that means.

It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I hope you enjoyed the story of Legends, if 11 years later. But it's time for me to go. See you guys next time. Bye-bye.