Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #228 - Legendary

Episode Date: May 22, 2015

Mark talks about the history of the Legendary supertype.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, well today's topic is Legendary. Literally, it's Legendary. I'm going to talk all about the Legendary supertype and where it came from and how we designed it. So, let's start from the very beginning. Okay, so, Legendary, or Legends, first appeared in the third Magic expansion called Legends. So it was designed by a guy named Steve Connard. So when Magic first started hitting big, Richard had gone and asked all his playtest groups to start making sets. And from that, you get Ice Age, you get Mirage, you get Spectral Chaos that went into Invasion.

Anyway, Peter Atkinson also went to some of his friends and asked them to start making sets. So one of the people he talked to was Steve Connard. Steve Connard and Peter Atkinson were old-time role-playing buddies. They played a lot of role-playing games together. And so what Steve was inspired to do when he made a set was he wanted to use a lot of the flavor from different role-playing games they had played. So his idea was he wanted to introduce a lot of characters,

and not just any characters, but characters specifically that they had played in their role-playing sessions, either directly or as NPCs. Non-player characters for those non-role-players out there. So the idea is he wanted to represent them as being unique things. Now, note, Richard in Arabian Nights, which is the first expansion, did have unique characters in the sense that here's Aladdin, here are characters from the tales of Arabian Nights

that were clearly individual singular characters. But he didn't mechanically differentiate them. So what Steve did is he said, okay, I'm going to tag them to say, these are special. These are one of a kind. And to do that, he ended up giving them a creature type. Now, when they first appeared,

they were not legendary creatures. They were, I'm not even a creature. It was summon, because back then it was summon. Summon legend. And because most creature types only had one... Only cards only had one creature type, most of them weren't even legendary anything. They were just summon legend.

Which we later went back and fixed some of that because, like, clearly they were something. But because we just said legend... The one exception, by the way, was the Elder Dragon legends, which were five of them, Nicole Bolas being the most famous of them. And anyway, so not only did Steve introduce

legends, he also introduced multicolor. Legends is the first set to have multicolor cards. And he decided to overlap them completely, which meant all the multicolor cards in the set were legends. All the legends were multicolored cards. So when legends were introduced, there were no monocolored legends.

And all the multicolored cards that existed at the time in that set were legends. Now, he did have legendary things. There actually were legendary lands. So lands weren't subtype legend. They had a supertype which said legendary. So when you first appeared, creatures were treated different from non-creatures. Now legends, the only thing legendary

in legends, I mean there were legends creatures, was lands. There were legendary lands. And the lands go from being pretty powerful to not so powerful. Some of them still show up today in constructed tournaments. Some less so. But anyway, so Steve put him on that. Now, when legends

first appeared, there was a rule. And the rule, this is how the legend rule worked. And this was true for both legends, the creatures, or anything legendary at the time of lands. The rule was once something was in play, once you would summon Dakin Blackblade, you could you had summoned Dakin Blackblade,

you could not summon another Dakin Blackblade. He's here. So when the second person went to go get Dakin Blackblade, the game said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't get Dakin Blackblade.

He's right there. So the first person to play it had essentially locked out all of their copies. So what happened was if I had Dakin Blackblade and I played it and you then later drew

Dakin Blackblade, it was a dead card in your hand. Until my Dack and Blackblade died, there's nothing you could do. You weren't allowed to cast your card. Now, another thing to remember is, when Legends first came out, all legendary, oh, sorry, all Legends, all the creatures, I don't know about

the lands, in fact, probably the lands too, all legendary things, Legends and legendary lands, were restricted, which meant you only have one of them in your deck. To solve the problem of you drawing a dead card that said, okay, here's the rule, you're going to have one legend in your deck.

Now, you still have the problem, when I played my legend, if I got it out first, I made the card dead in your hand. That was the problem. Now, note, in the same set, there were, at the time, were called enchant worlds. We've now called them world enchantments. The flavor of those were you were fighting a battle

and this thing would dictate where you were and it would have an influence on, it would have an enchantment effect on the battle. It would affect the creatures or the fighting in some way. And then, if you played a new enchant world, it would override, like you've now transported to this new world.

And so enchant worlds and legends worked backwards. Legends was, you know, if I have number one and you have number two, number one trumps number two. Enchant worlds or world enchantments, if I have number one, you have number two, number two trumps number one. So they didn't work the same.

That caused a little bit of confusion because there were two different things going on that worked backwards from each other. Okay, so Legends came out in the third expansion of Legends. They were popular. I mean, out of the gate. In fact, I believe from then on, it became instantly evergreen.

The very next set, which is the Dark, I believe the Dark, I think the Dark has some Legends in it. I'm not 100% sure on that. But anyway, very soon after, Legends just were a thing that you had. Not every set had Legends. There's a few sets that don't have them, but most that had Legends. And now it's a staple.

Now every set has Legendary. At least creatures, and sometimes more. Okay, so what happened was things... So for a while, we had the rule about you can only have one in your deck. Eventually we said, ah, that's dumb. It was making the restricted list so long. We're like, okay, fine, fine, fine.

You know, you can have as many as you want, up to four in your deck, but you can only play one at a time, and until that one dies, the other ones are trapped in your hand. Okay, so we've come to Champions of Kamigawa. So for most people,

so one of the themes of champions was a legendary theme. It was one of the major themes of the set. In fact, most people don't realize it. So every single rare creature, rare and mythic, there wasn't a mythic back then. Every rare creature was a legend.

There were some uncommon legends, but every rare creature was a legend. There were some uncommon legends, but every rare creature was a legendary creature. And so, in fact, most people don't realize this. When you say champions of Kamigawa, champions actually was referencing the legendary theme. But most people did not get that. So by the way, real quickly, because people bring this up, there's a lot of discussion about the difference between

champions of Kamigawa where I said the legendary theme, my famous little dictum of if it's not a common, if your theme's not a common, it's not your theme. So Dragons comes along, Dragons of Tarkir, and Dragons, it's not really any dragons per se. We tried to make some in design, but they got pushed up

during development to uncommon. So how is it that Dragons, which doesn't have a dragon at common, has a dragon as a theme, where Chems of Kamigawa... And the difference is... It's nice to make little catchy things. If the theme's not a common, it's not your theme.

It's very catchy. Really, what I was trying to say is if your theme's not at a low enough as fan, it's not your theme. So the problem is it's hard to make something catchy when you use a term that a lot of people don't understand because it's a complicated term. I've obviously explained as fan like a billion times on this podcast. The thing to remember is if you have two uncommons, that is the same as fan of having one common. So instead of having, you know, one common, like we could have stuck

a dragon at common in Dragons of Tarkir. I mean, we tried. It ended up not being good for limited. But the reality is having two uncommon dragons is the same as then as having one common dragon. And so one of the things that we made sure to do as we were fixing is have enough uncommon things. And uncommon, not only are there a whole bunch of dragons, there are a whole bunch of dragon referencing cards. If you look in the art, the dragons are littered in the sky of all the art. The set has dragons in its name. The big difference between Dragons of Tarkir and Champions of Kamigawa is nobody missed the dragon theme.

Nobody walked into dragons, opened up some packs of dragons and go, I don't get the theme. What's the theme here? Where people missed the legendary theme of champions. They just missed it. That just because you open up and there's a legend card in your pack, you don't all of a sudden go, oh, it's a legendary theme. Partly because we didn't call it Legends of Kamigawa, which would help. And partly because Legends

seem more diverse than Dragons. When you open your second Dragon, you go, oh, I got another Dragon. When you open your second Legend, you don, oh, I got another dragon. When you open your second legend, you don't really go, oh, I got another legendary creature. Usually legendary creatures are different enough, like, oh, I got a legendary dragon. Oh, I got a legendary human. They're just different. Anyway,

so when legendary creatures were coming into Champs de Camigou, we're like, okay, the rules kind of flawed. We, in fact, had moved away from, I mean, we had made other legendary things. We had made legendary artifacts, a few legendary enchantments. One of the things development had started to do was, A, when you make a legendary creature, because you can't have two in play at once, you get to push the power a little bit. Not a lot, but a little tiny bit. And sometimes what would happen is when we had a card that we

didn't want two of in play at once. Classic example is Croak's Thumb from Mirrodin. Originally it was like, I don't know, Lucky Goblin Thumb or something. And we realized having multiples in play caused problems, so the development team came to me and the creative team and said

is this a problem if it's legendary? And the creative team was like, is this a problem if it's legendary? And the creative team was like, fine, okay, it's Clark's thumb. It's a particular goblin thumb rather than just any thumb, any goblin thumb. And so one of the things we definitely use legendary as a means by which development will use it as a means to keep having more than one play at the same time. Anyway, along comes Legends with a legendary theme. We realize there's an inherent flaw. It creates a lot of dead card situations.

So we decide, okay, we're going to change the Legend rule. Instead of the first one trumping, what we said is the first one comes into play. You got the first one. When the second one gets played, when it enters the battlefield, it checks to see if there's another one there. If there is, it destroys both of them. Mutual destruction. And the idea was,

instead of, you know, if I play Black and Blackblade and you have a Black and Blackblade, your Black and Blackblade is no longer dead. What it does is it neutralizes my card. And so we made that change during Champions of Kamigawa. We said, okay, we've got a legendary theme, we'll make Legends a little better. Now, if you get one trapped in your hand, well, it's not trapped, you can use it as a means to neutralize your opponent. So that was the legendary rule for a while. Okay, now, flash forward to Theros. So Theros, for starters, we knew we wanted a pantheon of gods. We wanted five mono-colored gods, ten minor two-colored gods. That was 15 legendary creatures. And then we needed legendary characters beyond that.

So there's a lot of legendary creatures. Not as much as champions, obviously, but there's a lot in Theros. So we're like, okay, let's re-examine. We knew there was some issues with the legendary super type. Oh, by the way, I think during champions, I think during champions is when it changed over? Well, sometime between Champions and Theros,

Legendary switched from being a creature type... Yeah, I think it was during Champions is when we switched it. Instead of being a creature type, which had baggage on it, like Legend meant all the stuff that Legendary meant, but it was a creature type, we moved it to become a super type. It more felt like a super type anyway. It allowed us to put subtypes of what the creature was more easily.

So we moved it over. We took all the baggage off of our creature. Wall also, we made defender and wall no longer inherently meant it was a defender, although all walls were defender. Okay, so the super type exists. And now we get to Theros, and we're like, okay. It still is a problem.

We really were shying away from making legendary lands, just because this idea that I just neutralized yours, the gameplay wasn't particularly great. And so what we did was, we said, okay, we're going to change the rules. The new rule is, each player can summon a legendary card. I can summon Dak and Blackblade, I can summon Dak and Blackblade, you can summon Dak and Blackblade, and they can co-exist. Gotta ask Doug what exactly the flavor there is, but

we did it for gameplay more so than flavor. One of the things that comes up from time to time by the way is, where do you let flavor rule the day, and where do you let gameplay rule the day? And the answer is, you want to let flavor sort of stretch its wings wherever it can, but when it gets in the way of gameplay, we've decided that gameplay trumps flavor.

Can an elephant wear boots? Probably not, but it's much more restrictive to limit what creature you can put your equipment on. So we just say, whatever, you know, the boots are meant for humanoids, it looks like a humanoid boot, it makes sense humanoids to put them on. You got an elephant, you want to put the boots on, we're not going to quabble. It's just better gameplay.

Not having to write out all the words of, this could only go in a humanoid type creature. Well, what's a humanoid creature? That gets much more complicated. So anyway, we changed the legendary rule. So one of the things behind the scenes, just as a note, is I'm not a big fan of... I like the legendary... I like the legendary...

I like the legendary designation, but I do not like that it comes with a negative. I understand there's flavor that comes with that negative, but my personal feeling is if the game had just started and it was a marker, meaning it's something that we could reference... Oh!

Something I forgot, by the way. I'll get to that in a second. There's another really important thing that happened in the world of Legendary. I'll get to that in one second. But my big thing that I always argue about with R&D is if I had to start over, it would designate nothing. I do not like that the cards we most want you to care about have to come with a built-in negative. Now, given it's a flavorful negative, and people are much more willing to accept flavorful negatives, but I believe that if the game just started that way, that you already can have red Kamal and green Kamal in play, or white Macias and black Macias.

I mean, you can already have creatures that overlap each other that are the exact same character, and it happens, and the game goes on. I understand it's a flavor hit, but I actually think... Anyway, if it was up to me, the legendary rule would be slightly different. It would be, it doesn't mean anything other than it's a signifier to care about. Okay, speaking of a signifier to care about,

let me talk about another giant step forward for legendary. So somewhere in between Champions of GammaGao and Theros, I know it was before Invasion. So sometimes between Champions and Invasion. Not Invasion, not Invasion, not Invasion, Ravnica, sometime between Champions and Ravnica, sometime around there, there was a new

format made by a bunch of judges, known as, at the time, it was called Elder Dragon Highlander, and it's since been renamed Commander. And the Commander format was a casual format made by, you know, judges just to kind of plan their off time. It picked up some steam, became pretty popular. And before we knew it, there was this giant Commander format.

And what Commander really did to us is it really made us realize that legends, legendary things, creatures especially, took on an additional significance. All of a sudden, if we make something legendary, it could be a commander. Now note, by the way, we don't make every legendary creature to maximize its ability to be a commander. There's a lot of audiences that get served,

and that a legendary creature serves more than just the commander crowd. There's a lot of vortices and just people that really love the flavor of the game, that legends mean a lot to them and represent characters

they love. So legendary characters are doing a lot of work. We are conscious about making sure that some of the legendary characters make good commander generals. We don't make sure

that all of them do because there's different roles that they play. But anyway, legendary definitely have different roles that they play. But anyway, Legendary definitely have taken on this extra status. The Legendary designation for commanders really has

shown a light on them. I think if you notice, we've upticked a little bit how many Legendary creatures we're making. I think part of that is definitely an influence of the commander format. Okay, but now, let's talk about how exactly do we design a legendary creature or a legendary permanent it doesn't have to be a creature um okay what happens is so i talked about um in a previous podcast how there are three stages of

design that there's vision there's integration there's refinement um usually what happens is sometime during vision, the creative team gives us a general gist of what's going to happen. What's the general idea of the story? It's in vague terms, not everything's figured out yet. Usually at that point, we have a general

sense of who the major characters are. Who's the main character? Now usually that's a planeswalker and not a legendary creature. But we have some sense of who that character. Now, usually that's a planeswalker and not a legendary creature, but we have some sense of who that is. Then, usually during refinement, they will hand over a list of legendary characters. Now, sometimes that happens in integration. It usually happens in refinement.

But whenever they get it, they give it to us. And then, the way it works is as follows. Okay. First thing you do is you look at all the characters, and what they do is they send us a list of the characters and then a description, like a couple paragraphs, just sort of explain who they are so we get a sense of them. So first thing you do is you look at your file and you're like, oh, do I have a card

that I already like to fix the set that could be that character? Classic example of that was we were making Phage for I think it was Legions, and I had made a card already. I had made a card called Super Basilisk, I think. And the idea was, it was just, it was like a basilisk

or maybe it might have been Super Medusa. It was in black. And the idea was it had the equivalent of Death Touch. Death Touch wasn't keyworded at the time. It was like, I destroy anything I touch, any creature, or any player. And so it had the ability that if it hit the player, it killed them. So then Phage comes along, and Phage was like,

she has a death touch. And I'm like, oh my goodness, that's awesome. And so, I didn't make Phage to be Phage. I made Phage just as a random cool card. But when Phage came along, I'm like, oh, that's perfect. That's exactly what I want. It was already a cool splashy character, and it fit her perfectly. Other times though, well, okay, number one is you just perfectly have something that

fits the character. That doesn't happen a lot. It happens once in a while, sometimes. Next is you have a character that doesn't quite fit, but with a little fiddling, you can take a card you have. So sometimes what will happen is the card basically is what you want. So what we call tr is the card basically is what you want. So what we call trinket text. Trinket text is text that's more for flavor than for gameplay. It means it has some gameplay ramifications,

but they're small, and it's more there to add flavor. We tend to do trinket text at higher rarity cards. We tend to leave it off lower rarity just for simplicity purposes. But at high rarity, rare, mythic rare, especially on a legendary creature, we have kind of a flavorful thing...

Now, sometimes Trinketex can matter more than others. I know, like Baneclare Angel, we gave protection from dragons and demons, and it turned out that what started as kind of just cute Trinketex ended up being very important in the metagame. So sometimes Trinketex can matter quite a bit. So sometimes what you do is you find a card, you're like, oh, it's close. Let meagame. So sometimes Trinketex can matter quite a bit. So sometimes what you do is you find a card, you're like, oh, it's close.

Let me add a little bit of Trinketex and sort of, you know, you can adapt a card you already have. It's not that you're using it straight up, but you're adapting and adding a little bit to make it. Now, most often what happens is, eh, nothing you have really fits exactly because you're really trying to get, one of the goals of a design for a legendary creature,

or any legendary permit, especially creatures, is you're trying to capture the essence of it. That when someone plays the card, that the mechanics of the card, the gameplay of the card, conveys something about the flavor of the character. That is when you're, you know, that's when you're on the top, when you're like, oh, that, like, creative is going to

give it an awesome name, and great art, and cool flavor text that it fits. They're going to do everything they can to flavor it. But one of the goals of design is design is as much a flavor as any other element. Now, design has to also answer to gameplay. So, I mean, it's got multiple masters, but it is something that when you're designing your legends,

you want to make sure that the mere act of playing them, the mechanics itself, convey something and gives a feel for the character. I often talk about how when you design a set, you always have to figure out what emotion you're trying to tap into. Well, a similar thing is when you're designing a legendary character, you want to figure out what's the essence of what you're trying to do. So here's the trick when you make a legendary character. First thing you do is you figure out what's the essence of what you're trying to do. So here's the trick when you make a legendary character. First thing you do is you figure out what colors is.

And that can be figured out in a couple of ways. One is, philosophically, where does the character lie? Legendary characters tend to lean a little toward multicolor, just because characters, if you have any sort of complex facet to them, often are more than one color. Also, what tools do they use? You know, you could have a character that has a very blue philosophy, but if they're raising zombies,

well, they have some black in them. So the color represents both kind of the philosophy of the character, but also some of the tools used of the character. Okay. Once you have a color, the next thing you want to do is sort of figure out the creature type. Like, flavor-wise, what is this character? What is it?

Is it a human? Is it an elf? Is it a goblin? Is it a beast? Is it a sphinx? Is it a demon? What is it? You have to figure out what it is. And then, once you know that, then you want to figure out the range of size. And this is something you work with creative. One of the funny stories here is, during Theros design

I was trying to make a Hercules card sometimes by the way the way you get, you do legendary characters because they come straight out of the story needs sometimes with top down sets you will make a legendary creature because you're trying to capture a theme, we don't always make

them legendary like in Innistrad Jekyll and Hyde was referencing a specific thing, but we just went for the trope and didn't make it specific. But in this case, I was trying to make Hercules, so I was making him legendary. And the idea was I wanted to make him a 12-12 as a little nod to the 12 labors. And he had this restriction you had to figure out how to solve, but once you did it, he was this very powerful creature. And Kareem and I went back and forth because we'd never made a human 1212. And I'm like, he's not a human. He's a demigod. And they're like, well, that can be bigger than normal. He's Hercules. He's like super strong. And we went back and forth fighting over that.

But one of the things you have to figure out with the Kareem, what's the right size for what you want? Okay, so you figure out what color of colors it is, what creature type it is, what size it is, and then you want to go for the emotional essence. What is this character doing? What's the beat of the character? An example I'll give is I had a roommate back in my L.A. days who was an artist, and he took a class in caricatures. And he was explaining to me that one of the neat things about doing caricatures is

what you need to do is pick one or two aspects of your subject and really play them up. That a caricature is not just a straight drawing of somebody. It's a comical, you know, and part of what makes a caricature work is taking some aspects and just playing it up. And that's true with designing legends, legendary creatures, is you want to take some aspect and go, okay, what's the part of this I really want to hammer home? You know, if it's an assassin, I'm like, okay, the fact that he's an assassin,

he kills things, I want to play that up, or it's a diplomat, or, you know, whatever it is, what does the character do? I want to mechanically, I want to make sure that I have, like, the character, the main point of the character is this point, so that when I design it, I can really hit that point

for example, like I talked before about making Olivia Valerian, which was a Count Dracula trope, it's the lord of the vampires, and the thing I was really interested there was, I liked the idea of a lord of the vampires that could turn things into vampires

that could kill things or turn them but I really love that flavor of she feeds and gets stronger, but she has the ability to sort of stop and turn into a vampire. And that was really the driving force of this whole idea of feeding on other creatures and then you can turn them.

And the whole design was built around, well, how do I make that work? Usually, by the way, when I talk about design 101, one of the biggest problems designers have is trying to do too much on a card. With a legendary creature, that's also the same thing. Pick one thing that you really want to hammer home. Now, that doesn't mean you can't add on a keyword or something. One of the things you'll notice a lot of time we do in legendary creatures

is we'll stick on a keyword that is more thematic than it's mechanical. For example, you'll notice sometimes we'll stick death touch on a really big creature. And like, well, why in the world does a 6'6 or 7'7 need death touch? It doesn't. The death touch is there for flavor, not for mechanics. It's like, this thing is so deadly, it's just going to kill you. Well, it's probably going to kill you anyway. But, you know, we often, for example, like to... You'll see, like, intimidating things on creatures

just to try to stress that they're scary. And words are powerful. One of the things that, on legendary cards especially, sometimes you award keywords because the keywords are powerful in their words. I mean, we make sure they match the color pie and stuff. So, I mean, you know. But you definitely can

sort of help convey sometimes through the words you use. And the last big thing about making a legendary character, and remember, they're not just legendary creatures. You make legendary artifacts. You make legendary lands. Blue Moon makes legendary enchantments. We make those more frequently. The key to, like, a legendary artifact is you want to make sure that it feels like something special and unique. I try hard on our legendary stuff to make sure that they're doing pretty cool things and, you know, there's like, there's

one item in the universe that does this thing and, you know, you have that, you have the one item, so. The thing that's very interesting is, like I said, one of the signs that legendary things are so popular is

there are very few drawbacks left in the game. One of the things about Magic is we learned that players don't really like drawbacks and so once upon a time we did mechanics like Echo and stuff where it's like, really? It's kind of like, your creature's cheaper because it has a drawback. And we do those on one-by-one

cards. We do individual cards with drawbacks, but we tend not to do mechanics with drawbacks. And so it is a testament to the popularity of Legendary that essentially it's a drawback. I mean, I understand that for Commander it's not a drawback, but outside of the Commander format, it's just a negative thing. I mean, there's a few cards that reference it, but really it's like the inability to play a second one is a limitation.

It's a liability. But Legendaries are real popular, and I think a lot of that has to do with just there's something about it. One of my general rules is that players are willing to put up with things they normally dislike for flavor, if the flavor is strong enough. And I think that one of the things going on here for Legendary is the flavor is strong enough. Because people really like Legendary is the flavor is strong enough. Because people really like Legendary creatures. Something we've become more and more conscious of is that when we put a Legendary creature in a set,

it's going to draw attention. People are going to pay attention to it. And so we definitely spend extra time and attention, not just in design, but also in development, to make sure that our Legendary things are cool. Now, once again, every Legendary creature doesn't serve the same purpose. Not everyone's made for Commander, not everyone's made for Standard, not everyone's necessarily made for fun casual decks,

but we mix them up and we try to make sure there's a little bit for everybody. One of the things we're doing a little more recently is trying to make sure that there's legendary characters that represent major mechanical elements of the set. That's not something... Usually the way we pick legendary creatures is solely based on story. But we've been

a little more cautious. Something we're thinking more about is making sure that can we take one of the characters in the story and if there's a popular theme that the set really wants you

to build a deck around that we can give you a legendary creature that kind of goes in that deck. We're going to do it 100% but we're doing it more and more and it's something

we're very conscious about. You know, like, Innistrad lacking a legendary werewolf was a giant sticking point. It's something that was very loud to people, and, you know, we've heard you, when you guys complain, we listen to what you have to say,

and we are very much trying to figure out how to correct things in the future. But anyway, that, my friends, is everything you need to know about the history and the design of legends, legendary things. So hopefully today's podcast was legendary. Anyway, I've just parked my car. So you know what that means? It means it's the end of my work.

And instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll talk to you guys next time.