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| Daredevil, a card from the latest set |
The latest Magic set, Marvel Super Heroes, released days ago. The latest "Universes Beyond" set, it comes with a slew of new legendary creatures; this card type is the subject of today's post.
Introduction
In Magic, legendary is a supertype (printed before its card type(s)). Legendary cards of any kind (most are creatures, but there are also legendary artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers, and more) are subject to the "legend rule." From the comprehensive rules:
704.5j If two or more legendary permanents with the same name are controlled by the same player, that player chooses one of them, and the rest are put into their owners’ graveyards. This is called the “legend rule.”
Basically, you can have only one legendary card with a given name on the battlefield at a time (you can still include four copies of it in your deck, if you are playing a non-singleton format).
The Way Things Were
Legendary creatures have been around since 1994 (appropriately, they were introduced in the Legends set). Though Legends had a lot of them (55), legendary creatures were less than 10% of most sets released thereafter. And that's intuitive . . . "legend" implies scarcity (if everyone is legendary . . . nobody is). Plus, if you could have only one card on the battlefield at a time . . . why pump your deck full of potentially unplayable cards?
The Way Things Are
Two things have put the spotlight on legendary creatures in recent years: 1) Commander, and 2) Universes Beyond sets.
Commander, Magic's most popular multiplayer format, is singleton—you can have only one copy of a given non-basic-land card in your deck, so the normal drawback of legendary creatures doesn't impact deckbuilding here. And your commander must be a legendary creature, so pumping out lots of those expands options.
Universes Beyond (UB) sets, about which I have blogged at length, have increasingly dominated Magic's release plans. What do players want to see within a given UB set? Their favorite characters. Look at the below table covering the past 15 "normal" expansion releases. It is no surprise that the UB sets (in red below) produced in the last three years have 36% legendary creatures on average . . . whereas the "in-universe" sets produced in that same time have 8.2% of that card type. In Marvel Super Heroes, legendary creatures are almost 50% of the set . . . wow.
The Way Things Will Be
Commander will likely remain most popular multiplayer format, and UB sets are here to stay. I expect legendary creatures to continue to be produced at an astonishing clip. Consider how many legendary creatures were printed up to and including the following years:
2010: 444 unique legendary creatures2015: 611 unique legendary creatures2020: 1084 unique legendary creatures2021: 1276 unique legendary creatures2022: 1623 unique legendary creatures2023: 2026 unique legendary creatures2024: 2348 unique legendary creatures2025: 2827 unique legendary creatures2026: 3354 unique legendary creatures (and we're only halfway through!)
It took 27 years (1993-2020) to get to 1000 unique legendary creatures . . . then just 3 years to get the next thousand, and things keep accelerating.
Is this good or bad? I cannot say. It is certainly different . . . and makes me wonder if the preponderance of legendary creatures will eventually alter how the game is played. If it hasn't already.
Until next time . . . keep exploring.
