Oversoul
The Tentacled One
I was recently playing an EDH game in which I had a Drannith Magistrate on the battlefield, and the creature’s presence complicated things for my opponents. In a format that revolves around commanders, locking your opponents out of being able to cast their commanders from the command zone is potent, and most decks employ some other cards that rely on casting spells from other zones to some extent. In fact, my own deck that I was playing on the occasion included Dauthi Voidwalker, Vizier of the Menagerie, Opposition Agent, and Unburial Rites. Fortunately for me, Drannith Magistrate is not inconvenient for my use of such cards, as its ability reads, "Your opponents can’t cast spells from anywhere other than their hands." I am, alas, not my own opponent. Sure enough, I used one of those cards. If I remember correctly, it was Dauthi Voidwalker. This caused some stir and it seemed like everyone at the table agreed that the asymmetry of Drannith Magistrate was overpowered. Being such an obstacle, Drannith Magistrate was hit by a Path to Exile, and the action of the game continued. We moved on, and I eventually won with other cards.
It’s been suggested, if not outright confirmed, that the heavy use of asymmetrical effects in recent Magic design is tied to the “Philosophy of F.I.R.E.” Either way, symmetrical effects do still get printed, but they seem to be sparse compared to their use in older sets. Drannith Magistrate, printed in 2020, is an example of a card that certainly could have been symmetrical. It would still have been a strong card, but symmetry would have added additional gameplay considerations. Players would have to build their decks differently, navigate sequencing differently, or be prepared to remove their own Drannith Magistrate from the battlefield. The additional decision-making does add to the complexity of the game, and I admit that it could intimidate some new players. But Drannith Magistrate is a rare!
I’ve derisively referred to cards like Drannith Magistrate, ones that would be perfectly fine if symmetrical but are designed to be asymmetrical anyway, as “Have your cake and eat it too” cards. This isn’t my only qualm with the Philosophy of F.I.R.E. I’m also uneasy with cards like the aforementioned Opposition Agent, but even I can recognize that such a design wouldn’t make sense in a symmetrical fashion. Excessive asymmetry is one problem with contemporary Magic design, but it’s not the only problem. But the conversations I’ve had about Drannith Magistrate and other asymmetrical cards have gotten me thinking about this, about what makes a good card design, and more specifically about when to make an effect symmetrical instead of asymmetrical.
I want to zero in on two black enchantments from Legends. Despite glaring flaws in much of the rest of the set, I view these two cards as nearly perfect designs. They’re among my favorite cards of all time. They’re well-balanced, iconic, and powerful, while never quite being broken or adversely impacting other design choices. Printed in 1994, both cards had some significant presence in tournament and casual play, and both would, in their own way, later be the unfortunate victims of circumstances that the designers of Legends couldn’t foresee. In terms of symmetry, they could almost be considered polar opposites. The cards? Underworld Dreams and Nether Void.
Of course Underworld Dreams is the asymmetrical card and Nether Void is the symmetrical card. But to understand why I think these particular cards are so ingenious, we have to first understand the genius behind the set they came in. Legends was released in June of 1994. The original plan for the first expansion, Ice Age, wasn’t ready yet and wouldn’t actually be released until one year later. At this point, there was the original core set or base set, which had been released twice, in Limited and Unlimited versions, and there were two tiny “expansion” sets that were heavily thematic. There was also the new edition of the core set, the Revised Edition, which swapped out several cards in the original core set for ones in those two tiny sets, Arabian Nights and Antiquities. And that was it. Arabian Nights was a top-down design exploring the stories from the classic 1,001 Nights series of stories. It introduced some ideas that had never been used in the first set, such as utility lands, coin-flipping, -1/-1 counters, and some other ideas that would see further exploration later. Antiquities was a gimmicky set themed around a war between artificers, with every non-land card in the set either being an artifact or interacting with artifacts in some way. Both of these first two expansions were each well under 100 cards in size, so they had limited room to explore their own themes. The idea of swapping cards out for Revised Edition could have been neat in theory, but mostly resulted in overall downgrades. And really, that was it. Before Legends, that was the extent of innovation in Magic design following the release of the game. Ice Age was in the works, and was going to be a big deal, but like I said, it got delayed.
And then along came Legends. It had more overall cards than the core set and was Magic’s biggest set until Fourth Edition increased the size of the core set in 1995. It recapitulated on the themes used in the original core set and expanded on them. It sounds like business as usual when I put it this way, since of course an expansion set expands, but in point of fact, they hadn’t before and usually didn’t. The bite-sized Arabian Nights and Antiquities would really more appropriately have been termed “bonus” sets. And the other upcoming sets in 1994 would also do their own things. The Dark had an artistic emphasis and tried to showcase the “dark side” of each of Magic’s five colors. Fallen Empires played with creature types in card mechanics and made extensive use of different kinds of counters to put on permanents. And when Legends gets discussed in the history of these sets, it usually gets accounted for as the set that introduced gold cards, the set that introduced legendary creatures, the set that introduced world enchantments, etc. But don’t lose sight of the historical context! Like all other “expansion” sets at the time, Legends wasn’t meant to be played without the core set, and trying to do so wasn’t tenable. Expansion sets prior to Ice Age didn’t even have basic lands (except for one little mistake on the Arabian Nights common sheet). But while other early expansions essentially took a theme and gave players the option to incorporate cards from that theme into their decks, Legends painstakingly recapitulated the themes from the core set and gave new options for substitutions or additions.
The core set used lots of enchantments including many utility enchantments and build-around enchantments, so Legends provided more utility enchantments and introduced world enchantments. The core set had lots of landwalk, so Legends had even more landwalk and ways to interact with landwalk. The core set used trample to thematically make big, brutish creatures feel like meaningful attackers. Legends responded with rampage. The core set had lots of walls and tried to make walls a meaningful aspect of combat. Legends did even more with walls. Other than the central idea of making characters be “legends” and building the framework for what would become the “legendary” supertype, almost everything in the set is a callback to the core set. For instance, the designers of Legends were obviously thinking of Lightning Bolt when they created Chain Lightning, or Stone Rain when they created Land Tax. Keep in mind that this was all very early in the game’s history and deck design was a messy affair. Even relatively savvy players probably wouldn’t have all the cards. In hindsight, there were some dead ends in the design of all these early sets, including the core set. But in almost all instances, it seems that the designers of Legends tried to be faithful to the idea of Magic as it was presented in the original core set. And it’s uncanny how even with so many duds and mistakes that designers could learn from and later build more elegant sets, sometimes ingenious little nuances and interactions would only come up years later, as was the case with Green Ward + Aisling Leprechaun.
After just a few years, Wizards of the Coast would move to the block model of set design, with the “core” set having its meaning within gameplay diluted to the point that eventually core sets would be phased out entirely. But under the original framework, the mid-90’s vision for what Magic was supposed to look like as as agame, most early sets were what I’m labeling “bonus sets.” Compact, generally hyper-thematic, and divergent from the themes of the core set. Based on what I’ve seen of typical decks in this era, it seems that the assumption was that players would combine mostly packs of a single bonus set and incorporate them into the contents of one or more starter packs from the core set. A Goblins deck would be well-served to use stuff you opened from Fallen Empires or from the core set, but opening a pack of Arabian Nights would offer little chance for improvement. An artifact-based deck would of course benefit from some packs of Antiquities, but might have little use for The Dark.
Ice Age was a major development and milestone in the early years of the game. While it was the largest expansion set, it also felt more like a snow-flavored relaunch of the core set. It included reprints of many cards and even had its own basic lands, the first non-core set to do this. Despite being the largest Magic set at the time, much of the prodigious content found in Ice Age consists of exact reprints or rebalanced reprints of core set staples. Peruse the content cut between Revised Edition and Fourth Edition, and you’ll see lots of cards that have their roles filled by Ice Age cards. I say this not to insult Ice Age or complain about the direction the game took. Rebalancing was valid. However, this does leave Legends unique among large sets as something that took the term “expansion set” so literally. To understand the design of Legends, perhaps especially the quirky or failed aspects, it’s vital to understand that it was intended to complement the core set directly.
I mentioned Green Ward + Aisling Leprechaun. The “Ward” cycle of auras was not well received. They were panned from the beginning and were generally viewed with disdain when reprinted in later iterations of the core set, eventually getting dropped for Fifth Edition. It wasn’t until 2017, with the rising popularity of Old School ‘94 tournament play, that the utility of Green Ward alongside Aisling Leprechaun became popularized. The “Leprechaun Ward” deck uses Lifelace, Sylvan Paradise, and Aisling Leprechaun to paint opposing creatures green, then uses Circle of Protection: Green to prevent damage from them. The CoP: Green doubles as a way to prevent damage from one’s own Force of Nature, Ifh-Biff Efreet, and Hurricane. Lure on an Aisling Leprechaun can turn all blockers green, while Green Ward on another Aisling Leprechaun can ensure that it keeps getting in unblocked (while being pumped by Pendelhaven). The deck’s own big creatures, enchanted with Green Ward, can also circumvent blockers and push through for lethal damage. Now, I can’t prove that the designers of Legends were so clever as to foresee this sort of deck, only for it to lie undiscovered for the next twenty-three years, but I do believe that’s likely. There were probably plenty of other synergies they considered in set design that were never quite good enough for tournament play or didn’t ever fit into any tournament framework. And the sad truth is that so much of that was disrupted by outside circumstances.
The distribution of Legends was infamously poor. The set was underprinted for the size of the playerbase, which was growing rapidly. The collation of uncommons in this set meant that the west and east coasts of North America each received uncommons from different pools. Many players couldn’t get their hands on cards from this set, and even in areas where they could, the cards were overly expensive or only available in small batches. So while the idea of this as an expansion set that complemented the core set was there, the practical reality was different. The large size of the set coupled with its rarity meant that there were swaths of the set that went unseen by most players, lending Legends a reputation as an obscure, wonky set. I remember when a lot of Magic trivia focused on this set, and if you wanted to stump a knowledgeable player with something, Legends was the set to look at. I’ve heard stories that certain tournament-worthy cards, such as Moat and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, were highly sought after in 1994, sometimes by players who had no other experience with Legends at all. For my own part, I think I went well into the 00’s with some Legends cards being ones I hadn’t laid eyes on before, let alone used in gameplay.
It’s been suggested, if not outright confirmed, that the heavy use of asymmetrical effects in recent Magic design is tied to the “Philosophy of F.I.R.E.” Either way, symmetrical effects do still get printed, but they seem to be sparse compared to their use in older sets. Drannith Magistrate, printed in 2020, is an example of a card that certainly could have been symmetrical. It would still have been a strong card, but symmetry would have added additional gameplay considerations. Players would have to build their decks differently, navigate sequencing differently, or be prepared to remove their own Drannith Magistrate from the battlefield. The additional decision-making does add to the complexity of the game, and I admit that it could intimidate some new players. But Drannith Magistrate is a rare!
I’ve derisively referred to cards like Drannith Magistrate, ones that would be perfectly fine if symmetrical but are designed to be asymmetrical anyway, as “Have your cake and eat it too” cards. This isn’t my only qualm with the Philosophy of F.I.R.E. I’m also uneasy with cards like the aforementioned Opposition Agent, but even I can recognize that such a design wouldn’t make sense in a symmetrical fashion. Excessive asymmetry is one problem with contemporary Magic design, but it’s not the only problem. But the conversations I’ve had about Drannith Magistrate and other asymmetrical cards have gotten me thinking about this, about what makes a good card design, and more specifically about when to make an effect symmetrical instead of asymmetrical.
I want to zero in on two black enchantments from Legends. Despite glaring flaws in much of the rest of the set, I view these two cards as nearly perfect designs. They’re among my favorite cards of all time. They’re well-balanced, iconic, and powerful, while never quite being broken or adversely impacting other design choices. Printed in 1994, both cards had some significant presence in tournament and casual play, and both would, in their own way, later be the unfortunate victims of circumstances that the designers of Legends couldn’t foresee. In terms of symmetry, they could almost be considered polar opposites. The cards? Underworld Dreams and Nether Void.
Of course Underworld Dreams is the asymmetrical card and Nether Void is the symmetrical card. But to understand why I think these particular cards are so ingenious, we have to first understand the genius behind the set they came in. Legends was released in June of 1994. The original plan for the first expansion, Ice Age, wasn’t ready yet and wouldn’t actually be released until one year later. At this point, there was the original core set or base set, which had been released twice, in Limited and Unlimited versions, and there were two tiny “expansion” sets that were heavily thematic. There was also the new edition of the core set, the Revised Edition, which swapped out several cards in the original core set for ones in those two tiny sets, Arabian Nights and Antiquities. And that was it. Arabian Nights was a top-down design exploring the stories from the classic 1,001 Nights series of stories. It introduced some ideas that had never been used in the first set, such as utility lands, coin-flipping, -1/-1 counters, and some other ideas that would see further exploration later. Antiquities was a gimmicky set themed around a war between artificers, with every non-land card in the set either being an artifact or interacting with artifacts in some way. Both of these first two expansions were each well under 100 cards in size, so they had limited room to explore their own themes. The idea of swapping cards out for Revised Edition could have been neat in theory, but mostly resulted in overall downgrades. And really, that was it. Before Legends, that was the extent of innovation in Magic design following the release of the game. Ice Age was in the works, and was going to be a big deal, but like I said, it got delayed.
And then along came Legends. It had more overall cards than the core set and was Magic’s biggest set until Fourth Edition increased the size of the core set in 1995. It recapitulated on the themes used in the original core set and expanded on them. It sounds like business as usual when I put it this way, since of course an expansion set expands, but in point of fact, they hadn’t before and usually didn’t. The bite-sized Arabian Nights and Antiquities would really more appropriately have been termed “bonus” sets. And the other upcoming sets in 1994 would also do their own things. The Dark had an artistic emphasis and tried to showcase the “dark side” of each of Magic’s five colors. Fallen Empires played with creature types in card mechanics and made extensive use of different kinds of counters to put on permanents. And when Legends gets discussed in the history of these sets, it usually gets accounted for as the set that introduced gold cards, the set that introduced legendary creatures, the set that introduced world enchantments, etc. But don’t lose sight of the historical context! Like all other “expansion” sets at the time, Legends wasn’t meant to be played without the core set, and trying to do so wasn’t tenable. Expansion sets prior to Ice Age didn’t even have basic lands (except for one little mistake on the Arabian Nights common sheet). But while other early expansions essentially took a theme and gave players the option to incorporate cards from that theme into their decks, Legends painstakingly recapitulated the themes from the core set and gave new options for substitutions or additions.
The core set used lots of enchantments including many utility enchantments and build-around enchantments, so Legends provided more utility enchantments and introduced world enchantments. The core set had lots of landwalk, so Legends had even more landwalk and ways to interact with landwalk. The core set used trample to thematically make big, brutish creatures feel like meaningful attackers. Legends responded with rampage. The core set had lots of walls and tried to make walls a meaningful aspect of combat. Legends did even more with walls. Other than the central idea of making characters be “legends” and building the framework for what would become the “legendary” supertype, almost everything in the set is a callback to the core set. For instance, the designers of Legends were obviously thinking of Lightning Bolt when they created Chain Lightning, or Stone Rain when they created Land Tax. Keep in mind that this was all very early in the game’s history and deck design was a messy affair. Even relatively savvy players probably wouldn’t have all the cards. In hindsight, there were some dead ends in the design of all these early sets, including the core set. But in almost all instances, it seems that the designers of Legends tried to be faithful to the idea of Magic as it was presented in the original core set. And it’s uncanny how even with so many duds and mistakes that designers could learn from and later build more elegant sets, sometimes ingenious little nuances and interactions would only come up years later, as was the case with Green Ward + Aisling Leprechaun.
After just a few years, Wizards of the Coast would move to the block model of set design, with the “core” set having its meaning within gameplay diluted to the point that eventually core sets would be phased out entirely. But under the original framework, the mid-90’s vision for what Magic was supposed to look like as as agame, most early sets were what I’m labeling “bonus sets.” Compact, generally hyper-thematic, and divergent from the themes of the core set. Based on what I’ve seen of typical decks in this era, it seems that the assumption was that players would combine mostly packs of a single bonus set and incorporate them into the contents of one or more starter packs from the core set. A Goblins deck would be well-served to use stuff you opened from Fallen Empires or from the core set, but opening a pack of Arabian Nights would offer little chance for improvement. An artifact-based deck would of course benefit from some packs of Antiquities, but might have little use for The Dark.
Ice Age was a major development and milestone in the early years of the game. While it was the largest expansion set, it also felt more like a snow-flavored relaunch of the core set. It included reprints of many cards and even had its own basic lands, the first non-core set to do this. Despite being the largest Magic set at the time, much of the prodigious content found in Ice Age consists of exact reprints or rebalanced reprints of core set staples. Peruse the content cut between Revised Edition and Fourth Edition, and you’ll see lots of cards that have their roles filled by Ice Age cards. I say this not to insult Ice Age or complain about the direction the game took. Rebalancing was valid. However, this does leave Legends unique among large sets as something that took the term “expansion set” so literally. To understand the design of Legends, perhaps especially the quirky or failed aspects, it’s vital to understand that it was intended to complement the core set directly.
I mentioned Green Ward + Aisling Leprechaun. The “Ward” cycle of auras was not well received. They were panned from the beginning and were generally viewed with disdain when reprinted in later iterations of the core set, eventually getting dropped for Fifth Edition. It wasn’t until 2017, with the rising popularity of Old School ‘94 tournament play, that the utility of Green Ward alongside Aisling Leprechaun became popularized. The “Leprechaun Ward” deck uses Lifelace, Sylvan Paradise, and Aisling Leprechaun to paint opposing creatures green, then uses Circle of Protection: Green to prevent damage from them. The CoP: Green doubles as a way to prevent damage from one’s own Force of Nature, Ifh-Biff Efreet, and Hurricane. Lure on an Aisling Leprechaun can turn all blockers green, while Green Ward on another Aisling Leprechaun can ensure that it keeps getting in unblocked (while being pumped by Pendelhaven). The deck’s own big creatures, enchanted with Green Ward, can also circumvent blockers and push through for lethal damage. Now, I can’t prove that the designers of Legends were so clever as to foresee this sort of deck, only for it to lie undiscovered for the next twenty-three years, but I do believe that’s likely. There were probably plenty of other synergies they considered in set design that were never quite good enough for tournament play or didn’t ever fit into any tournament framework. And the sad truth is that so much of that was disrupted by outside circumstances.
The distribution of Legends was infamously poor. The set was underprinted for the size of the playerbase, which was growing rapidly. The collation of uncommons in this set meant that the west and east coasts of North America each received uncommons from different pools. Many players couldn’t get their hands on cards from this set, and even in areas where they could, the cards were overly expensive or only available in small batches. So while the idea of this as an expansion set that complemented the core set was there, the practical reality was different. The large size of the set coupled with its rarity meant that there were swaths of the set that went unseen by most players, lending Legends a reputation as an obscure, wonky set. I remember when a lot of Magic trivia focused on this set, and if you wanted to stump a knowledgeable player with something, Legends was the set to look at. I’ve heard stories that certain tournament-worthy cards, such as Moat and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, were highly sought after in 1994, sometimes by players who had no other experience with Legends at all. For my own part, I think I went well into the 00’s with some Legends cards being ones I hadn’t laid eyes on before, let alone used in gameplay.
