Magic: The Gathering is one of the most iconic games that has been introduced in the past few decades. In a generation of television and video games, Magic: The Gathering managed to capture the time, attention, and fascination of America’s youth with its incredible creativity, imagination, and strategy. While Magic: The Gathering has introduced myriad sets and expansion sets since its inception over two decades ago, the early cards are still the most exciting, bizarre, incredible, and unique. The entire Legends expansion set is included among the favored cards. What made the Legends expansion set so awesome and unique? Here’s a review of the set to help demonstrated why it’s still iconic many years later.
Inception
Legends was first introduced to the Magic: The Gathering world in June of 1994. This is notable since Magic: The Gathering itself was created in 1993, meaning that Legends was introduced right as the game was beginning to boom in popularity. The Legends set took advantage of this, as it was an extremely popular expansion set, jumping off the shelves to enthused Magic: The Gathering players and collectors.
Uniqueness
Before Legends was introduced, Magic: The Gathering expansion sets were sold in packs of eight cards. With Legends, however, packs contained 15 cards, making them much more exciting for collectors. On the other hand, boxes of Legends did a poor job of providing all of the common cards. While this was frustrating for players at the time, it made Legends a very unique and valuable set in hindsight. This was due to the extreme difficulty in collecting the entire set, which totaled 310 cards. Since Legends was introduced long before the days of buying individual cards on the internet, the people who owned the entire Legends set appear very rare and special.
In addition, Legends is the third scarcest Magic: The Gathering expansion set, with only 35 million cards produced.
Furthermore, there are many cards from Legends that are on the Reserved List; therefore, they will not ever be printed for tournament play.
Mechanics
Legends was revolutionary for the Magic: The Gathering world. It introduced five new mechanics to the game. Three of these mechanics are still in effect: Multicolor, which became very popular, first arrived in Legends as the first cards to require more than one color of manna to play came into existence; Enchant World, which introduced cards that had an affect on all players simultaneously; and Rampage, which gave creatures an added bonus when blocked by multiple cards.
The remaining two mechanics have since been altered or dismissed: the aptly named Legendary (or Legends Rule) introduced legendary creatures with the caveat that only one was allowed per deck. The restriction has since been dismissed, though it remains that only one legendary creature can be in play at a time. The other altered mechanic was Banding, which allowed creatures of specific types to be banded together. This mechanic has also been removed from the game.
Legends is one of the most iconic expansion sets in the history of Magic: The Gathering. It represents a shift in popularity for the great game, as it coincided with a boom in play. It still stands as one of the greatest expansion sets ever.
Byline
Connor Bentham is a freelance writer based in South Bend, Indiana. Connor recommends that those interested in the MTG series take a look at Card Kingdom Magic the gathering cards to possibly start or enhance a collection.
Image credit goes to Queen of frogs.
No Comments
Leave a comment Cancel