Retrospectives, part 3 - Legends
February 17th 2009 01:56
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
-- Emily Dickinson
When something becomes commonplace, you forget that there was a time before it existed. Many of us leave the television on nearly 24 hours a day; as a result, when the power grid went down during the heatwave that preceded the Conflux pre-release a couple of weeks ago, its worst effects were related not to the rapidly rising indoor temperature but rather the sudden absence of Sarah Connor and Bret Baier and Scooby and the gang. So it is with Magic – most of us have played our entire careers in a period when boosters were sold not just in specialized game and hobby retailers but (especially in America) major bookstores and Target-style one-stop emporia. Very few people now remember a time when the game was struggling to get off the ground, to find its audience and niche, to become a global activity that would one day be referenced on Family Guy and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
But there was such a time, and I will tell you about it. In 1994, the game’s player base still consisted mostly of small groups that were mostly isolated from each other. Some people didn’t even know about every card that existed, because set contents were not yet published online and not everyone had access to the Duelist magazine. Competitive play as we know it now did not exist; Friday Night Magic was more than five years away, and the Pro Tour had not yet been conceived.
With such a small existing card pool and fan base and none of the aforementioned unifying features of later years, something was needed to kick-start the game’s wild ride through the multiverse. When players first got their hands on a huge 310-card expansion set packed with artwork drawn by legendary comic book artists like Richard Kane Ferguson, Phil and Kaja Foglio, and Mark Tedin, inspiring flavor text like the Emily Dickinson poem I quoted above, and characters and places that were so powerful and unique that only one of them could exist on any given kitchen table, they knew they had found that something. The set looked like a pulp fantasy graphic novel and read like a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook (especially fitting, as we would find out in later years that many of the characters in the set were named after characters in Richard Garfield and his friends’ old campaigns).
Don’t view Legends with rose-colored glasses, though. The set was huge and unwieldy, and had no unifying theme other than general coolness. Wizards of the Coast made the bizarre decision to divide all the uncommons in the set between two different print sheets – and then draw from only one of those sheets for each booster box, meaning that for any given group of booster packs, only half the uncommons in the set were available to you. It contained some of the most powerful cards ever printed, and others that were barely even playable in theme decks. Sadly, many of the legendary characters fell into that latter category.
In much the same way that we leave the television on as long as we’re awake, we take it for granted that certain things are part of Magic and always will be. But everything had to be done a first time – and for surprisingly many of those things, that first time was Legends. It was not only the origin of legendary creatures (hence the set’s name), but also the first multicolored cards. Invasion’s dynamism, Ravnica’s sound and fury, and Shards of Alara’s gilded age all trace their lineage back to June of 1994.
Along with the following expansion, August 1994's The Dark, Legends was responsible for crystallizing and making permanent Magic’s unique blend of high fantasy and hedge fantasy, its unparalleled bridge between the worlds of the comics and of the printed word. Without Legends, Magic as we know it now would not – could not – exist.
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
-- Emily Dickinson
When something becomes commonplace, you forget that there was a time before it existed. Many of us leave the television on nearly 24 hours a day; as a result, when the power grid went down during the heatwave that preceded the Conflux pre-release a couple of weeks ago, its worst effects were related not to the rapidly rising indoor temperature but rather the sudden absence of Sarah Connor and Bret Baier and Scooby and the gang. So it is with Magic – most of us have played our entire careers in a period when boosters were sold not just in specialized game and hobby retailers but (especially in America) major bookstores and Target-style one-stop emporia. Very few people now remember a time when the game was struggling to get off the ground, to find its audience and niche, to become a global activity that would one day be referenced on Family Guy and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
But there was such a time, and I will tell you about it. In 1994, the game’s player base still consisted mostly of small groups that were mostly isolated from each other. Some people didn’t even know about every card that existed, because set contents were not yet published online and not everyone had access to the Duelist magazine. Competitive play as we know it now did not exist; Friday Night Magic was more than five years away, and the Pro Tour had not yet been conceived.
With such a small existing card pool and fan base and none of the aforementioned unifying features of later years, something was needed to kick-start the game’s wild ride through the multiverse. When players first got their hands on a huge 310-card expansion set packed with artwork drawn by legendary comic book artists like Richard Kane Ferguson, Phil and Kaja Foglio, and Mark Tedin, inspiring flavor text like the Emily Dickinson poem I quoted above, and characters and places that were so powerful and unique that only one of them could exist on any given kitchen table, they knew they had found that something. The set looked like a pulp fantasy graphic novel and read like a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook (especially fitting, as we would find out in later years that many of the characters in the set were named after characters in Richard Garfield and his friends’ old campaigns).
Don’t view Legends with rose-colored glasses, though. The set was huge and unwieldy, and had no unifying theme other than general coolness. Wizards of the Coast made the bizarre decision to divide all the uncommons in the set between two different print sheets – and then draw from only one of those sheets for each booster box, meaning that for any given group of booster packs, only half the uncommons in the set were available to you. It contained some of the most powerful cards ever printed, and others that were barely even playable in theme decks. Sadly, many of the legendary characters fell into that latter category.
Oh, dear.
In much the same way that we leave the television on as long as we’re awake, we take it for granted that certain things are part of Magic and always will be. But everything had to be done a first time – and for surprisingly many of those things, that first time was Legends. It was not only the origin of legendary creatures (hence the set’s name), but also the first multicolored cards. Invasion’s dynamism, Ravnica’s sound and fury, and Shards of Alara’s gilded age all trace their lineage back to June of 1994.
Along with the following expansion, August 1994's The Dark, Legends was responsible for crystallizing and making permanent Magic’s unique blend of high fantasy and hedge fantasy, its unparalleled bridge between the worlds of the comics and of the printed word. Without Legends, Magic as we know it now would not – could not – exist.
No other character from any other set could have been the marquee planeswalker for Conflux.
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