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As Commander has become the default format for the majority of Magic: The Gathering players, and as we shift into a world where there's as many (if not more) Universes Beyond sets each year as those within, we face an unusual problem with Magic design: Wizards of the Coast is printing way too many legendary creature cards.

Anyone who's been a Magic player for more than a few months of the last few years will be all too familiar with the absolute glut of content coming out of the printers at the moment. Even the most entrenched and card-hungry Magic players can get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of releases we're now subjected to.

With more sets means more cards and, recently, way more commanders.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Take a look at this thread from the Tapped Out forums on the rising number of legends in Standard-legal sets. This was from April 2022, before the influx of Universes Beyond had really kicked off (The Warhammer 40,000 Commander precons would release later that year). Already the trend was very visible, with single sets having double the legends printed of those present in entire blocks of Magic: The Gathering past.

There were definitely outliers. The original Kamigawa block, for example, had legendary cards in the high 90s across its three sets. This though, of course, was a set specifically built around a legendary creature theme. Not dissimilar to the recently rotated out Dominaria United set, itself, saw over 40 legends in a single set that was once again built around legendary spells as a theme.

This was a trend that wasn't overly welcome to long-term players who aren't a big fan of change, but it was a trend that made sense.

Commander is now the premiere Magic format, and as the original forum poster observes, the introduction of Commander precons tied with each Standard release saw a big influx of legends per set to accommodate players whose main purchasing incentive for new sets was to pick a shiny new legend to lead their Commander deck.

Here Come the Brands

Earlier this year, the first ever Standard-legal Universes Beyond set released in Final Fantasy. It marked the most recent of many U-turns in Wizards' policy on how UB sets would be printed.

From Secret Lair exclusives with in-universe reprints to Commander-only products to straight to Modern sets to now being legal in every format there is save for hyper specific ones, like Pre-modern.

Now, let me just clarify that I'm not here to talk about the qualities of Universes Beyond sets in anything but a mechanical sense. Personally, I'm really not a fan of this new era of Fornite colab MTG. If you are a fan then I'm very happy for you and I'm glad you're getting to play with cool stuff that makes you happy.

But with UB sets now legal in effectively every format in the game, there's some mechanical problems inherent to their design that are worth talking about. The one we're focusing on today being the hyper inflation of legendary creatures in new set card pools.

Final Fantasy is far and away the most legend-dense main set we've ever seen, with a whopping 99 legendary creatures in its main set according to Scryfall. Not to mention that the set itself also brings with it another 101 legendary creatures via its Commander product and the Through the Ages bonus sheet (which, in fairness, are just reprints). Either way that's an unprecedented total of 200 different legendary creatures among the set.

Character Dense = Legend Dense

Whilst printing more legendary creatures has been something Wizards clearly and intentionally focused on in the last few years' worth of sets, doing the same in Universes Beyond sets isn't much of choice. When you're adapting something like Final Fantasy into a Magic set, there's a hell of a lot of characters to fit into one set of cards. The franchise has been around for decades and every entry in the series has its die-hard fanbase.

And with a lot of these tie-ins you'll face a similar problem. One of the big selling points of Universes Beyond sets to those they target is owning their favorite characters on Magic: The Gathering cards. A lot of the upcoming and potential settings won't have much in the way source material that isn't named characters. It's why we've already been spoiled about fifteen different versions of Spider-Man in the upcoming set.

Outside of the webslinger and his many named villains and sidekicks, what other creature cards can you really make? Generic goon #5? Dude who steals an old lady's purse? Or as we've already seen spoiled, the incredibly exciting "Guy in the ChairGuy in the Chair"

Okay, So Why is That a Problem?

But who cares, right? So we've got a lot of legendary creatures coming out in newer sets. What actual effect does that have on gameplay? You might not think it would do much, but unfortunately there are problems that arise in Magic design when the legend count is too high.

Let's delve into them:

A glut of Useless Legends

First of all, when you get a lot of named characters in a set, you have a lot of legendary creature designs to go around, and realistically, not every legend is going to get the same amount of love. If every Final Fantasy legendary creature was as broken as ViviVivi, the set might have broken every format in existence. There are just some characters that'll have pretty mundane abilities.

And we've seen a huge influx of these in Magic sets in general. Legends that only see about five people building them as a commander and don't see play outside of draft environments. They don't exist as legendary creatures because the designers thought they were super powerful chase cards but simply because they are named characters.

Take a look at this SokkaSokka card from the upcoming Avatar set. Who is this for? What purpose is there for this card being legendary? Who wants to play with this other than as a meme?

I'm not sure where this card is from as the set symbol doesn't seem to belong to the main Avatar product line, so I'll cede that it's likely from some kind of teaching product, like a welcome deck. But take a look at the legends from the Bloomburrow starter decks above. At least they seemed to actually warrant their legendary status. This is just a card with someone's name on it.

Legends Don't Matter, But...

Whilst Final Fantasy was the most legend-filled set of all time, weirdly, it wasn't a set that actually cared about legends all that much. There were some cards that specifically called out legendary cards in their rules text, but from what I can tell, there were only about six of them.

That's out of about 300 cards in the set itself, and the above examples are all rare. I wouldn't call that a "legends matter" set. Compare it to UB sibling The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, which had a good selection of cards at all rarities that cared about players leaning into a predominantly legendary creature base, and it was a set that had slightly fewer legendary creatures overall.

But you can sympathize with Magic's designers here. You can't just have every single UB set be a legends matter set. Instead, we end up with a few token legends matter cards in the pool and predominantly a load of legendary creatures that are only legends because they're named in their source property.

..."Legends Matter" Even More

But I do think this will lead to a problem for Commander deckbuilders. When this many legendary creatures are in each set's card pool, more and more generic abilities and card archetypes end up being given a legendary frame.

Anyone who's been on the receiving end of a Jodah, the UnifierJodah, the Unifier deck knows that legends-focused strategies can be intensely strong in Commander, a format where the main drawback of a creature being legendary doesn't actually exist due to it being singleton anyway.

Legendary as a supertype is supposed to be a balancer. You get a card that punches above its weight, but you can only have one copy at a time. In Commander, they just punch above their weight. But you also have access to a nice big pool of cards that generically reward you for having your creatures be legendary.

So my question is: if there's soon to be a legendary version of every card in the game, why shouldn't you just play the legendary ones and reap the rewards of Heroes' PodiumHeroes' Podium and Relic of LegendsRelic of Legends? Why not just replace a card like Hinterland SanctifierHinterland Sanctifier with Aunt MayAunt May?

Effect on 60-Card Formats

Bear in mind that this is just Commander and the effects it'll have on Magic's biggest formats. We've not even spoken about the 60-card formats, like the aforementioned Standard. What effects will an overwhelming number of legendary cards have on a format that can play up to four of each?

Weird things are happening to my beloved format of Pauper, a place where legendary creatures were effectively nonexistent save for some truly awful old cards and one more modern example from Modern Horizons 3. In a format where legends aren't played, the king of removal is a two-mana black instant whose downside might as well not be printed on the card, Cast DownCast Down.

But with Spider-Man, we're starting to see legendary creatures rear their heads even there. Spider-Man, Web-SlingerSpider-Man, Web-Slinger could be Pauper-playable for aggro decks that might want to replay a Thraben InspectorThraben Inspector for the extra Clue. Does this set a precedent for sets to come? Is Cast DownCast Down about to become a whole lot worse just because Wizards needed more room to cram more named characters in?

More UB Legends Means Less Magic Legends

For those with an attachment to Magic's original worlds, we're also going to see less named, in-universe characters feature in the spotlight as well. The most recent set, Edge of Eternities, despite being a brand new setting we're to introduce ourselves to, saw a far lower number of legendary creatures. There were just 15 in total.

And this wasn't a mistake. Wizards is aware that the overwhelming increase in legendary creatures could be bad for Magic as a whole. As a result, they've effectively trimmed the amount that are allowed to be released with in-universe sets. As confirmed by Mark Rosewater, this is an exercise in bringing the total legends per year count down.

If you're a fan of getting new legends per set, then I hope you like whatever brand Magic decides to cross over with! Because that'll be the vast majority of the options you have to pick from.

It's good to know that Wizards of the Coast has some of the issues here on their radar, but it hurts to see that Magic's original IP is once again the one that'll have to suffer for UB's overreach.

A Legendary Future

As we've seen from the massive success of Universes Beyond product, this problem isn't going anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of UB sets per year continues to rise. With that, we can only hope that Wizards shows restraint in their design decisions. Otherwise, the general power level of new cards may be on the rise once again, and Magic as we know it may be on course to become even more unrecognizable than ever before.