Welcome back to the EDH in
Ottawa blog!
This week we look at the
centrepiece of any Commander deck, the Commander itself, or rather its
identifier as a Legendary Creature. As we know, the first occurrence of these
creatures occurred in the (Surprise!) Legends expansion
released in 1994. Distribution of the set was insanely scarce; I recall at the
time Fandom II had some boxes for sale, about two or three of them, and they
were sold almost instantly.
While we pored over the crazy
new creatures, it was obvious that some
cards were better than other
cards and people started jockeying for the better stuff. The saving grace
that scarcity gave us was that decks weren’t immediately streamlined so your Stangg
or Lord
Magnus might go all the way, unless your opponent had played theirs first,
in which case you were locked out from playing yours under penalty of losing
yours upon entering play. Oh, rumour has it that you could only have one of any
type of Legendary Creature in your deck as well, so if Jasmine
Boreal starts pushing up shurikens, that’s it for her and her plans for
world domination.
Of course, it should be noted
that the rules back then were very, very, very vague. Since there weren’t a lot
of judges around you basically had to go to USEnet and look up the various
newsgroups for rules updates, or hope to find an IRC channel where a rules
expert would help you out. The helpful folks at Wizards also included a nifty
rules insert explaining the legend rule, bands with other, enchant worlds and
why they actually used cardboard to print Wood
Elemental. Well, eventually we had The
Dojo (Thanks forever Frank Kusomoto) which helped introduce deck
streamlining to us all after the DCI's inception and the four per deck card
limit (with notable exceptions).
Calling your son
Mephistopheles? Hmm...
Before I move on to the
evolution of the Legend rule and its current impact on Commander, first an
anecdote on the coolness of Steven Conrad. Who the heck is Steven Conrad you
ask? He was one of the lead designers for the Legends set and fate (Well, it
was really my best friend Eugene acceding to a whim of mine...) drove me to the
Wizards of the Coast Game Center in 2000 or so. I namedropped Mr. Conrad's name
(I'd heard it from a friend) and the man spent a good half hour with us just
talking about Legends. The set was a top-down design and tried to cram as many
icons from their long-running RPG campaign as possible. They added other cards
to round things out and threw some overpowered effects for good measure.
Hilariously, when I asked Mr. Conrad to sign my set of Chains
of Mephistopheles (I had a really annoying deck with those and Megrim
/ Anvil
of Bogardan and so on) he joked that he wanted to call his newborn son
Mephistopheles at the time but his wife vetoed it. Somewhere in Ottawa (or
abroad?) is a set of four Chains with a vertical signature by Mr. Conrad. Use
them in good fun, whoever has them now. :)
Back to our iconic friends,
the Legend rule didn't start causing too many issues in sanctioned play until a
Rebel
grrl and her
posse had an encounter with a
certain blue enchantment. that turned any target into a Legend. What
followed would be a long, grinding game where you'd remove your opponent's
duplicate, or dig yours with Lin Sivvi and then hopefully
win before time ran out. Good times, good times. Eventually, Kamigawa Block and
its influx of legendary permanents brought a much-needed change to the rule.
From then on, legendary permanents would simply cancel each other out as a
state-based effect and the Legendary Creature supertype was born. Not a bad
deal since Umezawa's
Jitte proved somewhat
useful in that period, but as every rule must have an unintended consequence,
so did that one...
With Elder Dragon Highlander
starting out as a between rounds pastime for judges and blooming into a casual
staple, decks started streamlining. With streamlining comes efficiency and with
efficiency comes, well, this
guy his brother
Darrell and his other
brother Darryll. Then came the joyous proceeding of having your
more-than-two-mana Legendary Creature get sent to the Command Zone or seeing a Phyrexian
Metamorph become a permanent gamestate equalizer through Academy
Ruins. 'Cos Blue wasn't already good enough, I mean sure Healing
Salve is clearly miles better than Ancestral
Recall but hey...With time came an opportunity to clean up the rules and
M14 brings us to our current state: Each player may have one copy of any
legendary permanent and if you copy your own, you choose which to keep in play.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth around Hexproof commanders such as Thrun,
the Last Troll, Geist of Saint
Traft and Lazav,
Dimir Mastermind but recent gameplay at the Comic Book Shoppe (More on them
next week...) hasn't shown these to be ubiquitous. We also haven't had many
problems at Wizard's Tower so it looks like crisis averted so far.
I hope you all enjoyed
today's foray into the Legendary Creature rule. Next week we'll be taking a
closer look at the EDH tournament scene in Ottawa, focusing on Gilles Labelle's
tournaments at the Comic Book Shoppe, and how I fail at the partial Paris
mulligan.
In other news, local Rush fan
Robert McEachern asked me to mention the sorts of really bad cards we throw
into our decks for fun over at the Tower. Well, Jia Long has a "Sea
Monsters" deck that ramps from Quest
for Ula's Temple into Lorthos,
the Tidemaker and he once locked me with Natural
Selection on Isochron
Scepter. Hey, I was playing mono-black with a really bad draw. :(
Congrats to Jia Long for taking yesterday’s three-hour long game with Angel of Despair after a “Strioniced” Terastodon by yours truly (nearly?) crippled Robert by savaging his manabase. And he still almost took it by casting Black Sun’s Zenith repeatedly to keep himself in after a Morality Shift left him with a handful of cards in library. Fun times!
Next week we talk to Gilles Labelle about the 1 v 1 scene around Comic Book Shoppe and welcome Scott Job’s piece about the 1 v1 at Game Breakers!
Until then, may you avoid
being hit by a Falling
Star.
EDH
events:
Comic
Book Shoppe: 2-228 Bank Street 613-226-2319 Sunday, August 18th 1 v 1 play this
week, with standard EDH banned list.
Game Breakers:
6-780 Baseline Road 1-800-279-4115 Thursday, August 15th, Casualish tournament starting around 6 p.m. $5
entry, booster pack prizes. Please register early.
Wizard’s
Tower: 3350 Fallowfield Road 613-843-0705 Saturday, August 17th.
Casual starting around Noon.
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