MTG Top 10: Legends | The BEST Cards in one of Magic's Most UNDERRATED Sets | Episode 497 

lol well said

I'd literally always heard it pronounced the same way most Americans pronounce the capital of Venezuela and this pronunciation has me shook

I thought I'd been saying it wrong for years, that pronunciation has me all messed up lol

@@crazygermn I have no idea about the Venezuela thing, but in terms of Karakas, I've always heard it pronounced closer to "kuh-rah-kis" or "kuh-rock-us"

It was actually pretty terrible in a Mana burn environment

Was*, manaburn doesn't exist anymore, not even in eternal formats.

It's better than every other card in this list. Thanks to being too powerful (and hence banned in Legacy) it UNFAIRLY loses out on what would be so many more top 8s. It eats every other card on here for breakfast. Let's not forget it misses out on Standard, Modern top 8s because again, it's better than any other card on this list. It's the best card in Legends. Easily.

@@rashakor It wasn't.

Misstep is great, but a little too narrow to outdo mana drain. It is great in Eternal for sure, but that's because of the intricacies of the format, not how good it is in a vacuum

Land Tax + Land's Edge = pretty much 6 damage a turn :)

That lottery card thing is a smart move from WOtC... but it's indeed a lottery. It's a large set, so the chances that the very expensive collectors pack not only contains a Legends card but a good rare are very very low. People of course are hyped at the idea to crack a Tabernacle or an Abyss, but the reality is that it's more likely to get a Holy Day, Boomerang or Lady Orca.

This list is heavily biased towards recent decks. Note how quite a lot of cards start in the mid-2000s even though they certainly were seeing play in Eternal formats before that; the reason is that there weren't any premier events in Eternal formats until then. So the days of Abyss and Moat being good were only when there weren't any events being played. These days the cards don't see much if any play in Legacy. At 4 mana each, they're pretty big investments, and there are plenty of decks that simply don't care about them. They do have potential uses as sideboard cards, but they are somewhat narrow and there's a lot of pressure on sideboard slots. While this is a recent development, the new Boseiju means that a lot more decks will have maindeck enchantment hate.

Yeah, I have seen it every once in a while, but it's not nearly as popular as other choices. Since the format is slower than other Eternal formats, a great deal of the time it's completely dead. You really need a way to discard it for profit in some way, perhaps to Moon Circuit Hacker, in order to justify playing it.

People DO hate taxes!

Thanks!

Glad you enjoy it!

Almost every card game start the same, pokemon has low level pokemon cards as well if irc

Cool, thanks!

This list predates that card.

I was already shocked when Land Tax was revealed at Number 10. If Land Tax is Number 10, the rest of the list is going to be stacked. I was further shocked when Mana Drain was Number 6 AND beaten by Pendelhaven (I was expecting that card on the list but at a lower position). Sylvan Library and Karakas were the other two that I expected in the top five but I completely forgot Chain Lightning came from this set.

If tabernacle didn't cost $3000+, it would see more tournament play.

That's how I used to say it, but I looked up the pronunciation and it didn't agree.

@@NizzahonMagic From where is there an official pronunciation of the place in Magic lore? If you're referring to some real world word in a foreign language, how it's pronounced there is totally irrelevant.

It's pure collectability: with these really old sets, one isn't buying a game piece for playing, but a piece of history of the game. That's why also unplayable garbage cards are more expensive than modern staples. If it's just to play some random Commander game, of course one should use proxies. Damn, I use them despite owning for years the real thing- not going to be carrying around thousands dollars that can easily get lost or stolen at a lgs.

I remember playing it in "type 1.5" the precursor to Legacy, and it was absolutely nuts. Most cards that are played in the old formats don't cost much mana, so not only did you not burn for much if it came to that, but getting any amount of mana also greatly accelerated your plays.

This is false. Mana Drain was one of the three "pillars" of mana acceleration in the Vintage format (the other two being Dark Ritual and Mishra's Workshop). Mana Drain was prevalent in the old Type 1 of the 90's, where the mana it generated was used to power out Mind Twist or Braingeyser. Control decks back then frequently used other mana sinks, such as Jayemdae Tome. Mana Drain carried some risk, but was hugely popular. As the format evolved, the mana from Mana Drain started being used more for things like Mindslaver. Mana Drain wasn't quite as prevalent in the old Type 1.5, but it was a control staple thanks to the lack of other strong countermagic back then and the potential to rush out Nevinyrral's Disk.

So was I. I’m not surprised Karakas was number 1 though

Problem is it's banned in Legacy but not quite good enough to see play in Vintage.

Oh, I didn't name all of them. The set is filled with lots of awful cards - those were just examples. I never claimed that that was an exhaustive list.

These are some..uhm, interesting takes that don't seem based in reality. The bands with other lands are God awful, and no one plays them in Commander. Check out EDHRec. Bands with other is actually WORSE banding, because it requires the other card to have the same type. So it is strictly worse than banding.

@@NizzahonMagic you clearly don't understand banding, i don't blame you. yes they do have to be legends, but look up how many you can band together, and what the ruling actually is. bands with others had a rule change. and idc what edhrec says, y'all play terrible cards as a norm on there. if you're playing mono black, for instance, it's a free roll. but you can think whatever you want, "strictly worse," lol, like you're an authority, lol.

@@NizzahonMagic and dude, i was alive and playing the game "competitively" back in the 90s. you're reading off a website the reality i lived... and you're missing all the minutia. don't mean to bust your bubble, but you're the one talking about "takes." you clearly don't have a clue about the 90s era.

@@NizzahonMagic dude, you do legends as a topic, and no mention of "the deck" or moat... yeah, imma take your comments on my knowledge level with a grain of salt. you don't know what you're talking about, nerd.

I understand banding, I played the game in the 90s (though late 90s), I have a PhD in history, and I have been writing about and researching Magic's history for 7 years. I don't just make stuff up or omit things without doing a ton of research. Your criticisms basically amount to "I was there you weren't so to hell with the data!" without any real response to any of the points I originally raised! I didn't mention the Moat or the Deck because they didn't need to come up this video. This video isn't "What Magic was like when Legends comes out," it has more to do with the long legacy of the cards in the set. Yes, Moat is super important (it was #11) even today in EDH, but I have to do what the data tells me to. And the Deck is incredibly important in the history of Magic, but I wouldn't just randomly bring it up here. I am going to do a Deck History on it at some point though. The most baffling part of your rant is still the bands with other part. It is definitely not a "free roll" to play a bands with other legends land ever, since they never produce mana and have far too narrow of an ability. Bands with other was never good. it has always been a strictly worse version of banding. That take has nothing to do with any authority I may or may not possess. It is a fact! Banding is more flexible than bands with other. Period. It only lets you form bands with creatures who have some matching quality (in this case, legendary), while banding let's your creature band with any other creature. You are right there was a rules change, but it actually used to be even worse! Only things with bands with other could band with other things with bands with other. No matter when you want to talk about the mechanic, it has always been strictly worse than the more flexible banding. Your play group may have done it differently, but that means you were doing it wrong.

No, because the video explains it. Haha

"Bloated" is the best description of the set.

While I don't think that anyone would deny that the set has some severe flaws, it also has some very clever design elements. I do not think that it's particularly random. Most of the themes here expand on the mechanics originally developed in the core set. The original core set was kind of overloaded on enchantments and enchantment-based cards. It also did a lot with the basic land types and with color-hosing. Walls were another huge theme in the core set. Legends doubled down on all of those things. The other two sets prior to Legends were tiny and explored confined niches. This was the first expansion set to take expanding the game seriously.

You may miss the fact the words "non-land" is nowhere on the card.

I think if it was reprinted in Standard it would see a bit of play. We don't see effects that can bounce any permanent at two mana these days.

@@NizzahonMagic Especially not when that effect can bounce lands and potentially stall a critical bomb.

@@NizzahonMagic The only relevant text here is the missing "non-land" qualifier. Otherwise, we see those effects for 1 and a blue with upside all the time. For 1 and a blue with upside, those cards do see some play. But Boomerang has seen like 9 reprints and rarely was relevant in format, because before it is relevant bouncing lands in mono-blue or near enough mono-blue has to be relevant. Yes, in the early game this is almost always an effective timewalk in stopping the build of board presence in the same way that counter-spell can be a time walk. But if it's a two mana blue unsummon, that's not so great.

Boomerang bouncing creatures is an option, but not why you play the card. It's the general flexibility of it to temporarily deal with any possible permanent type, including setting your opponent back land drops. If you don't care about bouncing lands and aren't mono-blue there's Disperse, but there's only one 1-mana card that can deal with any non-land permanent, Chain of Vapor, and it has it potential drawback as well as not bouncing lands. The only other 2 mana spell that bounces lands as well as any other permanent is Eye of Nowhere. Soon after that card's printing in Kamigawa they really stopped printing efficient ways of removing lands from play, because people don't like not being able to play their cards.

@Sega-16 nah, I dont buy it. What a coincidence the ratio of chance is the same as textured foils...

We'll be able to tell if they are lying to us, they don't have the same kind of card stock these days.

They're all terrible by today's standards, where every playable creature HAS to leave behind value even if it's killed immediately when it enters, but cards like Thunder Spirit and Stangg were perfectly good in 1994. Heck, people were always coming up with fun/infuriating things to do with the OG Nicol Bolas.