Why Does Mark Rosewater Have Such a Negative Opinion of Legendary Permanents?
General forum
Posted on Sept. 1, 2024, 11:48 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
This post is one of many in which Mark Rosewater displays a negative opinion of legendary permanents, but I cannot understand why he feels that way, since legendary permanents are such for two reasons: first, from a flavor perspective, a legendary permanent represents a singular and unique person, place, or object of amazing power or fame; and, second, from a mechanical perspective, being legendary allows a permanent to be more powerful than a non-legendary permanent of the same mana cost, so I do not see any problem with legendary permanents, at they currently are.
What does everyone else say about this? Why do you believe that Mark Rosewater appears to dislike legendary permanents?
FormOverFunction says... #3
I also read it as Mark not liking legendary creatures: “If it was up to me (and it’s not), legendary would be a marker and have no rules weight. You could have multiple like any other creature or like how you can have one of every different version now.” That reads like a total negation of the “Legend” concept, to me. The introduction of legendary creatures could be Mark’s own version of my “omg they ruined the game by adding these planeswalkers” moment. He may just dislike them as a concept and take every opportunity to gripe about them, to the dismay of everyone nearby. Not that I would be able to relate to that, or anything.
September 2, 2024 9:47 a.m.
wallisface says... #4
The problem, as I believe he sees it, is that “legendary” currently needs to be applied to every named card, which means that those cards are unnecessarily restricted to being ”only one in play at a time” when oftentimes there is no mechanical or play reason for the card to have such a restriction.
Mark also illustrates he’d prefer some other “unique” indicator to prevent multiple copies of cards being in play that actually do create mechanical/play problems.
I get the feeling you’ve misread the intention of the post you’ve linked. He’s literally just saying ”legendary as it stands is unreasonably restrictive, and i’d prefer the rules for it were more modular/separated, so that they could be applied to cards in a way that’s actually meaningful”.
September 2, 2024 9:32 p.m.
As you correctly point out, there are two primary reasons for the Legendary tag - flavor and mechanical. Rosewater’s issue seems to stem from the first - he is uncomfortable with mechanical game design being limited by something more esoteric like flavor.
To a certain extent, he has a point - Legendary is limiting. It forces the design team to make “Legendary” cards worthy of being one-offs on a deck and also forces any card designed to be a one-off to be shoehorned into a lore-important figure.
As a game designer, he believes something superficial like flavor should be relegated to a non-mechanical indicator (basically glorified flavor text) and the mechanical requirements to produce unique cards could be produced with a lore-neutral keyword.
Personally, while I understand where he is coming from, I think he is wrong from a game design stance. There are design issues with “Legendary” as a mechanic, but I think those problems are eclipsed by the issues of MaRo’s desired solution. People do not like text that looks official, yet has no real meaning - that adds an additional word on a card that is confusing to new players. Additionally, important word bloat is an ongoing problem in the game - no need to have two different words (a mechanical one and a flavor text one) when you can just have one singular, universally applied supertype.
September 3, 2024 11:11 a.m.
Honestly I think part of the problem is that in order to cater to what Wizards believes that Commander players want, they've been printing a bajillion more legendary cards than they used to. I think it's probably harder for the design team to fit in 25-35 legends every set.
September 3, 2024 11:34 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #7
Here is another post that Mark Rosewater has made about this subject, if anyone here is still interested in discussing it.
plakjekaas says... #2
I'm not even sure I read the same thing you did. The question was: in the case of no legend rule, how would planeswalkers be handled?
And the answer is: I don't like how legendary is treated now. It should be only on the card so you can find it with Thalia's Lancers, and have no further rule implications. There should be a "Unique" keyword that means what legendary does now.
He didn't express a dislike for legendary permanents, he expressed a dislike for how the term "legendary" is used mechanically right now.
More of a "if I would build the game from the ground up with what I know now, this is how I would do it differently"-statement, without much judgement of how things are now
September 2, 2024 6:19 a.m.