Legends Legends - Lord Magnus

Welcome back to Legends Legends, your semi-weekly dive into 1994's Legends set and one of its 55 magical legendary creatures. As we near the end of the Legends list, we'll start to see some more... odd design choices of the era. In case you needed a reason to build around something worse than an overcosted French Vanilla creature, consider our forthcoming series on Legends's anti-landwalker cycle.

These three legendary creatures each turn off a different variant of the landwalk ability, a rarely printed effect these days, and even more rarely seen in Commander decks. What's the purpose of putting one of these do-nothing cards in your command zone? Let's take a look at Lord Magnus and see if we can't come up with a reason!

General Thoughts

[/el]Lord Magnus[/el] is a six-mana 4/3 Human Druid creature with first strike. He comes with two static abilities, as well, which make it so creatures with plainswalk and forestwalk can be blocked as though they didn't have these abilities. This is, undeniably, a nearly useless effect in Commander. The chances that your opponents are running forestwalk or plainswalk cards on their own are slim to none, and running a list of our own forestwalk and plainswalk creatures would be foolish... right?

Wrong! Today we've built an entire deck of forest and plainswalking creatures. Versus other green or white decks, we're simply a hose that's ready to drown them in unblockable attacks without Lord Magnus on the field.

Against other colors, we'll have to get creative and use some relatively uncommon cards. Part forest- and plainswalker showcase, part obligatorily convoluted Legends Legends deck, all fun! Let's see what makes it tick.

Plainswalkers (not that kind)

I really don't know what the designers were thinking when they designed Lord Magnus. At the time of his printing, there were only two other cards that even mentioned the word "plainswalk" on them, and one of them is Great Wall. The other is Righteous Avengers. Both of these cards were released alongside Lord Magnus in Legends, meaning there were literally no plainswalk cards in the game up until this point, and at the time of printing, there were more cards to shut off plainswalk than actual plainswalkers!

More instances of plainswalk would come about eventually. Portal: Three Kingdoms's Zodiac Rooster was the next creature with the ability baked-in, and Aysen Highway from Homelands was released shortly after Legends. 

Of the plainswalk creatures available to us (Boggart Arsonists is the only plainswalker we can't run [excluding Old Fogey]), Graceful Antelope is by far the best. Whenever it deals combat damage to a player, we can turn any target land into a Plains. We don't even have to target the player we dealt damage to, instead spreading Plains around the board so we can swing uninhibited at anyone we please.

Forestwalkers

There are quite a few more forestwalkers than plainswalkers available to us. Our top-performing forestwalkers will be Jedit Ojanen of Efrava and medium-sized creatures like Lumbering Satyr (notoriously not a Satyr in its artwork), Zendikar Farguide, and Zodiac Tiger. Many of our creatures start small compared to their mana cost, but their evasive landwalk ability makes them ripe to receive +1/+1 counters and other buffs.

Don't worry, we have a way to give forestwalk to any of our creatures that lack it, like Chorus of the Conclave or Champion of Lambholt. Besides Lumbering Satyr, Ivy Dancer, Scarwood Hag and Unseen Walker each grant forestwalk to a target creature. Dryad's Favor is another cheap way to sneak evasion onto one of our creatures.

Even if our opponents aren't playing green, we can still get some Forests onto their side of the battlefield with a couple cutesy cards. Yavimaya Dryad can gift a Forest from our deck to an opponent, turning all of our evasive attackers online, and Gaea's Liege turns one land into a Forest for just a single tap each turn. Finally, we can use Thelonite Monk to change an opponent's land into a forest indefinitely.

Forcing Everyone to Play Along

If you're a regular reader of Legends Legends, you know I've been on a "force blocks" kick lately. It's quickly become my favorite kind of removal, and we're using it mechanically to justify our Lord Magnus Commander deck's existence.

All these unblockable creatures should strike terror into the hearts of your foes, especially once we've spread enough Forests and Plains onto their battlefields to keep our creatures unblockable. Should our opponents be amassing a competent board state, we can put a stop to our unblockable violence by casting Lord Magnus and sticking him to the field. Once our commander is out, our creatures will be blockable again, but remember that this is a feature of this deck, and not a bug. 

Start swinging in with our now-buffed (from Cathars' Crusade and Beastmaster Ascension) and formerly unblockable creatures, then force unfavorable trades with our opponents with Irresistible Prey, Compelled Duel, or King Harald's Revenge. Swing in for lethal with Joraga Invocation or Overwhelming Stampede, then use Predatory Impetus on your own attacker to delete an opponent's creature each turn.

Remember, we can always use Beast Within and Stroke of Midnight to create some blockers to roll over if our opponents don't want to play any.

Mana Base

Green's the best when it comes to ramping; everyone knows this. We're running three green mana dorks in this deck - Avacyn's Pilgrim, Fyndhorn Elves and Llanowar Elves - plus nine other ramp spells in the form of our Rampant Growths and mana rocks. This, plus our 35 lands, forms the basis of this deck's mana.

Budget

This deck is dirt cheap by our standards. Our most expensive cards are only costly because they're rare, not because they're particularly strong. Zodiac Tiger, Zodiac Rabbit, and Zodiac Rooster are some expensive cards for being basically useless in modern Magic. If you want to cut them, go ahead. It'll bring this deck down from $165 to about $100. What you save in cash you lose in clout, though.

Lord Magnus Deck List

Wrap Up

Is this my best work to date for Legends Legends? Probably not. Is this a fun way to showcase every forestwalk and plainswalk card you can get your hands on? Definitely! Are there better builds for Lord Magnus out there? Possibly! Of the 18 decks Lord Magnus has logged on EDHrec, three are Druid kindred decks. A Druids deck using Lord Magnus as a legendary leader could function well, with many Druids being lands- and mana-focused, opening up big mana victories with cards like Helix Pinnacle.

Let me know how you'd build Lord Magnus in the comments!

Thanks for reading! Until next time!