I could be wrong. Maybe someone on the set design team really likes Kamahl.

In terms of cards for old characters, I'm actually pretty happy with the set. Belbe has always been my number one ask, and I'm happy to finally see her get a card. Though with partner and pirates as themes, I kinda wish Agnate/Thaddeus and Bo Levar could've been in the set.

I do wish new characters could've been more flavored towards times that are harder to return to in general though. For example, did Blim AND Juri both really have to be Rakdos cultists? Ravnica gets revisited so often, I'd rather see new Ravnica legends in a product like this to be limited to harder to use old story characters like Bell Borca. Instead, I'd rather see someone flavored to the time of The Brothers War/The Dark/Fallen Empires/.../Time Spiral, original Kamigawa, Mirrodin or shattered Alara, to be honest.

Again, though, these are minor quibbles, since there's only so much space and the set isn't just designed to address flavor.

I'd imagine they only have so much space for guild legends in Ravnica sets - it's limited to just the guildleader and the guild champion. Other guild-associated big names tend to slip through the cracks due to not being prioritized, hence it taking a while to get people like Massacre Girl and Juri.

Of course, there's an argument to be made that the Ravnican legendaries in Commander: Legends weren't necessary because Ravnica set legendaries would already be pretty similar in flavor to them even if they weren't the exact same people.

That's fair.

That doesn't mean I have to like it when it happens, especially not when it would have been really easy to avoid. In fact, Commander Legends has a lot of those issues, and Hans is really just a small part of my frustration (more on that below).

I mean, if you posed to have your portrait painted by an artist, and said artist delivered an absolutely delightful painting... that just randomly happened to show you with a large beard and made you look fat and twenty years older, would you be happy with the result? Would you just pay the artist and not complain? Would it still be a matter of taste?

I don't want to drag you into an argument over issues you aren't even responsible for (nor do I expect you to throw your co-workers under the bus), but I've finally found the time to address the issues with some of the art in this set, and I'd really appreciate it if someone - anyone - at Wizards could at least acknowledge that those issues exist and that there is a basis to those complaints that is objectively valid instead of just dismissing them along the lines of "Eh, whatever, I think it looks fine". And you have to admit that I've been really enthusiastic about a lot of the things Wizards has done in the past two years or so to aim at enfranchised old school Vorthoses (Dominaria, Modern Horizons, Core 21, certain things in Commander Legends), so it's not like I'm unpleasable or exist in a state of perpetual negativity (and to be clear, being "enthusiastic" has always meant putting my money where my mouth is). I was going to write the exact same rant that's coming below anyway, and I don't want you to misunderstand it as some kind of personal attack or even as a direct reply to what you've said.

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Let's start with Akroma, Vision of Ixidor. Never mind that her wings look terrible and all wrong, it's her legs we should be the most worried about. Akroma has canonically existed with 1.) normal humanoid legs, 2.) as a "cat-taur" with four legs, and finally 3.) with four bladed prosthetics replacing her cat legs (but not the cat body). This art clearly shows a version of her that has never existed, and it's not only confusing the hell out of less enfranchised players (which would be absolutely legitimate in this case), it's also confusing at best and irritating at worst if you've read the books and are looking at this card expecting to see... well, any of the three canonical versions I just listed. And the problems don't stop there, because I don't believe for a second that any art director who's working on, say, another Dominaria set and trying to include depictions of Akroma in the set (as a statue, on a tapesty, in stained glass...) isn't at least going to be tempted to model it after the art in Commander Legends. And whatever you do as an art director in a situation like that, you can't really "win" and might just give up on your plans to depict Akroma entirely (or do so only in her original humanoid form). Art like this blurs the lines of what is and isn't canon, and being on a prominent game piece only means it's getting a lot of reach. That reach creates expectations and misconceptions, which in turn poses a real danger of perpetuating the confusion in future projects.

Not much to say about Krark, the Thumbless. It's blatantly obvious that he was modelled after the wrong style guide (Scars instead of original Mirrodin), which is just lazy and super tone-deaf in terms of continuity. Like, what's even going on here? Do they want us to pretend that Mirrodin's goblins have always looked like that? Is Slobad going to get the same treatment if he ever gets reprinted? As someone who really hates the redesign of Mirrodin's goblins - both the new design as such and the fact that they were redesigned without any explanation at all - I was hoping to at least see the cool original design applied to characters that should logically have it.

Speaking of goblins, the art on Toggo, Goblin Weaponsmith is probably even more problematic than Krark's. This, too, uses the wrong style guide of the plane it's supposed to depict (Dominaria instead of Onslaught), and in this case it's even worse because it implies a historical context that doesn't really make sense given what we know. None of the goblins in Onslaught had the mogg-hybrid look we see in Dominaria, so why does Toggo? There were no moggs in Otaria because it hadn't been attacked during the Invasion. We don't really know for sure what Otarian goblins look like in modern times, but we know for a fact that they didn't look like Toggo, Goblin Weaponsmith does back in the day. Again, I don't believe for a second that the people working on future Dominaria sets won't be at least tempted to retcon what has been established about the Invasion only to bring it in line with this card. It wouldn't even make a ton of sense for modern Otarian goblins to look like this, and I absolutely don't want them to. Yeah, Skirk Prospector exists, but the art department was smart enough to cover most of his head so his exact features would remain ambiguous. But again, I could easily see future art directors giving in to the expectations set by Toggo's artwork when creating the look for modern Otarian goblins, even when there really would be no good in-universe reason for them to NOT look like those in Onslaught. If their goal is to make everything on Dominaria look the same, they might as well just reprint Time Spir- eh, never mind.

Hans Eriksson isn't even as big a deal in the grander scheme of things, but personally, I have zero understanding for the fact that they just let the artist paint a random dude when the short story he appears in is literally called 'Ach! Hans, Run!'. Like, none of the things I'm criticising in this post would have required obscure guru knowledge to get them right. That story matters, because it's a relic from a time when we'd still get actual anthology stories, and some of them - like 'Ach! Hans, Run!' - were actually decent and used their page count to give us another glimpse at one of Dominaria's coolest time periods (no pun intended), including an appearance of characers like Jaya Ballard and interesting ties to the main Ice Age trilogy. I get that this card only exists to be an easter egg, a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to enfranchised players, but the thing is, we already had that easter egg. 'Ach! Hans, Run!' was that easter egg, and not even making an effort to remain consistent diminishes that story and what it stands for. It drags it down to Magic's current level where continuity - at least more often than not - simply doesn't matter in the face of a quick buck.


Three out of those four pieces of art are related to Dominaria, Magic's original home plane that we didn't get to see for ELEVEN YEARS because Wizards couldn't figure out what kind of "identity" to give it. When they finally found the only solution that could have possibly worked and turned it into Magic's "history plane", this, to me at least, also implied a promise. That promise was that they would do their damnedest to remain consistent with what had been established, that the historical context of the stuff that had come before would actually matter. And Dominaria kept that promise. A titanic effort was made to get it right, and it was so successful that I could easily forgive the small rough edges that existed here and there. What is the art department's excuse for the screw-ups in Commander Legends, though? Isn't it their job to figure out what things should look like, to communicate that to the artists, and to request changes to the first draft if necessary? And if they aren't prepared to do that, who are they doing their job for? If the goal of the cards in question was to appeal to enfranchised Vorthoses and they still didn't give a damn about how they look because the average player wouldn't get it anyway, who are they making them for? Why make them at all?

To be clear, this doesn't diminish the awesome cards that we got in Commander Legends, at least not in a vacuum. But it absolutely has a non-zero impact on my view of the set as a whole, especially when viewed next to some of its other issues.

I have to say that the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Liesa started out as a new version of Selenia. The mechanic of the card is so resonant with Selenia’s original design that it’s bizarre for it to be used on a new character. There’s also no connection I can see flavour-wise between this new design and Liesa.

The mana cost however is pretty more on par with the original Powerpuffs. I think the thing is meant to be invocative of dealing with demons.