In September of 2024, Magic: The Gathering faced perhaps its greatest crisis ever. When the Commander Rules Committee, an independent group that oversees the most ubiquitous version of the trading card game, announced they were banning four popular cards from the format, a small but vocal contingent of players responded with vitriol. Some even sent violent threats to members of the committee. In response, the group handed over control of Commander to MtG publisher Wizards of the Coast, putting an end to almost two decades of independent rule.
This brief but fiery controversy is a blemish on the Magic: The Gathering community, revealing that even the 31-year-old game isn’t immune to our modern era of online harassment. But on another level, it also solidified what many players have known for a long time: Commander isn’t just the dominant version of Magic. Commander is Magic.
Commander, or EDH (short for Elder Dragon Highlander), is a twist on classic Magic: The Gathering. Each player chooses a legendary creature to lead their army and then builds a 100-card deck around that creature and its unique abilities. The format was originally invented by a group of Alaskan players in the ‘90s and started to spread in the early 2000s. Wizards released its first preconstructed Commander deck in 2011, solidifying it as the dominant Magic format.
The popularity of Commander has also led to a dramatic increase in the number of legendary creatures included in each new set of Magic cards. The latest release, Duskmourn, features 27 different legendary creatures, while 10 years ago, Khans of Tarkir launched in 2014 with just five. But a decade before that, just as Commander was starting to spread beyond the state of Alaska, Wizards released a set that was filled to the brim with legendary creatures — and it landed with a thud.
“When I think of Kamigawa, it's like it was trying to do something experimental,” Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: The Gathering, tells Inverse. “We made a lot of mistakes, but we learned from it.”
Champions of Kamigawa
Originally released in the fall of 2004, Champions of Kamigawa was a Magic: The Gathering set inspired by feudal Japan. (Rosewater recalls at the time debating between Egyptian mythology or Japanese mythology. “Japanese mythology won out,” he says.)
That on its own was a big deal for Wizards. Kamigawa was one of the first sets inspired by a real-world location rather than pure fantasy or science fiction. It also marked a major change in how new cards were developed. At the time, the company typically designed sets from the bottom up, meaning its employees would come up with new game mechanics first and then build a world and its inhabitants around that.
“It was our first top-down block,” Rosewater says, “and it had a lot of flaws.”
Kamigawa introduced flip cards, which could be turned 180 degrees to become a different card. It was an interesting idea that needed some fine-tuning, but would eventually lead to the double-faced cards prevalent in Magic today. However, the set’s biggest risk had everything to do with legendary creatures.
The Problem With Legendaries
“Legendary now has a mechanical definition. It could be your commander, but that just wasn't true back then.”
Every single rare creature in Kamigawa is legendary, and some of the uncommon creatures are too. (Wizards also took the opportunity to introduce legendary enchantments to the game.) This gave the set a ton of flavor, but in a way, it may have backfired. If every creature is legendary, that word loses its cachet. It also meant you could only play with one copy of that creature on the battlefield at any time thanks to the Legendary Rule (which Kamigawa helped define). And, of course, the biggest upside to being a legendary creature didn’t even exist yet.
“Commander was not a thing at the time,” Rosewater says. “Legendary now has a mechanical definition. It could be your commander. That means something. But that just wasn't true back then.”
Case in point: Marrow-Gnawer, a legendary “Rat Rogue” creature who went on to become a popular choice for Commander capable of creating a massive rat army that grows exponentially. On the deck-building site EDHREC, Marrow-Gnawer is currently ranked as the 92nd most popular commander (out of over 2000 total options).
Interestingly, the origins of this rat commander date all the way back to the earliest days of Magic: The Gathering. Back when Richard Garfield first created the game, he designed cards that referenced several types of creatures, including Merfolk, Goblins, and Zombies. He also made a card called Plague Rats.
“The idea of Plague Rat was the more Plague Rats you had, the bigger the Plague Rats were,” Rosewater says.
So when Champions of Kamigawa came around, Rosewater jumped at the chance to make a tribute to Garfield’s original rat.
“I love rats,” he says. “I'm a big rat fan. I made a lot of rats over the years because rats are fun to me.”
Return to Kamigawa
Champions of Kamigawa was ultimately a failure, but its ideas and influence lived on.
“It famously did not sell well,” Rosewater says. “We did market research and the world did the worst of any world in market research since we’ve recorded worlds. It's also a really interesting case where it took a long time for the audience to warm up to what Kamigawa was.”
When Magic: The Gathering returned to the world in the 2022 set Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, which takes place over a thousand years after Champions in a futuristic Japanese society, it was a hit.
“Neon Dynasty is one of the best-selling sets,” Rosewater says. “So there is something very cool about Kamigawa that obviously people liked.”
“Neon Dynasty is one of the best-selling sets.”
In a lot of ways, Champions of Kamigawa was ahead of its time. From the design process to the mechanics to its all-in approach on legendary creatures, it’s a set that Magic: The Gathering fans just weren’t ready for when it arrived in 2004. For Rosewater, it’s an example of the exact kind of thing Wizards should do more of, even if the risks sometimes outweigh the reward.
“I really think Champions of Kamigawa was a very noble effort that was trying to do a lot of different things,” he says. “Kamigawa was a pioneer in that kind of thinking.”
