When I was about eight, I had just started playing Magic the Gathering - indeed, anyone playing it had just started playing because the game was only two or so years old. I got a Royal Assassin in my first Revised Edition 60-card pack, which started my love affair with Black. (I was amazed to think that a 1/1 could possibly be better than most other creatures.)
At the time, it was common wisdom amongst my elementary school peers that Shivan Dragon was the best creature in Magic, though massive beasts like Force of Nature or Leviathan (or the Lord of the Pit) were also big contenders.
But then I heard about these particular creatures of special renown: the Elder Dragon Legends.
The Elder Dragon Legends followed the following formula: they were three colors, two of each color in an allied shard (in other words a color with its two allies) plus two generic for a casting cost. They were each 7/7 flyers, and each required you to pay one of each of their mana colors on your upkeep or sacrifice them.
Screw the Shivan Dragon, these guys were the best. Indeed, the inaccessibility of requiring hard commitments to three colors was part of the appeal (though, at least at my school, the very notion of not playing all five colors was foreign - we were kids and did not really understand the game that well.)
Anyway, a couple years after I started playing, a friend of a friend told us he had Elder Dragon Legends that he wanted to sell. They were from Chronicles, a re-release of popular cards from Magic's early sets when the initial run had been much smaller than there was demand for. Chronicles Cards were denoted by their white borders, despite having expansion symbols (in Revised through... some much later set, "Core Sets" had white borders.)
Anyway, he had a couple of the cards, and because I liked to play Black and Blue (we had figured out limiting our decks' colors by then) and also enjoyed a bit or Red now and again, Nicol Bolas was the one I picked up.
Now, having gotten a somewhat better understanding of the game, I came to realize that making your opponent discard their hand every time you hit them with this guy was pretty damned powerful - much more than Chromium's Rampage 2 (Rampage was a short-lived keyword that gave the creature +X/+X for every creature blocking it beyond the first.)
Still, even when I stopped playing in 7th grade and then picked it up again in college for a couple years, I didn't really give Nicol Bolas much thought. Magic's story had largely been focused on the Weatherlight Saga, which sort of started in Antiquities but really became the central focus in the Weatherlight Set and then the Tempest Block. There wasn't a ton of connection between stories after the Invasion Block, and when I picked the game up again in college, the focus was very much of individual stories on different planes - Mirrodin (which to be fair was connected to what had happened in Odyssey/Onslaught blocks,) Kamigawa, and the debut of the now-legendary Ravnica.
Nicol Bolas was my star player, even if getting him on the board was very difficult. But like most figures out of the Legends expansion, I didn't really think they'd put much into his story.
So it was perhaps a bit surprising when, following my second stepping-away from the game that Nicol Bolas would arise as what is basically Magic's big bad. While the Phyrexians came back for Scars of Mirrodin (sorry Mirrodin, you are basically hell now) and the Eldrazi gave Magic its truest Lovecraftian monsters, Nicol Bolas has had his story expanded tremendously.
It appears as if that plot, which has now been going for I believe a decade, might be coming to a conclusion in the current Ravnica block. But it is really odd to see what they have done with my coolest creature. The visual redesign turned him from a wrinkly humanoid dragon sitting in his personal wizard's library into an instantly-recognizable dragon whose horns have become an icon in and of themselves.
And he's been on a ton of other cards, many of them this now-decade-old-but-still-seems-new-to-me type called Planeswalker.
So that's been funny, but then in the 25h anniversary core set (I believe,) they actually brought back all of the Elder Dragon Legends: Palladia-Mors, Chromium, Vaevictus Asmadi, Arcades Sabboth, and of course Nicol Bolas himself (and yes, those names are hardwired into my brain so I don't have to look them up.) They're all new versions of these characters with far more sensible design philosophy.
Now all they need to do is update Baron Sengir, the patriarch of my favorite vampiric minions, and I'll feel like I'm a kid again.
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