Magic: The Gathering Has Only Printed One Card With This Rare Type Combo In The Past Year

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Okay, so Magic: The Gathering can be pretty intimidating when you first start playing. It’s a complex game! But if you’re already familiar with trading card games, or a long-time Magic player, it’s seriously rewarding. There are tons of different card types – lands, creatures, spells, and more – and each one has different variations. Designers are always coming up with cool combinations, though they try not to make things *too* complicated. You’ll see creature artifacts fairly often, but some mixes, like a legendary sorcery card, are rarer. They’ve got to draw the line somewhere!

Legendary spells aren’t drastically different from regular spells in Magic: The Gathering, but the game’s “Legend Rule” can create challenges – and opportunities, especially in formats like Commander. This rule prevents players from controlling multiple permanents with the same legendary name simultaneously; any duplicates must be discarded. Because of this, using legendary lands can be tricky, which explains why so few have been released recently.

Why Legendary Lands Are One of Magic: The Gathering’s Rarest Type Combos

The *Magic: The Gathering* set Bloomburrow featured many woodland creatures, and one of its most sought-after cards was Three Tree City, a special land card. Three Tree City perfectly showcases the purpose of these kinds of lands: it usually produces colorless mana, but you can pay two mana and tap it to create mana of any single color, based on how many creatures of a specific type you control. This design really complements the creature-focused decks in Bloomburrow, like those built around mice or frogs, and allows players to generate a significant amount of mana with just one copy of Three Tree City.

While 2024 featured a higher number of special ‘Legendary Land’ cards in total, only Three Tree City has been reprinted since the Bloomburrow set came out last August.

As a big movie and *Magic: The Gathering* fan, I find it really clever how they handled Three Tree City. Because it’s a Legendary card, you can only have one on the field at a time, which stops players from stacking multiple copies to create an unfair amount of mana. It’s also interesting that the *Final Fantasythemed town cards in *MTG* are just regular lands – that’s how they avoid the Legend Rule and let you have multiple copies of those iconic locations in play. It’s a neat way to honor the source material while keeping the game balanced.

I’m really excited about the Magic: The Gathering Spider-Man set! They’ve included famous spots like the Daily Bugle and Oscorp as lands in the game, but interestingly, they aren’t designated as ‘Legendary’ lands. It’s a cool detail!

The game features a little over 80 Legendary land cards, with most originating from the Kamigawa plane across several sets. A significant number also come from The Lost Caverns of Ixalan and Magic: The Gathering’s The Lord of the Rings set. Making these powerful land cards Legendary helps limit how easily they can be exploited. However, it might be even better, as suggested by Wizards of the Coast’s Mark Rosewater, to treat ‘Legendary’ simply as a tag, and use a ‘Unique’ designation to trigger the Legend Rule.

Why It Makes Sense to Print Fewer Legendary Lands in MTG

I’ve been thinking about how Wizards of the Coast seems to be handling those cool Legendary lands they’ve been previewing for *Final Fantasy* and Spider-Man, and it makes a lot of sense to me. It feels like they’re intentionally printing fewer of them, and I think it’s a smart move to give players more freedom when building their decks. In formats like Standard and Limited, having too many Legendary lands can actually *hurt* gameplay, so even though making iconic locations non-Legendary might feel a little less exciting from a flavor perspective, it’s probably better for the overall health of the game. After all, some of the oldest and most powerful lands in *Magic: The Gathering* – those original dual lands – are incredibly expensive, and even newer, strong lands like Boseiju, Who Endures, still cost a pretty penny!

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2025-09-18 23:01