When players look on Legends there's a lot of fond memories associated with it. It was the first set with legendary creatures, gold cards, and absolute powerhouse cards. You think of cards like the elder dragons, Nicol Bolas and Arcades Sabboth. You think of The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Moat, The Abyss, Mana Drain, Karakas, and other older famous cards that command such a high price most players could only dream of ever owning one.

Sadly, while Legends is remembered fondly for the abundance of good things and powerful cards it brought to the game, many forget how rough it was beyond that. For every cool, powerful, and iconic card in the set, there were probably at least five absolutely atrocious cards. Cards like Akron Legionnaire, the Glyph cycle, Great Wall, Quagmire, Wood Elemental, Bronze Horse, and many more. There are some that are less bad and just painfully mediocre, but are mediocre to the point that looking at the set as a whole can paint a sour look on your face.

This is not just the case for old cards. Every set needs some bad commons and uncommons, and even some terrible bulk rares thrown in. This set, however, also tremendously missed the mark on the majority of its legendary creatures as well. Many are unnecessarily expensive jank vanilla creatures, are that same flavor of vanilla with some bad ability, or have pretty hefty drawbacks somewhere in their design. While there are certainly iconic and beloved ones like Nicol Bolas, Dakkon Blackblade, Sol'kanar the Swamp King, Angus Mackenzie, and so on, the majority are simply awful. Even most of the iconic ones suffer from old creature design and are loved due to the nostalgia goggles more than anything.

This is why we're getting some new life breathed into many of these legends with Dominaria United in just a few short weeks. Thanks to the set's many box toppers, we're getting revised and updated versions of many of these original designs to bring them up to snuff with more modern design sensibilities. I already talked at length on Wednesday about the legends that I think will show up in this little subset, but today I wanted to focus on one we already know: Jasmine Boreal of the Seven.

Jasmine Boreal of the Seven is a remake of the card Jasmine Boreal. The original Jasmine Boreal became the face of the shoddy vanilla legendary creatures that one could expect to find in Legends. She wasn't the only one - far from it - but she received much of the notoriety. A simple human woman character being a five-mana 4/5 seemed somewhat nuts and still feels pretty weird in hindsight. The closest comparison I can think of now would be Emmara Tandris famously being a simple elf that also happens to be a 5/7 for a whopping seven mana.

Jasmine was one of the few that gained extra notoriety thanks to her reprint in Time Spiral's timeshifted subset. There were many great cards included in that subset like Psionic Blast, Akroma, Angel of Wrath; and even good Legends cards like Darkness and Sol'kanar the Swamp King. Jasmine Boreal stuck out like a sore thumb, becoming the butt of many jokes. With the Legends Retold cards, Wizards chose her to represent these mediocre legends by allowing Jasmine Boreal of the Seven to act as a mana dork and a way to buff your vanilla creatures by making them unblockable.

With this new Jasmine Boreal, I figured let's try something a little different for a change: Classic Commander with a modern legendary creature!

Jasmine Boreal of the Seven | Commander | Paige Smith

• Commander (1)
• 1 Jasmine Boreal of the Seven

• Creatures (39)
• 1 Alpha Tyrranax
• 1 Bear Cub
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Blade of the Sixth Pride
• 1 Craw Wurm
• 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
• 1 Elite Vanguard
• 1 Elvish Ranger
• 1 Elvish Warrior
• 1 Enormous Baloth
• 1 Fresh Volunteers
• 1 Fyndhorn Elves
• 1 Glory Seeker
• 1 Gnarled Mass
• 1 Grizzly Bears
• 1 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
• 1 Joraga Treespeaker
• 1 Kabira Vindicator
• 1 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
• 1 Knight Errant
• 1 Leatherback Baloth
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Master of the Wild Hunt
• 1 Memnite
• 1 Mirror Entity
• 1 Nessian Courser
• 1 Nullmage Shepherd
• 1 Panther Warriors
• 1 Primordial Sage
• 1 Savannah Lions
• 1 Scaled Wurm
• 1 Selesnya Guildmage
• 1 Silverback Ape
• 1 Spined Wurm
• 1 Tolsimir Wolfblood
• 1 Torsten Von Ursus
• 1 Trained Armodon
• 1 Watchwolf
• 1 Wilt-Leaf Liege

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Garruk Wildspeaker

• Instants (5)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Return to Dust
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 White Sun's Zenith

• Sorceries (5)
• 1 Austere Command
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Martial Coup
• 1 Overwhelming Stampede

• Enchantments (8)
• 1 Aura Shards
• 1 Beastmaster Ascension
• 1 Gaea's Anthem
• 1 Glorious Anthem
• 1 Leyline of Vitality
• 1 Marshal's Anthem
• 1 Mirari's Wake
• 1 Muraganda Petroglyphs

• Artifacts (3)
• 1 Dolmen Gate
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Talisman of Unity

• Lands (38)
• 8 Plains
• 14 Forest
• 1 Brushland
• 1 Horizon Canopy
• 1 Kor Haven
• 1 Krosan Verge
• 1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• 1 Mosswort Bridge
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Razorverge Thicket
• 1 Secluded Steppe
• 1 Stirring Wildwood
• 1 Sunpetal Grove
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
• 1 Windbrisk Heights
• 1 Wooded Bastion

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First and foremost, I have to imagine there's someone out there asking the obvious question. How can this still be Classic Commander (or New Phyrexia backwards to predate "made for Commander" cards) if you're using a commander made from modern day design sensibilities? The answer is actually quite simple! Jasmine Boreal is a dull and boring card. It's hard to come up with an actual Commander deck themed around her. By using the new version, it gives us something to work with as we design the actual list.

You might notice that the card Jasmine Boreal itself is absent from this list. That omission was very much on purpose. We may be using Jasmine Boreal of the Seven to give this deck some actual direction, but when it comes to actually playing this among actual Classic Commander decks, you should probably run the original blank Jasmine Boreal as the commander. That might seem a little odd, but in this case it works out a lot better since the deck already pretty heavily leans into vanilla creatures. But that's also how decks used to be made! Someone would have a Jasmine Boreal deck and have to try and find a way to make something out of this blank slate of a legend.

As it stands, you're essentially given the option to play it with the original legend at Classic Commander tables or play with the updated version at modern day Commander tables. Either way, it makes for a great time! After all, who doesn't love trying to make vanilla creatures work? Vanilla creatures are often seen as the most boring of the boring, and there's certainly some amount of truth to that, but there's almost a sort of challenge to getting them to go. For me, working on this deck was definitely more challenging than I anticipated it would be.

Think about all the bad kinds of creatures that you've seen over the years. Okay, maybe not bad ones, but the mediocre ones. The janky 10th-15th pick creatures with no meaningful abilities and junk stats. In your mind, a lot of these are probably filling the role of being vanilla creatures. Surprisingly, this isn't so! In fact, for Classic Commander, there's only 91 vanilla creatures in White, Green, and Colorless - many of which are of dubious quality. There're many more with a single keyword ability like first strike or trample, but that makes them French vanilla and thus they don't count here.

As such, we don't get a ton to work with, so I tried to pick some of the better options as far as vanilla creatures go. Grizzly Bears and similar are boring, but they're solid, efficient, and get a lot bigger faster. Watchwolf is an excellent upgrade to that and is extremely easy to cast off of Jasmine herself. Even a couple three-mana 3/3s like Trained Armodon and Gnarled Mass aren't the worst. For the top end, there's largely a bunch of big, classic wurms like Craw Wurm, Spined Wurm, and Scaled Wurm - the latter of which I personally thought was the most badass thing ever as a kid.

But you can't just have a deck be all vanilla creatures. Even in the best of scenarios that's just tremendously boring. What's worse is that Jasmine Boreal of the Seven plays on your creatures being vanilla and having no abilities. Playing cards like Serra's Blessing, Primal Rage, and Knighthood to give them vigilance, trample, and first strike, respectively, just doesn't really work all that much! I'd rather just pump up the creatures as much as I can with cards like Mirari's Wake, Beastmaster Ascension, and, of course, Muraganda Petroglyphs, and then smash face with a bunch of strong unblockable powerhouses!

The deck also features a smattering of creatures with actual abilities. Several of these such as Tolsimir Wolfblood, Kabira Vindicator, and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite all act as anthem effects themselves, but there's a few that do a little more. Nullmage Shepherd joins the likes of Aura Shards to help blow up problematic artifacts and enchantments. Master of the Wild Hunt spits out a number of tokens - all of which are vanilla - and acts as repeatable removal. There's also Primordial Sage as a way to repeatedly draw cards in an otherwise basic and flavorless deck as you can imagine. And, of course, there's a couple mana dorks to help make sure you can hit some of the bigger vanilla creatures in your deck.

What you end up with is a nice, solid deck that can be picked up and played by anyone. Thanks to the high density of vanilla creatures and basic lands, it's even fairly budget friendly! The best part is that whether you end up running it with a Classic Commander group or rock it among modern decks with the Legends Retold version, Jasmine Boreal's sure to serve up a great time. Give her a try at your next Commander night and prove to your opponents once and for all that you shouldn't mess with vanilla creatures!

Paige Smith

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