Gavin Verhey used today’s episode of Good Morning Magic to tell the story of the creation of the green spell magus, which has been years in the making, to celebrate today’s release of Commander Legends.
In 2006, Time Spiral showed off the first cycle of Magus creatures that were based off artifacts from Magic’s history. Cards like Memory Jar, Scroll Rack, and Candelabra of Tawnos were used for inspiration.
The next cycle came in Planar Chaos, where the creatures were now based off lands like The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Library of Alexander, and Bazaar of Baghdad.
The third cycle came in the last set of the block, Future Sight. These creatures were riffs on enchantments like Blood Moon, Moat, and The Abyss.
The Magus creatures didn’t show up again until Commander 2015, where they introduced Magus of the Wheel and began a new cycle based off sorceries. Each year, a new Magus would join the others in the year’s Commander set, until 2019 when the green one didn’t appear. Again in 2020, the green creature based off a sorcery was nowhere to be found.
The design team tried to include a version based off Eureka, but it didn’t fit name-wise and it wasn’t being activated because it often let opponents get more of an advantage than the controller. The next idea was Magus of the Channel based off the famous GGX spell, and Verhey had it in Commander Legends as the sixth card in the set after the other half of the Battlebond dual lands.
The Channel version turned out to be too powerful, so eventually the team found Magus of the Order, playing off Natural Order. The design team doesn’t like including tutors in the Commander precons, so instead of showing up in one the yearly Commander precon sets, it got moved to Commander Legends. And now after many delays and reschedulings, Commander Legends is here and so is Magus of the Order.
