Barktooth Warbeard

There's nothing to latch onto here. Overpriced vanilla legend -- got it, right.

A brief aside before delving into what we can with this guy: In the earliest Magic sets, there was a scale of sorts to communicate how tough a creature was. Regular humans would be 0/1s or 1/1s; trained soldiers would be 1/1s with an ability, or 2/1s, or 1/2s, or 2/2s, etc. These numbers were obviously loose, but they had something of a logic to them; White Knight's a 2/2 because he's a trained warrior; he was first strike because he was mounted; he was pro: black because he's a holy warrior. Squire is a 1/2 because he's trained, but not as well as a White Knight; he didn't have first strike because he wasn't mounted. D'Avenant Archer is a (spoilers!) 1/1, but she's a trained archer, making her better in a fight than regular dudes (but not as good as a White Knight -- or even as good as a Squire, back when she was printed. Damn you power creep, favoring archers so heavily!).

These large vanilla legends were supposed to be crazy-cool Craw Wurms. A mere human with 6 power was a fierce warrior whose name would go down in history -- a preternaturally and singularly powerful fighter. In this sense, Barktooth is insane -- he's a regular guy that's as strong as a Craw Wurm and even tougher. The real-world equivalent would be a soldier that shrugged off sniper fire and blew up buildings with his mind -- you know, like half a Steve McQueen.

Additionally, legendary wasn't so much a drawback back in the day. Before the Kamigawa legendary rule revision, if you played a legend, no one else could play that same legend. In other words, if you were first out of the holster with your giant dude, you could actually kill your opponent's draws -- they'd have to deal with your duder before they could run theirs out. It was a neat idea because it theoretically meant that, as long as all the legendary duders of a given niche were close in power level, there was a reason to play all kinds of different legendary creatures. For example, say there's 15 legends; five are constructed-worthy, and the other 10 are similar, but just slightly short of being truly competitive. (Something like Qasali Pridemage or Wild Nacatl vs. Watchwolf.) In normal Magic, the first five would completely edge out the second 10 -- there's just no room for them both. However, with plenty of legendary creatures, there's incentive to play less-efficient duders to keep yourself from being locked out of the game.

There's two problems with this logic:

First off, once you start riding the tempo train, the legendary rule made it very, very difficult for the poor hobos you were playing against to catch a ride. Think of it this way -- you go first and play out your explosive, low-cost legendary dude. Your opponent now must either a) kill your legend to play his version of it, putting him or her a turn behind; b) play his or her not-so-good dude, putting him or her slightly behind; or c) play a totally different strategy. If tempo-based legendary beats is the best strategy, you're doing well. If it's not, your explosive legend probably doesn't matter. If it's one of several viable strategies, then this whole legendary conceit doesn't have much of a mechanical effect at all, does it?

Second, it led to generic design. Look at all the stupid Craw Wurms in this set; you only need one Craw Wurm in a block, but this set has seven vanilla dudes with 4+ power. Except for those standouts Jasmine Boreal and Tobias Andrion, each one is worse than Craw Wurm; at least two are strictly worse than Craw Wurm. (I've got a bit of a Craw Wurm obsession, I know -- I'll explain the Craw Wurm Theory in a future post. But seriously -- strictly worse than Craw Wurm. As in, you'd always choose to play your Craw Wurm first. ... Craw Wurm, for chrissakes.)

In any case, I'm fairly certain that was the logic that led to the printing of all these terrible, forgettable legends -- that the legendary rule would encourage diversifying and not simply running "the best cards" over and over again. Of course, it failed -- for players, the obvious answer isn't to run bad duders, it's to run the best duders and the best removal (in this case, Serra Angel and Disrupting Scepter, Swords to Plowshares and Counterspell. Mission accomplished, legend rule!). From a design perspective, creating dozens of powerful, flavorful cards will lead to better sets that won't need artificial restraints -- people will choose fun, powerful decks from a selection of fun, powerful parts.

So, back to old Barktooth.

He never actually appears in a novel -- the character that masquerades as Barktooth is actually Halfdane, a shapeshifter and, by all accounts, a tremendous douchebag. All we know about Barktooth is that he's the head of the kentsu, an elite group of warriors working for Nicol Bolas. (They're so elite that they didn't notice their leader had been killed and replaced by a shapeshifter, but whatevs.)

Again, not much to work with. There's the easy fix:

Again, his casting cost isn't an accident; it's part of the Craw Wurm Theory. He gets +0/+1 for being legendary, which is a drawback today. However, that's boring (though at least one of the vanilla legends -- likely two, if my crystal ball isn't lying -- will stay vanilla). I'd like to do something else with Barktooth, but I don't know much about him. The kentsu are all elite warriors, and Barktooth was in a leadership position; it would be trivial to do something like this:

This has the nice effect of dovetailing with our Adun card earlier, something that I'm all for. Sadly, his type line would realistically need a trim -- I'd accept "Legendary duder -- Craw Wurm" -- but that's another discussion.