Legions (LGN): The Creature-Only MTG Set Guide

What is Legions?

Released on February 3, 2003, Legions (set code: LGN) holds a genuinely unique place in Magic history - it is the only expansion ever printed where every single card is a creature. Not mostly creatures. Not primarily creatures. All 145 cards. Rares, uncommons, commons: creatures, all the way down.

Legions is the second set in the Onslaught block, sitting between Onslaught (2002) and Scourge (2003). As a small expansion, it was designed to slot into an existing Draft environment rather than anchor one, which makes its all-creature constraint even more striking. Onslaught was already the block that turned up the dial on creature types and tribal play - Legions was the set that committed fully to that identity.

It is the 28th Magic: The Gathering expansion overall.

Themes and mechanics

A world of pure creatures

The all-creature constraint is the set's defining mechanical identity, and it's worth sitting with just how unusual that is. Draft a pack of Legions and you won't see a single removal spell, enchantment, land, or artifact. Every pick is a body. This pushed Onslaught block Limited toward a particular style of play - one built on combat math, creature synergies, and tribal interactions - and it shaped what the individual cards needed to do to compensate for the lack of traditional utility spells.

Many Legions creatures carry abilities that, in other sets, might appear on non-creature spells: built-in evasion, combat tricks in creature form, and creatures that do unusual things when they enter or attack. The set leans hard into this.

Tribal synergies

Onslaught block was the tribal block - Goblins, Elves, Soldiers, Beasts, Wizards, Clerics, and Zombies were all first-class mechanical identities. Legions deepens every one of those threads. With no non-creature cards to dilute the draft packs, the tribal tensions between archetypes become even more pronounced. You're not choosing between creatures and spells; you're choosing between tribes.

Morph

Morph - the mechanic that lets you cast creatures face-down for '{3}' as a 2/2 and flip them up later for a cost - returns from Onslaught in full force. Legions adds more morph creatures to the pool, which in Limited means more bluffing, more information games, and more moments where a turn-three 2/2 might be anything. That uncertainty is core to how the Onslaught Draft format plays.

Rules note: When a face-down creature is turned face-up, it gains all of its normal characteristics. Abilities that trigger on turn-up use the stack normally. See CR 702.36 for the full morph rules.

Limited and Draft

Drafting with Legions packs

Drafting Legions in an Onslaught block format (two Onslaught packs, one Legions, in the original draft order) creates a format that rewards creature-on-creature interaction more than almost any other environment in Magic's history. You get your removal, your spells, and your mana fixing from Onslaught - Legions gives you muscle.

Because every card in a Legions pack is a creature, early picks are almost always about which tribe you're committing to rather than which splash card you want. The format has a strong tribal aggro character: getting the right critical mass of a single creature type often matters more than raw individual card quality.

Format speed

Onslaught block Limited runs at a medium pace - fast enough that slow durdle strategies struggle, but with enough large-body Beasts and morph creatures that games don't always end on turn five. Legions creatures that punch above their mana cost in combat accelerate this dynamic.

Lore and setting

The world at war

Legions is set on Dominaria, in the continent of Otaria - the same region that anchored the Odyssey block before it. The Onslaught block's story picks up the consequences of everything Kamahl did in Odyssey, and by the time Legions arrives, those consequences have grown into full-scale war.

The companion novel, Legions by J. Robert King (published January 2003), captures the set's mood exactly. The blurb puts it well: the world stands divided between the followers of Phage - champions of the pit-fighting arenas, hungry for blood and new combat - and the followers of Akroma, an angel who has built a terrifying religion around her own creator. Caught between them is Kamahl, former champion of the pits, now trying to atone for the terrible wrongs that gave birth to both.

Lore aside: Akroma is one of the more compelling characters in Onslaught block lore - she was created by the illusionist Ixidor as a monument to his lost love, and she has taken on a religious significance far beyond what he intended. Her clash with Phage, who is herself a transformed version of someone Kamahl loved, gives the conflict a genuinely tragic shape.

The novel features an ensemble of characters including Virot Maglan, Braids, Zagorka, Stonebrow, Ixidor, and several others, reflecting the block's wide cast and the chaos of a world where multiple factions are tearing Otaria apart simultaneously.

The arena, the pit, and the saint

Onslaught block's flavour is inseparable from its setting: a world obsessed with gladiatorial combat. The pits are where champions are made, where Phage walks and kills with a touch, and where the crowd demands new blood. Legions is the escalation of that - the moment where the combat isn't just in the arenas anymore but has spilled across the whole world.

Set legacy

The one that broke the mould

Legions is remembered, first and foremost, as the set that did the impossible thing. Every expansion before and after it has non-creature cards. Legions doesn't. That's a design choice that was never repeated, which tells you something about how unusual it was - and, honestly, how constraining it made both design and play.

In competitive Constructed, the all-creature constraint limited Legions's impact compared to Onslaught, which introduced powerful tribal payoffs that still show up in older formats today. Legions creatures did see play, but the set's legacy lives more in the idea of it than in a roster of long-lived staples.

In Limited, it produced one of the more distinctive draft formats of its era - a tribal combat puzzle where every card in every pack was a body, and the skill was in reading which bodies your opponents were building toward.

For Magic history enthusiasts, Legions stands as a fascinating design experiment: proof that R&D was willing to push a set concept to its logical extreme, live with the consequences, and never do it again. That kind of 'what if we went all the way?' energy is part of what makes Magic's history so worth exploring.