Chromium

The original five Elder Dragons of Legends were the moment Magic first tried to design Commander-shaped finishers, before Commander existed as a format. Each carried the same template: a brutal mana cost, a 7/7 flying body, and an upkeep tax in the dragon's own colors that would sacrifice it if unpaid. The tax was the design discipline meant to balance the rate, the answer to "what if you could just resolve a 7/7 flyer?" Reading the cost today, the discipline looks misjudged: paying eight to cast and then three more every upkeep, in a fixed Esper combination, was a tempo disaster in a format era that did not yet have the fixing or ramp to support it. The Rampage 2 clause compounds the strangeness, scaling a creature that already wins combat unblocked into something that punishes the defender for chump-blocking with more than one body, a rule the modern game has retired entirely. What the cycle did accomplish was establish the visual and mechanical grammar of the multicolor legendary dragon: a 7/7 flier with keyword combat and a color-identity gate, a template Wizards has returned to constantly. Later printings have reimagined this dragon as a sleeker control piece, but the 1994 version remains the artifact: a glimpse of what the designers thought a build-around legend was supposed to look like before they knew.