Nicol Bolas

The original Elder Dragon, and the one whose design the brand has spent thirty years rehabilitating. The Legends cycle was Richard Garfield's attempt to print mythic-feeling creatures before mythic was a rarity, and the solution was a tax structure: each dragon demanded a triple-color upkeep payment or fed itself to the graveyard. This is a card whose rules text describes its own punishment. Eight mana to cast, three colors of upkeep to keep, and a 7/7 flying body that only matters if you can stick the landing for multiple turns. The discard trigger is the payoff and the reason the card has cultural weight: a connected hit empties the opponent's hand, which in 1994 was closer to a win condition than a tempo swing. Every subsequent Bolas printing has been a negotiation with this template. Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker dropped the upkeep tax and split the discard onto a minus ability; Nicol Bolas, the Ravager flipped the rate question entirely by front-loading a 4/4 flier. The God-Pharaoh treatment turned him into a storyline anchor for an entire block. What the original carries that the rest cannot is the artifact-status of being the card the character is named after: the Elder Dragon Highlander format took its name from this cycle, and the entire Commander format descends from a group of players trying to make these eight-mana legends castable.