Reki, the History of Kamigawa

A flesh-and-blood namesake who pays you for your deckbuilding's flavor. The trigger fires on the cast, not on resolution, so the draw replaces itself even if the legendary spell later gets countered or fizzles, and even if someone kills Reki in response; the card is already locked on the stack. The body is beside the point. The value is that every legendary thing you were already casting now draws a card the moment it goes up. The catch is the build cost, which is the entire identity: a pile of generically good cards does nothing here. You have to commit to the legendary supertype across creatures, artifacts, and planeswalkers to turn the trigger into a real engine, and the deck that does becomes self-sustaining in a way few three-mana green creatures of its era could. It is a tribal lord for a tribe that is not a creature type, rewarding a deckbuilding commitment that shows up nowhere on the battlefield. Worth being precise about what counts: only spells with the legendary supertype trigger it, so a Saga (which is not inherently legendary) does nothing unless it also carries that supertype. That narrowness is what gives the card its shape. It does not reward a broad "historic" pool; it rewards a deck willing to make legendary its through-line, which is exactly the constraint an era obsessed with legends rarely gave players a reason to embrace.