Sword of the Chosen

A repeatable buff that costs just two mana and asks for nothing but a legendary creature to point at: a fine rate wrapped around a restriction the game could not yet support. When this was printed, legendary creatures were scarce, mostly oversized, and governed by the old legend rule that kept you from running four copies of your best one, so the targeting clause read less as a synergy hook than as a wish. The card was built for a tribe that did not exist yet. That is the design tension worth sitting with: the rate is reasonable, but the restriction was aspirational, written as if a critical mass of cheap legends were a card pool the game already had rather than one it would spend the next two decades assembling. Modern sets have since flooded the type line with two- and three-mana legendary creatures and entire mechanics that care about being legendary, which is the only reason the targeting line reads as a payoff today instead of a near-dead clause. It anticipates a "legends matter" archetype by years, and it does so quietly, without fanfare. The friction is permanent: a legendary artifact that demands legendary targets is a closed loop, rewarding decks that lean all the way into the type line and offering nothing to anyone who does not.