Image courtesy of Scryfall.com
Border Identity in MTG: Silver-Style Legality and a Saga Samurai
When we talk about silver-border legality in Magic: The Gathering, we’re usually venturing into the playful, rules-warping corners where conventions loosen and creativity runs wild. The case study at hand centers on a white mana creature that arrives as a Saga, a structural oddity that invites you to think in chapters rather than in discrete turns. Summon: Yojimbo—printed in the Final Fantasy Commander crossover—offers a thoughtful lens on how border aesthetics and format expectations intersect with card design, power level, and multiplayer vibes 🧙♂️🔥💎. While its frame is the classic black border you’d expect in Commander staples, the conversation about silver-border legality remains a useful disguise for a deeper discussion about how unusual cards navigate rules, ban lists, and social contracts at the table ⚔️🎲.
Card profile at a glance
- Name: Summon: Yojimbo
- Set: Final Fantasy Commander (fic)
- Rarity: Rare
- Colors: White (color identity: W)
- Mana Cost: {3}{W} (CMC 4)
- Type: Enchantment Creature — Saga Samurai
- Power/Toughness: 5/5
- Artist: Benjamin Ee
- Legality snapshot: Legacy: legal; Vintage: legal; Commander: legal; Standard and most modern formats: not legal
- Text: (As this Saga enters and after your draw step, add a lore counter. Sacrifice after IV.) I — Exile target artifact, enchantment, or tapped creature an opponent controls. II, III — Until your next turn, creatures can't attack you unless their controller pays {2} for each of those creatures. IV — Create X Treasure tokens, where X is the number of opponents who control a creature with power 4 or greater. V — Vigilance
Seeing a Saga in a crossover set is a nostalgic wink to older enchantment tribes, but this one pushes into the modern Commander milieu with a very concrete ramp payoff. The text combines removal, taxation, and a late-game treasure surge into a single package, all wrapped in a sturdy 5/5 body with vigilance. The design invites you to lean into tempos: you buy time for yourself, shrink your opponents’ options, and then accelerate into a treasure-spiked finish. It’s a blend of control and value that white often courts—paired with the fan-service magic of a Final Fantasy mash-up 🧙♂️🎨.
“A well-timed exile can tilt an entire board, and a late-game treasure avalanche can swing the game” — a sentiment many white-led EDH lists hum along to as they pilot a Saga that wears its ambition on its sleeve.
How the Saga plays on the table
The core thrill here is the progressive power of a Saga that reads like a short, brutal movie arc. Each counter you add not only moves the narrative forward but reshapes what your opponents can or cannot do. On entry, you set the tone with targeted removal—exiling an artifact, enchantment, or a tapped creature—the kind of pivot you’d expect from a white control shell. This is your tempo tool, helping you stop a key play from a rival or disable a problematic engine before it fires. The arc then hardens into a defensive posture: for the II and III counters, your opponents’ creatures are effectively taxed out of the equation when they want to swing at you. The cost—two mana for each attacker—can be a meaningful deterrent, especially in multi-player commander where the number of attackers can get spicy fast ⚔️🔥.
When you reach the IV counter, the token economy explodes into focus. The Treasure tokens aren’t just nice to have; they become acceleration runes, helping you cast the right spells, recast threats, or fuel any number of artifact synergies your deck may adore. The exact formula—X equals the number of opponents who control a creature with power 4 or greater—rewards board state awareness. It’s a design that leans into political play: do you keep your opponents from committing big threats, or do you cultivate a wider board presence to maximize treasure generation? The final payoff, a vigilant fifth counter, crowns the saga with a line that’s as thematic as it is practical: your cleanup step becomes smoother, and your defenses stay intact as you coast toward the win on the back of ramp and a sturdy body 🧙♂️🎲.
In deck construction, you’ll want to pair Summon: Yojimbo with options that can protect or trip up its counters. Tutors, removal, and enchantment/artifact hate can help maximize I, while token generators and mana rocks amplify IV’s payoff. It’s a white card that wants to stay a step ahead—think of it as a knight that not only guards the gate but also plucks the coins from the enemy caravan when the moment calls for it 💎⚔️.
Silver-border legality vs. real-world play
There’s a playful contradiction baked into this discussion. Silver-border formats celebrate quirky, offbeat cards and sometimes house-rule interactions that bend the usual ruleset. In official Magic play, however, Summon: Yojimbo sits firmly on the black-bordered side of the line: it is not silver-bordered and is therefore not legal in silver-border-only cubes or formats that require that kind of border aesthetic. That said, the debate is valuable because it spotlights how border aesthetics influence pricing, perception, and the sense of “what belongs on my table.” In actual play, you’ll see this card shine in Commander circles that embrace crossover sets and heavy toolbox white strategies—especially those with a healthy respect for Treasure synergies and artifact/enchantment control. The card’s Legacy and Vintage legality indicates it can become a marquee pick in older formats, while its Commander viability ensures it can anchor a white-heavy list that prizes resilience, value, and tempo disruption 🧙♂️🔥.
Lore, art, and the design ethos
Benjamin Ee’s illustration anchors the flavor of Summon: Yojimbo in a crossover world where Final Fantasy mythos meets Magic’s duel-tone reality. The saga frame, with its layered storytelling, mirrors the card’s mechanical arc: a journey that begins with a decisive exiling moment, moves through a costly but strategic defense, then rewards with a treasure-driven crescendo. The white color identity sits well with the ethos of chivalry and protective strategy, which in turn makes the card a natural fit for EDH lists that savor complex interactions and patient play. The synergy between art, text, and ambition—honed for a crossover flagship—reminds us that MTG design thrives on cross-pollination and shared myths 🖼️🎨.
Market, value, and playability
In the current market snapshot, the card’s price sits around $1.51 in USD for non-foil copies, with European pricing hovering around €4.04. Collectors will find the rarity and crossover aura appealing, especially for EDH players who want a robust, multi-faceted white threat with a built-in engine for ramp and disruption. Its EDHREC rank sits in the mid-range, suggesting solid, if not sensational, popularity across casual and semi-competitive groups. If you’re trying to decide whether to sleeve Summon: Yojimbo into your white-led commander deck, consider how often you’re accelerating to big turns, and whether you can leverage its I–IV arc to stall top strategies while you pivot to a Treasure-fueled endgame. Foil variants add a touch of splendor to a table during pre-cons and kitchen-table showdowns, but the non-foil base remains the pragmatic backbone for most lists 🧙♂️💎.
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