Legionary

Legionary
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Attack
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Empires
Illustrator(s)	Elisa Cella
Card text
+ You may reveal a Gold from your hand. If you do, each other player discards down to 2 cards in hand, then draws a card.

Legionary is an Action-Attack card from Empires. It is a source of virtual coin and is among the most impactful handsize attacks in the game, forcing opponents to discard down to 2 cards before drawing a random card from their deck, as long as you are also able to reveal a Gold.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• Players wishing to respond to the Attack (e.g. with Moat) must do so before you choose whether or not to reveal a Gold.

Strategy

Legionary is a terminal Gold with a discard attack that is unreliable without the right support but very impactful when you can activate it. Legionary’s attack is among the strongest of the discarding attacks, because your opponents choose only two cards to keep for the three-card hard they will be left with, and must do so before they can know what the third one will be. A terminal Gold by itself is not very powerful in many cases, so Legionary is typically best when you can consistently activate the Attack, and when the discard attack is impactful (i.e., when the draw is weak or unreliable).

In order to reliably collide your Legionary with your Gold(s), you’ll probably need engine-level deck control because both are stop cards, and so like many other forms of payload, Legionary is typically best added to your deck after you’ve thinned out your starting cards. Draw and sifting may also be useful in this regard. Once you have these other components, you’ll often then add a Legionary and a Gold, sometimes even using the generated by Legionary to afford the Gold. A well-running engine can also usually draw your deck and thereby consistently collide the Gold with a Legionary to attack every turn; in this situation, it’s unusual to want more than a single Legionary.

Legionary can sometimes be useful as part of a money strategy. Although you may be unlikely to collide Legionary with Gold consistently, the attack can have a very high impact when you do manage to activate it. Making good use of the attack is paramount, so to improve your chances it may be beneficial to add extra Golds to your deck, e.g. using a Gold gainer such as Tunnel; adding multiple Legionaries may similarly be worthwhile in the late midgame as your deck size increases and you become less likely to collide Legionaries both with each other and with Golds.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+ You may reveal a Gold from your hand. If you do, each other player discards down to 2 cards in hand, then draws a card.	Empires	June 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Legioensoldaat
Finnish	Legioonalainen
French	Légionnaire			+ Vous pouvez dévoiler un Or de votre main. Dans ce cas, tous vos adversaires défaussent jusqu'à avoir 2 cartes en main, puis piochent une carte.
German	Legionär			+ Du darfst ein Gold aus deiner Hand aufdecken. Wenn du das tust, legt jeder Mitspieler Handkarten ab, bis er nur noch 2 hat und zieht dann 1 Karte.	2. Edition (2021)
Japanese	軍団兵 (pron. gundan-hei)			+ 手札から金貨1枚を公開してもよい。公開した場合、他のプレイヤーは全員、手札が2枚になるように捨て札にし、その後1枚カードを引く。
Polish	Legionista			+ Możesz odkryć z ręki kartę Złota. Jeżeli to zrobisz, każdy z pozostałych graczy odrzuca karty, aż pozostaną mu 2 na ręce, po czym dobiera kartę.	(2017)
Russian	Легионер (pron. lyegionyer)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

The first version had the other players "discard a card then draw up to 3" each time you played a Silver. So you got the full effect only if you played three Silvers. I quickly ran through a few variants before settling on, reveal a Gold to have them discard down to 2 then draw (an attack from Dark Ages that had been too annoying, but that one was cheaper and didn't require revealing a Gold). But then for a while it instead triggered on playing a Gold; for some reason I thought that might be better. It wasn't and it's back to revealing a Gold.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Empires Cards

Donald X.'s opinion

Militias in general are a bummer...Legionary is a better one since it doesn't attack right away.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Dominion Discord, 2020