A recent discovery has been made regarding discarded plans for a Leader class toy of Straxus in the pre-Evolution year of Legacy.
Originally, Amazon.com had a toy listing for a "TRA GEN Legacy EV Leader DARKMOUNT," (recall that all of the first-year Legacy toys were listed by stores as "Legacy EV" instead of just "Legacy"; this is not an indication that said toy would have been part of the second-year Evolution line). But when the final toy for this listing went live, it ultimately became the order page for Legacy Leader class Transmetal II Megatron instead, meaning that toy replaced the Legacy Straxus/Darkmount toy.
Awhile back, F.J. DeSanto (the head writer of both the Machinima Prime Wars Trilogy cartoons and the Netflix War For Cybertron Trilogy cartoon) had pitched a Legacy cartoon to Netflix that would have lasted for three seasons, but Netflix passed on the pitch.
More recently, a mysterious piece of artwork in the style of the Legacy toy packaging popped up online and DeSanto himself has
confirmed it to have been artwork created by Hasbro to represent a character who would have been the main villain of the Legacy animated series had Netflix picked it up.
IDW artist Anna Malkova also
chimed in to confirm that the artwork was none other than Straxus, for whom she had done preliminary design work. She created two different designs for this new Straxus, one being his "Original Body", and a Frankenstein-esque "After 'Accident'" design. The first one was used for "Straxxus" as he appeared in the 2019 IDW comics, while the second one went unused.
It is this second one that resembles the design seen in the artwork DeSanto confirmed to have been for the Legacy cartoon villain, meaning this monstrous version of Straxus with his head floating in a liquid tube inside his chest might have been what the Leader class Legacy toy may have looked like (the way it would have actually transformed, and into
what, exactly, is anyone's guess).