I have a confession to make. I’m a closet Dargon lover. During the time I spent as a Spike, I used to tease the players who took the Vorthos aspect of the game a little more seriously than I thought they needed to. “Dargons” was how, in my view, the prototypical Vorthos nerd talked about what was important to them: flavor. I didn’t care if I was riding a Dragon or a Planeswalker or a Unicorn to victory—I just wanted to win games, and sometimes, that took creatures. I never read flavor text, I didn’t know creature subtypes, and I certainly didn’t play casual. But it wasn’t always like that.

If you think Dragons are kickass, you’ll love Fate Reforged because it is giving us so many new Dragons that we’re going to be like, “Wow, that’s a lot of Dragons,” because we’re adults, and to react more than that could be perceived as hyperbolic.

Fate Reforged is giving us a few cycles of Dragons. If we want to play a Dragon deck in Commander, I think the uncommon cycle has two very good cards for us. The first is Wardscale Dragon. True, opponents can play some sort of removal spell before combat, but in a multiplayer game, they don’t always know whom we’ll be attacking. By the time you’re swinging, it’s too late. Opponents can block with creatures and accept their fates. Those are their options. Well, they can activate abilities of permanents, but it sounds cooler to say they have to take it. Wardscale Dragon is powerful and worth looking at. The other Dragon in the uncommon cycle is Destructor Dragon. The ability to blow up a permanent other than a creature is important in Commander, and being able to tutor for Destructor Dragon could let us do a bad approximation of Acidic Slime (or a good approximation of one, depending on how much you like to attack people with Dragons). It’s not the same on-demand answer as the Slime, but what it does is deter opponents from killing it if they have things worth keeping around.

Scion of the Ur-Dragon.

Scion goes against one of our principles of 75% deck-building to an extent. When I wrote the article about tutors, I was in favor of face-up tutors because face-down tutors make the other players wait for you to do something, and you do it in secret. I think we decided we could all live with tutoring if it were doing something like casting Worldly Tutor to put a win condition on top and then putting it into play with Mayael the Anima. Tutoring also increases the homogeneity of our gaming experience by letting us pursue the same path to victory each game regardless of the cards we draw.

Ultimately, I think our other founding principle pertaining to narrowing our card pool in order to skew more powerful as long as we stay within a theme will help us from going off our 75% rails. While it’s true that Scion of the Ur-Dragon can allow us to fetch whatever Dragon we want, if we are playing mostly or all Dragons, we can still only find the best Dragon for the situation, something that is probably to be different each time we play. Tutoring for any “utility” Dragons we have in the deck will trump us trying to fetch the de facto best creature left. I imagine building along this theme will help us have a dynamic experience, and our opponents will forgive us if we spend some time tutoring, especially if they have a Relic of Progenitus in play.

I don’t want to spend a million dollars on a mana base here, and that’s probably going to be our biggest challenge when constructing this deck. Let’s see what we come up with.

Scion of the Ur-Dragon ? Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (30)
• 1 Balefire Dragon
• 1 Bogardan Hellkite
• 1 Destructor Dragon
• 1 Dragon Tyrant
• 1 Dragonspeaker Shaman
• 1 Hellkite Overlord
• 1 Hellkite Tyrant
• 1 Scourge of Valkas
• 1 Utvara Hellkite
• 1 Vampiric Dragon
• 1 Wardscale Dragon
• 1 Steel Hellkite
• 1 Atarka, World Render
• 1 Bladewing the Risen
• 1 Dromar, the Banisher
• 1 Dromoka, the Eternal
• 1 Intet, the Dreamer
• 1 Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund
• 1 Keiga, the Tide Star
• 1 Kokusho, the Evening Star
• 1 Kolaghan, the Storm's Fury
• 1 Nicol Bolas
• 1 Numot, the Devastator
• 1 Ojutai, Soul of Winter
• 1 Oros, the Avenger
• 1 Rith, the Awakener
• 1 Ryusei, the Falling Star
• 1 Silumgar, the Drifting Death
• 1 Teneb, the Harvester
• 1 Vorosh, the Hunter

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Sarkhan Vol

• Spells (27)
• 1 Consume the Meek
• 1 Mortify
• 1 Oblation
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Austere Command
• 1 Beacon of Unrest
• 1 Divine Reckoning
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Guided Passage
• 1 Living Death
• 1 Patriarch's Bidding
• 1 Praetor's Counsel
• 1 Primal Surge
• 1 Profane Command
• 1 Regrowth
• 1 Relentless Assault
• 1 Time of Need
• 1 Unburial Rites
• 1 Villainous Wealth
• 1 Debtors' Knell
• 1 Frontier Siege
• 1 Palace Siege
• 1 Coalition Relic
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Loxodon Warhammer
• 1 Reito Lantern
• 1 Legacy Weapon

• Lands (41)
• 3 Forest
• 3 Island
• 3 Mountain
• 3 Plains
• 3 Swamp
• 1 Arcane Sanctum
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Cavern of Souls
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Crumbling Necropolis
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Forbidden Orchard
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Jungle Shrine
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Savage Lands
• 1 Seaside Citadel
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Vivid Crag
• 1 Vivid Creek
• 1 Vivid Grove
• 1 Vivid Marsh
• 1 Vivid Meadow
• 1 Watery Grave

Buy This Deck

I like a few of the Sieges in this deck. The green one, Frontier Siege, lets you either have a lot of free mana to activate Scion or fight every time you summon forth a Dargon. Either mode has to make you pretty happy. Palace Siege is less modular and is likely to mostly be cast for Khans so you can bring back creatures from the bin that you dumped there with Scion’s ability.

I decided not to have any non-Dragon creatures other than Dragonspeaker Shaman, whose flavor demanded his inclusion. In this way, I managed to make myself feel better about playing a walking tutor as a commander. I also took out the Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon that is a snap-include in Scion decks. I think he pursues a different aim than you would normally pursue, and that mean you’re pretty likely to only go fetch him if you think you can get away with it, whether you mean to do it or not. There are plenty of other Dragons who can mix it up and start some trouble, so you will have a wider array of options to tutor for if we leave him out.

That’s really what we’re trying to avoid with this build: homogeneity of experience. You have a large swath of Dragons to search for, and with the removal of other tutors and the one Dragon most people search for, you are forced to find the right Dragon for the situation. This will lead to fewer situations in which you ignore the board state because it can’t stop you from winning the game the one way you know how.

So what do we think? Are there too many new cards? Are there not enough? Is there no way to build a 75% deck with a flying tutor for a commander, or has removing a few problems cards and giving myself a lot to work with going to even things out? Are there any glaring omissions? Leave it in the comments section. Fate Reforged is a very exciting set, and Dragon lovers everywhere, closeted or otherwise, are in for some great Commander inclusions for years to come.