Commanding Dragons: Korlessa, Scale Singer

Posted on April 3, 2025

What do you think when you think about Simic () in Commander? I think about Vorel of the Hull Clade, my buddy's deck which made us all groan every time he pulled it out. I also think about my Volo, Guide to Monsters deck, which I play with my group from time to time (it draws a lot of cards). I think about Creatures, mana, +1/+1 counters, and card draw. You know what I don't think about?

Dragons.

Korlessa, on the other hand, desperately wants a lot of Dragons. I mean, bunches and bunches. The more Dragons we've got, the more we're going to be able to churn through our deck, putting more and more Dragons on the Battlefield, hopefully causing problems for our opponents. This sounds like fun.

Simic Dragons | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

Commander (1)
1 Korlessa, Scale Singer

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Turns out there are a fair number of Dragons in Simic. This deck can work for sure.

Korlessa has the advantage of being quite cheap; at two mana, we can get her out on turn two with a good amount of reliability. We're going to count on that, so we'll hope to play a tapped Land on turn one, an untapped Land on turn two, playing Korlessa, then most likely we'll ramp on turn three. However, we still have a lot of big spells to cast, and Korlessa doesn't help us with price, just access. So, we're still running our 40 Lands, which should help us get to the mana we need. I have to say, in testing, I never was sad to see more mana. I kept one six-Land hand and didn't regret it for a second.

We have all the Dragon-themed Lands here, though I have to say I'm not terribly impressed. Temple of the Dragon Queen is really for five-color decks, and it's kind of titchy for a single-color-producing Land. Haven of the Spirit Dragon could be decent to call something back, but Crucible of the Spirit Dragon is probably too slow, though if you have a mana-heavy hand and get unlucky with the top of your library, you can build it up to have a bunch of mana later.

After that, we ramp. I'm big on Lumbering Worldwagon right now; it's a nifty and useful piece of tech for decks looking to add Lands to the 'field. We have Jade Orb of Dragonkind and Lapis Orb of Dragonkind, too, which are worth it for the bonuses because every Creature we have is a Dragon, so all can benefit from being cast with mana from one of those shiny Orbs. I'm also testing Heaped Harvest here; this seems like another decent option for 3-mana ramp, with an option for a second at two mana more. (Plus it's a Food if you care about that.)

Korlessa doesn't draw for us, but she does offer a decent amount of card advantage, since about a third of the time we'll be able to cast something off the top with her. With that in mind, and the absurd mana requirements of many of our Dragons, I kind of went for a "draw 2" style of card draw here: Chart a Course, for example, is almost always two mana for two cards for us. Font of Fortunes and Mnemonic Sphere are both great, easy ways to draw two. Hunter's Insight and Hunter's Prowess are both great in any deck which attacks a lot. Ancient Silver Dragon, if it gets through, should draw us a bunch. Dragon's Hoard and Rogue's Gloves draw us some here and there. Our real winner is Vanquisher's Banner, though; in one play-test, I got that and Old Gnawbone out and I was down to 30 cards in my Library on turn 10.

Thirty-nine of our cards are Dragons. That's... a lot. More than a third of our deck. So, our chances of having a Dragon on the top are decently good; less than 1:2 but better than 1:3. This is good, because we're going to win with our Dragons. Play out Dragons. Attack. Beat people up. Win. Seems obvious.

All the various Dragon helpers are here too, at least the ones in these colors (no Crucible of Fire). We have Draconic Lore, Dragonlord's Prerogative, Silumgar's Scorn, Acolyte of Bahamut... you get the gist. No Adaptive Automaton or anything, since most of our Dragons aren't actually that helped by a simple +1/+1, but Belltoll Dragon, Draconic Muralists, and Renari, Merchant of Marvels all help us with our Dragons in some way or another.

Our answers are mostly tied to the Dragons, with stuff like Foe-Razer Regent and Steel Hellkite. The thought here is to be the threat, not sitting back and dealing with threats - sure, we might take a little damage in the early game as we get set up, but pretty soon we're going to be dealing 20 or 30 damage a turn with our attacks and most of our stuff flies. I like Destructor Dragon here, and we have a few fun Blue ones like Icefall Regent which tap things down - perfect for that Angel blocking our path.

A lot of our Dragons do things. This is where this deck can become complicated to pilot - it's going to be tricky keeping track of all the various triggers. Skanos Dragonheart gets +X/+X until end of turn when it attacks, where X is the greatest power among other Dragons we control. Okay, but also Lurking Green Dragon can't attack unless our opponent controls a flier, and Foe-Razer Regent has a trigger anytime anything fights but it doesn't trigger until the beginning of the next End Step, and Wandering Troubadour Ventures us into the Dungeon if we played a Land. See what I mean? It can get complicated. Hope your friends are patient.

If you read last week's column, you'll know the idea here is a shell for new Dragons in Tarkir: Dragonstorm. I think we're likely to get Dragons in every color, and having a place to put them that isn't your everyday Dragon deck could be nice; that's where this series comes in. This is a great Dragon deck which makes a lot of big plays and plays a lot of big Dragons, all without Red. I'd happily play this in Bracket 2, but I think it would easily scale up to Bracket 3. It'd be tough for a group of Bracket 1s to defeat this one, but if you play nice it might hang.

While this deck is not wildly expensive to begin with, you can drop the price a whole lot by simply not including Astral Dragon, Ancient Silver Dragon, and Old Gnawbone. Cut the Ancient Bronze Dragon and you've dropped the price by almost 75%. Considering we'll almost certainly get four Dragons in these colors in Tarkir, you can just leave them blank to be filled in as we get our cards or run other Dragons - I didn't include every possible option.

I like this idea so much I just bought the whole thing and look forward to playing it soon (as well as updating it with new Dragons when they arrive). I think this will be a blast to pilot and play against, and won't be your everyday Dragon deck.

Thanks for reading.