Dragon's of Tarkir Review: Threats

Welcome to The General Zone's Review of Dragons of Tarkir! My name is Grandpa Growth and it is my pleasure to comb over all of the new cards with you and share my thoughts.

As always, the review will be broken down into four different installments.  Legendary Creature cards, threats, the answers, and everything else.

Uncle Landdrops has already posted his review of the new Legends. Check it out here: Legends

Let's go over the ground rules for the review articles:

• This is a blog about Commander, so my comments on cards should be viewed in that context unless otherwise stated.
• I will not discuss every card. If it isn't relevant to Commander I may leave it out of the review. Also, I will not discuss any reprints, since we already understand where they fit in the metagame.

In today's article we will be discussing the threat cards. A threat is something that you use to win the game. Mostly Creatures, but planeswalkers, and spells that make Creatures or add to the board are all threats. Pretty simple. Let's jump right in!


We begin with one of the warrior themed support cards. A Double-Striking 2/2 for three is a pretty standard offering in Magic these days. This gives you the ability to have other warriors get Double Strike as well though. I have seen a lot of people try out the full variety of these cards, but I am not sure it is ever going to work. Mirran Crusader and Silverblade Paladin are the accepted staples in this category and I don't see why you would play Arashin Foremost over either.









I love modal spells. Flexibility is power in this game, and these monks are pretty flexible. Khans block has brought us a number of cool Creatures with modal triggered abilities and this is the most exemplary of the bunch. I like all the abilities on this one and the stats are great for its cost. This is a great midrange beater that keeps you way head in the damage race and is tough to block.










This just might be the most expensive reanimation effect that I am willing to consistently play. I am not sure that this is actually going to make it into any of my decks because the ends don't justify the means, but the effect itself is intrinsically powerful. Getting back some major threats or planeswalkers is a good way to take the lead in a game. Having a second shot at key permanents like Mindslaver or Doubling Season will help add redundancy to engine/combo strategies that play mainly on the battlefield.

When I saw this card I just assumed that it was picturing Narset. The flavor of the card evokes her story in a very visceral way. In the plot of the set, she travels to the various Ojutai strongholds to uncover the secret past that is hidden deep within ancient scrolls. However, that doesn't seem to be the case here...the character doesn't actually LOOK like Narset, which feels like a missed opportunity to me. The art is a huge part of selling the flavor of a card, and it just doesn't transfer well for me.

This card seems amazing to me and, in my opinion, should be the gold standard of token generation. It scales perfectly, it is an Instant, and it makes tokens that are a relevant color and type. There are decks that can absolutely use this card. Some of them are even staples of the format.

HOWEVER, My problem with this is that so many premium token generators have been printed in the last few sets that we have become supersaturated. Many of those token generators are just straight up superior to this.

I question the design teams lack of ingenuity and reliance on 'the usual suspects' of card design. Not every block needs a card like this. Maybe we don't even need this card more than once every five years. At this point in time, this design space has been fully explored and there are better versions available if you wanted to play with them.




This is a sleek mid-market threat that plays very well in both single and multiplayer. I can't see this cracking into the top decklists, but there are certain scenarios that will make this card very threatening. I am particularly interested to combine this with Extort effects, life payments, and other such nonsense that will allow you to leverage the bonus of extra life, turning it into a game-breaking resource advantage.










Holy McWow! This is the grand-daddy of them all right here. This is basically an excuse for me to never include any Creatures in my decks ever again. Why do you need to play anything? There are enough Clone effects and Mind Controls to steal games consistently.

This is certainly the best card in the set in my opinion and one of the splashiest cards that we have seen in a while. If you are hunting for big games like my pal Uncle Landdrops, this is definitely going to make your hit list.








I don't know too many people who play Dungeon Geists, but this is supposed to be a bigger, better version of Dungeon Geists. It costs one extra colorless mana, which I am usually not into, but let's take a look at what we get for it:

First, we have an extra point of power. A four power Flier is definitely better, but not having an extra point of toughness is pretty distracting. Leaving alone the lack of cubic design symmetry (a card having the same p/t as its converted mana cost) a 4/3 isn't ideal. We are talking about a five drop that will still die to Lightning Bolt.

We also get the Frost Titan, 'Shroud Tax' ability. This was constantly underrated when it first debuted, but as time went on people began to realize that it is as good as Shroud in many situations, sometimes even better. With Icefall Regent, being that it functions as an ETB removal spell, actually giving it Shroud or Hexproof would be impossible given the current mindset of R&D. I personally think that this is a great choice of a protection ability for this type of Creature and can't wait to test it out, however I am skeptical whether it can actually make it into any of my Blue decks.




There are a ton of interesting things going on with this card. I love the idea of getting to exile a Cruel Ultimatum and smash for a while before eventually recasting the card and laughing maniacally as I revel in my ultimate victory.

Unfortunately, there are a laundry list of problems with this as well. First of all, it is a fragile Creature. Moreover, it is a Creature that requires some legwork to set up. It doesn't give you much more than a body either, and you won't have great control over the size of that body despite the fact that you always have to pay the same price for it. The ability to outmaneuver this card with graveyard hate, Creature removal, or counters just makes this too unreliable to really be a win condition in this format.





I am not sure what deck you are going to put this in, but profitable sacrifice outlets are always great, especially when they can attack. This provides both early damage and a way to reach across the table in a board stall and continue to attack your opponent's life total. Sadly, Warrior tokens aren't super easy to come up with and feeding this real cards doesn't seem like a great way to get things done. The same cast of characters are going to show up along with this: Skullclamp, etc. It is all very exciting to people who care about this type of thing, but I am not one of them.







There is a huge potential for card advantage with this. It hearkens back to many great cards from sets past like Reaver Demon and Sunblast Angel, but Deathbringer is tougher to trigger and this is problematic. You MUST cast it from your hand AND there MUST be a particular number of Creatures. It isn't enough to be behind, you must be ridiculously behind before you can bring yourself back from the edge of death.

Remember when Black removal spells couldn't kill Black Creatures? It took over a decade for us to figure out that there was no reason that needed to be true. Sadly, something else is starting to happen because of a similarly arbitrary mechanical theme. To an outside observer, it is starting to look like Zombies just can't block. That is sad.

Design overuses the same tropes and the same mechanics; re-packaging them under new names and circling back over the same territory. It is all very sad and boring and I am wholly uninterested. There are new cards that actually include new ideas that I would rather get to instead.






I like my Creatures to be multi-functional. A two-drop is going to be good for a few points of damage in the early game, particularly when they have evasion. Later in the game when your 2/2 is no longer dominating the board, you can then switch into token-production mode and threaten to defeat your opponent with a steady stream of large Fliers.

I often write about how excellent Wrath of God is in Commander. Formidable exposes you to being beaten by Wrath of God by forcing you to commit multiple Creatures to the board even to just 'become Formidable'. However, Dragon Whisperer does let you mitigate this a bit by allowing you to add to your board presence significantly without exposing additional cards to a board sweeper once you have met the conditions.

Here we get our first look at the 'new' Morph mechanic: Megamorph. The morph cost on many of the rare cards is very competitive. In fact, there is a cycle of rare Megamorphs, of which this card is a part, that are all very aggressively costed and provide the opportunity for card advantage.

I like Ire Shaman quite a bit. I just talked about how two-drops are often good for quite a bit of damage. You can get in meaningful attacks at a point in the game where most people are durdling about and increasing their mana supply. If you get to the point where they are able to put out a blocker, you are now flipping up Ire Shaman, dealing an extra point every turn and you get a free card. Nice.




I don't see this as much of a Commander card, but there are many cards in this set that I feel fall into that category and I have priced myself into talking about all of them because they are mostly Dragons. Dragons are inherently important to Commander because people like them so much. Why? I have no idea.

A Flying midrange threat that doesn't do much besides damage is not a good card. There are some decks that care about dealing damage quickly, but they aren't very good. Dealing damage in a card-advantageous way, or at least a card-efficient way, is vastly more important than dealing damage quickly in Commander.





Hardened Scales, Ghave, Doubling Season. If these cards are familiar to you, then you probably have a deck that this card is going into. Let me know how it works out, because you guys all know by now that this just isn't my bag.
















This card looks sweet on the surface, but it has some very significant problems. In order to guarantee that you hit two Creatures when you cast this, a very large portion of your deck would need to be dedicated to eligible threats. If 20-30 of your cards are Creatures that cost three or less, you are probably not set up very well to win in the late game.

Being an Instant is great and potentially generating card advantage is even better, but who cares about flashing in a mana dork and a small threat? This is the end of turn four we are talking about. Someone at the table is getting ready to cast a Titan and there is another guy holding multiple board sweepers. This card is sweet, but it just isn't where you want to be in this format.

Again, this card is geared much more heavily towards Standard. There are not enough high-quality Morph cards to reliably trigger this. Even then, you get back a small-ish Creature that isn't likely to win you the game. Deathtouch makes a huge difference because it is hard to block profitably and it can help you defend yourself against more expensive threats, but these benefits are exaggerated.

There are many popular removal spells that exile their targets, rendering the main upside of this card moot. Most proper game-winning threats are either going to Fly right over this or have a built in way to kill it, e.g. Inferno Titan.





This is the second in the Rare two-drop Morph cycle, and it is a pretty sweet one.

Comparing it to Eternal Witness, you have to invest a two more mana, but you get a 3/2 that is tougher to block. I see these cards playing great alongside one another.













This dragon is undersized for what you have to pay to get it, but the idea is to play it, fight a dork, and make it bigger. That all sounds well and good, but if you are paying this much mana you can do better.

The value of adding counters to Creatures through additional fight effects is pretty marginal because there are relatively few quality fight cards. Additionally, you don't want to commit a large percentage of your removal portfolio to situational cards. That is a recipe for disaster.







This is a trap. Let's examine that ability:

Why would you want to tuck the Creature away on the bottom of your library? This is really only inhibiting you from using some recursion effect to eventually get it back. So you almost certainly won't do that.

You probably don't want to put it on top of your library in most situations either. In most games, you are going to lose pretty handily if your opponent has multiple removal spells. You put it on top, they kill it and attack you, repeat. How many turns can you survive taking damage before you just lose?

The only situation that this ability is actually useful in is a late game topdeck war. If they have nothing and you have nothing, you can draw a 6/6 Flier instead of a blank. This all assumes though, that your opponent can't exile it, mill it, counter it, steal it, copy it, or Pacify it, which is a bit of a stretch.




This card is wholly unexciting on its own. It is a mediocre threat with no ability to generate card advantage and no ability to protect itself.

However, it does have one saving grace: This guy can kill in one hit. There are plenty of decks in Commander that can create infinite or at least arbitrarily large numbers of tokens. Mr. Boltwing here is ready to turn that new supply of dorks into a huge amount of damage to the face.










Again, this is the type of card that I would normally leave out of the review because it is just so pedestrian, but this is Dragons of Tarkir where everything is a dragon. Xhibit put some dragons in our dragon so that we can dragon-ception while we watch M.C. Escher draw dragons that are drawing dragons.

It is like the marketing team did a focus group and some kid was like, "I like dragons." Then everyone else at the table agreed and R&D decided that maybe they should just make everything a dragon to appease the masses. I shudder to think what will happen when they ask the same question to the kid who said that he "likes turtles."

This card is only slightly less lame. This at least makes tokens and mills, but the packaging is just too expensive in my opinion. I don't think that anyone is really going to play this because quite frankly: there is no reason to.

Instead of justifying that opinion I am going to talk about physics. This dragon is huge. It is so big and so fat that I can't imagine how it would ever fly. There is a hard limit to how big something can be and how much it can weigh while still being able to fly.

In fact, using a little information from your engineer friend's materials science textbook, you will learn that even using the lightest and most efficient THEORETICAL materials, you really couldn't get this mass into the air if it is more than half a ton. A dragon this size would not be able to move, much less fly. Which, I imagine, is why we see so many of the Silumgar brood dragons lazily plopped on the ground.

One of the Skywise on the other hand, may actually be able to fly. Some of the smaller ones pictured in the set's art aren't much bigger than a horse, which is much more realistic. A 40-ish foot wingspan could maybe put a 1000 lbs. dragon in the air for a short time, but you wouldn't really call it 'flying'.

Also, taking off without the help of a high elevation would be a nightmare requiring an expenditure of calories on the order of the millions.

Such an inefficient use of energy would be a severe disadvantage to a Creature living high in the mountains where the air is thin, temperatures are colder, food is scarce, and then they'd have to find a way back to the summit again.



The really tricky bit would be landing this bad boy. At best, the wings would barely be generating enough thrust to keep the dragon aloft, but landing would require beating their wings at an incredible rate. Unless these things can flap like a hummingbird (again, necessitating massive energy consumption), they would crash into the ground in a spectacular and lethal 'splat'.

This all assumes that the creature could even beat its wings at all, but in reality the forces acting on their wings would be more than enough to snap bones and tear flesh.

For those of you who are thinking: 'Gosh Grandpa! The dragons fly with magic.' You're a fool. Magic is what fools call science. It is also the name of a card game.

In case you were wondering: No, I am not going to talk about any of these cards that are wrapped into the text.



This card is sweet. Six is a lot of mana. There is good chance that you can get this down early with some Cultivating. Once you start the beatdowns you are going to be tossing out Ulamogs and Colossi with RECKLESS ABANDON. I think this card is neat and I might actually just build a big dumb Creature deck so that I can have fun playing/losing with it.











This card is also sweet. It is a reliable source of recursion and card advantage tacked on to a flying body. This I can get behind. Or on top of. Really anything but beneath it seems to be fine.

I love the look of the Kolaghan dragons. That is some terrifying, high fantasy stuff right there. This might be one of my favorite pieces of art in recent sets. I imagine this thing gliding effortlessly like the alien ships from Independence Day; just obliterating anything underneath it while it floats casually along to its next destination.

Finally, we are in the home stretch. The planeswalkers in this set are just awesome. Starting with the newly sparked Narset Transcendent. At a monster 6 loyalty this girl is huge and she actually has a relevant +1 ability. You could be drawing extra removal/counterspells while moving swiftly up to her ultimate which will lock all your opponents out of using their own non-Creature spells. Being able to rebound your removal or card draw is enough to make me want to play this card, but she really does have the total package. If you have a deck with both plains and islands, you are crazy not to play this card.







I don't know why Sarkhan is unbroken, but I am sure glad that he is. Did I miss somewhere that it was implied he was going to break? Is that what happened went he went crazy after his domination by Nicol Bolas?

Regardless, this bad boy is a lot of colors, and that usually isn't a good sign, but these are three colors that have a lot of stature in Commander. There are a few high quality generals that would love to fight along side this planeswalker.

Ticking up while providing card advantage is the best test of whether a pdub is playable in my opinion, so ability one is a check. The second test is whether or not it can protect itself. Well, a 4/4 Dragon means a lot more in Standard than it does in Commander, but this is a still a heck of a token. Check. Finally, does the ultimate ability win the game? I would have to guess that this is pretty close to a game-ender. It doesn't say that you straight up win, but getting 5+ dragons on the board will likely give you enough air power to have lethal if you get to untap. If they do end up sweeping your board, oh well, I guess you will just have to go back to drawing two cards per turn.

Well, that is all of the threats. Let us know how you feel about the changes to the blog, the review, and the new cards in the comment box below. I will be back next time with continuing coverage of Dragons: reviewing the answers cards from the new set. See you then Zoners.

-GG