We are officially in the perpetual spoiler season of the MTG year, and Wizards has not been disappointing us. Most people can get behind a set centered largely around dragons, and it definitely helps that the plane itself is one that we have wanted to see them bring back for a long time. Over a decade later, we are going back to Tarkir. I played a good bit of Magic and did a lot of deck building the last time we had some fun dragons on Arena, and I knew that this set was going to call me back to those days. My favorite archetype a couple of years ago was Boros Dragons. I largely played that in the Alchemy format, but I am going to bring you a Boros Dragons Standard Deck today. We are going to take advantage of a combo that is used in Standard currently, but we are going to use a different payoff this time. We are going to cast dragons for FREE and then either they will have the opponent dead just from entering, or we will hopefully have a way to give them all haste! We will take a look at the new cards that are awesome. Then I'll let you know about the combo that will help us get there.
We want to keep the board as clear as we can for our dragons and then slam them all on the board at once to clean things up. We also have some smaller creatures that we can use to chump block earlier in the game. When needed, we also have board wipes to deal with other creatures.
New Cards from Tarkir Dragonstorm
You guessed it, this is the card that inspired this deck. A lot of the dragons we have seen so far cost four or more mana. Some of them are a little cheaper, but I haven't seen any yet that appear worthwhile for under four mana. While we are on the topic of high mana costs, it goes without saying that we probably won't be looking to hard cast this enchantment. We are going to discard it and reanimate it from our graveyard. We have a few discard outlets in the deck and a few options for reanimating. If we absolutely need to, we can also ramp up a bit with the options we have to generate more mana. We will effectively be looking for that Omniscience type of turn where once this is on the board, we can effectively win the game that turn, or pretty much just have it to where our opponent concedes because they will quickly fall way too far behind. A lot of people are saying this card is made for Commander, and I don't disagree, but if people are playing Omniscience in Standard, I'm gonna play Dracogenesis in Standard. If nothing else, it'll be fun.
We had to throw this one in here for some free mana. It tells us that we have to play dragons, so we might as well do it. I didn't exactly want to be drawing multiples of them since it is legendary, so I don't see the need for more than two or three copies of this in the deck. The fact that it costs zero mana also allows us to more consistently ensure that our combo goes off on turn three or turn four. What is pretty nice about it is that it can still pay off on turn 4 as the finisher, and I will get to why it works as a win condition later on.
This one is awesome, and you can probably see why we want to have it in the deck if we are going to be slamming a lot of dragons. What we want to do here is cast all of our dragons first, and then cast this guy last. Ideally, we would have maybe three or four dragons in hand, and then we would get that many copies of this guy minus one. With another one of the dragons that we have in this deck, that should definitely lead to a one -turn kill.
Combos and Win Conditions
This is what we will use to reanimate Dracogenesis. We can do it as early as turn 4, and we can even use Mox Jasper to then win on that turn. Theoretically, we could get extremely lucky and even do this on turn 3, but it is most likely to be done on turn 4. The funniest thing about this is that we will be using creatures to win, and the enchantment even comes back as a creature, thus giving us more firepower.
We will also use this one to try and combo kill our opponent. If we are not able to kill them while attacking the same turn with our dragons, we will simply kill our opponent from the dragons entering. Terror of the Peaks having its pseudo-ward ability is also useful, because we will look to punish our opponents every chance we get with this deck.
This one is useful for a few reasons. We want to use it to discard cards, and of course draw more, but we also want to be able to give our creatures haste once we lay them all on the board. Comboing our dragons with Mox Jasper on the board will allow us to get that extra mana once our dragons are out, and then we will use the one mana to activate the ability on the enchantment to effectively win the game. We have a ton of extra abilities with our dragons as well. We can do double damage when needed, and of course deal direct damage with them before combat.
Our sideboard is pretty transformative and is simply used to buy us more time to get to our combo. We will have to use some board wipes, and who knows, we may even lose some dragons on the way, but they can be expendable when necessary, especially if we are casting them for free. The fact that we are Boros allows us access to the best removal and most efficient board wipes, so we aren't too worried about the creature matchups. If opponents play enchantments or artifacts that deal with our graveyard, we also are prepared to deal with that.
I hope you enjoyed this "way too early deck" from Tarkir Dragonstorm, and make sure to keep an eye out for the next deck that we drop as more cards are revealed!
