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Magic Untapped reports the latest Magic: The Gathering set, Tarkir: Dragonstorm, has been so popular stores are selling out of it and sometimes struggling to restock. “Demand for Tarkir: Dragonstorm has been exceptionally high and we are working to bring more to the market,” said Wizards Play Network community manager Nelson Brown.
It’s tempting to put this down to how traditional Dragonstorm is. It’s a return to a setting that debuted in 2014, with a theme—dragons, obv—which is as close to generic fantasy as you can get. But while some recent sets, like the racing-themed Aetherdrift and detective-themed Murders at Karlov Manor, have been criticized for leaning too hard into gimmicks, we did just have the extremely old-fashioned Foundations too. It’s not like this is the only chance players have had to put money down on conventionally themed cards this year.
Meanwhile Magic’s “Universes Beyond” crossovers are still doing well, and excitement is particularly high for the Final Fantasy set due on June 13. I wouldn’t be surprised if that one sells out at plenty of stores too, given how even people who were previously down on crossovers have changed their tune after seeing how rad the cards look.
While it may not be as palatable to Magic tragics, the other thing Tarkir: Dragonstorm has going for it is simply that it’s well-stocked with powerful new and returning cards—particularly ones that are useful in Commander, which is still the most-played official format. This is a set with a bunch of bombs and high-powered dragons you’ll want in your Commander decks, and a collection of preconstructed Commander decks that do the work for you.
I played Commander using those decks at a prerelease event last week, and it was notable how wild it got with multiple back-and-forth board wipes and near-wins in quick succession. The Sultai Arisen deck, which is built around discarding cards and then bringing them back living dead-style, almost dominated thanks to Lord of Extinction (first seen in Alara Reborn), which has a power and toughness equal to the number of cards in everyone’s discard pile added together.
It showed up as a 49/49 and only got more powerful from there—although it was flashy enough to attract everyone’s attention and got deleted almost immediately. Of course it came back even stronger after that thanks to the deck’s return-from-graveyard effects, and later I found out the deck also contains Consuming Aberration, which has the same terrifying stats.
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The actual winner was the Mardu Surge deck, which builds an army like it’s rehydrating warriors from a pack. It started small, with the Chittering Witch card that summons a rat for every opponent. Three rats is nothing, though. That’s a level one clear-out-the-tavern-basement quest. Several turns later the rats had been joined by cards that brought their own hosts of goblins and angels and insects with them, as well as a Redoubled Stormsinger that creates a temporary copy of every creature that entered the turn it attacks. The real kicker was Within Range, an enchantment that makes your opponents lose life equal to the number of creatures attacking them. Even blocking the majority of the mass didn’t save us from that, and we were overwhelmed with pure numbers in short order.
Back when the Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate set came out I tried to build my own dragon-themed deck with Firkraag from Baldur’s Gate 2 as the face. It sucked hard, and reminded me why I usually play with preconstructed Commander decks—if they don’t work out it’s not my fault. But Tarkir: Dragonstorm will make it way easier to build that draconic deck, with cards like Dracogenesis, Stormscale Scion, Mox Jasper, and Ugin, Eye of Storms as strong contenders for inclusion.
Other decks will benefit from the likes of Warden of the Grove, Elspeth, Storm Slayer, the return of Craterhoof Behemoth, and plenty of others. In the same way that cards from the original Tarkir sets continue to show up in eternal formats years later, these cards will be useful for a long time, and that’s as important to a set’s popularity as its theme—if not more so.
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Kurt Indovina
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