For a set all about Dragons, Tarkir: Dragonstorm has not presented a lot of playable ones. As cool as some of the new massive Dragons, like Ureni, the Song Unending, are they are outclassed by other threats currently legal in every format. Atraxa, Grand Unifier is an extremely difficult late-game bomb to top.
Fortunately, one new MTG Dragon looks playable in decks that can reliably ramp it out. If you can get this flying lizard out ahead of time, it will seriously hamper your opponent’s speed.
Magmatic Hellkite
For four mana, Magmatic Hellkite is a deal that’s tough to turn down. This overstated flier isn’t too unreasonable to cast, and it comes with an insanely powerful upside that we’ve never seen before. Unlike most nonbasic land hate effects, Magmatic Hellkite cares a bit less about what nonbasic land you destroy. The important part of this creature’s ability is that the replacement Basic Land comes into play tapped with a Stun Counter on it.
This means that Magmatic Hellkite, generally, is happy to destroy any land that it can. Slowing down your opponent for a turn, especially if this card comes in ahead of schedule, is an enormous tempo swing that we haven’t seen in a long time. Even mono-colored Standard decks currently use nonbasic utility lands where possible, so the chances of Magmatic Hellkite failing to have a target are significantly low.
Of course, this card’s value goes up in formats where you want to destroy specific lands. Soulstone Sanctuary, for example, is a very high-value land to blow up with Magmatic Hellkite. The card still considers itself a land after you animate it. Imagine playing Soulstone Hellkite, blowing up an animated Sanctuary, and replacing it with a land that opponents can’t even use.
Outside of obvious applications, two very interesting and unintuitive things to do with Magmatic Hellkite involve Flickering and Proliferate. Proliferate could allow you to keep Basic lands locked down for longer periods of time while Flickering the Hellkite has its own obvious applications.
Ramping into Magmatic Hellkite
Fortunately, Standard has a lot of powerful ramp options for getting Magmatic Hellkite out ahead of time. Perhaps the most synergistic of these is Sarkhan, Dragon Ascendant. Magmatic Hellkite can pay Sarkhan’s Behold cost, ramping the creature out a turn early. Thankfully, because Sarkhan provides a Treasure, removing him doesn’t even slow you down.
Playing Magmatic Hellkite also turns Sarkhan into a sizeable threat. Even getting one payoff from Sarkhan makes this a fantastic deal for two mana. As long as you can consistently trigger Sarkhan’s Behold ability, this will likely be the best card you can use with Magmatic Hellkite in Standard.
If Dragons aren’t quite as viable, there are other options for ramping out Magmatic Hellkite. Llanowar Elves is a great mana dork if you want to try Gruul. If you want to try and build a big red deck, Sunset Strikemaster is a new condition-free mana dork for red. Depending on how the metagame develops, if this card’s removal effect becomes relevant, it could be one of the strongest cards in Standard. Even if that’s not the case, an aggressive statline allows the Strikemaster to play a ton of different roles, including getting Magmatic Hellkite out a turn early.
What About Other Formats?
Magmatic Hellkite certainly seems like an interesting tool for Standard, but even then, it isn’t necessarily guaranteed that this will see play. Magmatic Hellkite is certainly strong enough to potentially do some damage, but it’s tough to know for sure if this card’s land destruction effect is debilitating enough since we’ve never seen it before.
The only other place that Magmatic Hellkite might see play is Pioneer. Thanks to the larger card pool, there’s a chance that the format can enable Mox Jasper, potentially allowing for some obscene turn two plays.
Flickering is a very powerful way to use Magmatic Hellkite. Unfortunately, Flickering cards don’t become very accessible until you get to Modern. Sadly, there are faster versions of Magmatic Hellkite that do very similar things. Thanks to a lack of Basic Lands in the format, you’re usually much better off playing White Orchid Phantom on turn two.
In Commander, Magmatic Hellkite is a tough sell. The Stun Counter effect isn’t as potent here since the games go longer and Magmatic Hellkite only affects one player. Instead, the nonbasic land you destroy needs to be very valuable to make running this card worth it. Having some land destruction in your Commander deck is recommended thanks to cards like Field of the Dead running amok, but Magmatic Hellkite is likely only considered if your deck has additional synergies with it.
Very Cool Card Design
We’ve never had Stun Counters enter on lands before, and Magmatic Hellkite is an interesting way to introduce the idea. The card certainly seems powerful enough to see Standard play thanks to the incredible tempo swings it is capable of, but only time will tell if that pans out. Fortunately, Tarkir: Dragonstorm has not been fully revealed yet, which means that more Dragon support could still be on its way.
