Tarkir: Dragonstorm cards are finally available on Magic Online and MTG Arena, and players are starting to take full advantage. This set has a ton of powerful tools that should shake up multiple formats.
From a Standard perspective, the floodgates are now open for brewers. The format has been dominated by mono-red aggro and self-bounce strategies for some time, but now, there’s hope that some new strategies will emerge.
In a recent Standard tournament, one player made top four with an awesome Sultai Dragons deck. This deck is built to dominate the long game and has some really sweet synergies centered around one of MTG’s most broken mechanics in delve. Could this shell be poised for long-term success? Let’s dive in and discuss.
Dragons Rule
This Sultai deck is constructed with a control focus, using Dragons as the top end threats. There are plenty of removal spells and board wipes present to help you build up your mana. Assuming you’re able to stave off early pressure, your Dragons should help you stabilize.
The most important Dragon this deck has access to is definitely Teval, Arbiter of Virtue. Teval is an enormous flier that, thanks to lifelink, is nearly impossible to race once it hits the board. It also gives your spells delve. This comes at a rather hefty cost, but even a single attack with Teval can circumvent the life loss.
There are a couple cards that work particularly well with Teval. Doppelgang becomes a bonified game winner if you have a decent chunk of life to work with, since you can pay a bunch of life and exile cards from your graveyard to help pay for X in Dopplegang’s mana cost. Similarly, the omen portion of Scavenger Regent can serve as a one-sided board wipe alongside Teval.
Between Scavenger Regent, Teval, and Disruptive Stormbrood (which comes with a decent removal spell attached), you have a high enough density of Dragons to enable both Caustic Exhale and Dispelling Exhale. Both of these cards are particularly strong if you can behold a Dragon.
Caustic Exhale is a big upgrade over Cut Down here, letting you kill cards like Screaming Nemesis for just one mana. Dispelling Exhale becomes an elite Counterspell even in the late game as long as you can reveal a Dragon or control one in play. The presence of these cards is a huge reason to go down the Dragon route when building your deck.
Enabling Teval
As cool as Teval is, though, it does require some set up to be able to maximize. Not only do you need a lot of disruption to buy you time to cast it and keep your life total high, but you also need ways to fill your graveyard. Fortunately, this deck is chock full of cards that help on both accounts.
Besides the Exhales, Go for the Throat can take care of even the burliest of creatures. Awaken the Honored Dead cleanly answers any nonland permanent, then mills you and provides a bit of card selection. Deadly Cover-Up acts as a great precursor to your Dragon spells, ensuring that the coast is clear for you to slam Teval.
Speaking of card selection, one of the best tools this deck has and a big reason to play Sultai is to be able to reliably cast Rakshasa’s Bargain for three mana. Rakshasa’s Bargain is an elite card advantage spell that digs four cards deep and adds two cards to your graveyard in the process. What more could you want?
Between Rakshasa’s Bargain and Jace, the Perfected Mind, it’s tough to run out of cards to spend your mana on. Still, it is a bit surprising to not see this deck utilizing the power of Up the Beanstalk.
The curve of Up the Beanstalk into Rakshasa’s Bargain to trigger it is already showing up in more powerful formats, and this deck has Dragon spells, Deadly Cover-Up, and Dopplegang as ways to abuse it. Even without Leyling Binding in the mix, it doesn’t take much before Up the Beanstalk has pulled its weight.
An Evolving Metagame
Given how little time Tarkir: Dragonstorm cards have been tournament legal, it’s obviously a bit difficult to draw major conclusions about the Standard format at large. Nonetheless, this form of Sultai control passes the test against some of Aetherdrift Standard’s best archetypes.
Most importantly, this deck has a great gameplan versus mono-red. Caustic Exhale and Disruptive Stormbrood’s omen both act as extremely cheap removal spells. Dispelling Exhale can keep more problematic threats, like Sunpsine Lynx, from ever hitting the board.
Plus, while you likely won’t want to go all in spending life with Teval, simply having a 6/6 with lifelink should sway games in your favor. Withstalker Frenzy doesn’t kill it, either, which is a huge boon.
Against midrange decks where you may have more life to spend, Teval can help you build out a big board late in the game. The only concern is that Teval is a bit clunky and dies to Go for the Throat, so you may want to sandbag the powerful Dragon until you have six or seven mana to work with and can immediately get value by casting another spell via delve.
Teval being vulnerable to Leyline Binding is awkward versus Domain, and the sheer amount of value Up the Beanstalk and the Overlord package can generate out of that deck makes the matchup far from ideal.
There’s still plenty of time to adjust things to improve the matchup, though. We look forward to seeing how Tarkir: Dragonstorm Standard shakes out, but for now, if you enjoy big Dragons and hate losing to mono-red, Sultai Dragon control may be the deck for you.