At long last, we’re going back to Tarkir after ten long years in Tarkir: Dragonstorm. Releasing on April 11th, 2025, this set, unsurprisingly, features plenty of Dragons alongside Tarkir’s classic Khans. As the only return visit to an established Magic plane in 2025, Tarkir: Dragonstorm offers a warm hug of nostalgic goodness.
All in all, Tarkir Dragonstorm went down as a pretty successful set. From fun Commander precons to unleashing a new terror upon competitive formats, Tarkir: Dragonstorm packed everything it needed to be memorable.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm Release Date
Following the set’s official first look at MagicCon: Chicago, players already knew all the important dates to look forward to. So, without any further ado, here are all the preview, release, and event dates for Tarkir: Dragonstorm.
Preview Dates:
- The Magic Story Podcast: March 7th
- Story: March 3rd – 17th
- Debut and Previews Begin: March 18th
- Full Card Image Gallery: March 28th
Release Dates:
- Prerelease Events: April 4th – 10th
- MTG Arena Release Date: April 8th
- Tarkir: Dragonstorm Worldwide Tabletop Release: April 11th
Event Dates:
- Standard Showdown: April 4th – June 5th
- Magic Academy: April 4th – June 5th
- Commander Party, Round 1: April 11th – 17th
- Magic Presents: Spring Flourishes: April 18th – May 4th
- Store Championship: May 3rd – June 1st
- Commander Party, Round 2: May 16th – 22nd
Tarkir: Dragonstorm Spoilers
With spoilers having begun March 18, 2025, the entire Tarkir Dragonstorm card list has now been revealed. A few cards ended aging extremely well, while other exciting headliners didn’t end up accomplishing much.
Ugin, Eye of Storms and Cori-Steel Cutter ended up being in a league of their own. Steel Cutter, in particular, manages to define Pioneer, Modern, and Legacy at the time of writing. The card had to leave Standard after warping the format in an incredibly healthy manner.
Ugin, Eye of the Storms, in addition to being one of the best colorless payoffs MTG has ever seen, commonly appears in Modern Tron decks. A few other standout cards, like Voice of Victory and Elspeth, Storm Slayer, have made an impact in both constructed and Commander formats, alike.
Mox Jasper, despite being extremely hyped up in spoiler season, largely fell flat. It may be the set’s headliner, but playing the artifact amongst Dragons ended up being too large a restriction to make it work.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm Mechanics
Tarkir: Dragonstorm has a total of six new mechanics, with a couple recurring ones. Similar to the game’s original visit to Tarkir, each of the five clans has a unique mechanic that sets the tone for what each color combination is trying to accomplish.
Thanks to Cori-Steel Cutter, the Jeskai clan’s Flurry mechanic is perhaps the most infamous among these. Simply granting an award whenever you cast your second spell in a turn, Flurry is extremely easy to trigger in faster formats with many powerful zero and one-mana spells.
Attached to the Mardu clan, Mobilize is an attack trigger that creates temporary 1/1 Warrior tokens that come in attacking, and die at the end of the turn. Depending on your Mobilize number, you’ll create a different number of Warrior tokens. Voice of Victory, for example, has Mobilize 2, creating two attacking 1/1 Warriors whenever it swings for damage.
Thanks to Winternight Stories, Harmonize makes common appearances in Standard. This allows you to cast a spell with Harmonize from your graveyard for a cost. Because you can tap a creature and use its power to help pay the Harmonize cost, these spells are usually very expensive to cast with just mana. This mechanic is attached to the Temur clan.
Sultai have always cared about getting things in the graveyard, and Renew essentially helps with that. You can pay a Renew cost to exile a card from a graveyard and get additional value out of it. in Qarsi Revenant‘s case, you essentially turn any creature you control into an honorary Vampire Nighthawk.
Finally, Abzan offers the new Endure mechanic. Similar to Mobilize, Endures has a numerical value attached to it. When a creature Endures X, you can either choose to put that many +1/+1 counters on it, or create a token with X power and toughness.
Behold, a new word for an old mechanic, is making its debut in Tarkir: Dragonstorm. You can find the mechanic on Sarkhan, Dragon Ascendant. He specifically wants you to Behold a Dragon, which basically means to reveal a Dragon from your hand or in play to gain an additional benefit.
For better or worse, Storm is back as a cameo mechanic in Tarkir: Dragonstorm. Mercifully, this doesn’t mean it’s a main feature of the set, as only Stormscale Scion has it. This mechanic has made a few returns to Magic, also appearing on Ral, Crackling Wit in Bloomburrow. Neither of these cards ended up being offensive, proving that Wizards of the Coast is being very careful with its subtle reintroduction of one Magic’s most infamous mechanics.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander Decks
Tarkir: Dragonstorm has five preconstructed Commander decks attached to the set. Some of these decks expand further on the main set mechanic that was attached to the clan, while other decks, namely the Abzan precon, go in an entirely different direction.
Here is a list of the five preconstructed decks, and their respective decklists:
Between the five decks, Sultai Arisen offers the best reprint value, smashing the competition at $111. Two mechanically unique cards in this precon, Colossal Grave-Reaver and Teval’s Judgement, have reprint values that surpass $10. Jeskai Striker is the other outlier, only offering a $63 reprint value. Despite this, Jeskai Striker plays particularly well out of the box thanks to having an infinite combo in the 99.
Many players enjoyed the nostalgic return to one of Magic’s most beloved planes. The only misnomer that Tarkir: Dragonstorm created overall, besides perhaps Cori-Steel Cutter, was a mediocre Draft format. That said, the set was overall a resounding success, with many cards introduced here having a strong chance of making a lasting impression in Magic’s multi-decade history.