Magic’s Tarkir: Dragonstorm preview revitalizes 3-color Commander decks

So many deck-building challenges in Magic: The Gathering could be solved with one weird trick: Just add another color to your deck! Whether it’s a three-color Commander or some extra fetch lands to smooth out your mana base, extra colors can usher a little extra risk in exchange for a big reward.

A decade ago, the original Khans of Tarkir block probably wasn’t designed with Commander in mind the way so many of today’s sets tend to be. But that block’s diverse collection of multicolored cards, flexible lands, and powerhouse spells have since become staples in many Commander players’ favorite decks. 

Ten years later, our first look at cards from the return to Tarkir reveals plenty of new three-color legends and a fresh batch of fetch land reprints, which are poised to make Dragonstorm just as exciting, flashy, and game-changing as its predecessor. 

Put your back into it

One of the new Commander cards almost certain to become a fan favorite out the gate is Felothar the Steadfast. A member of the Abzan clan, which is represented by the green, white, and black colors, Felothar features an ability that doesn’t have a formal name, but brewers will recognize for its spin on conventional Magic card design. 

“Each creature you control assigns combat damage equal to its toughness rather than its power,” Felothar’s card reads. While this ability makes cards like Abzan’s alternate Commander, Betor, Ancestor’s Voice, attack for five damage despite its 3/5 stats, Felothar’s ability is even more important for cards that have zero power, of which there is no shortage in Magic. 

“Creatures you control can attack as though they didn’t have defender,” is the next line of text on Felothar, referring to an ability that’s so central to the game’s core design that it was retroactively added to cards dating back to Magic’s first set, Alpha. Although we have yet to see any cards with the defender ability from Dragonstorm, it’s often added to wall-type creatures who have some amount of toughness but zero power, making them pesky blockers but hardly win conditions. 

The final ability on the card, which allows its controller to pay three mana and sacrifice another creature to “draw cards equal to the sacrificed creature’s toughness, then discard cards equal to its power,” will pair perfectly with not only walls, but certain treefolk, turtles, and plants, too — creature types that will almost certainly fill out an eventual Felothar deck. 

Felothar arrives with another baked-in synergy with the new Abzan Spirit Dragon from the set, Betor, Kin to All. Though both Abzan legends are powerful on their own, together they expedite the deck’s primary strategy and value engines.

Despite Betor’s seemingly steep requirements to do its thing, reaching 10 total toughness is a breeze in a deck full of creatures with inflated toughness. And among the cards you could draw into is a powerful enchantment from the older Dragons of Tarkir set, Assault Formation. 

This unassuming two-mana enchantment not only offers the same baseline effect as Felothar, but with the added ability to pay three mana and give creatures you control +0/+1 until end of turn — thus making their toughness even larger and inching you closer to Betor’s biggest payoff of draining each opponent for half their life total, if creatures you control have total toughness 40 or greater. 

How to accommodate a 3-color deck

While Tarkir sets seem to push you toward building decks with ambitious mana requirements, seasoned players will know how easy it is to fall prey to a deck’s inability to draw the necessary colored lands in the ideal order. Fortunately, the plane of Tarkir offers a few built-in solutions to this problem. 

The original Tarkir block had a cycle of three-color lands to match the set’s five clans, such as Sandsteppe Citadel, Nomad Outpost, and Opulent Palace. This was in addition to two-color lands, including Swiftwater Cliffs and Jungle Hollow. A mix of both is certainly crucial to supporting decks with needy mana requirements. 

But it’s the Dragonstorm Special Guest cards that players will want in order to solve the most diverse color challenges in their decks — fetch lands. This power cycle has appeared in a handful of Magic sets over the years, including five of the 10 seeing reprints in the original Tarkir block. Now, those same five fetches will appear once again in Dragonstorm booster packs, in the “special guest” slot, which is reserved to expansion-appropriate reprints that don’t change the given card’s format legality. 

In other words, though someone might open a fetch land in a Dragonstorm booster pack, fetches will not be legal in Standard, the card game’s flagship competitive format. 

What makes fetches so critical and important to Commander and other competitive formats is their ability to retrieve a deceptively wide variety of cards in a given deck. For instance, Arid Mesa can be sacrificed to “search your library for a Mountain or Plains card, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle.” 

While this can be used for basic lands of the stated types, it can also be used to fetch nonbasic lands with the given types. So, in a three-color deck built around red, white, and blue, aka the Jeskai colors, an Arid Mesa can fetch up a Raugrin Triome, which is a nonbasic land with the mountain, island, and plains types, and subsequently taps for all three corresponding colors. 

But the plot thickens. Because fetch lands can retrieve any land that meets one of its land type requirements, that same Arid Mesa can fetch a Steam Vents, which is an island mountain dual land. Between the variety of fetch lands and the sheer number of multi-typed dual lands, there’s probably a complicated mathematical equation that can estimate the number of combinations a single fetch land can search up for a deck. But I’m a writer, not a mathematician, and will let someone more experienced explain that particular formula.  

Complicated math problems aside, the challenge is well worth it. Not only for providing coverage to a single color pair’s innate shortcomings, but because Tarkir’s three-color legends are complex powerhouses, packed with abilities that would only be possible if they required some effort to cast. 

Tarkir: Dragonstorm, along with five new Commander decks, one representing each of the set’s five warring clans, will be released worldwide on April 11.