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So, I won the Tarkir: Dragonstorm Prerelease last Friday.
Won the Tarkir: Dragonstorm Prerelease at @BifrostGamesNYC last night.
— Michael Flores (@fivewithflores) April 5, 2025
Here's my deck!
I only lost one game (cleverly kept one land + Temur Monument on the draw).
Won every Roar of Endless Song game by a million miles. I feel like this card has to have Constructed legs pic.twitter.com/ExLDGxO752
That was cool! I don't play much Limited these days (usually just the Friday night Prerelease), so this isn't a category I get to to much bragging.
Nobody reads this column to hear what I have to say about Limited, so I'll be brief on that front. The best card in my pool (at least I guessed the best card in my pool having never played the set) was this one:
I had two lands that would help string together a Temur mana base, but a ton of cheap fixing.
I played only sixteen lands (one Island) because I had the Temur Monument and this other little guy:
In fact, the only game that I lost the whole Prerelease was keeping a one lander on the draw with a fixer. I figured if I hit the second land I'd actually have three, etc. etc. I missed the second land, though, and ended up discarding. Luckily, I got all the others, largely on the back of the Roar of Endless Song. Let's talk about that one.
This card was super impressive to me! To the point that I wanted to write about it for potential Standard play. Let's break it down.
Both Chapter One and Chapter Two make 5/5 Elephant tokens. That means a couple of things. That means that if you have all of it in its entirety, Roar of Endless Song is a single card that is worth about 25 damage.
Is that good enough to hang your hat on?
I've heard this card described as "just a Broodmate Dragon" but that's also kind of reductive: A Broodmate Dragon was good enough to win the Pro Tour (and lose to Naya Lightsaber in the Finals of the World Championships). Broodmate Dragon also made smaller creatures and cost more mana.
Imagine this card's potential fail states.
If the opponent destroys it immediately it's five mana for a 5/5 creature (which isn't exactly something to write home about)... But that also took, say, two mana from the opponent and forced them to discard an enchantment removal card. A 5/5 Ravenous Rats for five mana? That's kind of interesting. And the removal card was probably a Get Lost, so you might draw as many as two more cards on the 5/5. That's not bad.
In the Prerelease, I had an opponent destroy my Roar of Endless Song when it was about to hit Chapter Three. I had spent the preceding turn dumping all my small creatures onto the battlefield, in anticipation of the giant "Overrun" type effect.
So, I didn't get the instant kill mode. But in addition to stealing mana and forcing him to have the relevant removal right then and there, the Roar of Endless Song had given me two 5/5 Elephants. They were more than enough to win the game!
Those are some pretty good fail states, don't you think?
Now what if you get everything you ever wanted? That is, the opponent doesn't destroy your Roar of Endless Song before Chapter Three goes off?
The first Elephant can have gotten in for five damage; and then you get the second one.
By your second attack, the Elephants are each 10/10 (where my 25 damage estimate comes from)... But that's not actually all. If you have anything else, all of that gets bigger for the Chapter Three attack also. It can represent much more than 25 damage! The point is that this card can not only win the game by itself, it makes your whole deck better and is itself a card advantage machine if you're stuck grinding. It draws two extra cards that are both 5/5 Elephant tokens and potentially is a Disenchant magnet.
On the one hand, I think this card seems spectacular and I want to build with it. On the other hand I'm a little worried it'll be the victim of super large Standard. Is this something "better" than Overlord of the Hauntwoods? Is it something you'll want to follow Overlord of the Hauntwoods up with on turn four (turn three if you win the lottery with a Llanowar Elves)?
I'm not sure where this rests on the continuum of "just different than a White deck" and "just worse than a Zur deck" but I can tell you it was a banger in Limited that had me thinking a lot about Constructed.
Now how about that other card?
Again with the fail state: A 2/1 for two mana isn't really "good" or even "good enough to play" in 2025. But it's a 2/1 for two that can ensure your next land drop. It's a 2/1 for two that can stretch you into an additional color effortlessly. Those are at least interesting. Interesting but still probably not good enough.
Now what if you have a Dragon in play?
They were really careful about this card. Because if you could just Behold a Dragon everyone would be trying to figure out how to break it. It would be the Silumgar's Scorn of Rampant Growths. Except much, much, better than Rampant Growth.
Think about it: Rampant Growth is fantastic.
Overlord of the Hauntwoods - one of the best cards in Standard - is at its center a watered-down Rampant Growth. Yes, you get a powerful creature as an eventual payoff, but not before overpaying for your land search.
I actually tried this card when it was Standard legal. They make you jump through crazy hoops to get your Rampant Growth because Rampant Growth is so powerful.
Occasionally you'll see folks with the current Standard-legal take; which of course lacks Rampant Growth's ability to find colors. Glimpse the Core only really stands out in Mono-Green Ramp decks. Being unable to, say, find the one Mountain to sweep away all the little Mice gives Mono-Green a big question mark in the metagame.
Embermouth Sentinel is weird. At the base case it's not good enough to play. But if you have a Dragon, it's much better than a card that is basically too good to make available in Standard. It's too good because Rampant Growth is too good at two mana and you'd be getting a 2/1 on top of that! But you know what? It's even better than that.
Rampant Growth is Green.
Embermouth Sentinel is not.
All of a sudden - again, if you have a Dragon - you're giving Rampant Growth to like Azorius. But why stop at two colors? You're giving Rampant Growth to Jeskai or Esper!
Is that something worth thinking about?
Before you shake your head, the Dragons synergies had more legs (wings?) than anyone gave them credit for the last time we visited Tarkir.
I myself won the Utah Regional PTQ (yes, I flew to Utah to play in a PTQ) with a strategy the nice people in Renton, WA said was the most inventive of the season.
Mono-Blue Dragon Control | 2015 Standard | Michael Flores
- Creatures (10)
- 1 Dragonlord Atarka
- 1 Dragonlord Silumgar
- 2 Icefall Regent
- 3 Dragonlord Dromoka
- 3 Dragonlord Ojutai
- Planeswalkers (1)
- 1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
- Instants (18)
- 1 Disdainful Stroke
- 1 Dragonlord's Prerogative
- 1 Voyage's End
- 2 Anticipate
- 2 Nullify
- 3 Dig Through Time
- 4 Dissolve
- 4 Silumgar's Scorn
- Enchantments (2)
- 2 Encase in Ice
- Artifacts (2)
- 2 Perilous Vault
That deck was opportunistic because other people underrated how good Crucible of the Spirit Dragon was and because I had a not-card-advantageous 2-drop that I sideboarded just to hit my land drops.
Omenspeaker's 1/3 body made it a good sideboard card against Red aggro (while helping to draw lands)... But it was also invaluable when I was playing for the slot against a more traditional Esper Dragons deck. My opponent, after having been demolished by Dragonlord Dromoka in Game 1 was happy with a hand of three Foul-Tongue Invocations. My turn two Omenspeaker basically ruined all that.
Do you see some parallels here?
Okay, okay... So, what Dragons?
How about a not-obvious one?
This is another standout from the Prerelease; just from one of my opponent's decks, not my own.
I read it and thought it was pretty good.
I'm the Gnarled Mass guy, remember. I broke a format by adding a 3/3 for three that had no abilities other than being bigger than a 2/2 at a time that one of the most successful strategies proudly played 2/2 creatures for one, two, three, and even 4 mana.
Clarion Conqueror is a heck of a 3/3 for three. Think about the super garbage stuff this does. It shuts down Maps. So if you have a Clarion Conqueror, your Get Lost is now roughly one trillion times better. Sort of a Vorthos fail, but it shuts down Treasures (sorry the thematic life aspiration of basically all other Dragons).
But think about the non-garbage-y stuff this card does. It shuts down Jace. The problem for a Dragon-based Control deck is that at a fundamental level, it's a creature-based Control deck. They can over-the-top your creatures with Jace or The Wandering Emperor and you're cooked.
...Unless of course none of their Planeswalkers work.
Now you can shift your whole way of playing. You don't need to use your Counterspells to stop their Planeswalkers any more. You just need to use your Counterspells to protect Clarion Conqueror for, say, seven attacks. Because after that point, they'll be dead.
This creature flies.
It's not Legendary.
It's kind of phenomenal and richly disruptive on rate.
And it's cheap enough we can have an Embermouth Sentinel conversation around it. Embermouth Sentinel would be too good if you could Behold a Dragon. Fine. It's simply not exciting if your Dragons all cost five or 6 mana. You've already got your mana at that point, so who cares?
But at three?
If you can three mana Clarion Conqueror and then follow up with Embermouth Sentinel - with two mana open for maybe a Counterspell - might we be cooking with GASOLINE?
Nah my friends.
We'd be cooking with dragon fire.
LOVE
MIKE
