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Magic: The Gathering loves dragons. It loves them as major players in its lore, it loves them on lavish card art, it occasionally loves them in dungeons, when dallying about with its fellow Wizards of the Coast property. But as the venerable trading card game enters its next original expansion—on the precipice on its next, controversial step into the game’s crossover-laden future—it wants to bring you back not just to the familiar realm of Tarkir, but to the basics. Which, in this case, involves looking the hell out of some dragons.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm marks the conclusion of Magic‘s latest storyline—the middle chapter of an ongoing trilogy of narratives that have encompassed the game’s original card sets since August 2024’s Bloomburrow, all the way to an as-yet-untitled set due to release late next year. Returning to the plane of Tarkir, first visited in the 2014 block beginning with Khans of Tarkir, it’s set amid chaos on the plane as it’s ravaged by the aftermath of a series rebellions against the five Dragon Lords that ruled over Tarkir, creating a dangerous wild new kind of dragon in the process. Dragonstorm will see the planeswalkers Elspeth and Narset team up to investigate the threat of dragons that have been cropping up across the last couple of expansion narratives—battling Sarkhan as he attempts to solidify dragonkind’s grip over both Tarkir and the planes beyond it.
Suffice to say, dragons are a huge element of Dragonstorm, not just narratively and in the makeup of the cards to be found in the set, but artistically and mechanically as well. Beyond the legions of dragons that will be found in Dragonstorm, the creatures are dotted throughout variant cards in the set, from special draconic frames to a series of collector-booster-exclusive lands that focus on dragon eyes, to another set of lands that feature the classic land types of Magic‘s various colors of mana, dominated by the shadowy presence of a dragon flying overhead.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm Card Previews
But within the actual mechanical systems of Dragonstorm, that means there are a lot of dragon cards, and a lot of big dragon creatures to play around in decks with. This coalesces into two major new mechanics being introduced for Dragonstorm. The first, “Behold,” adds a new piece of mechanical language to Magic‘s ever-growing lexicon.
“This isn’t so much a mechanic, but it’s something we wanted to do a lot of times across the set. We kind of wanted to get some better language for the cards, to make them more readable,” Adam Prosak, a senior game designer on the Magic team, told press at a recent event revealing a swath of new cards from Dragonstorm. “I refer to the behold mechanic as a ‘point to a dragon,’ or ‘promise us you put a bunch of dragons in your deck’.”
Present on a lot of the cards in the set (naturally, given the prevalence of dragons on Tarkir), to behold a dragon allows a player to either point to a dragon card they have in either their hand or played on the battlefield, and use its presence to activate an ability on another card. “We chose that word very specifically,” Prosak joked, hoping that players will majestically point toward the myriad dragons at play while announcing their play. But not only will dragons be used as leverage to activate other card’s abilities, multiple of the larger dragon cards in the set will carry another mechanic to help players soften the blow of dumping a lot of high-cost creatures into a thematically appropriate deck: Omen.
“This Omen ability is just something that lets you put a whole bunch of dragons in your deck without messing up the gameplay of having a bunch of really expensive big creatures in your deck,” Prosak explained. “What are you going to do for the rest of the game?”
Omen will be an ability on certain dragon cards that essentially lets them be useful to draw other cards, and then be saved back into your deck for later once you’ve ramped up your mana resources: an instant ability that lets you draw an amount of cards, and then discard the card that used Omen, shuffling it back into your library. “These are basically two cards in one, except for when you cast the instant, you’re hoping to draw your dragon later,” Prosak continued. “And if you catch a dragon, well, you’ve cast a huge dragon. So that’s very exciting.”
Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander Deck Previews
But while Dragonstorm is going to be a set about dragons in myriad forms, it’s also a Tarkir set, which means another element at play throughout the set is the major clans first introduced in Khans of Tarkir. “When we returned to Tarkir, we wanted to make sure this set encompassed everything that players expected and loved from the original Tarkir block,” Athena Froehlich, the product designer on Dragon Storm, said. “So you can expect the best of both worlds, that is, clans and dragons.”
The five clans of Tarkir—Abzan, Mardu, Jeskai, Sultai, and Temur—will all return in Dragonstorm, and not only will each of the clans have an allied spirit dragon that connects them all to the rebellions against the Dragon Lords, as well as new characters reflecting how each of them have developed since players last visited the plane, they will also each have a unique mechanic that defines their archetype in the set. Abzan introduces “Endures,” which grants creatures either bonus power and toughness, or creates new spirit tokens, while the Jeskai introduce “Flurry,” bonuses introduced if a player casts a second spell in their turn.
The Mardu have “Mobilize,” which lets cards create additional temporary 1/1 warriors, playing into other cards that rely on having extra creatures, while Sultai adds “Renew,” used from the graveyard to exile a creature entirely in exchange for granting bonus counters (including keyword counters like Lifelink or Deathtouch) to your cards in play. Lastly, the Temur have “Harmonize,” a variant of Flashback that lets players cast sorceries and instants from the graveyard for a higher cost–one that can be reduced by tapping creatures in play, leveraging the Temur’s connection to high-power creatures alongside their spells.
All these will play a role in the not traditional four, but five Commander decks that will release in Dragonstorm, each built around a particular Tarkir clan, and synergize around two potential commanders: one of the clan leaders, or one of their matching spirit dragons, synthesizing the wider set’s theme around both the major factions that define Tarkir… and the massive beasts that might end up dooming them all.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Magic‘s 104th major expansion, hits shelves from April 11.
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