Ho ho! Time for words!
Magic: The Gathering: Dragons of Tarkir (and also hanger-on small set Fate Reforged)
This is a set about dragons.
Dragons are popular, I am told. People love these majestic creatures of awe, wonder, magic, and power. They're incarnations of pure ego, representing greed and vanity, in European traditions, or nearly the exact opposite in Eastern mythos. As Nasu might put it, they exist in a conceptual realm a level above that of humanity. Blah, blah, blah...
Well, I don't really like dragons.
I don't
dislike them. I certainly don't hate them. They're... fine. There are certainly interesting things that can be done with them, like just about any supernatural or mythological creature. I don't get the elevation, though. But to use them as a mantra, to say "This set is about DRAGONS and will have DRAGONS in it! That is why you should buy and play this set!" just doesn't do anything for me. It's like shouting "There will be ELVES in this set! Willowy and ethereal, yet enduring and mana-charged! Everyone, get hype for Llanowar Elves!" But nobody does, there's no particularl excitement for elves in Magic, not even when there are special and interesting elf-exclusive things going on (like there were in Lorwyn!). By the same token, there's at least *a* dragon in almost every Magic set these days (except for the one named Dragon's Maze, ironically) and many of them are decently powerful and interesting cards. So I don't get the whole DRAGON SET!!! hype. Must be a marketing thing, like the angel craze that got some people believing Avacyn Restored was good.
Enough words about how I don't like the gimmick, though! So, we have dragons. That's... nice, I guess? What do they
do?
In limited, there are a fair number of cards with dragon tribal synergy, which lets players... um... well, you can't actually intentionally draft or build dragon decks, because there are no common-rarity dragons to be passed around. There are a lot of very strong dragons at uncommon and above, but they're all strong enough to be slam first picks. And then, the lucky drafters who opened some insane dragonlord get rewarded again with the dragon synergy cards being passed to them, since the people without dragons can't play them. You don't really draft a dragon deck so much as open one.
Mark Rosewater once said that "if your theme isn't at common, it isn't your theme." For Dragons of Tarkir, he backpedaled on this and chewed out people on his blog, saying the real intent of the quote was "if it isn't at a high enough as-fan it isn't your theme." (as-fan here being the statistical reference of how often a given element shows up in a random booster pack.) This would be understandable,
except when you go back and look at the original quote, no, he really did mean common. In my last post about MTG I talked about the difficulties inherent in taking Rosewater's public statements at face value;
this article provides another eloquent analysis that I find myself agreeing with.
Going back in time a few years (or possibly forward in time to this fall...), the Rise of the Eldrazi set made a distinct point of having its namesake Eldrazi at common. Not just the little brood spawner ones, either, but the giant lovecraftian 8/8s with Annihilator, those were at common. The entire draft format was built around that fact. It was highly experimental, but the experiment was a massive success, Rise of the Eldrazi is generally heralded as one of the best draft formats of all time. So why are there no common dragons in the dragon set?
In the storyline, Sarkhan's gone back in time and changed things in order to save the dragons, and the result of this is a world full of dragons... who eat, destroy and dominate everything and everybody else. The clans and khans were demolished. Far from being a better timeline, this is demonstrably worse for everything on Tarkir that isn't a dragon or engaged in a crazed obsession with dragons.
So putting all the pieces together here, what we actually have here is the social privilege set, where the gameplay and flavor both intertwine to create a dynamic of the haves and the have nots, the special and powerful vs the plebs they rule over, the dragons vs everyone else. Dragons aren't at common because dragons themselves aren't the theme at all - the theme is dragons stomping on everyone else, and the players with dragons need to be the distinct minority in order to feel special.
If you can't tell already, I'm not a fan of this set. I see what they did there and I don't like it, and I distinctly hope it doesn't repeat with Eldrazi 2.0 in the fall.
Oh, the actual gameplay? It's... fine. The mechanics are generally boring and Fate Reforged being the last pack and "pivot set" is something that... just doesn't matter. Rebound is back, but stripped of all power, so who cares. Prowess is supposed to be gone, but as it was one of the actually good mechanics of the block, it still exists in sneaky form on several creatures. Morph is now megamorph, because, I don't know, change for the sake of change. Dash exists and asks one-sided, medium difficulty questions in limited sometimes. Bolster... exists. And finally we have Exploit as the marquee mechanic that actually works well and influences gameplay, although it's hardly new in concept.
The khans are gone, though. Mana fixing is gone, except for the FRF pack in draft. Megamorphing costs more and results in bigger creatures. Outlast is gone. The prowess deck is still there, the BW warriors deck is still sort of there (but with vastly reduced synergies), R/X token aggro is still a thing and there's a nice UB exploit deck to be had now. But overall, the limited format feels much less interesting and less complex than Khans, and frequently comes down to haymakers.
In constructed, there are dragons. The dragons there are powerful and format defining for the year going forward. Dragon theme decks are a real thing, in Ojutai, Silumgar and Atarka flavors. So good job there I guess.
Overall verdict: disappointment and a sense of unease. Seems like the set is banked really, really hard on people digging the draconian superiority thing, and that may be a litmus test for liking it or not.
