Ancient Gold Dragon – Baldur’s Gate
Date Reviewed: June 20, 2022
Ratings:
Constructed: 1.00
Casual: 4.00
Limited: 5.00
Multiplayer: 4.00
Commander [EDH]: 4.00
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
If you wrote out “create 20 1/1 creature tokens” on a card, that would be intimidating. When it’s part of a longer sentence with clauses like on Ancient Gold Dragon, the intimidation is just delayed a little bit. Now, of course, you don’t get 20 1/1 creature tokens every single time, but if you do a little math on the odds of rolling a particular number of higher on a D20, you’ll find you get pretty good odds of a number that’s hard for many decks to deal with. And since white is also the color of Glorious Anthem effects, that can sometimes represent even more damage than it sounds like (and it already sounds like a lot).
Though he’s a little expensive for formats like Legacy, he is pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered for supporting attack-based strategies in multiplayer and Commander settings (at least ones without the dreaded moniker “cEDH”. If you’re not familiar with that, don’t even worry about it).
Constructed: 1/5
Casual: 4/5
Limited: 5/5
Multiplayer: 4/5
Commander [EDH]: 4/5
The ancient metal dragons from this set certainly are eye-catching, with vicious combat damage triggers if they ever land a blow. Ancient Gold Dragon thankfully doesn’t settle for life gain, like you might pessimistically expect from the white member of the cycle, but instead raises an army of friends to separate faces. A good roll can well turn this into a massive swing, especially if you pair with with a card like Impact Tremors or Warstorm Surge…and that’s before we get to our swooping friend’s big body. 10 toughness means red decks will have trouble killing it (and it goes well into decks that use toughness for all their combat calculations), and 7 power isn’t so bad. It’s weak to most non-red removal, which is a bit of a bummer, but considering how much you can crack a game open if this hits once, I suppose that’s not a bad place to be, that sort of “remove me or perish” threat.
As a reminder for this (and any other dragons that may or may not be on the review slate), the average result of a d20 roll is 10.5, so while it’s not completely accurate to assume that this will generate 10+ dragons with each swing, it might help for evaluating how powerful these triggers are.
Constructed: 1 (it’s seven mana without any comes-into-play triggers or haste; it’s almost certainly doing nothing in Legacy besides looking cute and pettable)
Casual: 4
Limited: 5
Multiplayer: 4 (if your group starts the game with 20 life, the odds are in your favor for this to swoop twice with its friends and be done with it)
Commander [EDH]: 4 (probably pairs best in red, since that might give it the haste it desires and offers ways to abuse the tokens coming into play)
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