Dragonstorm – Scourge
Date Reviewed: March 13, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: 1.13
Multiplayer: 3.63
Commander [EDH]: 3.75
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
I remember the first time Dragonstorm was good. It was not until about three years after it was originally released. It’s true that people at casual tables had combined it with cards like Dark Ritual readily enough, but dragons in those days tended to be lower-impact, needing to use their generally ample power and toughness in combat. The only hint of what was to come was when people used it to search up four copies of Kokusho and drain opponents for twenty life. But if you already have Dark Ritual, you can just cast Kokusho early and save the trouble; not to mention that you’d encounter plenty of people who still ran middle-school casual mainstays like the Mogg Maniac / Fire Covenant combo, things which ran a lot faster when combined with the black cards you needed to make Dragonstorm run slowly.
But I mentioned that point three years after Dragonstorm’s initial release – specifically, Time Spiral. Not only did it return to Standard, but it did so alongside a dragon that literally sets your opponent on fire when it comes into play. And not only that, for some reason Standard had not one, but two red analogues of Dark Ritual – Seething Song and Rite of Flame. Anybody who was disappointed by the confusing Coldsnap theme decks baiting and switching Dark Ritual in Standard quickly found a new thing to latch on to. (Though I do understand the confusion, to be honest – every other set-based theme deck had been entirely cards that were legal in its Standard season up to that point.) And remember that blue’s counterspells and deck-digging spells were very strong in the Ravnica and Time Spiral blocks – everything converged into a combo deck that was fast, consistent, and shockingly resilient. A perfect storm, if you like.
The deck remained one of the top three in Standard until Lorwyn was released, and then disappeared . . . for a time. Someone eventually realized that there were an unusually-high number of three-damage burn spells still in the format, plus another deceptively threatening bulk rare: Spinerock Knoll. By sequencing your spells correctly, you could use the Knoll to cast Dragonstorm for just one mana, not counting the costs of the burn spells. The advantage of this version was that you sometimes didn’t need more than one Bogardan Hellkite to finish the opponent off. The mono-red deck was never quite as good as the blue-red one, but it still existed and could win games in a format with Thoughtseize. Ponder that for a moment.
In 2006 and 2007, I was in a rather melancholy mood much of the time, feeling my way into graduate school and feeling significance whenever I heard this one Nelly Furtado song about “I have lived so many lives”. There’s truth in that statement for people, and there’s truth in it for cards, especially ones like Dragonstorm. I’m glad to have moved on from those days, because on the other side of the pain was a life as a writer and an academic and a much more balanced casual Magic player. And I think Dragonstorm has settled into a much better niche now, too: that kind of combo deck can be fun to play and interesting to see go off, but the streamlining demands of tournaments get you thinking too much about math and not enough about a huge sorcery that summons multiple dragons – something that’s just about as metal as it’s possible to get. The Modern Horizons sets’ revisits of the suspend mechanic have given Dragonstorm much more fun and eye-catching ways to go off than sitting around chaining Truth or Tale until everyone at the table falls asleep; and dragons just keep on coming and keep on burninating. It inspired a card from the long-overdue return to Tarkir, one that breaks Mark Rosewater’s storm scale in the most literal way. It has now even joined the club of cards that share a name with an expansion. It’s an icon of Magic.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: 1 (now that I’ve said it, the next Masters set will probably be one where it works)
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.5 (harder to do in singleton formats . . . but not by as much as you’d guess)
rawr
A big, flashy Dragon card for the ostensible “dragon set” (a set with exactly four Dragons), Scourge‘s Dragonstorm is an interesting card in concept and in execution. Originally written off as a flashy junk rare (and rightfully so), a reprint in Time Spiral changed the paradigm a fair bit as a result of Bogardan Hellkite emerging to swoop with impunity. A Dragonstorm that fetches four Bogardan Hellkites is incredibly lethal, and it turns out that fast mana spells were just enough to make the spell actually effective (think Desperate Ritual, Rite of Flame, and Seething Song).
Nine mana for one Dragon is not a good deal, but Dragonstorm scales well with just a bit of support, and it’s not impossible to create a massive spell to burninate an entire board in short order. Fast mana lets you ramp into the casting cost with enough copies to spare, and even a couple Dragons can make things hairt. It’s hard to say if Dragonstorm will return in Tarkir Dragonstorm, but the absurd red storm spell that overcame perceived jank status to actually have a day in the sun is impressive.
Constructed: 3 (its time was in Extended, and while it’s not completely useless, the fast mana it needs is constrained in Modern, and it’s too fragile for Legacy)
Casual: 5
Limited: 1.25 (don’t)
Multiplayer: 3.75
Commander [EDH]: 4
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