Mox Jasper – Dragonstorm
Date Reviewed: March 21, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 4.63
Casual: 4.88
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 4.37
Commander [EDH]: 4.5
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Much like a multi-mana land, it is very difficult and maybe impossible to design a bad Mox. Gavin Verhey made one that literally kills you for using it, and not slowly either, and it is still widely considered good enough for powered cubes. You can slow them down by making them legendary, like the Jasper and its previous Standard-legal cousins, and that should be enough of a brake that the smaller format won’t come entirely off the rails. But make no mistake: this card is good. It’s true that it doesn’t function well in the kinds of creature-light decks that use Moxen in Vintage, and it can be hard to square with accelerating the expensive plays we often associate with its connected creature type. Yet Magic was always more than binary questions like those, and that’s even more true now: even just a few years ago, nobody could have predicted that there would be multiple one-mana and two-mana dragons. If this turns out to be a tempo Mox, it would shake everything we thought we knew about Moxen, tempo, and maybe dragons. Which, if you recall what we’ve been talking about recently, would actually be quite fitting for a Tarkir set.
Constructed: 4.5
Casual: 5
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 4.5
Commander [EDH]: 4.5
With Tarkir Dragonstorm on the horizon, one of its most intriguing cards is first on the docket, the first Standard-legal Mox since Mox Amber in Dominaria. Mox Jasper is a very unusual card because of its weirdly opposing axes: you need a Dragon to produce mana, and Dragons are notorious for being higher-end cards, but Mox Jasper also costs zero mana. This feels similar to Mox Opal and Mox Amber in that they can’t be “stacked”, but they can be played in sequence to generate a big burst of mana.
This is an unusual Mox in that it’s a bit trickier to get it online immediately, though there are one-mana Changeling creatures that can help the effort somewhat, and there are also dragons as cheap as two mana running around. I think there’s a valuable question to be had in how reliably you can have this rolling to start turns 3, 4, or even 5…Dragons do benefit from a spot of extra mana to power out their expensive and majestic friends, but you do need enough of them to ensure you’ll have your Mox Jaspers online. This will undoubtedly be a chase card of the set, and it is a Mox at the end of the day…but I do think it is fair to ask how powerful a Mox it will ultimately prove.
Constructed: 4.75 (call this a bit conservative; it’s powerful, but I don’t yet know how often it will come online)
Casual: 4.75
Limited: 3.5 (there do appear to be more Dragons than normal in this Limited set, but a mythic rare mana rock is not where you’d ideally be)
Multiplayer: 4.25
Commander [EDH]: 4.5
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