Tarkir: Dragonstorm for Peasant Cubes
These reviews represent my initial reactions and thoughts about the cards from Tarkir: Dragonstorm for peasant cubes. These thoughts are all based on theory-crafting as I haven’t actually played with these cards. My main method of reviewing a card is to identify a comparable card and to highlight the relative strengths/weaknesses of those cards versus one another and to theorize about play patterns.
I group the cards into five categories: Strong/Staples, Interest, Similar, Unique/Synergy, No Interest.
- Strong/Staples are going to be strong cards that I expect to see in power-maxed peasant lists.
- Interest cards are ones that I think are interesting and are powerful enough to fit in most peasant cubes.
- Similar cards are cards that are slight improvements over cards that have been or are on the edge of playable.
- Unique/Synergy is a bit of a catch-all for cards that either provide a unique or rare effect in a color or cards that would be interesting if you explicitly support a particular theme or archetype.
- No Interest are cards that are either worse than a comparable card that sees little play, cards that have a very low power level, or cards that have a niche effect that is unlikely to be desirable.
Not every card will be reviewed to the same length.
Some mechanical thoughts:
Endure: This mechanic provides a nice bridge between counters and tokens, but I think in most instances the token is going to be the preferred mode (if only to avoid putting eggs in one basket).
Flurry: We’ve now seen this theme multiple times across multiple limited formats and outside of a handful of cards, it has never been good enough. The payoff for double-spelling needs to be relatively high or the card needs to be strong enough on its own because you can’t realistically plan to double spell that many times per game.
Harmonize: Flashback redux. And based on the pricing, they seem to be pricing this at about 2-mana more than a similar Flashback spell and limiting it to sorcery speed. That doesn’t mean it’s not a playable mechanic, but I’ve been a little underwhelmed.
Mobilize: Mobilize 1 functions as (generally) slightly better than +1/+1 on attacking. It obviously synergizes with sacrifice themes, but those don’t need help in most peasant cubes.
Renew: A graveyard value mechanic that turns heavily on the specific costs/value of the ability. Similar to Scavenge, which has not been previously a large player.
Omens: It’s really annoying that the frame is so similar to adventures, when mechanically it’s quite different. These essentially function as Creature split-cards and I evaluate them the same way.