MTG Salvation

Hello Everyone! I've been meaning to make a Dragon deck for a while now, and I figured it would be a good idea to finally do it with the new Brawl format. I've included the deck in this post, but I'm thinking it could always be better. Anyone suggestions?



Should probably note that The Ur-Dragon is my commander.

Hi, there! It looks like you are new to Magic.

Brawl is a format where only the last two years worth of cards are allowed (give or take). The deck you've created above features cards from all throughout Magic's history, and isn't really suited for Brawl as a result. If you're interested in playing Brawl, you'll need to limit your deck to cards from Kaladesh, Aether Revolt, Amonkhet, Hour of Devastation, Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan, and Dominaria.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I'd be happy to assist you.

Hey! Thanks for responding. I've been playing Magic for a while, under a year though, so I am a little new. I should have been more specific in what I said. This deck does feature cards from invalid editions, however, that is kind of the idea with my small group of friends. We do not particularly care about limits on sets, rather just like to make cards that fit the criteria otherwise. I do not plan to play officially at any tournament with this deck, I just hope to enjoy it with my close friends. I hope I am not in the wrong forum for help, I just figured this section is where I would receive the best advice. I really appreciate you responding, and I'm sorry for any confusion.

TL;DR - My friends and I play Magic, would like to personally get into Brawl, and do not really care what sets the cards are, just that we can make essentially "60-card commander decks".

Choosing to forgo the Standard only restriction is going to make your deck look nothing like a Brawl deck. Really, what you have is a 60 card Commander deck. If I were you, I would spend some time looking at EDHREC to see what other Ur-Dragon players have done. You're not the first person to build this kind of deck, and researching similar decks will help you get ideas regarding what kinds of cards you might want to play with.

Currently, your deck looks like a hodgepodge of cards, the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who's only working with what they own. In that regard, it's extremely difficult to offer any kind of individual card suggestions since the decklist you've presented here is so far away from being tuned that virtually every card in the deck could seemingly be replaced by something else. Here's two pieces of advice.

First, you're not playing enough lands. Dragons are expensive, even when they're being discounted by The Ur-Dragon. Most decks want to play with roughly 40% land. In a 60 card deck, that's 24 lands. You're only playing with 21 lands, and your cards are more expensive than most, so you're going to want even more lands than normal, not less. If I were you, I'd cut some cards to make room for at least five more land cards.

Second, your deck could really stand to improve its mana base. You only have five lands that can potentially produce more than one color. That's an incredibly small amount, and you're likely to get color screwed as a result. Look to include more lands that tap for more than one color. That will help you cast your dragons more reliably.

I think you'd be better of just building regular commander decks. The main reason brawl decks are 60 cards is because, with the limitation of the standard card pool, they need to be smaller or you end up running a bunch of mediocre cards, especially in mono and zero color decks. If nothing else, this is a topic much closer to commander than brawl, and probably belongs in that forum (although I think everyone here also plays commander)

With that in mind, the ur-dragon precon is a great place to start. It's really going to get you off on the right foot. If you still want to make 60 card decks, you can just pare your deck down from 100 to 60 and probably end up with something quite solid at the end.

As axotl says, you have a lot of cards that are not good fits here. I'll list off a few, and why they're bad fits, just to get you thinking.

song of freyalise and cryptolith rite work best with having many creatures, because more creatures = more mana. Dragons are big and expensive, so you usually won't be able to get very many onto the board at once - plus they're more likely to eat removal. And even if they live, they probably should be attacking instead of just tapping for 1 mana. Song of freyalise and cryptolith rite work best in decks that generate tons of tokens to get maximum value, and are a bad fit for dragons. Yes, they fix your mana, but you'd be better off with something like darksteel ingot or rampant growth which will fix your mana and ramp you, and not tie up your dragons tapping for mana.

impact tremors has a similar problem. Not many creatures will enter the battlefield under your control. Impact tremors is great with, say, tempt with vengeance. Not so good when you cast 1 fat dragon per turn.

second harvest synergizes with very few cards in your deck. You'd really want to use it in a deck where nearly half of the cards produce tokens, to ensure you get value out of it. In your deck, you'd be lucky to make a single token, and you have a high risk of doing nothing with it.

dragon egg and journey to eternity are interesting and decent cards (well, journey is powerful, dragon egg is mediocre but at least it's a dragon). But without a way to sacrifice them, they often won't do what you want, because you're relying on your opponents to kill them for you. You need cards like high market and yahenni, undying partisan so you can be in control of when they die.

However I think token synergy and sacrifice synergy are both pretty antithetical to what dragons want to do. So I don't think you should build towards either of those things. Much more synergistic with dragons would be ramp and color fixing, which will be best achieved by building primarily green to include cards like cultivate and kodama's reach. I certainly agree with axotl that you should include more lands that have multiple colors too, though, 5 color can be very unreliable without cards that improve your odds of getting all your colors. I don't think cards like dark ritual are a good idea. They don't fix your colors, and while they might get a dragon out early, one removal spell and it's all for nothing. Better to cast a ramp spell that fixes your mana while also making sure you can play dragon after dragon after dragon. Getting one dragon out early is not likely to win the game on its own.

Hey, so I took both of your words of wisdom into consideration. I researched Commander decks online and redesigned the deck entirely for the Commander format. I'll move this thread over to the Commander Format forums so I don't clutter this forum with something that doesn't belong. However, if either of you would like to view the deck out of curiosity, here it is:



Thanks again! If and when I do move the post over there, I'll put the link here so you can see if you are interested.