A lot of cards have been spoiled now, but most of them have hardly been relevant for our beloved EDH-format. Especially since the last wave of cards are common and uncommon reprints (or functional reprints).
But still there is one card worth discussing:
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| yet another 4/4 dragon for 4 |
While his abilites definitely seem a bit awkward, they have the potential to heavily synergize with certain strategies. So what do you have to look for? Well, first of all, you need a deck that already employs such a strategy, since building around one card really only works when that card is your commander. What strategies am I talking about?
Everything that involves the graveyard of course! Kind of obvious isn't it? Of course not all Daretti decks are that centered on abusing his -2 ability but they'll still be able to use Avaricious Dragon without worrying too much about the "drawback".
Starting with Daretti, I think the most overlooked aspect of the interaction of the two cards is that, you'll be able to see 4 cards every turn at the cost of 0 mana. When looking at it from that direction the "discard your hand at the end of turn" ability doesn't seem so bad all of a sudden since, because we're playing EDH, the games are very slow and at a point where you get to have Dragon+Daretti in play, your mana should've reached a point where you're able to cast both cards in your turn anyway if you want. And if you hit really expensive cards, they should a) be artifacts and b) you should be fine cheating them into play with Daretti anyway. So if you hit them with your first two draws, you can discard them to Daretti to draw two more and if you hit them with your Daretti draws, you'll discard them at the end of turn.
Additionally having a card like Avaricious Dragon in play, helps a lot to ensure your Planeswalker stays in play making it more likely that you'll be able to (ab)use the synergy between the two.
Even though, he synergizes with decks that want certain cards to hit the graveyard you'll still loose cards you would've liked to keep in hand from time to time. That is if you get him into play the "normal" way since you will have to discard your hand first and you'll only get to draw cards from him if he lives until your next turn.
That is where Feldon and Malfegor come in and funny enough both with a very different approach. Let's start with Feldon first: With Feldon you're able to revive your Dragon during upkeep to draw an extra card. Then you can play your turn, even attack with your Dragon and, since most of the Feldon decks I've seen run these types of cards anyway, use...
... a sacrifice outlet to get rid of the dragon before your endstep, netting some additional value AND avoiding the discard trigger (if you so desire). Note that both Bosh and the Trading Post let you sacrifice an artifact and since Feldon reanimates creatures as "an artifact in addition to its other types" you still get to use them.
So how about Malfegor? Why does he synergize so well with the Dragon without having to change up the deck? Pretty straight forward: A Malfegor deck is always full of stuff that let you get cards out of your graveyard, reanimation cards, cards with flashback, etc etc.
And once you've cast Malfegor you have no hand anyway, which means the drawback of Avaricious Dragon is pretty much non-existent the first time around.
Then again, which deck likes cards like these too? Right, Glint-Eye Nephilim! Of course Glint-Eye isn't officially legal in EDH as a commander, but many playgroups still allow for it to be played as one. And, as always, more colors equal more possibilites:
Cards like these are perfectly reasonable with Glint-Eye on their own, with Moonring Mirror being one of my favourites. Now when combined with our Dragon, they'll work just as fine while giving your deck another card to fuel the draw-discard-graveyard-based interactions that will be surely built into it. I want to highlight Moonring Mirror here again, since it allows you to pick up a pretty big chunck of cards in a crucial turn, all made possible by the extra draws from Dragon and/or Nephilim.
All in all, I feel like Avaricious Dragon, while being a card with a heavy drawback, definitely will see play in EDH. Be it in the above mentioned decks where he just naturally fits into, or in decks where the theme synergizes with the Dragon while the commander just provides the colors, EDH is a format where recurrsion and "cheating" things into play are pretty common. And since the Dragon does help fuel such strategies I can't imagine people not playing him.
That's it for now, next time I'll probably review the newly spoiled planeswalkers. With that - and some more questionable interactions with the Dragon - ....
See y'all 'round
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