Scion Storm

Commander / EDH Competitive Dragons Ramp Reanimator

kaigen

Land (29)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Arid Mesa
• 1x Blood Crypt
• 1x Bloodstained Mire
• 1x Breeding Pool
• 1x Cascading Cataracts
• 1x Cavern of Souls
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Flooded Strand
• 1x Glimmervoid
• 1x Godless Shrine
• 1x Hallowed Fountain
• 1x Indatha Triome
• 1x Mana Confluence
• 1x Marsh Flats
• 1x Misty Rainforest
• 1x Overgrown Tomb
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 1x Sacred Foundry
• 1x Scalding Tarn
• 1x Spire of Industry
• 1x Steam Vents
• 1x Stomping Ground
• 1x Temple Garden
• 1x Twilight Mire
• 1x Verdant Catacombs
• 1x Watery Grave
• 1x Windswept Heath
• 1x Wooded Foothills

Combo Dragon (7)

• 1x Dragonlord Kolaghan
• 1x Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund
• 1x Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm
• 1x Scourge of the Throne
• 1x Scourge of Valkas
• 1x Terror of the Peaks
• 1x Utvara Hellkite

Ramp (28)

• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Azorius Signet
• 1x Basalt Monolith
• 1x Boros Signet
• 1x Chromatic Orrery
• 1x Crop Rotation
• 1x Dimir Signet
• 1x Fellwar Stone
• 1x Golgari Signet
• 1x Grim Monolith
• 1x Gruul Signet
• 1x Izzet Signet
• 1x Mana Crypt
• 1x Mana Vault
• 1x Mox Amber
• 1x Mox Opal
• 1x Nature's Lore
• 1x Orb of Dragonkind
• 1x Orzhov Signet
• 1x Rakdos Signet
• 1x Selesnya Signet
• 1x Simic Signet
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Talisman of Hierarchy
• 1x Talisman of Resilience
• 1x Three Visits
• 1x Utopia Sprawl
• 1x Wild Growth

Temp Ramp (6)

• 1x Cabal Ritual
• 1x Channel the Suns
• 1x Dark Ritual
• 1x Irencrag Feat
• 1x Lotus Petal
• 1x Seething Song

Support Dragon (4)

• 1x Beledros Witherbloom
• 1x Dragonlord Dromoka
• 1x Silumgar, the Drifting Death
• 1x Velomachus Lorehold

Commander (1)

Support (15)

• 1x Buried Alive
• 1x Crux of Fate
• 1x Demonic Tutor
• 1x Enthusiastic Mechanaut
• 1x Etherium Sculptor
• 1x Grand Abolisher
• 1x Helm of Awakening
• 1x Invoke Calamity
• 1x Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
• 1x Mystical Tutor
• 1x Orim's Chant
• 1x Silence
• 1x Survival of the Fittest
• 1x Teferi, Time Raveler
• 1x Vampiric Tutor

BIGWIN (10)

• 1x Bring to Light
• 1x Command the Dreadhorde
• 1x Dragonstorm
• 1x Eerie Ultimatum
• 1x Emergent Ultimatum
• 1x Haunting Voyage
• 1x Living Death
• 1x Patriarch's Bidding
• 1x Rise of the Dark Realms
• 1x Twilight's Call

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Sideboard

Other (2)

• 1x Dark Petition
• 1x Prismatic Lens

Scion Win (1)

• 1x Dragon Tyrant

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{W}{U}{B}{R}{G}

Welcome to my Scion deck explanation its a little wordy but its also a fairly thorough dissection of the build, please enjoy!

Background/Mission

Ever since knowing about Commander I've wanted to build a Dragon deck that could throw a bunch of dragons on the field all at once, This deck has been though 7 years of evolution to take its current form. The goal of the deck was to make a Scion re-animator as powerful as possible. In the following I will go over basic deck strategy as well as card selection.

Strategy

The deck is pretty fast but it by no means plays itself, the deck is actually very difficult to play well as there are several choices to move toward the win but there is always one that is faster, more efficient, safer, you will have to see all the lines that can be used and assess the game situation accurately in order to raise deck consistency. In affect this is mostly a Scion recursion deck, focusing on putting dragon fatties in the graveyard to bring them back soon after. Much of the nuance will be explained in detail in the card selection tabs so if you can read though to the end I think you'll appreciate how this deck plays.

Typical turns:

1. Land + ramp(Sol Ring)
2. Land + ramp(Arcane Signet)
3. Land +cast Scion of the Ur-Dragon
4. Dump dragons,(SeeCard Selection, Dragons and Resurrection)
5. BIGWIN (Patriarch's Bidding)

Card Selection (Mana)

The fundamental mana Strategy is to be as explosive as possible, which means we want to be able to lay down as many rocks as possible in one turn, I will be referring to "effective" cost a lot in mana explanation. All it means is how much the spell costs minus what it can provide back into the mana pool on the same turn.

Rocks:

For this part we stick primarily to effective cost “1” Artifacts, this usually will take the form of a card that costs 2 but can tap for mana immediately: Arcane Signet is the top of the heap in this category. There are a few rocks that add mana into the pool even subtracting their cost, it's wise to hold these to your hand if you find that it's unnecessary to use them before attempting to win:Mana Vault or Mana Crypt is a good example here. There is one oddy in the actual rocks category which is Chromatic Orrery because its effective cost is 2, This card earns its place because its effective cost is low considering what it can do. Fix mana for everything, colorless and spell mana alike and has a draw ability to help increase consistency in the case of a game that is going poorly.

Non- rocks:

This takes the form primarily in mana added spells like Channel Suns, however there are also 2 enchantments with an effective cost of 0, a mana search with effective cost of 1 and Crop Rotation which can be used to fix colors or grab Ancient Tomb for mana added on turn.

Actual Mana:

In this deck we run a risky very lean mana base focused on leveraging the massive rock count, This list looks for high color availability to make sure the deck hits the whichever color it needs most at any given time.

Cost reduction and added value:

Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy will help the deck have insane explosive turns especially if you’ve been hoarding cards, while Etherium Sculptor and others also support the artifact heavy manabase.

Card Selection (Dragons and Resurrection)

Now that the speed has been accounted for what are we doing with all this mana? We’re racing to a big aggro finish, here’s how it works: race out mana, toss dragons into the graveyard with Scion of the Ur-Dragon, Survival of the Fittest or Buried Alive. Then before anything else is really in the yard you resurrect all of them to the battlefield. Alternatively we can use Dragonstorm, if the grave is being watched then you can still sneak around it if you are able to secure this strategy.

Dragons aggro combo:

Which dragons do we want and how many? Ideally we want 4 but 3 can suffice in a pinch;

• Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund _OR_ Dragonlord Kolaghan can provide haste. We'll want to do this in one turn
• Utvara Hellkite _OR_ Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm so we can make some dragon tokens
• Scourge of Valkas _OR_ Terror of the Peaks so all those tokens can burn players and creatures to dust. The first cards listed are generally going to give higher damage results and any are generally lethal to a single player, however we can do one better
• Scourge of the Throne double attack in one turn will make the other dragons abilities exponential, resulting in hundreds of damage to divvy on the table.

Dragons protection:

Dragonlord Dromoka is around to protect the combo and follows a theme of silence requiring counters to come out. The ones with Hexproof are there to help keep Scion in the battlefield if opponents are targeting him.

The BIGWIN spell:

In the early game if we were able to race out quickly before the action really gets going resurrecting everything will work out just fine the majority of the time if we get delayed and have to go into the later turns of the game, then one sided recursion becomes more ideal but the cheapest one is Command the Dreadhorde but the life requirement is quite steep when grabbing the dragons we want, Eerie Ultimatum could work but its very invasive to cast. Still these provide the much needed extra count and give the option of excluding high threats that need to stay in the grave. Dragonstorm is also an option if opponents are looking to hate out graveyards, however this will generally require a degree of planning/ forward thinking. We don’t need to rack up 100 spells like you might need to traditionally use to make storm effective, 3 other spells will do plenty. The other option to avoid graveyard hate is Emergent Ultimatum, a seemingly underwhelming card truly brought to life in this deck, I would go with 1. Buried Alive 2. Rise of the Dark Realms 3. Dragonstorm, this way you have guaranteed yourself 3 dragons at least (explanation at the very bottom of the deck overview).

Card Selection (Support)

We have already discussed much of the decks support cards, being used to make the rocks more efficient or to enable graveyard wins. The main card type undiscussed in Silence effects. There are 4 "Silence" cards in the deck, and you might wonder "why so few?" because it seems like it would be a good idea to protect our BIGWIN with them. However Dragonlord Dromoka can help out with this, bringing the number up to tutorable. So then why have the spells at all? Because lots of game tables see Scion as a high threat level and try very hard to kill him, Therefor its a good idea to have a few work arounds to the effects that you could normally tutor with him.

The support cards are also the most replaceable cards in the desk, These are the ones I felt matched with best with the deck but it will function fine without.

Stats and numbers for NERDS

Counts of many of the card effects in this deck were driven by a hypergeometric calculator. Starting with lands seeing as that count influences how many true card slots we’ll have. This desk runs 29 lands because there are so many other mana sources, however most of them still require mana that doesn’t cost mana. For the deck to run optimally we want to see 2 mana in the opening hand and no more than that, 28-30 is the count to maximize the odds of 2 success in 7 from a pool of 99, Hence 29.

The element of the build that allows for such an aggressively low mana count are the mana ramp cards, ideally you would see 3 or more of these in an opening hand. Unfortunately that would take up about 42 card slots, which we can’t afford, the other two limitations are that we want to stick to the most aggressive costed rocks we can find which we will run out of, lastly we need to see mana before the ramp so there shouldn’t be more of them than actual mana, so we will settle for 2 successes in the opening hand like mana 28(This number includes Utopia Sprawl, Wild Growth and Nature's Lore but not the cards that make make things cheaper nor temporary mana).

Win spells, while it's not technically ideal to open a hand with expensive cards you hope to win with, it can offer reassurance that you have the win in hand right up front. There are only 9(This Number includes Bring to Light because it plays the card for free) cards in the deck that can be used for the BIGWIN, which is enough to give us a good chance of a single success on the 4th draw. This is a little on the late side because the deck has the speed to go off on turn three, so we supplement that number with tutors, 4 in this case bringing us to 13 cards, better odds of a success on turn 4 with the best odds being on the first draw of the game.

Now to an interesting paradox, we don’t want to see dragons in our hand at all, however we need them in the deck. If we do draw dragons we don’t want the whole strategy to be ruined. So it has to be as lean as possible but also redundant. I always left room for 11 dragons in the build which gives us "good odds of success” by the 2nd draw, with about 4 of them being important to the decks primary combo, which, if all odds always played out wouldn’t come up until past the 14th draw of the game. However this is unrealistic and I saw the need to have “back up” win dragons in-case one was drawn, as well as a few cards that could help get the dragons where I wanted them (ie: Survival of the Fittest) bring the count of combo dragons to 7, which gives the highest chance of “success” by draw 6. After that there is one more dragon to be used as a back up Voltron win if the primary one isn't viable.

The rest of the cards in the desk are various support cards to the main strategy, because there isn’t room left in the deck to get counts of these cards to ideal numbers. We just play the deck and tailor these cards as we see the need, the current support cards are for protecting combos or exploding mana into the pool to get a win card out. They number 18, silence effects, temporary mana, and discount effects make up the majority or that count.

This is a helpful chart to make it easier to find the ideal card count of effects in a deck created by Cmywilli(one of the best deck-smiths around) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l9-yg-NWtzovRA_HilZ3mdGQxv0Mczlb/view?usp=sharing

Closing

This is the most consistent "reanimator win con" Scion I feel I can build, rather than Scion voltron/ combo most commonly used in strong builds with this commander. It's fun and challenging to play at its best. My build of this deck is through playing with a consistent meta among friends and some play with PUGs at local card shops, that being said maybe this deck is super weak in your meta. If I were to rank this deck on competitive aggressiveness (assuming Tier 1 - 5 one being CEDH five being someone new to card games deck) I would say its a Tier 2, CEDH will have to many answers or just be that much faster so I wouldn’t think it’d thrive in that environment. However if you have a group that plays CEDH but likes to goof off with decks that are still really strong then this one should fit right in.

Bonus: Also before I go I will finish the Emergent Ultimatum explanation, what I meant by that was that if you play Emergent and it is not countered and you choose the three cards suggested then this is what your opponent is left with. 1. Choose Rise of the Dark Realms, which gives you Dragonstorm and another spell, counting the Emergent cast, you then cast Buried Alive and "fail to find", that's two spells meaning three dragons when storm goes off 2. They get clever to this and choose Dragons storm, oops, well you cast buried alive this time finding three dragons dump in grave then get back with Rise, The opponent can not respond to the dragons being put in the graveyard as the spell is not finished resolving and no one has priority. Mix and match having dragons in the grave or casting other spells ahead of Emergent to make it a really hard spell to follow best options for with the table. Scourge is the only card that does not have a redundant effect in the dragon aggro combo so as long as they don’t get wise to that idea just play around with the opponents trying to figure out which way to die. xD

If you've made it this far, (even through the dry explanation of Emergant) then why not drop the deck a like!

+1 Upvote

Thank you~!!!

Date added	9 years
Last updated	1 year
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	45 - 0 Mythic Rares 26 - 2 Rares 11 - 1 Uncommons 17 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.35
Tokens	Copy Clone, Dragon 6/6 R, Pest 1/1 BG
Folders	Commander Tier 2