Meme or Dream? Only Fools Believe in a Mana Curve; I Believe in Breaching Dragonstorm
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Meme or Dream! This week, we're heading into the always-interesting world of infamous small Japanese tournaments for a deck that managed to Top 8 an event with five players. Yes, that's right. Five. Actually, five is a very important number to this deck in more ways than one. Not only is it the number of players in the tournament it managed to Top 8, but it's also where our curve starts. Not a single card in our deck has a mana value less than five, and most of our deck costs between six and eight mana! Why such a wild curve? The idea seems to be to take advantage of Breaching Dragonstorm, a new Tarkir: Dragonstorm enchantment that, when it enters, reveals cards from our deck until we hit a non-land and lets us cast it for free. The problem with Breaching Dragonstorm is that, in most decks, you are likely to spin into some random small creature or removal spell. But today's deck managed to solve this problem by refusing to play any cheap cards at all! Your Breaching Dragonstorms can't whiff if there are no whiffs in your deck. (Insert Thinking Guy meme here...)
Is it really possible that a deck with a curve starting at five can work in Standard? Is Breaching Dragonstorm good enough to build a deck around? Let's get to the video and find out if this wacky brew is a meme or a dream!
Meme or Dream? Breaching Dragonstorm
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we finished 3-2 with the deck, which, by our definition, makes it a dream, although honestly, I still have no idea just how good this deck really is. The plan is pretty straightforward: play Breaching Dragonstorm and hopefully spin into cards that give us even more spins, like Trumpeting Carnosaur, Etali, Primal Conqueror, and Breach the Multiverse, and hope that this will build a big enough board to win us the game within a turn or two. Worst case, we spin into something like Bloomvine Regent or Spinewoods Armadillo, which are fine but not immediately game-ending by any means. Thankfully, if we hit a Dragon, we get to bounce Breaching Dragonstorm back to our hand to try again the next turn.
The deck feels pretty busted when the plan works, letting us build a nearly unbeatable board on Turn 4 or 5, although this power comes with a high cost of not being able to play any cheap cards in our deck. The good news is that it's 2025 and there are a bunch of ways to cheat on this, with cards like Disruptive Stormbrood, Virtue of Persistence, and Trumpeting Carnosaur giving us cheap removal that technically comes attached to high-mana-value permanents. Bloomvine Regent gives us an almost-Cultivate on a big Dragon body, and Phyrexian Fleshgorger can be played for three mana if we need an early-game blocker, which means the curve isn't quite as bad as it looks at first glance, although it still is hilariously high.
While we didn't play against Mice proper, we did play against a weird build of Mono-Red and got beat, which is perhaps my biggest worry about the deck. If you look at our matches, the deck performed really well against midrange decks, but I'm not sure it has much of a chance against hardcore aggro since our curve is so high. Our other loss came to Reanimator. This felt like a very awkward matchup since they were also playing Etali, Primal Conqueror, which let our opponent take advantage of the fact that our deck is built to have basically zero "whiffs" with random cascade style effects. Basically, the deck worked way better than I expected, and it is super funny, although I'm still not sure how competitive it is overall since the matchup against aggro seems pretty brutal. Still, we finished with a winning record overall, and while aggro might be tough, other matchups felt surprisingly easy since our deck can go over the top of just about anything. If you aren't a believer in mana curves or just like chaotically spinning into random bombs, give the deck a shot! Whether it's truly good or not remains to be seen, but it is certainly funny and also a ton of fun to play!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
