MaRo Teases Tarkir: Dragonstorm Support for Dragons, Warriors, and… Turtles?

Last updated on March 11, 2025

Rally the Monastery | Illustration by David Astruga

As players have come to expect for each new set release, Mark Rosewater has dropped his teaser for Tarkir: Dragonstorm (TDM), which is set to release in early April. It’s the pre-previews preview, if you will, and gives players insights into what kinds of text, card names, and creature types to expect in the upcoming set.

While this iteration of the teaser game is a bit less juicy than the spoilers for Aetherdrift were, there’s still plenty of room for speculation, especially surrounding some of the typal-based bullet points on MaRo’s list.

New Creature Type Support

The original Khans of Tarkir block had a small typal theme to it, with warriors being prevalent in all three sets and a heavy shift towards dragons in Fate Reforged and Dragons of Tarkir. It wasn’t as heavy a focus as, say, the critter creature types from Bloomburrow, or the factions of various Ixalan sets, but there was just enough to make a few Constructed decks and Limited archetypes tick (forcing BW warriors in Khans Draft again, eh?).

MaRo’s teaser doesn’t explicitly state that there are strong typal themes in TDM, but it’s safe to say a single-set visit to the beloved plane of Tarkir is definitely going to “check in” on some of the themes people fondly remember about the original set. They’ve made it abundantly clear that dragons will get their time to shine here (for the first time ever, surely), but it looks like some other creature types are getting in on the action.

Dragons, Dragons, Dragons

Dragon Tempest | Illustration by Willian Murai

Back in 2013 Wizards of the Coast made the mistake of assuming players knew how apostrophes worked and released a set called Dragon’s Maze. To the dismay of grammar-impaired players everywhere, the set was not, in fact, about dragons. In fact, Dragonshift was the only card in the entire set that referenced dragons (Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius was in Return to Ravnica).

Fastforward to Dragons of Tarkir in 2015 and there were dragons abound. Seems Wizards learned that you can’t put the word dragon in a set name without setting up some huge expectation, and that’s reflected in Tarkir: Dragonstorm so far as well. From the little that’s been shown off, it seems like dragons will be a huge role-player in the set. They got their own Mox, for crying out loud.

But what about MaRo’s spoiler? Well, check out this ominous line of text:

• Dragons get a new typal enchantment based on a popular Zombie one

A quick Scryfall search will show you that there are 39 enchantments that reference zombies, many of which could be rejiggered into a dragon payoff. The most likely candidates seem to be:

• Endless Ranks of the Dead
• Liliana's Mastery
• Necroduality
• Rooftop Storm

Money’s on one of these cards getting the dragon treatment. Rooftop Storm being reworked would make sense given the whole “dragonstorm” thing, and Necroduality would fit Magic’s current obsession with doubling everything. Not that Commander really needs a second Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm floating around.

Looks like dragons are also getting some sort of alternate wincon, because attacking with a bunch of massive fliers isn’t a good enough path to victory itself:

• If you put +1/+1 counters on five Dragons this way, you win the game.

Hey babe wake up, a new Liliana's Contract just dropped! Seems like this will be some sort of +1/+1 counter distribution card (obviously) that just auto-wins if you have a brood of five or more dragons in play. Do dragons need a card like this? No. Is it going to be massive fun for a lot of The Ur-Dragon players out there. You bet.

What About Warriors?

Take Up Arms | Illustration by Craig J Spearing

Warriors occupied the BW space throughout the entire original Khans block, so it makes sense that they’d want to revisit the creature type 10 years later. Whether or not it’ll be a standout theme of the set remains to be seen, but MaRo offered one little snippet to work with:

• During your end step, Warrior tokens you control have “This token can’t be sacrificed.”

That’s already a pretty weird line of text to have on a card, but it seems pretty likely that it’s referencing some sort of Heat Shimmer effect that’s circumventing the end of turn sacrifice. Effects like this tend to be red, so it’s possible this ends up being a creature-copying effect than can copy anything, but lets your tokens stick around if you copied a warrior.

This is reminiscent of The Master, Multiplied from Doctor Who, which also included text that circumvented sacrificing temporary tokens. It was designed to work with myriad, but was templated to work with other effects like Flameshadow Conjuring and Molten Echoes too. Looks like warriors will get a similar payoff in TDM.

Don’t Forget the Turtles

Meandering Towershell | Illustration by YW Tang

Here’s one of the more intriguing lines of rules text form MaRo’s teaser:

• Whenever you cast a Turtle spell, untap this creature.

And just like that, everyone wishes this were Tarkir: Turtlestorm. That said, it’s always fun to see these one-off typal cards, kind of how Mindspring Merfolk appeared in Aetherdrift, a set with no other merfolk creatures. Obviously, whatever this card is has to be something that works in a vacuum without other turtles, unless the Simic Limited archetype is UG turtles or something extremely unpredictable like that.

For what it’s worth, the original Khans of Tarkir set had a little bit of turtle meme energy too with Meandering Towershell, a big bumbling beater that basically wanders away for a turn whenever you attack with it. Odds are this “turtle payoff” will be some sort of nod to that. Tarkir: Dragonstorm obviously isn’t afraid to get referential, given that they’ve already proudly revealed Skirmish Rhino, a nod to MTG hall-of-famer Siege Rhino.

Everything from MaRo’s teaser is still up in the air, but players will get some answers starting on March 18th when preview season officially kicks off.