Dragons of Tarkir Spoiler: Dragonlord's Reaper

Spoiler season is once again upon us. And with a name like, "Dragons of Tarkir," we are all expecting some serious dragon action. Up first, we've got this guy.

Dragonlord's Reaper

5BB
Creature - Dragon
Flying When Dragonlord's Reaper enters the battlefield, if you cast it from your hand and there are five or more other creatures on the battlefield, destroy all other creatures.
Illus. Chris Rallis	5/6

What we have here is a cool-looking black promo in the form of a 5/6 flyer (Dragon!) for 7 mana. On the surface, that's not a great deal. 7 mana is a lot. But let's see what the ability can do for us.

There are a lot of hoops to jump through to make this ability work, but if you meet all of the conditions, you end up with a creature on an otherwise empty board. I'm looking at this from the Commander perspective and thinking that there aren't a whole lot of situations where I want this creature over some other creature like Reiver Demon, for example. Dragonlord's Reaper is less mana and more splashable, but the conditions are considerably more restrictive for the payoff.

 

A sweeper spell, like Life's Finale, is probably better. And that's a sad statement to make. I like a creature-centric game of Commander. If I can reasonably put a creature in place of a non-creature spell in my deck, I'll try to figure out a way to make it work.

To make this guy do it's destruction thing, you have to cast it from your hand. That means no funny business with reanimation or cheating it into play. It also has to enter the battlefield, so it won't do its thing if it gets countered. Also, there has to be five or more other creatures to start reaping. That's a lot of "ifs."

Probably too many.

Even if you can get the ability to trigger, the Reaper is going to destroy your other creatures too. The Reiver Demon is all upside if you are playing black creatures on your side vs. any other color creatures on the other side. With the demon, a very real situation is that you still have your army to attack with while your opponent is left with nothing. With the Reaper, you are always in a bad position after it shows up unless you already had an empty board position.

I'm not saying that you couldn't make Dragonlord's Reaper work in a deck. I'm also not saying that I couldn't come up scenarios where this dragon is better than the alternatives. What I'm saying is that it's a cool promo and a cool dragon that I might add to my collection, but probably won't add to any of my decks.