Legends Legends - Ur-Drago

Welcome friends, foes, and neutral acquaintances, to another exciting edition of Legends Legends! This column explores Magic: The Gathering's first cycle of legendary creatures from the 1994 expansion Legends. We're on #46 out of 55, and today's mythical monster is none other than Ur-Drago
This mask-wearing Dimir Elemental was created by the evil planeswalker Terrent Amese specifically to punish the cat warriors of Ojanen; how petty! He's summoned to do the bidding of evil wizards and planeswalkers in two separate novels, his reign of terror only ending when he's banished to the Abyss by Greensleeves.
Ur-Drago
General Thoughts
Ur-Drago
Initially, I wanted to build a deck around running every swampwalk creature I could fit, but that would be counter-intuitive to Ur-Drago
This deck has two broad gameplans: First, we'll ramp until we can cast our Commander, then use our variety of control spells to make Ur-Drago
If this board presence doesn't cinch the game up for us, we can always go for an infinite extra turns combo using Meloku the Clouded Mirror
Ring-Bearing
The first step to seeing success with this deck is making Ur-Drago
Many of the tempting spells we run are as effective or better than their non-tempting counterparts. Sauron's Ransom
The four steps of Ring-bearing each benefit [/el]Ur-Drago[/el] in different ways. The first step, giving him pseudo-skulk, helps compensate us for running such a high-cost commander with such a small body. The second step gives our deck some much-needed looting to filter through our library to find the Wraiths and support cards we need, all the while storing cards safely in our graveyard to be returned later with Sam's Desperate Rescue
The final two steps make Ur-Drago
Finally, and this is just for fun and flavor, we're running exactly nine "ring" artifacts to play and attach to our creatures. The Ring of Three Wishes
Replicating Ring
We're running the LOTR version of Sword of the Animist
Wraiths And More!
The Dark Lord does not act alone. In fact, he acts with an army of Wraiths and monsters to spread evil across the land. Ur-Drago
While it may appear that we're not running enough actual Wraith creatures for this deck to function, consider first that both Lord of the Nazgûl
In addition, we're running one of my favorite enchantments ever, Conspiracy
The Combo(™)
While combat damage from an army of Wraiths led by our monstrous Ur-Drago
Profane Tutor
Mana Base
Ur-Drago
We're running 37 lands in this deck plus seven mana rocks. We absolutely can't afford to miss a land drop, so we're also running Liliana of the Dark Realms
Budget
This deck is, unfortunately, not cheap to assemble. Nine copies of the Nazgûl
My recommendation for cheapening up this deck is to skip The One Ring and Cyclonic Rift, and instead add some cheap tutors, like Diabolic Tutor or Personal Tutor to lean into our Meloku combo.
Ur-Drago Decklist
Ur-Drago
View on ArchidektLands (37)
Creatures (21)
Planeswalkers (1)
Wrap Up
Ur-Drago is a very villainous-looking legend, so it only makes sense (to me, at least) that he ought to lead an army of vicious Wraith creatures into combat. Other builds with Ur-Drago could include a Dimir Elementals deck, where we try to make a creature type work in atypical colors, or as a Swamps-focused deck where we run all the "Swamps matter" effects we can find (think Liliana of the Dark Realms, Akuta, Born of Ash, and Corrupt effects).
How would you build an Ur-Drago deck? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading! Check back next time for another Legends Legend!