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. No, not The Ur-Dragon, and not his Scion either.
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's a tricky card to build around, considering his abilities don't lend themselves to a particular theme. Today, we've gone a little AWOL with our commander and have decided to mix intellectual properties by building a Wraiths-focused kindred deck!
General Thoughts
Ur-Drago is a seven-mana 4/4 creature with first strike. It's the swampwalk entry in the cycle of Legends Legends that "turn off" landwalk abilities, something I guess the designers were very concerned about back in the day.
Initially, I wanted to build a deck around running every swampwalk creature I could fit, but that would be counter-intuitive to Ur-Drago's design. Instead, I noticed that many Wraith-type creatures come with swampwalk, and that got me thinking: is there a kindred Wraiths deck we could build in just blue and black? Turns out yes!
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 our Ring-bearer and start wailing on our opponents. While we do that, we can create a board presence by casting a variety of Wraith creatures and using some mild creature type synergies to buff them up.
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 and Mystic Sanctuary.
Ring-Bearing
The first step to seeing success with this deck is making Ur-Drago our Ring-bearer. We're running just about every card in our color identity that we can that includes the phrase "the Ring tempts you," omitting only The Black Breath, Uruk-hai Berserker, and Dreadful as the Storm.
Many of the tempting spells we run are as effective or better than their non-tempting counterparts. Sauron's Ransom, for example, acts as a cheaper Fact or Fiction that pulls one fewer card. It doesn't reveal the cards to us, but if we know our own deck well enough, this won't matter. We'll be able to choose the best stack at a glance, or at the very least recur any important spells from our graveyard on a later turn.
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 and Raise the Draugr.
The final two steps make Ur-Drago into a combat monster: forcing opponents to sacrifice any creatures they block with, then spreading damage to the entire pod whenever he connects with an opponent. At this step, we can abandon its pseudo-skulk effect in favor of attaching Aqueous Form or Bilbo's Ring to our commander.
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 gives us consistent access to a tutor effect to set up our Meloku the Clouded Mirror combo, while Ring of Evos Isle and Ring of Xathrid give our commander some middling protection.
Replicating Ring is some of the best ramp available for any games that run long enough, and we can use the mana from its copies to activate Aladdin's Ring over and over again.
We're running the LOTR version of Sword of the Animist, Ring of Barahir, plus Sisay's Ring and, of course, The One Ring. And who could forget dear Sol Ring?
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's Wraiths include nine copies of Nazgûl, plus Lord of the Nazgûl and the two printings of the Witch-King of Angmar.
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 and Sauron, the Necromancer create Wraith tokens for us to buff with the Nazgûl ability, and we'll use Reflections of Littjara to make our nine Nazgûl feel like 18!
In addition, we're running one of my favorite enchantments ever, Conspiracy, to change any non-Wraith creatures we control into Wraiths. Our Titan of Littjara doesn't need the help, but making Gandalf, Elrond, Gollum, and our Possessed Skaab into Wraiths means they'll benefit from the +1/+1 counters generated by the Nazgûl creatures as well.
The Combo(™)
While combat damage from an army of Wraiths led by our monstrous Ur-Drago is a fun way to end the game, it's not very Dimir-y. If you've found you just can't keep up with the actual combat-focused Naya decks in the pod, we can use our tutor spells to fetch up the [/el]Meloku the Clouded Mirror[/el] combo and take infinite extra turns.
Profane Tutor, Ringsight, Mystical Tutor, and Ring of Three Wishes give us a good base of tutor spells to find the missing pieces to this combo.
Mana Base
Ur-Drago is an expensive-to-cast creature, and many of our Wraiths are expensive as well, so we'll need a lot of mana available each turn, especially if we plan to use the Meloku combo every turn and still have mana leftover to, well, cast spells.
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 to fetch a Swamp from our library each turn, or buff Ur-Drago in the late game.
Budget
This deck is, unfortunately, not cheap to assemble. Nine copies of the Nazgûl will run you nearly $80, and despite its banning, The One Ring is still quite valuable at around $50 for the cheapest printing. We can cut Cyclonic Rift in favor of Evacuation, but we'll definitely feel that suboptimal board wipe's worse effect.
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
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!
