Intro

Hey friends, welcome back to Commander On A Budget! This month I'm talking about a budget brew I'm enjoying so much that I've added it to my own personal collection: $50 Izzet Dragons led by the commanders Ganax, Astral Hunter and the background Feywild Visitor!

In Magic, Dragons are expensive -- both in terms of their high mana value but also high monetary value, as the extremely popular creature type comes with a "Dragon tax" where all the good cards are worth far more money due to being a Dragon than if they were any other creature type. This makes brewing a Dragon deck on a budget pretty difficult: you kinda feel forced into Green just so you can ramp out your expensive dragons, and you're locked out of playing a lot of the Dragon staples due to price.

Recently, however, I stumbled upon a Commander that solves both these issues: Ganax, Astral Hunter. I had to build Mono Red Dragons for a recent Commander Clash episode and chose to run Ganax + Guild Artisan to pull it off, and I was blown away at how much treasure Ganax was pumping out for me, allowing me to effortlessly cast all the expensive dragons in my hand, in Mono Red of all things! I was so impressed with Ganax's performance that I decided to explore the commander further and dabble with a different background: Feywild Visitor. This background is absolutely nutty with Ganax, generating up to three dragon creature tokens each combat which means three more treasures from Ganax, which in practice is incredibly easy and consistent. It also gives us access to Blue, which provides the deck superior interaction in the form of countermagic and superior card draw, both weak spots in my Mono Red list.

So Ganax, Astral Hunter + Feywild Visitor is the primary engine of the deck: we play out both and then the Visitor generates a bunch of 1/1 dragon tokens, Ganax provides us obscene amounts of treasures, and then we use those treasures to ramp out our big haymaker dragons!

The heart of the deck is, of course, dragons: while all the best ones comes with the "Dragon Tax," recent reprints in Foundations have helped us afford some big hitters, with the single best one for the deck being Scourge of Valkas which is actually stronger here than any other Dragon deck since Feywild Visitor pumps out so many dragon tokens and makes Scourge's burn trigger into a game-ender. 

We've also got other classic haymakers like Lathliss, Dragon Queen flooding the board with dragons, Drakuseth, Maw of Flames burninating the countryside, and Terror of Mount Velus giving all our beefy dragons double strike for a lethal swing.

Blue adds less dragons than Red but there's some really good pickups going Izzet like Firkraag, Cunning Instigator for draw and goad, Lozhan, Dragons' Legacy adding a ton of burn, and Renari, Merchant of Marvels giving the deck flash. More importantly though is Blue's card draw: because Feywild Visitor can flood the board with dragons, Distant Melody, Reconnaissance Mission, and Bident of Thassa can all immediately refill our hand if we have some tokens already on board. Even if we have a single dragon on board instead, Draconic Lore and Winged Words are just very efficient draw that require little setup.

There's also a Treasures subtheme because Ganax is so good at pooping them out: Magda, Brazen Outlaw and Magda, the Hoardmaster are both obvious inclusions and also support dragons specifically, but we can also tap our treasures to draw with Shimmer Dragon, turn them into repeatable mana rocks with Inspiring Statuary, flip Dowsing Device for super ramp + haste, use them to cascade with Rain of Riches, and goad creatures with Gloin, Dwarf Emissary.

One final shoutout before we check out the list: this deck is actually the perfect home for one of my favorite Timmy cards, Dragonstorm! At a whopping nine mana this super sweet card just doesn't make the cut in most traditional Dragon lists, but this list can actually make enough mana through Ganax that casting one or two spells before finishing with Dragonstorm is actually possible! Dragonstorm just makes me smile every time I see this big dumb card, and I'm so happy that I can actually run it in a deck where it feels playable!

Alright, here's the list:

This list is a great start to Izzet Dragons and should be fine in both Bracket 2 and 3. Obviously there's tons more powerful cards you can add with a greater budget, the biggest being Dragon Tempest which doubles as haste and finisher for the deck. Utvara Hellkite, Goldspan Dragon, Cavern-Hoard Dragon, and Terror of the Peaks would be my next pickups. If you're okay with combos then Astral Dragon would go infinite with the Cursed Mirror we're already running. There's also plenty of non-dragon cards to bolster the deck like Mana Geyser, Fierce Guardianship, and Mana Drain. It all depends on what Bracket you're aiming for and what your budget looks like!

Hope you enjoy this deck as much as I do! Thanks for reading!