At long last, the Magic: The Gathering Duel Decks: Knights vs. Dragons decklist has been revealed. Knights vs. Dragons features new artwork on old classics and two ready to play decks designed to do battle with a MSRP of $19.19. Let's take a look at the contents of each deck and then do a quick roundup and review:
Knights
1x Silver Knight (New artwork!)
1x Knight of the Reliquary (new artwork)
1x Loxodon Warhammer (New art on this will be highly sought after Commander fare)
12x Plains
6x Forests
Dragons
1x Bogardan Hellkite (new artwork)
1x Punishing Fire (New artwork)
1x Seething Song (New art... whaa?)
24x Mountain
Historically we've loved how the Duel Decks have turned out, offering great artwork on highly sought after classics and presenting fun matchups between timeless factions. This time, Duel Decks: Knights vs. Dragons really fails to deliver.
New artwork on Knight of the Reliquary and Loxodon Warhammer (and even Punishing Fire, to some extent) is wonderful, welcome, and should be in demand, the rest of the decks seem disjointed and hobbled together from odds and ends. Let's take a look at Dragons.
There are too many one of's for any consistency to occur, and it's downright frightening that one of the Dragon deck's win conditions is Dragon Fodder > Shivs Embrace on a goblin token.
You're going to be scrambling to draw the cards to let you play your scaly sovereigns, and failing to come up with the goods most of the time.
Maybe making this deck mono-red was thematically correct but it really seems to have limited its choices, as there are literally dozens of excellent eligible dragons in Magic: The Gathering lore that could have been included, but the order of the day was Dragon Whelps and... a Seething Song? A single Seething Song? With new art? Dragon's Claw?
Knights has a lot more going for it, and without any playtesting it's not hard to see that it has a considerable advantage over the opposing duel deck. Silver Knight can practically defeat the Dragon deck by itself.
It also contains a lot of nice solid early and midrange options, and if you end up getting to choose which deck you get to play in the matchup, be sure to select these righteous rebels over the underwhelming wyrms.
Both decks are fully playable out of the box and the price is right for the card value you get, but Knights vs. Dragons has missed the mark in our opinion.
Hunted Dragon was made to be in this matchup (Guess they were hunted to extinction...), and it's also impossible to think Dragons couldn't find better representation than the rather stale Bogardan Hellkite, a few goblins, 5 mana 3/4 colorless dragon, and some whelps.
We can't condemn Duel Decks: Knights vs. Dragons too much, as it's certainly worth the $19.99 price tag if you can find it at retail price, but for gameplay and cards a little more interesting than intro pack fare, you're probably going to want to seek out one of the other Duel Deck packages.
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