Introduction

The dragons of Tarkir have teamed up with Goddric, Cloaked Reveler and Charming Scoundrels to wreck havoc across the Wilds of Eldraine!

This is my third attempt at a mono red dragon aggro deck, utilizing all possible contructed-playable dragon combos in Standard. This deck includes Goddric, Cloaked Reveler, which can turn into a dragon and which has become a staple 3-drop in almost all recent mono red aggro decks. However, getting Goddric nicely into a dragon aggro deck was not simple, because he needs some card support to trigger his celebration ability, mainly Charming Scoundrel. To make some room for them, I had to remove Phoenix Chicks from the deck, which I considered to be the weakest card. I also tried Squee, Dubious Monarch, but there was a problem that Squee tokens turned Goddric into a dragon too late that he would trigger Defiant Thundermaw. There were also too many 3 mana spells in the deck, wherefore I decided to drop Squee completely, even though he is quite a fine card by itself. There are also only 3 copies of Play with Fire and Lightning Strike, since I did not want the deck to become too non-creature spell heavy, as it is usually the creatures, which deal most damage in a red aggro dreck.

My previous dragon aggro deck suffered from the problem that it was slower than regular mono red decks, which meant that facing them was not favored towards that deck. Therefore, I wanted to make sure that this deck would fare better against them. This meant that I included a lot of creature removal in the deck (but not too much) and dropped the number of Shivan Devastators to 3.

Format

• The deck is for the Standard format, as of September 2023, with Wilds of Eldraine being the last legal set.
• The deck should be Tier 1.5 caliber.
• The deck can be played in both Bo1 and Bo3.
• When you are playing with Invasion of Tarkir // Defiant Thundermaw, you are not looking towards killing your opponent as fast as possible, but instead for flexibility and resilience against different kinds of threats. Therefore, I think this deck fares better in Bo3 matches than in Bo1 matches. But nonetheless, I think the deck is fun to play in Bo1, too, even though the matches can be a bit longer than with a traditional mono red aggro deck.
• The deck is pretty fast, and thus it's suitable for quickly grinding a large number of wins in the Arena ladder.

Source

This is my own brew.

Strategy

Goddric, Cloaked Reveler

Goddric requires 2 non-land permanents to enter the battlefield in the same turn to trigger his celebration ability. You can achieve this in a few ways:

• Play Goddric in the same turn as Kumano Faces Kakkazan // Etching of Kumano flips.
• Play Charming Scoundrel and attach Wicked Role to a creature while Goddric is in play. These will count as two permanents, because Wicked Role is a token aura enchantment.
• Channel Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance when Goddric is in play. The nice thing is that channeling Sokenzan costs only 3 mana when Goddric is in play, and therefore this action also fulfills the principle of everything costing 3 mana or less in the deck.
• Play any two non-land permanents normally.

Goddric can also boost Defiant Thundermaw and Shivan Devastator up while in his dragon form, which can greatly increase the damage of all your dragons.

Invasion of Tarkir // Defiant Thundermaw

The deck is a bit more complicated to play than a traditional mono red aggro deck, because you need decide whether you want to flip Invasion of Tarkir // Defiant Thundermaw or not. If you have Nahiri's Warcrafting in your hand, you can usually use it to flip Invasion of Tarkir // Defiant Thundermaw, unless you need it for Sheoldred, the Apocalypse or another creature. Flipping the Invasion may also be effective, if you have an additional dragon in your hand. Since flipping the Invasion requires 5 damage, it is usually a question whether you want to deal this damage to the opponent or to the battle. As a rule of thumb, I would say that if you have a really good board state that probably wins you the game, do not flip the Invasion. However, if your board state is weak and is probably not enough to win you the game, it is better to flip the Invasion first and thus get a better board state before you try to go for killing the opponent. Since Nahiri's Warcrafting cannot deal damage to the player, it is often useful to use it to flip the Invasion, which saves your other damage spells and combat damage for the opponent. But of course, you can use Warcrafting to kill a creature to make a way to deal combat damage to the Invasion and flip it.

Statistics

Mana Base

The deck has the following mana base:

• 20 lands that produce red mana
• 3 lands that produce colorless mana

This setup gives the following chances for drawing lands (if don't take a mulligan; values are for on the play / on the draw):

• 3rd land by turn 3: 73.6% / 80.4%
• 4th land by turn 4: 57.5% / 66.3%
• 5th land by turn 5: 42.1% / 51.4%
• Two lands that produce red mana by turn 2: 80.5% / 85.7%
• Two lands that produce red mana by turn 3: 85.7% / 89.6%
• Three lands that produce red mana by turn 3: 62.3% / 70.1%

Spells

Some chances for drawing cards (if you don't take mulligan and you are on the play):

• At least one 1 mana spell on turn 1: 75.8%
• At least one 2 mana spell by turn 2: 93.0%
• At least one 2 mana creature by turn 2: 76.7%
• A least one 3 mana spell or Shivan Devastator by turn 3: 76.8%
• At least one Invasion of Tarkir by turn 2: 42.4%
• At least one Nahiri's Warcrafting by turn 3: 37.0%