Wizards of the Coast previewed 100 cards from the upcoming MTG Dominaria Remastered set in a Weekly MTG video update on Tuesday. The new remastered set will contain cards from 27 previous MTG sets based on the plane of Dominaria, and according to the video, the famously busted ‘storm’ mechanic will be the blue-red draft archetype.
The storm mechanic first appeared in 2003 in the Scourge set. When you play a card with storm, you create a copy of that spell for each spell cast before it during the turn – the number of spells you’ve cast is colloquially referred to as the ‘storm count’. Constructed storm decks win by casting multiple spells in a turn, usually ‘ritual’ spells that generate mana and ‘cantrip’ spells that cost very little and draw a card, before casting their win condition storm card.
The Dominaria Remastered preview shows six cards in the blue-red Storm archetype.
Blue Storm cards in Dominaria Remastered:
- Frantic Search
- High Tide
- Mystical Tutor
Frantic Search and High Tide are powerful storm enablers. Frantic Search is effectively free, allowing you to draw and then discard two cards and untap the lands you used to cast it, adding one to your storm count and enabling you to select the cards you need most. High Tide is a cheap instant, adding to your storm count and giving you a temporary mana advantage. Mystical Tutor is a powerful MTG tutor, able to find any instant or sorcery and put it on top of your library for just one mana – it’s so powerful that it is restricted in Vintage and banned in Legacy.
Red Storm cards in Dominaria Remastered:
- Empty the Warrens
- Grapeshot
- Storm Entity
All three red cards in the preview are powerful pay-offs for building your storm count. Empty the Warrens creates two 1/1 goblin tokens for a mana value of four, while Grapeshot has a converted mana cost of two and deals one point of damage to any target. Those would be terrible cards, but both have storm, allowing you to make a horde of goblins or fire off a huge chunk of direct damage out of nowhere. Storm Entity doesn’t have the keyword it’s named after, but is a 1/1 with haste that enters play with a +1/+1 counter on it for each spell cast before it during the turn.
The preview shows old border art treatments for many cards, including Empty the Warrens, Frantic Search and High Tide.
Storm is so powerful that MTG designer Mark Rosewater named a scale ranking how unlikely a mechanic is to receive new cards ‘the storm scale’, where storm holds the top spot as the least likely to return mechanic. Unsurprisingly, new storm cards have been few and far between, and tend to make an impact when they show up – the recently printed Chatterstorm from Modern Horizons 2 has already had a big impact on the Pauper format (a constructed format that allows any card printed at common rarity).
Unlike Time Spiral Remastered from March 2021, which reprinted cards from the three closely related sets in Time Spiral block, Dominaria Remastered draws from 27 MTG sets that were originally totally independent. Storm cards featured in both the Scourge and Time Spiral sets – it remains to be seen if other popular blue or red storm cards, such as the dragon-summoning Dragonstorm, will be reprinted in Dominaria Remastered.
Dominaria Remastered is a supplemental set and the cards in it won’t enter the MTG Standard format, so you won’t have to adapt your MTG Arena decks around the storm archetype. If you’ve seen a powerful reprint in the previews that’s got you excited to brew a new MTG Commander deck, we have a guide to the best MTG Commanders you should consider sleeving up.