MTG Tarkir Dragonstorm release date, spoilers, and latest news

What is the MTG Tarkir Dragonstorm release date? In the second major set of 2025 we’re going back to Tarkir, a dragon-filled world with multiple diverse factions, each inspired by different Asian cultures. It’s going to be a high point for Magic fans – and, as of Wizards’ Magic Con Chicago live stream on Friday, February 21, we’ve got fresh news, commander decks, and card spoilers to share!

Below you’ll find the Tarkir Dragonstorm release date and all information revealed so far about this upcoming MTG set. If you want to see how it fits in with the rest of next year’s slate, check out our complete MTG release schedule.

MTG Tarkir Dragonstorm release date

MTG Tarkir Dragonstorm releases on April 11, 2025. That’s its global release date on paper, but you should expect the cards to arrive in your Local Game Store a little before this, with prerelease events likely to begin from April 4.

These days, Magic: The Gathering sets are usually shown off just under a month before they come out, so expect to see cards from this set in mid-March.

MTG Tarkir Dragonstorm news and spoilers

Wizards of the Coast revealed some major bits of Tarkir Dragonstorm news during its Magic Con Chicago live stream on Friday, February 21.

First, all five of the classic clans from Khans of Tarkir are returning in this set – Abzan, Jeskai, Mardu, Sultai, and Temur are all present and correct. Each clan also gets its own Commander deck – you can read full details on all five precon decks below.

Card spoilers are thin on the ground as yet, but Wizards’ February 21 stream did reveal two big hitters – by far the most exciting of them a brand new Mox card, Mox Jasper.

The original ‘Moxes’ – a set of five wildly powerful artifact cards that generate mana without the one-per-turn limit of a Land – are quite rightly locked away in the MTG reserved list so they’ll never be reprinted, and they’re understandably a fixture in the Commander banlist too.

So it’s quite a shock to see a new Mox card join the game after so many years – even if Wizards has cut back its power level significantly versus the original mox jewels. The Mox Jasper still costs zero mana, and this time taps for one mana of any color – but you can only activate it if you control a Dragon.

We’ll have to wait for the full Tarkir Dragonstorm spoiler season next month to get a better measure of the set as a whole, and work out just how good the Mox Jasper will turn out to be.

But, given that it’s not only getting a regular Mythic Rare variant in this set, but a 500-card serialized printing too, it’s pretty obvious that Wizards expects it to be one of the biggest chase cards of the set.

And we finally get a closer look at the mono-red legendary creature version of Sarkhan we knew was coming: meet Sarkhan, Dragon Ascendant. A 2/2 for two mana, he gets a +1/+1 counter every time you put a Dragon into play, and becomes a Dragon with Flying himself until the end of the turn.

While Wizards’ latest info promises “cinematic martial arts action” and “dynamic clan gameplay”, we still don’t have many hard details about the spread of mechanics and card types that’ll take a lead in this set.

Sarkhan does spoil one brand new mechanic, however: Behold a Dragon. This gives you a reward in exchange for either nominating a Dragon card you control, or revealing one from your hand; Sarkhan does it as an ETB (enter the battlefield) effect, and gets a Treasure token for his trouble.

While this mechanic doesn’t tell us much about how Tarkir Dragonstorm will play, beyond ‘dragon decks good’ (which we had just about worked out for ourselves) – it is pretty cool. We’ll be watching further spoilers to see what else this might synergize with.

We also know that Ugin is back with another colorless MTG planeswalker card that’s sure to be powerful – though no further details have been released yet about how the new Ugin will work.

Tarkir Dragonstorm story

Wizards’ February 21 reveals tell us a bit more about the backstory for the new set – its official press release confirms that Dragonstorm’s plot “follows from the events of Dragons of Tarkir where people were subjugated under the oppressive rule of the dragonlords”.

In response, Wizards says, “the people rebelled against dragonlords, taking up the banners of the old clans”, and the rebel leaders uncovered “a powerful ritual, one that would summon a force strong enough to defeat the dragonlords once and for all”.

Stirring stuff – but we’ll have to wait to find out how that plot plays into the set’s new cards, and where major characters like clan leaders, Sarkhan, Ugin, and others fit in.

Tarkir is quite an unusual MTG plane in that it received an in-universe retcon, with time-wimey shenanigans replacing the three-color clan factions from Khans of Tarkir with two-color forces led by dragons. That was a pretty unpopular decision, so in Tarkir Dragonstorm, Wizards of the Coast is trying to bridge the gap between the two versions of this world.

That means Tarkir Dragonstorm will have plenty of dragons both old and new, but also sees return of the three color ‘wedge’ factions, in the form of the five clans. Story-wise, that’s justified by the humans rebelling against the dragons and rediscovering the lost clans. 

Tarkir Dragonstorm Commander Decks

Tarkir Dragonstorm will release with five new Commander precon decks – one for each clan: Abzan, Jeskai, Mardu, Sultai, and Temur. Wizards of the Coast revealed all five of the Tarkir Dragonstorm Commander precons during its Magic Con livestream on Friday, February 21.

Here are the five Tarkir Dragonstorm Commander decks:

We don’t yet know exactly how much these decks will cost on release – but we can at least be confident it won’t be $70, like the MTG Final Fantasy ones.

Wizards’ Magic Con Chicago stream also finally dropped the curtains on 2025’s mystery Universes Beyond release: MTG Avatar The Last Airbender is confirmed! We got details on the game’s upcoming sci-fi set, too – you can read more in our MTG Edge of Eternities guide.

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Source: Wargamer