Have you tried Utvara Hellkite? I really like it in my personal dragon deck.

Nexo, Utvara Hellkite isn't standard. Anyway, take out some Surraks, they are legendaries.

Nexo,

I LOVE Utvara Hellkite, and do have one in a dragon deck I use casually at home. As Liarz0 said, it's not Standard.

But good call.

Liarz0,

I'm gonna try it this way for now. I did 20 test draws with this, out to Turn 10, and wasn't flooded on Surraks once during those draws, even while not playing against anyone (just drawing the cards out to see how often I could pull things off by certain turns). I was doing a playtest on here in addition to that and did flood on Surrak Dragonclaw one game. I find that people can almost always remove your first creature or two, and so I'm not that worried about it. And if they DON'T kill those creatures, I'll probably win anyway. Even if the board is stalled, if I have multiples in hand I can be less careful with them.

I had given it some thought, though. I was thinking maybe I could replace one each of Surrak, the Hunt Caller and Surrak Dragonclaw with two Torrent Elementals, which I could also sometimes hit on Turn 3, or use later to clear the way for my heavy hitters.

To be fair, I only hit the Turn 2 Savage Knuckleblade once during the 20 test draws. I guess it's just not that likely to have the exact 4 cards in hand you need to do it, a Yavimaya Coast and Elvish Mystic and Mountain and Savage Knuckleblade. BUT, 14 of the 20 times I put a 4/4 or better creature down on Turn 3, and just once (and I hadn't even thought of the fact that this was possible), I hit Dragonlord Atarka on Turn 4 (blew my mind!), with the sequence of T1 Elvish Mystic followed by T2 or T3 Shaman of Forgotten Ways, while hitting land on all four turns.

An additional comment about the 20 test draws I did...

There were seven times that I Mulliganed once, one time that I Mulliganed to four cards but played Magic from there, and another time I Mulliganed to four cards and still had no land and didn't even draw any cards after that and just moved on to the next test draw from scratch.

I did remove one Surrak, the Hunt Caller, even though I really really appreciate the Haste, and replaced it with a single Sarkhan Unbroken. The thing I don't like about Sarkhan is that the Shaman can't help pay his mana cost, but I'm gonna try it this way for a little while.

I just realized you don't have Savage Knuckleblade in this deck

Yeah, I like Savage Knuckleblade but I wanted to cut something to fit in more removal and more Planeswalkers and I wanted to keep the Regents and Stormbreath. Even Surrak, the Hunt Caller is only a single.

I haven't played much with Planeswalkers before and want to try that out more. I bought the two Xenagos and the Sarkhan, but Nissa and Ugin I got from booster packs. So once I decided I wanted to play Ugin it made sense to be a slower deck with more removal to get that far into a game sometimes.

Depending on what new cards the new sets bring I plan to bring Savage Knuckleblade, Surrak, the Hunt Caller and Surrak Dragonclaw back into the deck. I had a deck that featured those as my main threats along with Thunderbreak Regent (before I got the Stormbreaths and the Coursers) and they just get killed so easily by Abzan Charm or Hero's Downfall and then get shut down so hard by Elspeth.

Between Thoughtseize, Abzan Charm and Hero's Downfall I just could not keep a threat on the board long enough to do anything. Stormbreath Dragon will certainly help with that, and Courser of Kruphix will help me get a few extra cards. I could beat the Abzan Aggro decks by outclassing them with creatures, but if they brought it in their good removal stuff I just couldn't play threats often enough, and I was using Shaman of Forgotten Ways which is great for ramping, but gets obliterated by Bile Blight.

So in a Theros world I'll do much better with these new cards, and I'll see where the deck goes after rotation. I definitely want to find room for Savage Knuckleblade, and I like Crater Elemental too and feel like he has a place maybe after rotation.

I like Sagu Mauler a lot as well. For a while I had a Simic deck that featured that with Aqueous Form and it was pretty cool. At the time, Crackling Doom was about the only thing that could handle it, but since DTK there's also Foul-Tongue Invocation and Self-Inflicted Wound, so being Hexproof or even Indestructible isn't quite as good as it used to be.

• score for the pun