Dragana Battle Guide
First, I’ll say Dragana is currently obviously too strong and needs a nerf, though I don’t think she’s as broken as the pink healer commander – whose name I’m forgetting – was at her strongest. But I run a free-to-play commander, and while Dragana is strong, I beat her routinely.
Finding ways of killing the pylons is the name of the game. I don’t have a strong Alisha, which would obviously be the easiest route, so I have gotten very used to making the best use out of both poison and infection. It’s not fast, but my deck excels at stalling the game; Casey and Charlotte are two of my best units, and both are actually very good against Dragana because Dragana’s pylon-based immunities don’t block stun or blind. Either of those two can and do lock down whole massive boards for multiple turns, long enough to stack up poison and infection stacks. I actually think infection might be even better than poison for getting protected pylons down if you have lots of units that create a lot of attacks, like Mitsuki, Arachne, and Natasha, though both is certainly best.
Once the pylons are down, you’re pretty much just dealing with decks overstuffed with melee units that are expecting to be protected and aren’t. I’m sure at higher levels people play smarter, but you’d be surprised how often I’m able to just assume the opposing player forgets their second ability even if it would win them the game.
While my deck isn’t optimized for it, I have had a couple of games where the enemy Dragana player forgets to lock down all four lanes, and I’m able to punch through damage around them. A lot of Dragana players have little or no healing, and while I don’t have a Faye build, being able to drop a couple of big damage units that aren’t currently blocked and then Faye-ing them could be a fairly consistent deck against some of these Draganas.
Also, I have successfully hit my suppression button as Rachie against full boards of melee units with Dragana pylons still up, specifically by:
- A) My Charlotte surviving a few turns, locking down a large board and then the opponent playing a ranged unit, which doesn’t retrigger the pylons, or…
- B) Less commonly, my Casey has zeroed out all the melee units’ attack, preventing them from attacking, and then the opponent plays a ranged unit.
The opposing player thinks their units are protected from suppression, and then they evaporate. Not something to rely on, but definitely possible.
Counter strategies and actual effective, reliable counters are very different things. You can’t tell me playing 1 Alisha against Dragana’s pylons is the same experience as:
- Building a deck that hopes to have enough non-Alisha stuff that might be able to fight Dragana while also being playable against everyone else, then once you find her.
- Stacking infection and poison against Dragana’s pylons while.
- Trying to keep her nearly unkillable units in check with good crowd control draws, of which there are as far as I’m concerned maybe four in the whole game. Good luck if you don’t have at least two of Charlotte, Casey, Asha, and Omega – and those latter two are clearly worse than the first two.
- On top of all that, do you have enough force shield, immunity, or raw card advantage to get through Dragana’s two-turn kill-everything-but-shield-and-immunity-for-free button that is objectively stronger than every other commander’s most destructive abilities?
- Then she has a third ability stronger than any starter commander gets, though not as crazy as the first two, but still an I-win button if ahead, where most purchasable commanders usually have at least one clear weakness any deck can exploit.
But that’s just the experience of playing against her, and subjective, you say, and fair enough. If you want hard numbers, just look at the health totals of Dragana players you run into vs everyone else at your same level. The lower a player’s health total at a given league, the more cleverly they had to use their resources to punch above their weight class, and in the reverse, higher life totals mean more autopilot, whether literally or figuratively, because the resources they have are carrying them. Dragana players consistently have the highest health total at all tiers, not close.