How To Train Your Dragon

Thomas Neilson

Merrisod Dragon Ramp | Deck & Primer | May 16th, 2025

Written by - Thomas NeilsonMay 16th, 2025

Left Side Story

For your veil, both the Veil Of Enchantment and Veil Of Shimmers are solid options, but I'm personally a big fan of the original veil. Having the flexibility of grabbing any Mythical Beast Unified and Fortified is incredibly strong for getting access to key cards like Revelation, Dragon Protector Empowerment, and Bind The Dragon Soul.

Merrisod's abilities aren't anything special, apart from Special Ability being a key way to flood your board with Crystal Dragon Egg tokens to setup the consume ability of Nyx, The Indigo Dragon Lancer. The main importance of your Warlord is access to crucial archetype cards like Dragon Protector Empowerment, Dragon Sprite Life Transfer, and Dragon Tail Beatdown.

For your synergy it's a similar case for locked cards, with Pandesha, The Lost Island being needed for Leylines Of Liquid Crystal, and Pandesha's Gifted Sprite. Additionally, the synergies ability itself is a fantastic way to break apart a fortified line, forcing an opponent to "use it or lose it" with their control tools, giving you an easy way to sail through your turn 3 unburdened.

Last but certainly not least, Nyx, The Indigo Dragon Lancer is easily the strongest card out of your left side, with it's start of game ability being a consistent setup piece, and the Consume ability giving you the shot of gas to accelerate past any late game plan your opponent may have. The most crucial part of the deck is in accelerating past turn 3, and this is the key card for setting that up.

Sprites - Setting The Stage

With Merrisod, the bulk of your deck is generally leaning into the Dragon package. While there are tools for a more Sprite focused build of the deck, I haven't found them to be more appealing than the Dragon pieces. In my build, there are only a few dedicated pieces in the list, but the ones that exist are some of your most important starting synergy pieces. Nyx, The Indigo Dragon Lancer, and Pandesha's Gifted Sprite are two key ways to tutor out your two Sprite Warriors, which themselves both tutor other important pieces.

Millenium, The Rainbow Sprite

Millenium's Charisma ability is a solid way to get excess Warriors out of hand, but her real power is in her two Perish abilities. The first lets you eradicate a dragon with 3 or more attack from your deck, giving you a way to setup your big dragons for your revival effects.

Her second Perish lets you manifest up to 3 Crystal Dragon Egg tokens, and she's your main way in the deck to do so.

This is almost always my target to tutor out with Nyx at the start of the game.

Epox'Adon, The Sprite Bond Dragon

Epox'adon having both the Dragon and Sprite line makes it incredibly easy to tutor out, which is why I'm less interested in grabbing it with Nyx off the start. Where Epox'Adon is great however, is in combination with Pandesha's Gifted Sprite.

Epox'adon's first ability is an incredibly recursion ability, being able to bring itself back alongside any other Sprite card, with Gifted Sprite being useful to recur multiple times for an expensive but useful burst of card advantage.

The second Perish is useful too for finding Bind The Dragon Soul, an incredibly useful piece to have consistent access to.

Pandesha's Gifted Sprite

Similarly to Nyx, Pandesha's Gifted Sprite is another way to tutor out your Sprite Warriors, with an additional benefit in granting the conscripted Warrior with (Wisdom), (Plunder), and (Shockwave). With this letting you effectively draw 2 cards, while also being able to trigger important Perish abilities, which is especially relevant with Millenium and Epox'Adon.

Dragons - Eradication And Devastation

In addition to your two main Sprite Warriors, and Lady Darksky, there's 4 key Dragons in this list. Your big dragons, Odrem, Golden Destruction Dragon, and Terrafirma, The Crater Quake Dragon, are big win-conditions, which work with Dragon Reflection Destiny, but especially with Dragon Tail Beatdown to push in huge chunks of effect damage. Your smaller two dragons, Geode, Crystal Scales Dragon and Crystal Dragon Whelp, are key engine pieces to enable your various eradication and destruction synergies.

Terrafirma, The Crater Quake Dragon

The newest addition to the deck out of ELP, Terrafirma amps up the damage you're able to output with Dragon Tail Beatdown. The Monolith keyword is also great for putting the pressure on your opponents, putting them between a rock and a hard place where they need to find a way to get around an almost inevitable 9 damage burn.

Odrem, Golden DEstruction Dragon

While Odrem as a Vanilla 5 Attack may seem like just a worse version of Terrafirma, (and it kinda is), it's really easy to eradicate your big dragons with Millennium, The Rainbow Sprite, and it's useful to have access to two to get max value out of your Dragon Tail Beatdown and Reflection. Additionally, 5 damage is an important breakpoint to be able to destroy your own Crystal Dragon Eggs with Merciless Dragon Fire.

Crystal Dragon Whelp

Crystal Dragon Whelp is one of your other main card draw pieces alongside your eradication effects and Gifted Sprite. Additionally, it's incredibly useful to be able to trigger your eradication effects from hand, and to get other Dragons from your hand into your eradication zone to revive.

Geode, Crystal Scales Dragon

The second best dragon in the entire list, Geode is rather unassuming, but offers an incredible amount of utility being able to destroy a Dragon Warrior once per turn, enabling your Crystal Dragon Egg hatch abilities, important perish effects, and letting you push in constant streams of additional effect damage over time.

Eradication Abilities

Dragons focuses on a more targeted style of eradication like Castiel or Gaia, rather than a mass-eradication build like with Prometheus, or Adramelech. With that, you have a few key eradication effects, and a few key ways to eradicate them.

Dragon Reflection Destiny

The Eradication ability of Reflection Destiny is one of your two key draw pieces alongside Dragon Protector Empowerment. Shuffling two Dragon cards on eradication is additionally incredibly useful for being able to reset cards back into deck, while also offering a nice chunk of card draw.

Dragon Protector Empowerment

Your other draw engine, Dragon Protector Empowerment's Eradication ability is huge as a refill tool, offering up to 5 cards on demand. While it does take more work to setup your Crystal Dragon Egg tokens, this is your best card to eradicate off of Nyx's Consume ability.

Merciless Dragon Fire

As a strong utility piece, Merciless Dragon Fire offers a strong board wipe on both halves, while also letting you eradicate a Dragon Warrior from deck. One of the best uses of this is to destroy your own Crystal Dragon Eggs from a full board for plenty of Hatch triggers.

Dragon Tail Beatdown

While Beatdown is mainly important for it's on-play ability, the eradication effect is useful as an alternative to Merciless Dragon Fire for clearing out your own eggs.

While Dragon Fire is generally your best bet here, it's nice to have access to the utility.

Cave Of The Dragon Protector

On the flip side here, Cave is only here for the eradication ability, making it a consistent way to tutor out your Leylines Of Liquid Crystal while recovering a bit of life. If I haven't eradicated this by turn 3, I'm almost always including this in my eradication pile off of Nyx.

Lady Darksky, The Dusk Dawn Dragon

Arguably the strongest Dragon Warrior in the list, Lady Darksky could honestly have an entire writeup just covering the lines available. The key here is the ability to turn any of your revive effects, including your Hatch keywords, into the destruction of a card, letting you destroy your opponent's board on mass, and to extend your own lines.

Stages Of The Game

Early Game

As a Ramp style deck, your power with Merrisod comes online later in the game, with the ability to accrue more value, and destroy your opponents' boardstate over and over again. As such, your early turns are mainly focused on trying to stay alive, and pull ahead of your opponent when possible.

To this end, you're interested in finding your control tools and getting them online early, drawing through cards with Pandesha's Gifted Sprite, and Crystal Dragon Whelp. Past some of the more obvious bounty fortified pieces, strong Dragon options like One With The Dragon Army, Nest Of Dragon Crystals, and Dragon Dangerclaw offer important interactive tools.

One of the other most important things to look for early is Revelation. Your Warlord has a lower DCM, and quite a few ways to pay (Bloodbourne), making Revelation important to avoid blowing away all of your DCM. If you can't find it early, it's not the end of the world, but you'll have to be significantly more careful with how much DCM you pay.

With your opening hand and mulligans, you're generally looking for the cards I've mentioned here, especially Pandesha's Gifted Sprite, Revelation, Nest Of Dragon Crystals, and Dragon Dangerclaw.

Mid Game

In the mid game, you're looking to break up and disrupt your opponent's board, while creating difficult boards for your opponent to break through.

Your Dragon Crystal Eggs and Terrafirma, The Crater Quake Dragon are two key pieces for this, with the Egg tokens offering walls of blockers that hatch into strong pieces like Lady Darksky, The Dusk Dawn Dragon. Terrafirma is not only a huge Warrior that can be revived by Dragon Reflection Destiny and Dragon Tail Beatdown, but with the (Monolith) keyword, it's difficult for your opponent to remove without taking a huge chunk of damage.

Dragon Tail Beatdown can also be great here, letting you push in constant pressure while putting out huge Warriors.

One of your best ways to pull ahead is with your board destruction pieces of Nest Of Dragon Crystals and Dragon Dangerclaw. Nest lets you blow up 2 Crystal Dragon Eggs to blow up 2 other cards, while Dragon Dangerclaw works incredibly well to bring out Lady Darksky. Both Nest and Dangerclaw offer great ways to destroy an entire fortified backline at the end of their turn, especially with Lady Darksky's keyword abilities letting you build multiple sequences off of one another.

The last card I want to mention here is Mystic Fire Dragon Clash, this card is one of the strongest in Sh'Lara, and is so much stronger with Merrisod. With (Shockwave), (Rift), and (Shed) keywords from your Warriors it's incredibly easy to trigger your Dragon Clash over, and over, and over again. One cute tip if you've got a bunch of eggs, a Darksky, and a Dragon Clash, is you can loop Lady Darksky to blow up each egg, hatching out your Darksky once again, building up a ton of Mystic Fire Dragon Clash triggers to potentially destroy an entire board. Do note, Dragon Clash is significantly harder to spam without Revelation, as those (Bloodbourne 2) costs build up real fast.

Dragon Clash also works great with the previously two mentioned fortified cards, Nest and Dangerclaw.

Late Game

Here you're looking to pull ahead and burn your opponent out when they have no way to stop you. Once again, Nyx is your best way for facilitating this, with my recommended eradication pile drawing 7 cards, tutoring out your Leyline, and setting up a fantastic boardstate. For this, you're starting with Merrisod's Special Ability to make 5 eggs.

From there, your eradication pile for Nyx's consume ability looks something like this:

Dragon Protector Empowerment
Dragon Reflection Destiny
Cave Of The Dragon Protector
Merciless Dragon Fire

For slot number 5, I'd generally go for 1 of your small Dragon Warriors to setup for Hatch Triggers, unless you've already got plenty in Eradication.

From here, Empowerment will draw you 5 cards (one for each Crystal Dragon Egg), Reflection Destiny draws you 2 more while shuffling important cards back into deck (I usually shuffle back my Empowerment!), Cave tutors out your Leylines Of Liquid Crystal while healing 5 DCM, and then your Merciless Dragon Fire finally destroys all 5 of your eggs, giving you a potential 5 Hatch triggers to revive a bunch of dragons all at once.

Winning The Game

Generally you'll "win the game" by pulling so far ahead of your opponent that they can't catch up, but you do have to win the game somehow, and Dragons have a few tools to get there:

Dragon Sprite Life Transfer
- Bestowing +10 to your little Dragons lets them push in for some huge damage, and Epox'Adon, The Sprite Bond Dragon, can retrieve it back to use again with it's (Perish) ability.
Bind The Dragon Soul
- Bestowing +2 to every Dragon you control is nice for not only burst damage, but sustained damage over multiple turns.
Dragon Tail Beatdown
- Reviving Both Terrafirma and Odrem gives you a 16 Damage Effect Damage burst on your opponent's turn.
Geode, The Crystal Scales Dragon
- Remember this little guy? 3 damage may not seem like a lot, but I've had many games where I've activated shed 10+ times across a game, and with Swift, Geode can be just the push you need to get across the finish line.

Closing Thoughts

Dragons is a bit of a difficult deck to explain, with how many options the deck has available to it throughout a game. As such, I've tried to higlight some of the key play-patterns and gamestages you'll be playing through, and exploring how different tools can help you in each of these stages.

With the selective nature of your eradication abilities, Dragons can really quickly turn from a versatile toolbox, into an absolutely explosive powerhouse over the course of a single turn, and it's a deck I highly recommend for more advanced pilots looking to put their sequence management skills to the test!

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