The Dragon is a play element that is fun to play with, but frustrating to play against. Playing with a Dragon but against superior forces or against an AI with a card bonus creates interesting asymmetries.
I completely agree. It sounds like from what I've gleaned from preview videos that the player is at a disadvantage in the story mode's strategic map (I might be wrong though as this is all based on seeing a few videos). It looks like the player has to use his/her dragon in the RTS map to turn the tides of a losing battle on the strategic map which would be quite fun. Taking on an outnumbering and higher tech army and using your dragon powers to turn the tide sounds awesome to me even without an AI dragon. That said multi-player comp stomps would suffer unless you put the AI on a harder difficulty to compromise.
