Like many children, I was fascinated by Dinosaurs when I was a kid. I learned the difficult word “archaeologist” at a very young age so that I could say it and spell it when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. And this was before Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981 and made archaeology super-cool.
Jump ahead a few decades, and I’m sitting in a cool, dark theater watching Jurassic Park for the first time, my mouth open in slack-jawed wonder at seeing what looked like real Dinosaurs on the huge silver screen alongside people desperate to avoid being chomped. While my ideas for a career path had changed by then, my inner little kid marveled at Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster masterpiece.
Flash forward a few more decades, and the very first Ixalan set came out, with Dinosaurs being one of the creature types that got a bunch of typal support. You could finally make Dino decks in Standard and Commander, and again my inner little kid got excited by the possibilities.
Now, with Wizards of the Coast (WotC) returning to the plane with The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, not only do we have more cool Dinosaur cards, but there’s an entire Magic: The Gathering Universes Beyond booster insert set of cards you can open in Set and Collector Boosters that feature characters and moments from the Jurassic Park franchise. It’s a brilliant move that is sure to excite tons of Magic fans like me that were once Dino-obsessed kids. Today, I’ll look at cards from that collection that have been previewed so far, with a focus on Commander since that’s what we are all here for.
Let’s dig in, starting with legendary creatures you can build a Commander deck around!
Ellie and Alan, Paleontologists
It’s really cool this legendary creature represents Ellie Sattler, as played by Laura Dern, and Alan Grant, as played by Sam Neil. Together they make up a pretty cool Bant commander that wants you to play a bunch of creature cards that can make their way to the graveyard, not necessarily Dinosaur creatures.
The first thing that crossed my mind was playing large cycling creatures. They give you some early-game value but become quite explosive when exiled with Ellie and Alan to discover X, where X is the mana value of the exiled card. Think Angel of the Ruins, Krosan Tusker, Striped Riverwinder, and Shefet Monitor.
Another angle is to play with some of those suspend cards with no mana cost, like Ancestral Vision, Crashing Footfalls, Resurgent Belief, Lotus Bloom, or Mox Tantalite, and get a zero-mana creature in the graveyard for Ellie and Alan to discover them with. This is easy enough to do with cards like Walking Ballista, Stonecoil Serpent, and Hangarback Walker.
Long story short, Ellie and Alan have a lot of space to do some really fun and cool things, and I can’t wait to see what people cook up!
Ian Malcolm, Chaotician
This card depicts Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm from the original movie, and the mechanics of Ian’s card quite nicely embrace the chaos of a Chaotician! Ian’s abilities suggest a nifty spin on a “group hug”-style deck. The more players who draw two cards in a turn, the more cards get exiled and put into the “chaos” pool that people can cast spells from. You’ll want cards like Fevered Visions, Howling Mine, Dictate of Kruphix, Kami of the Crescent Moon, Minds Aglow, and Temple Bell to help accumulate exiled cards people can cast later. And don’t go traipsing around with Ian without Vision Skeins!
Since those cards are exiled and you will eventually, hopefully, cast some of them, you might want to include some “cast from exile” synergies with cards like Flaming Tyrannosaurus; Mizzix, Replica Rider; Wild-Magic Sorcerer; The Twelfth Doctor; Sage of the Beyond; and Nalfeshnee.
Indominus Rex, Alpha
The “villain” Dinosaur from Jurassic World, Indominus Rex offers the promise of a deckbuilding adventure, as you do your best to build in enough creatures with powerful keyword abilities to assemble a fearsome Mutant Dinosaur. There are some cool “keyword soup” creatures in Sultai you can add to your deck, like Questing Beast, Venomthrope, Nighthawk Scavenger, and Mirri the Cursed. Scavenged Brawler goes even deeper with a whopping four keywords, and it will do good work even from the graveyard by boosting up some other creature. Rhonas the Indomitable and Bontu the Glorified can unlock indestructible, and Carnage Tyrant can unlock hexproof. How many different keywords can you put on Indominus Rex?
Of course, since you’d be playing black, cycling all these creatures into the graveyard gives you plenty of reanimation options, such as Reanimate, Victimize, and even Rise of the Dark Realms.
Indoraptor, the Perfect Hybrid
A hybrid Dinosaur from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Indoraptor loves it when you deal damage to your opponents before it hits the battlefield, growing larger with its bloodthirst ability. Cards that efficiently deal damage to each opponent work great for this, such as Chandra, Torch of Defiance; Tectonic Giant; Creeping Bloodsucker; and Delayed Blast Fireball. And if you can pull off casting Blood for the Blood God! before casting Indoraptor, you’re going to feel glorious!
Pyrohemia and Pestilence are great for enabling Indoraptor’s bloodthirst and setting off its enrage ability, dealing damage equal to its power to a random opponent unless they sacrifice a nontoken creature. Those enchantments also do a good job of cleaning up cluttered battlefields so that there aren’t a lot of easy choices for sacrifice when the enrage abilities resolve.
Okay, now on to the cards we might want to put in the 99 of our Commander decks!
Don’t Move
Don’t Move depicts when Alan and the kids first encounter the Tyrannosaurus Rex. You can really set up an asymmetrical battlefield sweeper here by casting something like Naya Charm or Cryptic Command on an opponent’s end step, then untap and cast Don’t Move. But what’s wild is the delayed trigger that lasts until your next turn, so even if an opponent follows up by casting a haste creature, they’re strongly discouraged from attacking with it. Keep in mind, the effect works on your creatures too, so if they don’t have vigilance, you’ll want to stay put too.
Life Finds a Way
The card name comes from a line where Ian Malcolm explains how the checks Jurassic Park put into the Dinosaurs to keep them under control won’t work. Life Finds a Way wants to be in a deck with high-powered creature cards that make creature tokens, preferably tokens that are worth copying with populate.
I’d definitely toss this in a Ghalta and Mavren deck, or one with cards like Hornet Queen and Ophiomancer in it. If you’ve got a Smaug token on the battlefield from the There and Back Again Saga, you can populate Smaug and, since it’s legendary, you’d have to sacrifice one and make fourteen Treasure tokens. That certainly seems worth doing! And if you’ve ever wanted to build a deck with Godsire, Life Finds a Way is there to cheer you on!
Welcome to… Jurassic Park
The Saga depicts the events of the Jurassic Park movie and does some wacky things along the way in the name of flavor.
First, Chapter I lets you choose the most threatening noncreature artifact from each player to turn into a 0/4 Wall artifact creature with defender in the hopes that, once Chapter III comes around, you will destroy all of them (along with any other Walls around).
Next, Chapter II gives you a 3/3 green Dinosaur with trample and haste until the end of the turn, which likely can’t get by the Walls you’ve given each of your opponents until the end of the Saga.
Finally, Chapter III transforms the Saga into Jurassic Park, a sweet land that any Dinosaur deck will be thrilled to run. It’s basically a Gaea’s Cradle for Dinosaur typal strategies, with the added ability of letting your dead Dinos escape from the graveyard, assuming you have ways to fill it up with extra cards. This is a powerful card with a narrow use, and I’m here for it!
Dino DNA
Dino DNA shows Richard Attenborough as John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park, explaining how they were able to unlock the DNA of Dinosaurs for their cloning creations. The design is amazing, with its six-mana activation creating a Colossal Dreadmaw as a Dinosaur “base” – a six-mana, 6/6 creature with trample – and splicing it with whatever creature card imprinted on it fits the bill.
Creatures that would be awesome to splice with Colossal Dreadmaw include Cold-Eyed Selkie, Blight Mamba, Trygon Predator, Blighted Agent, Predator Ooze, Baleful Strix… the list could go on and on! I’m definitely going to slide this into my Zirda, the Dawnwaker Commander deck to shave two mana off that six-mana activation, so I can churn out an army of Colossal Dreadmaw hybrid monsters, maybe spliced with Ancient Copper Dragon or Ancient Gold Dragon!
Compy Swarm
This card depicts the Compsognathus, a small, pack-hunting Dinosaur, and the cool design depicts more and more of them showing up whenever a creature dies on your turn. I’m not sure if I’d jump through too many hoops to try to break this card, but in any deck where you’re running enough pinpoint removal to destroy a creature, or sacrifice outlets to kill your own creatures, this might be worth a slot, especially if you’re also running token synergies too, like Chatterfang, Squirrel General or Grismold, the Dreadsower.
Ravenous Tyrannosaurus
The art is really cool, from the Jurassic Park scene where a living T. rex destroys the fossilized T. rex skeleton in the visitor center. Any creature deck with expendable creatures is going to love playing this—sacrifice one creature to devour, and it’s a 9/9 for six mana. Sacrifice two and you get a 12/12. When playing this card, you’ll no doubt accumulate stories about just how big you managed to make this creature.
Even though it doesn’t have evasion, its attack trigger will let you punch damage though to any opponent who has a creature smaller than Ravenous Tyrannosaurus. And it doesn’t even have to be the opponent you’re attacking! Ram Through is an incredible card, and this ability is basically a fully powered up Ram Through each time you attack.
I can’t wait to see the other cards from Jurassic World Collection that we haven’t previewed yet. Maybe some of Chase’s predictions will still come true—I personally can’t believe they won’t have a Velociraptor named Blue for us to put in our Dino decks!
Which Jurassic World Collection cards are you most excited about? Are you going to use any of them as the Commander for its own deck?
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And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.
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