I've found myself pleasantly surprised by The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. While I always appreciated Ixalan as a unique setting, it suffered from being a creature type focused set full of creature types I'm indifferent to. Merfolk don't do much for me, and while I do like a lot of their individual cards, I've never felt particularly compelled to build a vampire or pirate deck. Dinosaurs are a bit different, however.

I have felt compelled to build a dinosaur deck, though not because of the dinosaurs themselves. I certainly don't mind them - they're fascinating animals, just not ones I've ever been that interested in. For me, the real draw to Ixalan's dinosaurs is the enrage mechanic. Enrage abilities do something when the creature they're attached to takes damage, and I find them absolutely delightful. Hurting your own creatures is very simple to accomplish in the Naya () color identity that most dinosaur decks center around. I've loved enrage for a long time - long enough that not long after the original Ixalan was released, I built a Gishath, Sun's Avatar deck centered around the mechanic. I've long since taken it apart, but I have plenty of fond memories of the deck. The one thing I was never really satisfied with was the commander.

Gishath is an incredibly powerful card, but she mostly acted as a way to turn excess mana into a threatening board position. While that was far from a bad thing, it was never really how I wanted to win and tended to take the spotlight away from the synergies the deck was trying to be about. I didn't see a way to get around the problems I was having, and I took the deck apart.

Wayta, Trainer Prodigy makes me regret that decision.

Wayta is a three-mana legendary creature in Naya colors with a statline of 1 power and 5 toughness. While commanders with low power and high toughness generally aren't what you want, those stats are perfect for what Wayta is doing. On top of having haste, you can pay mana and tap Wayta to have a creature you control fight another target creature, making both deal damage equal to their power to the other. While you can use this to remove your opponents' creatures, that isn't all you can do with it. In fact, the ability discounts itself if you control both of the targeted creatures, incentivizing you to make your creatures fight each other. Her last ability hones her focus on enrage creatures even more, by causing your damage-based triggered abilities to trigger an additional time.

Wayta is an incredibly powerful enabler for a deck that cares about damaging its own creatures. While they're definitely powerful, mechanics like enrage can become unwieldy if you don't have a way to trigger them. With her fight ability, Wayta gives us consistent access to exactly that, on top of doubling the payoff of every enrage trigger. Wayta's low power and high toughness makes her unlikely to kill any dinosaur she fights, but very likely to survive the enounter. Haste allows her to make things start fighting as soon as she hits the table. Generally, we're going to want to spend our first few turns ramping and playing creatures from our hand, and we'll only play Wayta once she has a good opportunity to do something when she hits the table.

Man Creates Dinosaurs

With a commander that specializes in enabling creatures with enrage, we'll want to play a lot of creatures with enrage that can generate value for us.

In Magic, the two most important resources are mana and cards, so naturally, we'll start with those. Ranging Raptors is a three-mana 2/3 dinosaur that, when it takes damage, allows you to search your library for a basic land, and put it into play tapped. This might be one of the best cards we can have in our opening hand. If you play this on turn three, then play Wayta and have her fight it on turn four, you can untap on turn five with six lands, thanks to Wayta doubling the trigger. That's not where it ends. We'll also be able to search for two more lands every single turn, just by spending a single mana. Of course, we'll need cards to actually spend that mana on, but that's where our next two cards come in.

Ripclaw Raptor is a 4/5 for four mana that draws us a card whenever it takes damage. That is quite a bulky statline, but its power is low enough that Wayta can survive a fight with it. That gives us a repeatable card draw engine - one that draws two cards every time we untap.

Flumph isn't quite as powerful as Ripclaw Raptor, but it has an undeniable advantage in charisma. Just look at those big goofy eyestalks. Flumph is only two mana, and is a 0/4 with flying and defender. Not being able to attack is unfortunate. Having zero power, and therefore not dealing damage to any creature it fights, is even more unfortunate. However, Flumph will make you and an opponent both draw a card every time it takes damage. This technically isn't an enrage ability, but Wayta will double it all the same. You can distribute the cards among your opponents, or play favorites with just one, but either way, Flumph is excellent at making friends.

Not unlike Flumph (sorry, I just wanted to write "Flumph" as many times as I could get away with) Hornet Nest has zero power. Again, this is unfortunate, but this unassuming three-mana insect creature is special. It works a bit differently, compared to the enrage cards (and Flumph). Unlike those, which only care that they took damage, Hornet Nest cares how much damage it takes. While Wayta still doubles it, you're going to want to use this ability a bit differently. Rather than just making Wayta punch a Hornet Nest repeatedly, you can get a lot of value from throwing it at whatever creature on board has the most power. With Wayta out, doing that will give you twice that creature's power in angry bees. While they are fragile 1/1 creatures that will die to any damage, those bees are incredibly powerful. Not only are they an army of evasive creatures and excellent blockers, we can also use Wayta to make them fight an opposing creature, which will instantly kill it, since these Insect tokens have deathtouch.

Indestructibility is a powerful tool for any deck, but it's doubly effective in Wayta. Mithril Coat is an equipment with flash and indestructible that attaches itself to one of your legendary creatures when it enters the battlefield, giving the attached creature indestructible. While Wayta is the creature we'll usually be attaching it to, she's far from the only one that can benefit from it. On Wayta, it can allow her to survive fighting some of your more powerful creatures. On one of your other creatures, it can help them survive fighting one of someone else's creatures. Most importantly, though, on something like Hornet Nest, it can let the nest survive being thrown at an 8/8 and spitting out sixteen bees.

What can we do if none of our opponents have a big creature? Do we have to settle for only eight bees? No.

Star of Extinction is the perfect payoff for our creatures that care how much damage they take. It's an expensive spell, at seven mana, but it's more than worth that cost. Star of Extinction will destroy a land, and deal twenty damage to every creature. Yes, twenty. With Wayta and Hornet Nest, that's forty bees on a newly empty board, since everything just died from taking twenty damage. With Wayta and Stuffy Doll, that can deal forty to a player.

Even when it doesn't win you the game, Star of Extinction is a perfectly serviceable board wipe. Every deck needs a few of them, so why not use ones that benefit you enormously? We'll also be running Blasphemous Act and Chain Reaction to the same end.

Temple Altisaur is the perfect way to make your damage based board wipes even more one-sided. It's a five-mana 3/4 dinosaur that prevents all but one of every instance of damage your dinosaurs take. While it doesn't work with everything we'd want it to, Temple Altisaur affects most of our enrage cards. Most of our creatures that care about how much damage they take aren't dinosaurs, and will therefore dodge this damage prevention. This ability also makes our board incredibly difficult to kill with anything short of a "destroy all creatures" board wipe.

We can't rely on our commander alone to damage our creatures. One of my favorite older cards for that purpose is Caltrops. Caltrops is an extremely simple artifact. It's three mana, and whenever a creature attacks, it deals one damage to the attacking creature. It triggers your enrage abilities whenever your dinosaurs attack, and as a free bonus it also kills any 1 toughness creature that tries to attack. I wish every card in this deck were so easy to evaluate, but alas, things can't be quite so simple.

Dinosaurs Eat Man

When I try to describe how I feel about this deck, I can't help but liken myself to the scientists in Jurassic Park. I look upon what I have created, and I fear it. My hubris has led me to do something far beyond my understanding. To put it less poetically, I accidentally built a deck many times more powerful than I anticipated. Let me introduce you to the culprits.

Wrathful Raptors is the card that made me realize what sort of deck I had built. Wrathful Raptors is a 5/5 dinosaur with trample, which, whenever one of your dinosaurs takes damage, deals that much damage to a non-dinosaur target. With Wayta being able to double those triggers, Wrathful Raptors can kill players alarmingly easily. With Wayta, Wrathful Raptors, and Star of Extinction, you only need two other dinosaurs to kill the rest of a four player table from forty life. I didn't intend to build a deck that was capable of that, it just kind of happened. But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Cacophodon seems unassuming at first. It's a 2/5 that untaps a permanent whenever it takes damage, but that effect is far more powerful than it looks. When it's doubled with Wayta and paired with her fight ability, it can grant untold levels of flexibility. Being able to untap both Wayta and a land every time it takes damage can allow you to do an enormous amount by making your creatures fight repeatedly - really, the only limit is their toughness. Because damage resets between turns, you can repeat that process on every single player's turn. Alternatively, if you don't need to untap Wayta, you can just untap two lands, instead, putting your ahead on mana.

Pyrohemia is an odd card, but not a complex one. You can pay a Red mana to deal 1 damage to each creature and each player, and if there are no creatures on the battlefield when the turn ends, you sacrifice it. You usually don't want to try and clear the board with this, although being able to devastate your opponents' creatures is definitely a powerful bonus. The real strength of this card is in being able to repeatedly trigger every enrage creature you have for only a single mana. It works especially well with Cacophodon. Alongside Wayta, those two cards can allow you to generate four mana every turn, all while keeping the board clear of small creatures and rapidly chipping away at life totals.

What if toughness wasn't as much of an issue? And what if doing all of that also made your creatures enormous? Rite of Passage answers these questions. Quite simply, every time one of your creatures takes damage, they also get a +1/+1 counter - Wayta makes that two counters, of course. With Pyrohemia and Cacophodon, that means that the only limit left is your own life total. Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite so elegantly without Pyrohemia. If you start with Wayta and Cacophodon, both without any counters, they can only fight one another twice. After that, Wayta will have accumulated too much damage, and will die. However, she's already a 5/9 by that point, and even though she can't survive fighting the Cacophodon more than once per turn, she can still survive one, and continue to grow stronger with each and every punch she takes.

With toughness being the limiting factor to these combos, making our creatures indestructible can allow those combos to become infinite. No card is quite so fit for the task as Stalwart Pathfinder. As 3/1 with vigilance, its statline isn't perfect, but its ability makes up for that. At the start of your turn's combat step, your creatures become indestructible if you control at least three creatures with different powers. This condition isn't terribly hard for our deck to fulfill, and repeatable indestructibility is excellent for us, whether we use it to go infinite or not.

Polyraptor is a strange card. At eight mana for a 5/5 with no keywords, it may seem slow. That's because it is, but it more than makes up for it with its enrage ability. Whenever your Polyraptor takes damage, you create a copy of Polyraptor. This card in this deck is the definition of overkill. Take something like Pyrohemia. With that, every Red mana you pump into the spell, you will double your number of Polyraptors. Triple, if Wayta is out. The only real downside is the mana investment it requires. They also survive damage-based board wipes like Blasphemous Act, whether they're coming from you or an opponent.

I don't understand how Wizards of the Coast printed Forerunner of the Empire in the same set as Polyraptor. Well, I do. They did it because Polyraptor is eight mana and doesn't do much on its own. But Forerunner of the Empire doesn't just synergize with Polyraptor - it tutors it or another dinosaur to the top of your library. That's not bad, although it's not enough to justify Forerunner being a four-mana 1/3. Let's take a look at this synergy.

When a dinosaur enters the battlefield, under your control, you can choose to have Forerunner deal 1 damage to each creature. To risk stating the obvious, Polyraptor is a dinosaur.

So, where does this combo get us?

You have Forerunner in play, and you cast Polyraptor. It comes into play, and Forerunner triggers Polyraptor, along with all our other enrage creatures. You get a second Polyraptor, which then triggers Forerunner again. The damage will trigger both Polyraptors. You now have four Polyraptors. The two new ones both trigger Forerunner. Here you have a choice. Forerunner now has two damage marked on it, and any more damage will kill it. If you want to keep your Forerunner to do this again next turn, you can choose to not deal damage for either of the triggers. You already have 20 power worth of Polyraptors.

You can also go for broke. If you deal damage with both triggers, your Forerunner will die, but all four of your Polyraptors will trigger twice. Since none of them have taken enough damage to die, you'll end this process with a cool twelve sticky 5/5s. That's without Wayta on the battlefield. With her, you can make more than sixty. I stopped trying to do the math after Wayta dies, and thankfully, you can just decline to deal damage on the trigger when you want to stop doing that math. And all of this happened because you drew Forerunner and played your Polyraptor.

Life Finds a Way

Make no mistake, this list is far from finely tuned. I haven't had many chances to play it, and I'd feel a little bad subjecting my loved ones to it. It is shockingly good at generating value and ending games. This is not the sort of deck your opponents can afford to give any slack. Unfortunately, it's also not a deck that can hold up especially well to targeted destruction. It's highly vulnerable to counter magic, and similarly vulnerable to board wipes that don't deal damage or destroy creatures.

Wayta, Trainer Prodigy | Commander | Lilian Johnson

• Commander (35)
• 1 Wayta, Trainer Prodigy
• 1 Bellowing Aegisaur
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Boros Reckoner
• 1 Brash Taunter
• 1 Cacophodon
• 1 Curious Altisaur
• 1 Delighted Halfling
• 1 Donna Noble
• 1 Fire Ants
• 1 Flumph
• 1 Forerunner of the Empire
• 1 Gishath, Sun's Avatar
• 1 Hornet Nest
• 1 Ill-Tempered Loner
• 1 Intrepid Paleontologist
• 1 Marauding Raptor
• 1 Needletooth Raptor
• 1 Neyith of the Dire Hunt
• 1 Pantlaza, Sun-Favored
• 1 Polyraptor
• 1 Ranging Raptors
• 1 Ripjaw Raptor
• 1 Roaming Throne
• 1 Runic Armasaur
• 1 Seedborn Muse
• 1 Siegehorn Ceratops
• 1 Skullwinder
• 1 Stalwart Pathlighter
• 1 Stuffy Doll
• 1 Sunfrill Imitator
• 1 Temple Altisaur
• 1 Thrashing Brontodon
• 1 Trapjaw Tyrant
• 1 Wrathful Raptors

• Instants (8)
• 1 Boros Charm
• 1 Flawless Maneuver
• 1 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Spikefield Hazard // Spikefield Cave
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Valakut Awakening // Valakut Stoneforge
• 1 Wear // Tear

• Sorceries (11)
• 1 Bala Ged Recovery // Bala Ged Sanctuary
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Chain Reaction
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Fiery Confluence
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Star of Extinction
• 1 Three Visits
• 1 Turntimber Symbiosis // Turntimber, Serpentine Wood

• Enchantments (4)
• 1 Pyrohemia
• 1 Rhythm of the Wild
• 1 Rite of Passage
• 1 Spiteful Banditry

• Artifacts (5)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Caltrops
• 1 Fiendlash
• 1 Mithril Coat
• 1 Sol Ring

• Battles (1)
• 1 Invasion of Gobakhan // Lightshield Array

• Lands (36)
• 6 Forest
• 6 Mountain
• 2 Plains
• 1 Arid Mesa
• 1 Bountiful Promenade
• 1 Castle Garenbrig
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Jetmir's Garden
• 1 Karplusan Forest
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Mossword Bridge
• 1 Overgrown Farmland
• 1 Pit of Offerings
• 1 Rockfall Vale
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Spectator Seating
• 1 Spire Garden
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Sundown Pass
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Windswept Heath
• 1 Wooded Foothills
• 1 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth

Buy This Deck Export text

I don't have an enormous amount to say about tuning this deck either up or down. A deck as synergistic as this one can be difficult to tweak. Of course, it could benefit from fast mana and more interaction, but many of our cards are difficult to remove without compromising our synergies. Tuning it down is a bit more straightforward. Remove Polyraptor, Wrathful Raptors, and maybe Cacophodon, and the deck has significantly less explosive potential, though it might still be fairly powerful at a casual table.

Final Thoughts

When I began building this deck, I didn't expect it to be that much better than my old stompy Gishath deck. I knew having a more synergistic commander would improve the deck, but I didn't think it would be half as good as it wound up being. I have a bit of a problem with building decks that stack so many triggered abilities it's difficult to keep track of all of them. It started with my Zimone and Dina landfall deck, continued with this one, and I have an increasing suspicion that the Felisa, Fang of Silverquill list I've been brewing will be more of the same. While I do feel a little bad every time I play a game where I have to stumble through a huge pile of triggers on every single end step, I still adore building and playing these decks.

It's far from a CEDH list, but I still believe this deck is undeniably powerful. It doesn't have as much artifact and enchantment removal as it should have, and it struggles to interact with boardwipes that don't destroy or deal damage, but it excels at building up enormous amounts of value while devastating other creature decks with our access to repeatable fight effects and a high density of damage-based board wipes.

I think it's a shame how overlooked enrage cards seem to be, when they're capable of this much. I hope I've made you rethink your opinion on at least a couple of them. That's all for this column, I'll see you later.