Tribal Laboratory: Primal Dinosaurs

Pat Cook
January 18, 2018
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Last weekend was my favorite time of year, prerelease season! Rivals of Ixalan printed some exciting stuff for standard’s tribes that were set up in Ixalan. In Rivals of Ixalan, obviously the vampires and the merfolk are stealing the spotlight with their new fancy tribal cards, but the tribe i focused on this week was Dinosaurs! Now I bet you’re expecting a stompy dinosaur list, with powerful midrange creatures and some removal here and there, but the list I decided to make is centered around one of my favorite new cards, Polyraptor. Combo decks are something that i have very little experience with so i drafted the help of my friend and manager of the Flipside Gaming Clifton Park store, Anthony Audette. The hardest part of the combo is that it requires a ton of mana to play. So I began this list with the idea that I wanted to use a shell of an established combo deck and modify it a little, so i began with scapeshift. Scapeshift seemed like a powerful choice, because like most combo decks, it’s able to fall back as a control deck. Being able to protect our combo seemed strong, but the mana requirements were too much for this combo deck style. Our next iteration became a Tooth and Nail list.


We basically just wanted to ramp into Tooth and Nail using Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl and Fertile ground to make a ton of mana. Once we have a ton of mana we play primal surge into our combo Forerunner and Polyraptor. The problem with this is that we needed one more element to win with the combo, we needed more than just Polyraptor and Forerunner of the Empire. We thought about using the cards Impact Tremors and Altar of the Brood, which have abilities that trigger when creatures enter the battlefield.


This iteration was a little too clunky, so we looked at one more card that would be the catalyst of our combo: Primal Surge.


 Primal Surge is a card that rewards you for play permanents. Let’s take a look at the list:


Primal DinosPatrick Cook Arbor Elf Birds of Paradise Elvish Visionary Eternal Witness Wistful Selkie Forerunner of the Empire Regisaur Alpha Polyraptor Ghalta, Primal Hunger Boseiju, Who Shelters All Forest Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx Stomping Ground Windswept Heath Wooded Foothills Garruk Wildspeaker Primal Surge Oath of Nissa Utopia Sprawl Fertile Ground

 

 

Ramp is really important to our list, unfortunately we can’t play things like Rampant Growth because if we exile it off the top with Primal Surge, it stops our catalyst and our chemical reaction stops. Our ramp suite is the same as our Tooth and Nail list, with a few extra sweet cards. Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx allows us to make a ton of mana by playing our permanents. We have a ton of creatures that enter and draw us cards, such as Wistful Selkie and Elvish Visionary. Our card advantage has to be permanents, so we have our cantrip creatures, but we also have Oath of Nissa, which will allow us to dig for our important cards, all while being compatible with Primal Surge. Once we resolve Primal Surge, essentially our entire deck comes into play, meaning that our Polyraptors and Ghalta enter and stomp our opponent with the help of Regisaur Alpha, our haste outlet.This iteration doesn’t fall back on being able to control the deck, but has another plan of creating giant creatures and stomping our opponent into the ground with another new card, Ghalta, Primal Hunger. Ghalta is the epitome of the color green, it’s just a giant dinosaur!

 

One of our hardest matchups are ones that have permission. Considering the glass cannon nature of our deck, one Cryptic Command, counter draw and our whole game plan falls apart. In our list we play Boseiju, Who Shelters All. Boseiju is like a Cavern of Souls for Instants and Sorceries, our very vital Primal Command won’t be countered with this bad boy in play!

Our ideal game would be land into Arbor Elf right away. From there we want to load up a land with some enchantments like Utopia Sprawl or Fertile Ground. We want to keep producing tons of mana and cycle through our Selkies and our Elvish Visionaries into Nykthos, and playing Primal Surge with Boseiju. Primal Surge goes one card at a time, so eventually we’ll hit our combo of Forerunner of the Empire and Polyraptor, and Regisaur Alpha. We’ll put a ton of creatures in play, so we can usually play Ghalta for 2 mana, due to his discount.

Our deck is very flexible in the sideboard, the only thing we have to follow is that our cards have to be permanents. That means that we can still play Rest in Peace, Leyline of Sanctity and Stony Silence. White has access to the most powerful silver bullets in modern, being able to instantly shut down decks is a powerful aspect of the color, especially in a format where the sideboard is so important. Playing Red allows us to play blood moon, which is really good against modern’s aggressive mana bases.

My favorite combos have always been creature combos, I play Kiki Jiki Zealous Conscripts in commander, creatures like Polyraptor are always a treat, as they lead to some crazy decks, like what we have this week. I feel that Wizards really hit the nail on the head with this set, i loved seeing waves of vampires going against merfolk and the stompy dinosaurs. As always thank you very much for reading my article, if you think that you could craft this combo deck better, or think i forgot something be sure to leave a comment!