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Gishath/Atla Polyraptor Combo on a Budget

Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2019 6:35 pm
by Hawk
My sister-in-law wants to build dinosaur tribal under the following restrictions:

1. She wants the deck to utilize Gishath, Sun's Avatar and Atla Palani, Nest Tender interchangeably as the Commanders of the deck.

2. She wants the deck to be as close to a 75% deck as possible - not in those terms, but she wants to be able to hang with well-tuned lists that can all descend to infinite or at least are full of very strong engines. She's tired of showing up to a gun fight with casual knives of vanilla beaters (her first deck was Emmara Tandris for context) and wants a deck with some real power.

3. Budget-wise we have to come in under $100. She already owns Sol Ring and Lightning Greaves if she wants them, and she does in this deck I imagine, so those won't count against budget. But literally everything else is unowned - her current "good" dinos include just anything in the Huatli, Dinosaur Knight deck and minus maaaaybe Burning Sun's Avatar I am not sure we want to run any of that junk unless we must.

My plan is to piece together a deck in this thread since MTGNexus's budget tools are so good, and my initial plan is budget tribal with a Polyraptor engine. It'll be hard to truly infinite with Poly on a budget, but there should be enough budget redundancy to at least build very strong engines with it.

What are the Polyraptor engines?

Polyraptor + Forerunner of the Empire isn't infinite but by itself it generates forty power of angry raptors - enough to one-shot someone with the help of a haste enabler like Fires of Yavimaya or Regisaur Alpha or a ETB trigger card like Warstorm Surge.
Bellowing Aegisaur extends the life expectency of that combo by a few points, making many more raptors and making them bigger and angrier.
That love connection becomes actually infinite if we add Rite of Passage or some way of making Forerunner indestructible. Duplicating Aegisaur with something like Mirror of the Forebears or Twinflame also does the trick. Indestructibility is hard to come by on a budget as most effects are luxury priced or are real bad or are one-shots - but I'm considering adding Rootborn Defensesand/or Valorous Stance thanks to their versatility. If budget allows I'll also be adding Eldrazi Monument.
Pyrohemia is a very strong engine card, letting us effectively make exponential raptors each turn.
Aether Flash and Marauding Raptor are actually infinite - as in, blue screen of death the game without a way to destroy one of the permanents to break the chain. They are powerful and budget friendly so we'll add them anyways, and the deck would just need something that allows sacrifice of any permanent, like Claws of Gix, or sacrifices creatures for 0 like Witch's Oven or Goblin Bombardment or Ashnod's Altar or Spawning Pit. Atla Palani wants to break her eggs anyhow, so these aren't terrible additions to the deck. We can run some instant speed destruction spells like Chaos Warp, Generous Gift, and Return to Nature to be safe.
Warstorm Surge (and its progenitor, Pandemonium) could be infinite alongside Temple Altisaur which is fun and spicy.

Those will be the "engine" of the deck - there are obviously more and different infinites with Polyraptor but most that I have seen involve increasingly expensive cards like Blasting Station + any token doubler which is just too much unless the rest is shaping up nicely.

We're currently sitting at $31 (already minusing out the cost of Sol Ring and Greaves) and 22 cards. I'll be playing around with it but suggestions are welcome - from here it's a formula of...

- I'd like at least 10 ramp cards so we need 9 more.
- I'd like 5-8 "interaction" spells.
- We are currently only running 5 dinosaurs; the deck needs at least 15 more to reasonably call itself a dino deck and have any hope of hitting off of Gishath.
- That'd still leave 7-12 slots to either run more dinosaurs or run some enablers for the two commanders, budget allowing, or to run some tutor and draw to hit combo more consistently.
- Coming in under budget in order to recommend my sister buy some actual dual lands outside of Refuges + Command Tower would probably also be a huge deal for the deck.

EDIT: I ended up filling in most slots. Now, we're looking at how to fill three more slots to run 37 lands. I turn to you all, as a community, to advise on how best to spend money and fill those slots. Powerful staples? Synergistic effects? Upgun some of the mediocre beef? Or add in cheap common and uncommon dinosaurs like Charging Monstrosaur and spend exccess funds on upgrading the manabase?