Is this dinosaur a new meta jund commander?!

Magic's newest expansion: Lost Caverns of Ixalan has been released nearly a month ago. Among the many new and exciting cards were also new Jurassic Park cards. Most of these cards aren't really that great and won't see play outside of meaby EDH. But meaby there is one exeption, a new jund commander introduced with this set that could enter the metagame after the new bans.

About the commander

The commander I am talking about today is ofcourse, Indoraptor, the Perfect Hybrid. He not only has great art but also some pretty nice abilities for a 3 cost creature. His base statline isn't the greatest but he has bloodthrist which is a unique mechanic that we haven't seen in a while. This means that Indoraptor will be much bigger if you deal some damage to your opponent which may be a deadly combination with menace. Since he is a dinosaur, he also has enrage which makes blocking him even more problematic as you will be forced to sacrifice a nontoken creature or take even more damage.

All of these abilities combined make him a powerful and unique commander for EDH but also for jund aggro decks in duel commander. He finished in top 8s in three tournaments already so I would say that he has some potential.

How to deckbuild

When building a deck with Indoraptor as your commander, you probably shouldn't really focus on him or his abilities. All of the succesful decks are just standard jund aggro decks. These decks are even using some of the new cards introduced in Lost Caverns of Ixalan like Inti, Seneschal of the Sun, Molten Collapse and meaby some other ones. 

You can certainly play some cards that make use of the commander and his enrage ability though. Cards like Tail Swipe, Ulvenwald Tracker and Inti can all help you trigger his enrage ability or help you push more damage.

Yet more jund?...

Indoraptor is certainly a powerful commander that has already showed some results at tournaments. However the question is if he is better than the current most popular commander: Slimefoot and Squee which is also jund. I personally believe that Slimefoot and Squee is the better deck of choice however the decks are quite different from each other. Slimefoot and Squee is a powerful and consistent midrange deck while Indoraptor takes the form of a much more aggressive style of jund.

Indoraptor, the Perfect Hybrid is quite interesting but I don't think that the deck is as tightly synergistic as Slimefoot and Squee and won't probably be as popular in tournaments. On the other hand, he is quite new and the list may not be as optimised so we should probably wait and see how it evolves and what the deck achieves. I could see the deck being a tier 2 deck in the future if the meta allows for it but I don't believe that he will ever be as powerful as Slimefoot and Squee which is currently dominating the duel commander tournament scene.

Author: Tomas Solovic

Date: December 11th, 2023