Tyrox, Saurid Tyrant Commander Deck Tech

Unsummoned Skull • March 28, 2025

Deckbuilding

Tyrox, the T Rex that T Rocks!

1, 2, 3, 4 Ferocious dinosaurs make a big roar! When you think of dinosaurs in Commander, you usually think of 3-color offerings, primarily in Naya colors. Cards like Gishath, Sun's Avatar

, or, more recently, Pantlaza, Sun-Favored
. But there are plenty of mono-red dinosaurs, and a new commander to give them their day in the sun, no longer competing with their green and white brethren. Many of them have 4 or more power, making them truly Ferocious, and working well with the red aspect of Tarkir's Temur khanate.

Dinosaurs

Like the other Muraganda vanilla legends, Tyrox, Saurid Tyrant

provides a blank canvas for a creative deckbuilder. It lacks the raw stats of its blue and black counterparts, and it lacks the additional card type of its white counterpart. But what it does have going for it is red's access to a lot of cards that care about the commander's power, and it also has a well-supported creature type in dinosaurs.


Many of the red dinosaurs are smaller and cheaper than their green and white cousins, but they have useful abilities, such as Nest Robber

's haste hitting the ground running and Belligerent Yearling
's trample and power-increasing ability, a la Eldrazi Mimic
, to beat face quickly.


Even our less-aggressively costed creatures, such as Frilled Deathspitter

, have abilities that enable them to profitably attack, such as Enrage. Whether they survive the combat or not, we're getting value out of our little guys, in addition to the triggers from casting them.


Sawhorn Nemesis

might just be my favorite dinosaur. It's decently-aggressively costed, but it has a devastating ability: it's a damage doubler. When multiplication gets involved in calculating damage, life totals drop steeply and players drop like flies.


Ferocious

Bolt Bend is the cheaper stepsister of Deflecting Swat

, with its cost reduced when the Ferocious requirement is met, which our commander happens to fill. Temur Battle Rage
 is another massive beating involving the Ferocious mechanic, granting trample and deathtouch in combat.


Sarkhan's Unsealing

was one of the main reasons I wanted to build this deck and kind of serves as a secret commander: there are a lot of ways to trigger it at different levels, and the card does a lot of work over the course of the game. At a certain point, a 4-power 2-drop provides diminishing returns over the course of the game, but the Unsealing gives us a reason to keep casting our commander long after it becomes outclassed.


Crater's Claws

has long been a favorite of mine, and I do love me a good Fireball
. The Claws do additional damage when the Ferocious requirement is met, giving us solid reach with a card that's better with our commander out, but doesn't require that to be useful.


Flames of the Raze-Boar

is a sneakily nasty card. Ferocious made a quiet return in War of the Spark when Armies were introduced, giving a different route to a creature with high power and a use for an increasingly-large creature without inherent evasion. Our commander happens to fit these needs, and our dinos, by and large, meet these as well, including growing less and less useful as the game progresses.


Ramp

There are versions of this deck that could use a bigger top end and more ramp, but this version just needs the ramp to get things going. As a result, Otepec Huntmaster

enabling the dinos to come out quickly is just what we need.


Battle Hymn

might seem a bit like a "win more" card, as it provides a bump in mana equal to the amount of creatures we control, but we do have ways to make creature tokens, and we should usually be in the position where this is mana-positive and enables aggressive starts.


Removal

Since we are building a wide board of small-to-medium creatures, we need ways to protect our board. Red has some neat Counterspell

-esque cards, such as Tibalt's Trickery
, as well as cards that can copy counterspells, such as Flare of Duplication
.


In terms of actual removal, we want to hit our opponents' stuff without hitting our own, enabling us to continue attacking while disrupting our opponents' game plans. Quite a lot of this involves blowing up artifacts, as red happens to do that quite well.


The general plan is to make dinosaurs, triggering Ferocious for extra value, while going into the red zone early and often.
.

Tyrox, Saurid Tyrant Commander Deck Tech

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Commander (1)

Lands (40)

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Unsummoned Skull

Unsummoned Skull

Teacher, judge, DM, & Twitch Affiliate. Lover of all things Unsummon. Streams EDH, Oathbreaker, D & D, & Pokemon. Even made it to a Pro Tour!