Pantlaza, Sun-Favored Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on February 27, 2024

Trumpeting Carnosaur | Illustration by Lars Grant-West

One of the most notable mechanics of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan is discover, which functions like a “fixed” cascade. It’s a fantastically flavorful mechanic that captures the idea of exploration and the tangible rewards for working to expand your worldview.

It’s also broken, as you’d expect a mechanic that allows players to cast free spells would be. Casting spells from exile has become a deck archetype in Commander with an ever-increasing amount of support. For today’s deck guide, I’m going to take a look at Pantlaza, Sun-Favored, the dinosaur-themed discover commander, and see what we can cook up with a deck that focuses on discovery and casting spells from exile.

The Deck

Otepec Huntmaster | Illustration by Daarken

This is ultimately a casual to mid-power Timmy deck. You’re ramping hard and throwing down not just any giant creatures but the coolest giant creatures: dinosaurs! You also have a distinct focus on casting spells from exile. Called impulse drawing, exiling cards from the top of our library to cast for the next turn or two has become red’s premier source of card advantage.

Because this deck focuses so much on this card advantage mechanic, along with discover and cascade, two more mechanics that generate card advantage, you get to see a lot of cards every game. You look to win by overwhelming your opponents in sheer card velocity. Not only are you seeing more cards than them, but lots of your cards also cast spells from exile, so you’re getting a great mana advantage off things like Trumpeting Carnosaur and Bigger on the Inside.

Supplemented further by cards that reward you for casting spells from exile, the deck has a singular goal: Take the already busted mechanics that allow you to cast free spells and dial that advantage up to 10, getting a bunch of extra damage or power in addition to the free card and mana advantages delivered.

Finally, the dinosaurs wrap the deck up in style. They’re essential for your commander, but lots of dinosaurs get in on the exiling game. They also give you a concrete path to victory. Even if the exile stuff doesn’t work out because of cards like Drannith Magistrate or Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, simply accelerating into Gishath, Sun's Avatar and Ghalta, Primal Hunger offers more than enough pressure to win the game.

The Commander

Pantlaza, Sun-Favored enables all the other cards in the deck. It casts spells from exile and gives your dinosaurs a little extra oomph when they come down. That said, this isn’t a deck dependent on its commander. You want to play Pantlaza ASAP, but the deck works fine if it never leaves the command zone.

Pantlaza is worth building around because it’s an inherently powerful commander. The more I play with this deck, the more I see it. Pantlaza is a potent source of card advantage right in the command zone. If it resolves, you get a free spell right away. This puts you up a card, even if an opponent responds to the ETB trigger with Swords to Plowshares. Then, you get the same value for every other dinosaur you play. You’ll spend every turn getting free spells.

Since dinosaurs are innately large and expensive, this does mess with your sequencing. Pantlaza helps patch up what I’d consider one of the bigger weaknesses in Timmy decks: playing a single thing each turn. That singular card tends to be impactful, yes, but also flimsy. Your three opponents can easily handle it while developing their own game plans.

Pantlaza lets you double spell for free, generating a card and mana advantage while allowing you to play only one spell each turn. It’s a must-kill commander because of the value it offers. But, because the deck doesn’t need it to function, removing Pantlaza doesn’t stop the deck so much as delay it a little and leave your opponent with one less interactive spell to kill your other dinosaurs.

Cast From Exile

These are both the cards that help you cast spells from exile and the spells that reward you for doing so. They help support Pantlaza and your dinosaurs while providing additional card advantage and resources.

Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald offers both card advantage and board presence. You’ll never worry about flooding with this in play, and the steady stream of Wolf tokens provides plenty of blockers or aggressive cards.

Passionate Archaeologist is one of the most potent backgrounds from Baldur’s Gate, provided you build around it with a commander that casts spells from exile each turn. Even just dealing 2 or 3 extra damage a turn adds up, but you can often hit for 4 to 6.

Rocco, Street Chef gives the table a bit of card advantage, but you keep the rewards of +1/+1 counters and Food to yourself. Rocco is basically just a thematic Howling Mine.

Bonehoard Dracosaur enables your cast from exile shenanigans while being a dinosaur for a potent double threat that demands a quick answer or threatens to take over a game.

The War Doctor is among your best payoffs for exiling spells. Because of a rules quirk, each card you reveal through discover or cascade counts as an individual event, putting that many time counters on John Hurt. It doesn’t take long to accumulate ten counters, turning this 4-drop into a formidable source of board control or direct damage.

Pioneer and Historic have felt the impact of Trumpeting Carnosaur, but I think it’s an incredible card even when played fairly. A large threat that casts a second spell is already impactful, but the flexibility of its “channel” ability turns it into a potent modal spell that’s powerful early and late.

Etali, Primal Conqueror is one of the most egregiously pushed cards we’ve seen in recent years. You get five spells for 7 mana! Etali can whiff if the trigger hits a counterspell or something, but that whiff rate gets smaller the more players in a pod. It’s kind of unbelievable how much value this creature offers before flipping into Blightsteel Colossus.

This kind of deck can lose to plays holding up countermagic every turn, so Chimil, the Inner Sun offers valuable counter-protection in addition to casting a free spell each turn.

Bigger on the Inside is a little expensive, but the payoff is even more free spells alongside a little mana ramp. It can also become an interesting political tool as you can give any player the extra mana and the cascading spell.

Sunbird's Invocation works incredibly well with all these expensive dinosaurs. You get to see so many cards and cast so many extra spells. With Invocation and Pantlaza in play, each dinosaur represents three spells.

Flaming Tyrannosaurus is your last payoff, and it’s a beauty. You’ll have plenty of board control and burn off this lovely creature, which becomes a formidable threat by accumulating +1/+1 counters.

Dinosaur Typal

These are your dinos. Some support having more dinosaurs, while others are here to trigger Pantlaza. All of them are cool.

Gishath, Sun's Avatar and Zacama, Primal Calamity are two of the best dinosaurs ever printed, so they deserve a spot here. They both offer potent mana advantages through different means and close games single-handedly.

Runic Armasaur and Pugnacious Hammerskull are primarily here because they have incredibly high toughness relative to their mana value, which is important for Pantlaza and helps you sequence multiple spells a turn.

Changeling Titan is similarly overstatted but has additional value. You can tuck one of your ETB dinos, like Etali, Primal Conqueror or Trumpeting Carnosaur, beneath the Titan for wrath protection.

Hunting Velociraptor is one of the most absurd Jurassic Park cards. Getting to cast Etali and other monsters for 3 mana just isn’t far. This card generates enough mana advantage that its inclusion in a casual deck is a bit contentious.

Regisaur Alpha occupies the lower end of your dinosaur power range, but two bodies and haste across your biggest and best creatures are still worth a slot.

Ghalta, Primal Hunger and Ghalta and Mavren are just absurdly large creatures for the mana you’re spending on them. Cheap 12/12s are must-haves in a deck with Last March of the Ents and Rishkar's Expertise and can clean up games on their own.

Bronzebeak Foragers is pretty cool. Grasp of Fate on a stick is a card with plenty of value, especially when you care about the types on that stick.

Scion of Calamity comes in the same The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander precon deck as Pantlaza, and it’s a hell of a dinosaur. Myriad helps apply even pressure across the board, and blowing up enchantments and artifacts puts your opponents behind on mana, even if those card types aren’t the focus of their deck.

Wakening Sun's Avatar and Apex Altisaur are two of your best finishers because they clear the way for your other creatures. The Avatar is just a 7/7 Plague Wind. The Altisaur’s devastation isn’t as complete, but it’s often enough to clear away one player’s blockers.

Naya Staples

These are just the good cards holding everything else together. You won’t see them in every Naya deck, but a solid number can at least consider adding these to their lists.

First, there’s the interactive suite. Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Delayed Blast Fireball, Volcanic Torrent, and Winds of Abandon all help clear away opposing threats. Vandalblast and Nature's Claim handle non-creature permanents. This deck focuses more on proactivity than reactivity, so it’s light on interaction.

While your discover cards offer plenty of card advantage, you can never have too much. Up the Beanstalk works well here. You only need it to trigger once after casting it to get a Night's Whisper, so I think it belongs in pretty much every green list with a commander that triggers it. Sylvan Library offers a classic source of card advantage and a peek at how much 2-mana green enchantments have changed over the years.

In a deck with so many monsters, not adding Last March of the Ents and Rishkar's Expertise would be foolish. It’s hard to lose after casting one of these spells because they’ll draw so many cards.

Much of your interaction, namely the spells that exile or kill all your opponents’ creatures, work as finishers. You also have Taunt from the Rampart, one of the best ways to politely ask your opponents to wrap the game up so you can get home in time for dinner.

The Mana Base

This deck produces a lot of mana. It needs to, as your curve is as big as the dinosaurs you want to cast. You have plenty of staples, like Birds of Paradise, Arcane Signet, and Cultivate, but one thing way this deck ramps is by focusing on cost reduction.

Shadow in the Warp and Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma provide a harsh mana reduction that makes your spells cost next to nothing. Goblin Anarchomancer and Otepec Huntmaster aren’t quite so potent, but they still make your dinos cheaper. Once multiple copies of this get into play, your spells are almost free.

You also have a host of mana dorks that tap for more than 1 mana. Gwenna, Eyes of Gaea is a card I find heavily underrated. It provides a significant boost to your mana, can be used multiple times a turn, and becomes a threat in its own right once you’ve dumped your hand or made so many land drops that a mana dork no longer has value.

Somberwald Sage, Orcish Lumberjack, and Bloom Tender all provide huge leaps of mana. There’s a definite cost to the Lumberjack, but it can also play Pantlaza on turn 2. Tender and Sage are amazing in multicolor and creature-focused decks, respectively.

As for the lands themselves, they’re primarily fixing lands. You have a few modal double-faced cards, which let you play over forty lands while mitigating concerns about flooding. Similarly, you have Boseiju, Who Endures and Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire to get some spell lands in there.

Beyond these, it’s just mana fixing. You have a fetch–shock mana base alongside as many good untapped lands as your colors provide.

The Strategy

The most important thing you need to consider when piloting this deck is how much ramp is in your opening hand. You need to have some; this deck is too slow to function without at least one, preferably two, pieces of early mana acceleration.

Pantlaza, Sun-Favored is a potent enough card advantage engine I’d rather keep a hand of seven mana sources, including some accelerants, than a hand with a balance of lands and spells. It’s a little extreme, but it worked for this deck. Because you have so much card advantage and many expensive spells, accelerating and making land drops every turn is vital to curving out well.

This is a deck that’s all about the curve out. You don’t have any combos to try and set up, and you’re not working to construct some complex engine that brings five cards together to win the game. You’re ramping into dinosaurs and casting some extra spells along the way.

The best hands cast Pantlaza on turn 3; turn 4 is also fine. The deck can have good draws that curve into Pantlaza naturally; Faldorn into The War Doctor is a good example of this. In general, though, you need acceleration for your other dinosaurs. Casting Pantlaza on turn 5 is well and good, but you want creatures like Ghalta and Mavren and Etali, Primal Conqueror to come out earlier when possible.

Curving out is important because this deck has so many great top-end cards. Ghalta and Mavren, Etali, Primal Conqueror, and Gishath, Sun's Avatar are all more than capable of winning games alone. Getting them into play efficiently and quickly is your top priority.

Combos and Interactions

This is a predominantly fair deck. There are no infinite combos or anything to build toward, though you have one really sweet interaction that can raze players to the ground.

Bigger on the Inside + The War Doctor

For this, you need both permanents in play and any 1-mana spell in hand.

Activate the ability Bigger on the Inside gives your enchanted permanent, then use one of the 2 generated mana to cast your 1-mana spell. Because this deck has no 0-cost nonland permanents, the cascade trigger whiffs, revealing your entire deck and then shuffling it.

Because cascading counts revealing each card as a unique event, The War Doctor gets a time counter for every card in your deck – more than enough to remove a player from the game when it attacks. This is a three-card combo you can’t set up with tutors, but it’s still fun to keep an eye out for.

Rule 0 Violations Check

This deck punches well above the belt. You’re playing casual Timmy Magic in a way that really captures the ideals Commander was once built upon: lots of mana, lots of spells, and big, epic creatures. Some players might take issue with Tyrranax Rex deploying poison counters, which is completely fair. I wanted a hasty threat that ignored counters, but Carnage Tyrant works well in that spot.

Budget Options

The first and easiest place to make the deck suit your budget is to cut untapped lands in favor of tapped lands. Gates, gain lands, and other alternatives can slash the budget tremendously. Additionally, the MDFCs and channel lands can be replaced by basics of the appropriate colors.

Apex Altisaur can be replaced with Ezuri's Predation for another way to sweep out your opponent's creatures, though you lose out on a dinosaur.

Etali, Primal Storm is a less reliable but cheaper threat to play over Etali, Primal Conqueror.

It’s hard to replace the card advantage of Bonehoard Dracosaur, but Quartzwood Crasher works as a formidable five-drop to keep the curve consistent.

Hunting Velociraptor can be any ramp piece or an Elvish Piper if you’re dedicated to cheating dinos into play.

Return of the Wildspeaker is an acceptable replacement for Last March of the Ents that gives you an Overrun instead of a mana advantage.

Delayed Blast Fireball works well with your exile effects, but another one-side wrath, like Everything Comes to Dust, can take its place.

Sylvan Library provides steady card advantage, but Dawn of a New Age works as well in your creature-heavy deck.

Other Builds

Pantlaza, Sun-Favored needs to be surrounded by dinosaurs for impact, but you can still do a few different things with this list. The first is to dramatically increase the firepower. Cards like Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, and Mana Crypt would propel this deck to new heights. While upping the power, you could include plenty of Naya’s infinite mana combos to work with Zacama, Primal Calamity.

This deck could also go way harder on dinosaurs. I chose to focus on the discover ability more than dinosaurs, but there are plenty of powerful typal cards you could play over the exile stuff. Molten Echoes and Kindred Charge dramatically up the deck’s pressure, Kindred Summons cheats dinos into play like no tomorrow, and Herald's Horn and Descendants' Path reward you for going deep on one creature type with card advantage.

Commanding Conclusion

The War Doctor | Illustration by Lixin Yin

Playing around with new mechanics is always fun, especially when they’re as powerful as discover. Getting a bunch of free spells from taking basic game actions often works as the foundation of a powerful deck, especially with the additional supporting casting spells from exile that have been seen recently.

The end result is a casual Timmy deck casting the coolest creatures without lacking card advantage. Which commander from The Lost Caverns of Ixalan have you enjoyed playing with the most? Do you like typal decks? Let me know in the comments or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and keep playing monsters!