On Monday, October 21st, Wizards of the Coast announced Pioneer, a brand new format for Magic: The Gathering paper and digital platforms. Pioneer will be a bridge between Standard and Modern and will help some Standard cards retain value, but won't feel impossible to buy into for new players who didn't have the benefit of playing Magic literally 16 years ago to get their Mirrodin block cards. Pioneer won't affect Commander at all, but not celebrating the announcement of this format isn't much fun and I'm all about having fun with this column.

One of my 8 simple rules suggests limiting your card pool so you don't have to limit your deck in any other way and we could limit our card pool quite a bit by only allowing cards legal in Pioneer. However, I don't think that's QUITE what I want to go for since we don't have access to Sol Ring or other Commander-specific cards that we would likely be too non-competitive if we omitted. If you want to really challenge yourself above and beyond what I am doing, though, you could try and build a Commander deck that only contains cards from the following sets -

No Commander decks, no Brawl decks, not supplemental cards whatsoever. I think that could be a fun challenge, but I'm not about that life. The life, however, about which I am, involves cards that were printed or re-printed after Return to Ravnica was printed. That gives us a big card pool, but also kind of a small one.

Which Commander is good for such a wacky deck? I think one with a lot of block-specific mechanics or synergy is the way to go. Do we go all the way back to Return to Ravnica or pick something a little more recent? You can tell me your ideas below, but for this one, I think I'm going to go with a creature I wanted to build around at the time but didn't - Gishath, Sun's Avatar.

Gishy, as it likes to be called, is a big old dinosaur commander with a ton of keyword abilities and dinosaur synergy out the wazoo. You'll want a lot of mana ramp and you'll want a lot of dinosaurs and lucky for us, most of the dinosaurs were printed after Return to Ravnica. The deck wants to deal combat damage, hit some value and in general, be a big, dumb creature deck. Can we make this deck work with cards from October 5th, 2012 forward? I think so!

So what do we lose?

Well, it turns out we lose almost nothing. Some decks like to run a Pyrohemia and Rite of Passage combo and we lose access to both of those spells, which hurts a bit. We don't have Asceticism or Aura Shards or Worldly Tutor, but for the most part, our deck as I would like to run it is largely intact. Here's what a post-2012 Gishath deck looks like.

Pioneering the Land of the Lost | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Gishath, Sun's Avatar

• Creatures (34)
• 1 Apex Altisaur
• 1 Atzocan Seer
• 1 Bellowing Aegisaur
• 1 Burning Sun's Avatar
• 1 Carnage Tyrant
• 1 Deathgorge Scavenger
• 1 Drover of the Mighty
• 1 Etali, Primal Storm
• 1 Forerunner of the Empire
• 1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger
• 1 Goring Ceratops
• 1 Kinjalli's Caller
• 1 Kinjalli's Sunwing
• 1 Knight of the Stampede
• 1 Marauding Raptor
• 1 Otepec Huntmaster
• 1 Polyraptor
• 1 Raging Regisaur
• 1 Raging Swordtooth
• 1 Ranging Raptors
• 1 Regisaur Alpha
• 1 Ripjaw Raptor
• 1 Runic Armasaur
• 1 Silverclad Ferocidons
• 1 Snapping Sailback
• 1 Temple Altisaur
• 1 Thrashing Brontodon
• 1 Thundering Spineback
• 1 Trapjaw Tyrant
• 1 Verdant Sun's Avatar
• 1 Wakening Sun's Avatar
• 1 Wayward Swordtooth
• 1 Zacama, Primal Calamity
• 1 Zetalpa, Primal Dawn

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Domri, Anarch of Bolas
• 1 Huatli, Warrior Poet

• Instants (5)
• 1 Boros Charm
• 1 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Naya Charm
• 1 Shake the Foundations
• 1 Swords to Plowshares

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Circuitous Route
• 1 Commune with Dinosaurs
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Savage Stomp
• 1 Thunderherd Migration

• Enchantments (6)
• 1 Colossal Majesty
• 1 Elemental Bond
• 1 Mirari's Wake
• 1 Rhythm of the Wild
• 1 Sylvan Library
• 1 Zendikar Resurgent

• Artifacts (7)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Boros Signet
• 1 Gruul Signet
• 1 Selesnya Signet
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 The Great Henge
• 1 Vanquisher's Banner

• Lands (36)
• 4 Mountain
• 4 Plains
• 9 Forest
• 1 Boros Garrison
• 1 Canopy Vista
• 1 Cinder Glade
• 1 Clifftop Retreat
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Gruul Turf
• 1 Jungle Shrine
• 1 Path of Ancestry
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Rootbound Crag
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Selesnya Sanctuary
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Sunpetal Grove
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Unclaimed Territory

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I'm a little underwhelmed - this was a little too easy if you ask me. I barely had to give anything up since so many good spells were printed in Commander sets or Conspiracy sets or some other product like that. This is a pretty basic list and doesn't have a ton of my fingerprints on it, I basically just submitted it here to show how close to a stock list a deck made under those rules would be. I think for this to be a worthy undertaking, we're going to have to be tougher on ourselves. To whit, I'm only going to allow my deck to have cards printed in the sets from the announcement. No commander decks, no sets like Conspiracy or Masters and, what the heck, no Khans fetches either because those are banned in Pioneer. This will force us to make some actual modifications to the deck, something I'm all about.

Pioneering the Land of the Lost, Take 2 | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Gishath, Sun's Avatar

• Creatures (32)
• 1 Atzocan Seer
• 1 Bellowing Aegisaur
• 1 Carnage Tyrant
• 1 Deathgorge Scavenger
• 1 Drover of the Mighty
• 1 Etali, Primal Storm
• 1 Faeburrow Elder
• 1 Forerunner of the Empire
• 1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger
• 1 Goring Ceratops
• 1 Kinjalli's Caller
• 1 Kinjalli's Sunwing
• 1 Knight of the Stampede
• 1 Marauding Raptor
• 1 Otepec Huntmaster
• 1 Polyraptor
• 1 Raging Regisaur
• 1 Raging Swordtooth
• 1 Rampaging Ferocidon
• 1 Ranging Raptors
• 1 Regisaur Alpha
• 1 Ripjaw Raptor
• 1 Runic Armasaur
• 1 Silverclad Ferocidons
• 1 Temple Altisaur
• 1 Territorial Allosaurus
• 1 Thrashing Brontodon
• 1 Thundering Spineback
• 1 Trapjaw Tyrant
• 1 Wakening Sun's Avatar
• 1 Wayward Swordtooth
• 1 Zacama, Primal Calamity

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Domri, Anarch of Bolas
• 1 Samut, the Tested

• Instants (5)
• 1 Boros Charm
• 1 Eerie Interlude
• 1 Heroic Intervention
• 1 Return of the Wildspeaker
• 1 Shake the Foundations

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Broken Bond
• 1 Circuitous Route
• 1 Cleansing Nova
• 1 Commune with Dinosaurs
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Grow From The Ashes
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Savage Stomp
• 1 Thunderherd Migration

• Enchantments (6)
• 1 Colossal Majesty
• 1 Elemental Bond
• 1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
• 1 Guardian Project
• 1 Rhythm of the Wild
• 1 Smothering Tithe

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Dowsing Dagger
• 1 Helm of the Host
• 1 Icon of Ancestry
• 1 Lifecrafter's Bestiary
• 1 Pillar of Origins
• 1 The Great Henge
• 1 The Immortal Sun
• 1 Vanquisher's Banner

• Lands (39)
• 6 Mountain
• 7 Plains
• 9 Forest
• 1 Canopy Vista
• 1 Cinder Glade
• 1 Clifftop Retreat
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Fabled Passage
• 1 Fortified Village
• 1 Game Trail
• 1 Rootbound Crag
• 1 Sacred Foundry
• 1 Scattered Groves
• 1 Sheltered Thicket
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Sunpetal Grove
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Temple of Triumph
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Unclaimed Territory

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This isn't ideal but it's pretty close and we stuck to our guns with the rules. I didn't even add cards from Throne of Eldraine that are only in the Brawl decks. And by "cards" I mean "Arcane Signet", even though I wanted to.

Speaking of mana rocks, pickings were a bit slim so I had to get kind of creative. Pillar of Insight is a card that could see more play in tribal decks like this one so I included it. I added the maximum amount of dinosaur cost-reducers and mana-producers and even added Faeburrow Elder because it's the closest thing we have to a Bloom Tender. Growing Rites of Itlimoc isn't a card I'll always use but it seemed quite good in this deck since we're eschewing staples like Signets and Sol Ring and we need the help. Without Cultivate and Kodama's Reach and Rampant Growth, I was stuck using Grow From the Ashes. Broken Bond and Wayward Swordtooth aren't really the best kind of ramp with a low land-count so if you want to lower the mana curve, there are probably some dinos that are cuttable. In general, having a smooth early game is more important than drawing a ton of dinosaurs early because we have quite a bit of card draw later in the game and some cards like Lifecrafter's Bestiary to make sure we get value from connecting with Gishath.

If you manage to get your mana going, there is a subtheme of dealing all of our creatures some damage to trigger their Enrage abilities. Most of them are quite good and if we weren't doing that, I'd like cut the very expensive dinosaurs like Silverclad Ferocidons to lower the mana curve. You can experiment with cards to ping your Enrage creatures - I added Shake the Foundations because it can kill token decks and also trigger a ton of Enrage. It even draws a card in a pinch. Fighting is out best creature removal without cards like Swords to Plowshares so make sure your Enrage creatures are the ones scrapping so you can get even more value. You can add more fight cards if you want - Huatli, Dinosaur Knight could do some work but you'd have to relax my rules about Planeswalker deck cards. If you do, feel free to also add Sun-Blessed Mount.

This deck is somewhat similar to the stock list but a lot of the choices we made seem suboptimal on paper. What you'll find, though, is that this is quite a bit more potent than a Brawl deck made from cards from that block and while you'll miss Sol Ring and Lightning Greaves, there is so much synergy here that you may ramp out of control with cost-reducers anyway. You'll draw a lot of cards once you get going so swing away and deal some damage with these meaty creatures who haven't heard the rumor that attacking with creatures is bad in Commander because it's too "fair."

What do we think? Leave me some questions or comments below and don't forget to share this on social media. Until next time!