Raining Cats and Dogs Secret Lair Commander deck guide

Twenty-four of this deck’s 35 creatures are Cats. Six are Dogs, and one of those six is the commander. For a hundred-card box called Raining Cats and Dogs that looks like an oversight, and the card that squares it is already in the list, filed under artifacts.

Why the Dog half of the commander barely fires

Rin and Seri, Inseparable has two triggers pointing in opposite directions. Cast a Cat spell and you get a 1/1 white Dog token. Cast a Dog spell and you get a 1/1 green Cat token. Neither costs anything extra. You just have to cast the spells.

The box casts one of them far more often than the other. Counting the changelings, which I’ll come back to, 29 spells in this deck are Cat spells and 11 are Dog spells. A normal game with the stock list produces a pile of white Dog tokens and a handful of green Cats.

The anthems point the other way. King of the Pride gives other Cats +2/+1. Regal Caracal gives other Cats +1/+1 and lifelink. Feline Sovereign gives other Cats +1/+1 and protection from Dogs. Pack Leader is the only lord in the box that touches a Dog, and it is a two-mana 2/2 handing out +1/+1.

So the three largest anthems sit on the type this deck makes least of, and Feline Sovereign gives your Cats protection from the tokens your own commander keeps producing. That last one costs nothing at a real table, since your creatures never fight each other. It is just a good measure of how little the two halves were reconciled.

One thing is aimed correctly, and it is the part most people skip. Rin and Seri’s activated ability deals damage equal to the number of Dogs you control and gains life equal to the number of Cats. The damage scales on Dogs, which is exactly what casting Cats makes. Put Basilisk Collar on her and that ping has deathtouch, turning three mana and a tap into repeatable removal for anything on the board.

Maskwood Nexus is the card that makes the name true

Five creatures in the deck are Shapeshifters and every one has changeling: Mirror Entity, Taurean Mauler, Masked Vandal, Realmwalker and Bloodline Pretender. Crib Swap, the removal spell, is a changeling as well. Changeling means every creature type in every zone, so each of those six spells is a Cat spell and a Dog spell. Cast one with the commander out and both triggers go on the stack: one Cat, one Dog, off a single card.

Six cards out of a hundred is a rounding error. Maskwood Nexus is not. For four mana it makes every creature you control, every creature spell you control and every creature card you own every creature type at once, which promotes all 35 creatures in the deck into that six-card effect. From the turn it resolves, every creature you cast makes both tokens.

Anointed Procession doubles whatever comes out of that. With both on the battlefield a single creature spell is four tokens. Add Impact Tremors, a two-drop already in the box, and casting one Cat is four damage to each opponent before the tokens have done anything at all.

That chain is the deck’s ceiling and the box ships one copy of each link. Maskwood Nexus is the piece to protect.

What to name on Herald's Horn, and why Jinnie Fay changes the answer

Four cards make you choose a creature type: Herald's Horn, Realmwalker, Bloodline Pretender and Vanquisher's Banner.

Name Cat. With the changelings counted, 29 of the 35 creatures are Cats against 11 Dogs, so Cat wins on all four by a wide margin. Realmwalker and Bloodline Pretender are changelings themselves, so they are the chosen type whatever you pick.

Naming Cat does have a cost. Vanquisher's Banner gives the chosen type +1/+1, and the tokens your commander produces most often are Dogs, so the Banner misses the widest part of your board.

Jinnie Fay, Jetmir's Second is the answer, and she is the least typal-looking card in the box: an Elf Druid, the only one of the 35 creatures that is neither a Cat nor a Dog. Her replacement effect turns any token you would create into a 2/2 green Cat with haste or a 3/1 green Dog with vigilance, chosen one event at a time. With her on the battlefield those 1/1 white Dogs arrive as 2/2 hasty Cats instead, and King of the Pride, Regal Caracal, Feline Sovereign and a Cat-named Vanquisher's Banner all reach them.

A two-type commander pays a small dividend here too. Path of Ancestry scries off 34 of the deck’s 35 creatures, since Rin and Seri is a Dog and a Cat and everything else in the box is one, the other or both. Jinnie Fay is the only miss.

One board wipe, and six lands that always enter tapped

Card draw is the thin spot. Seven sources sits at the bottom of the eight-to-twelve band a Commander deck normally wants, and the best of them is Skullclamp, which is close to perfect here: equip a 1/1 token, it dies, you draw two. Keeper of Fables and Tocasia's Welcome are the other two that scale with the token plan.

Sweepers are thinner still. Dusk // Dawn is the only one, and it is built for this board. The front half destroys everything with power 3 or greater and leaves your 1/1 tokens standing; the back half buys the small creatures back later from the graveyard. Ramp is healthier than the mana rock count suggests, because half of it is land searches: Nature's Lore, Three Visits, Farseek and Cultivate alongside Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, Cursed Mirror and Greater Tanuki.

The mana base is 38 lands with 22 basics, a sensible split, and then it gives some of that back. Six lands always enter tapped, including all three cycling duals and Jetmir's Garden. Seven more are conditional, and with 22 basics in the deck those are close to free.

The pip math is where it bites. Green has 21 sources for six spells that want two green by turn three, which lands at 61% on the play. White is in the same shape: 21 sources for seven double-white cards. That is the honest answer to why this deck sometimes sits on a hand it cannot cast. It is not the land count, it is the colours. Average mana value is 3.46 and twenty cards cost exactly three, so turn three carries more weight here than the curve alone suggests.

Nothing in the box is a Game Changer and nothing attacks anyone’s lands, so the deck sets no bracket floor of its own. It plays where a precon plays.

Twenty-two of the 27 Secret Lair printings are basic lands

A Secret Lair Commander deck is not a hundred Secret Lair cards, and the split decides what you are buying. Twenty-seven of these hundred carry a Secret Lair set code. Five are spells: Rin and Seri, Jetmir, Nexus of Revels, Jinnie Fay, Anointed Procession and Sol Ring, all reversible double-faced foils. The other 22 are basic lands, ten Plains, seven Forest and five Mountain.

The remaining 73 cards are Planeswalker-stamped reprints from The List. Scarcer than an ordinary copy, and nothing like a one-off foil.

The five spells carry the exclusive value. As of September 2026 the Anointed Procession is $79.83, the Sol Ring $70.64, Rin and Seri $47.52, Jetmir $33.20 and Jinnie Fay $18.84. The 22 foil basics come to roughly $133 between them, at $5 to $8 a card. On the stamped side the standouts are Lurking Predators near $21, Jetmir's Garden near $19 and Three Visits at $10.

No single card runs away with it. The Anointed Procession is 13.5% of the deck’s value and the top five together are 42.9%, so anyone hoping to crack the box for one card will not find one.

The cheap version of this deck still costs more than the box did

Price the same hundred names in their cheapest paper printings and you get $337.85. That is 2.25× the $149.99 sale price, and the second-dearest rebuild among the seven Secret Lair Commander decks, behind only Heads I Win, Tails You Lose at $361.25.

Set the two totals against each other and the box printings are worth 1.75× the cheapest printings of the same cards, which is exactly the median of the seven. The markup is ordinary. The card list under it is not, and one card explains most of that: the cheapest paper Anointed Procession you can buy anywhere is $59.29, because it has four paper printings and none of them are cheap. Giving up the reversible foil saves about $20, not $70.

Everything else that makes the deck work is inexpensive. Maskwood Nexus, the card this list is quietly built around, is $1.48. Impact Tremors is $2.62, Three Visits $5.72, Skullclamp $5.84. Buying the good half of this deck outside the box is a twenty-dollar exercise and it plays identically.

Chase the sealed deck or the five foils if you want the printings, and expect a secondary-market price, because Wizards sold this one directly through the Secret Lair store in a limited window and has not offered it since. Buy ordinary frames if you want the deck. It is worth playing either way, and it needs nothing the box didn’t already give you.

The decklist

The hundred cards as they shipped, in the printings the box used. Hover any name to see the card and what it costs today.

Load into the deck builder Copy decklist

“Load into the deck builder” opens this list in your account, pinned to the printings the box shipped, ready to edit or save. “Copy decklist” gives you plain text for Moxfield, Archidekt or Arena — no account needed.

FAQ

Should Rin and Seri name Cat or Dog?

Cat, on all four cards that ask. Counting the five changelings, 29 of the deck's 35 creatures are Cats and 11 are Dogs. The catch is that Vanquisher's Banner then misses the 1/1 Dog tokens the commander makes most often, which is the gap Jinnie Fay, Jetmir's Second fills by turning those tokens into Cats.

Does Maskwood Nexus make the commander trigger twice?

Yes. Maskwood Nexus makes every creature spell you control every creature type, so each one is both a Cat spell and a Dog spell and both of Rin and Seri's triggers go on the stack. Without it only the five changeling creatures and Crib Swap do that.

How much of the deck's value is in the Secret Lair printings?

Twenty-seven of the hundred cards carry a Secret Lair set code, and 22 of those are basic lands. The five spells — Anointed Procession, Sol Ring, Rin and Seri, Jetmir, Nexus of Revels and Jinnie Fay, Jetmir's Second — hold most of the exclusive value, about $250 of it as of September 2026 against a whole-deck total of $589.75.

Can I still buy the sealed deck?

Not from Wizards. It sold through the Secret Lair store in a limited window from January 2024 and has not been offered since, so any sealed copy today is secondary-market and priced accordingly.

Are the foil basic lands worth anything on their own?

Individually, $5 to $8 each as of September 2026 — the Forest is the dearest of the three. Together the 22 of them are worth about $133, which is a real slice of the box but spread across twenty-two cards nobody buys one at a time.

What does this deck do badly out of the box?

Two things. Card draw is seven sources, at the bottom of the normal range, and there is exactly one board wipe. The other is colour: 21 green sources for six spells that want two green by turn three works out at 61% on the play, and white is in the same position.