Brewer's Corner: EDH--Pramikon, Sky Rampart
Brewer’s Corner: EDH - Pramikon, Sky Rampart
Welcome back to the Brewer’s Corner. This week we’ll be covering one of the new legendary creatures from this year’s commander pre-constructed decks, Pramikon, Sky Rampart. There’s a few reasons I chose this card. First off, it’s just hilariously political. It’s a wall, its color identity is RWU, and it has you pick a side, left or right. Secondly, it’s a great commander with relevant abilities and a low casting cost so you’re not stretched thin on mana late because of commander tax. It isn’t one you’re going to Voltron out and deal tons of commander damage with, though there’s ways to do it. It’s one that you’ll actually be playing a very political fort strategy. For those unfamiliar with the card, Pramikon is a 1/5 legendary creature-wall with flying and defender for URW. It states that when it comes into play choose left or right. Each player may attack only the opponent closest to them in that direction and planeswalkers controlled by that opponent. Today we’re going to look at ways we can use this ability to our advantage.
The first card that comes to mind with this card is Helm of the Host. Helm of the Host is a 4 mana equipment with an equip cost of 5 that says to make a token copy of the equipped creature at the beginning of combat on your turn, if the equipped creature is legendary, the token isn’t, and the token has haste. We don’t care about the haste very much as we’re not attacking with our commander anyway. We do however care about the left or right thing. The reason we care about the left or right part of its ability is that if there’s copies of pramkion and you choose left for the original one and right for the copy you’ve deadlocked anyone out of attacking, they have to remove one of them first. Once this is done you can set up a bunch of tax effects to make players pay extra to attack in general. I'll cover some of these cards later. Also this makes it a bit easier to Blood Moon your opponent out of the game. If you notice they're short on basics and mana rocks you can play a Blood Moon to keep them from casting a wrath and forcing you to reset.
There's a couple different win conditions in this combo. The first is by casting a bunch of spells and copying them. There's a bunch of good redirect and copy effects in both red and blue that you can use to either target their spells with and redirect them at their things or them. Or you can cast one of your things and copy it. With this combo you're essentially a storm deck trying to win on the back of Grapeshot or by using activated and triggered abilities of other creatures to deal damage. Another wincon here is to use something like Laboratory Maniac to try and mill yourself out. The last one with this combo is one of my favorites in a deck that can rack up counters on permanents quickly is Azor's Elocutors. The Elocutors is a super janky win condition that people tend to sleep on because they don't read all the cards if they're unsure as to what they do. There's not many ways to proliferate in Pramikon's color identity but there's enough to make it work I think. The best card to pair with the Elocutors is Inexorable Tide, which allows you to proliferate whenever you cast a spell.
Another combo in this deck that comes to mind is Fractured Identity and Fires of Invention. I talk about Fires in my top EDH cards from Throne of Eldraine article but I'll go into the combo more in depth here. Fires of Invention is an enchantment for 3R that says you can cast spells only during your turn and no more than two spells each turn. It also says that you can cast them for free so long as you have lands greater than or equal to its cmc. Fractured Identity is a sorcery for 3UW that says to exile a nonland permanent. Then it says that each player other than that permanents controller makes a copy of said permanent. How this works is by having a Fires of Invention in play and then following it up with a Fractured Identity targeting the Fires of Invention. At this point everyone else has a Fires of Invention except you. Now you can just hate each player out individually because they're limited on the number of spells they can play each turn and they can only play spells on their turn. If you're having issues against one player specifically and don't want to mess everyone up you can use Harmless Offering to give them the Fires of Invention to keep them from being able to get their combo off right away.
The Fires/Fractured Identity combo works great with Teferi, Time Raveler as well. The static ability really helps keep this combo from being countered because it makes your opponents only be able to cast spells at sorcery speed. He also can bounce something back to its owners hand the turn he comes into play. This combo however, offers no protection to you or Teferi as there's no creatures as part of it. This is where combat tax comes into play if you don't have the Pramikon/Helm of the Host combo online. Angelic Arbiter is a great one because your opponents have to choose to either try to attack or try to cast a spell. If they opt to cast a spell they can't attack and vice versa. Archangel of Tithes is another one. She makes it so they have to pay to attack as long as she's untapped and they also have to pay to block so long as she's attacking. Baird, Steward of Argive is similar in that he puts a tax on attacking you or a planeswalker you control. Blazing Archon says that creatures can't attack you. Brainwash is an enchantment that is very similar. For W you can enchant a creature and it can't attack unless its controller pays 3. There's a million different combat tax cards out there. Just choose what fits your budget and style really.
Welcome back to the Brewer’s Corner. This week we’ll be covering one of the new legendary creatures from this year’s commander pre-constructed decks, Pramikon, Sky Rampart. There’s a few reasons I chose this card. First off, it’s just hilariously political. It’s a wall, its color identity is RWU, and it has you pick a side, left or right. Secondly, it’s a great commander with relevant abilities and a low casting cost so you’re not stretched thin on mana late because of commander tax. It isn’t one you’re going to Voltron out and deal tons of commander damage with, though there’s ways to do it. It’s one that you’ll actually be playing a very political fort strategy. For those unfamiliar with the card, Pramikon is a 1/5 legendary creature-wall with flying and defender for URW. It states that when it comes into play choose left or right. Each player may attack only the opponent closest to them in that direction and planeswalkers controlled by that opponent. Today we’re going to look at ways we can use this ability to our advantage.
The first card that comes to mind with this card is Helm of the Host. Helm of the Host is a 4 mana equipment with an equip cost of 5 that says to make a token copy of the equipped creature at the beginning of combat on your turn, if the equipped creature is legendary, the token isn’t, and the token has haste. We don’t care about the haste very much as we’re not attacking with our commander anyway. We do however care about the left or right thing. The reason we care about the left or right part of its ability is that if there’s copies of pramkion and you choose left for the original one and right for the copy you’ve deadlocked anyone out of attacking, they have to remove one of them first. Once this is done you can set up a bunch of tax effects to make players pay extra to attack in general. I'll cover some of these cards later. Also this makes it a bit easier to Blood Moon your opponent out of the game. If you notice they're short on basics and mana rocks you can play a Blood Moon to keep them from casting a wrath and forcing you to reset.
There's a couple different win conditions in this combo. The first is by casting a bunch of spells and copying them. There's a bunch of good redirect and copy effects in both red and blue that you can use to either target their spells with and redirect them at their things or them. Or you can cast one of your things and copy it. With this combo you're essentially a storm deck trying to win on the back of Grapeshot or by using activated and triggered abilities of other creatures to deal damage. Another wincon here is to use something like Laboratory Maniac to try and mill yourself out. The last one with this combo is one of my favorites in a deck that can rack up counters on permanents quickly is Azor's Elocutors. The Elocutors is a super janky win condition that people tend to sleep on because they don't read all the cards if they're unsure as to what they do. There's not many ways to proliferate in Pramikon's color identity but there's enough to make it work I think. The best card to pair with the Elocutors is Inexorable Tide, which allows you to proliferate whenever you cast a spell.
Another combo in this deck that comes to mind is Fractured Identity and Fires of Invention. I talk about Fires in my top EDH cards from Throne of Eldraine article but I'll go into the combo more in depth here. Fires of Invention is an enchantment for 3R that says you can cast spells only during your turn and no more than two spells each turn. It also says that you can cast them for free so long as you have lands greater than or equal to its cmc. Fractured Identity is a sorcery for 3UW that says to exile a nonland permanent. Then it says that each player other than that permanents controller makes a copy of said permanent. How this works is by having a Fires of Invention in play and then following it up with a Fractured Identity targeting the Fires of Invention. At this point everyone else has a Fires of Invention except you. Now you can just hate each player out individually because they're limited on the number of spells they can play each turn and they can only play spells on their turn. If you're having issues against one player specifically and don't want to mess everyone up you can use Harmless Offering to give them the Fires of Invention to keep them from being able to get their combo off right away.
The Fires/Fractured Identity combo works great with Teferi, Time Raveler as well. The static ability really helps keep this combo from being countered because it makes your opponents only be able to cast spells at sorcery speed. He also can bounce something back to its owners hand the turn he comes into play. This combo however, offers no protection to you or Teferi as there's no creatures as part of it. This is where combat tax comes into play if you don't have the Pramikon/Helm of the Host combo online. Angelic Arbiter is a great one because your opponents have to choose to either try to attack or try to cast a spell. If they opt to cast a spell they can't attack and vice versa. Archangel of Tithes is another one. She makes it so they have to pay to attack as long as she's untapped and they also have to pay to block so long as she's attacking. Baird, Steward of Argive is similar in that he puts a tax on attacking you or a planeswalker you control. Blazing Archon says that creatures can't attack you. Brainwash is an enchantment that is very similar. For W you can enchant a creature and it can't attack unless its controller pays 3. There's a million different combat tax cards out there. Just choose what fits your budget and style really.
This combo is more attack friendly than the Helm of the Host one as it only taxes your opponents attacks and/or blocks. Pramikon is a pretty straight forward build as it looks to do one main thing, prevent your opponents from attacking you. As I pointed out there's some odd-ball win conditions that can be included if you choose to find room for them. Being in white helps with protection of pretty much all of your pieces as there's things that give your creatures hexproof, give you hexproof, protection from colors, etc. Let me know what you've come up with to use and abuse Pramikon's directional attack ability to your advantage. Or are you playing it in the 99? Either way, have fun and happy brewing.
Comments
Post a Comment