(Pramikon, Sky Rampart | Art by Richard Wright)

Technically Playable - Pramikon, Sky Rampart

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is

Obviously Pramikon is a control deck. It's a huge body that blocks well and allows you to control who can attack you. Its colors also push you down a control route with blue giving you plenty of control magic like Counterspells and card draw, white giving you great spot removal with cards like Swords to Plowshares and Generous Gift, as well as board wipes which white is well known for. Red comes into play a little later.

You could easily go down the classic route of win conditions like Approach of the Second Sun or even planeswalkers since you can make sure that the green player to your left can't attack them. But there are much more interesting ways to build Pramikon, even with a control playstyle in mind. In this article I'm going to look at my favorite "control" deck for Pramikon.

Walls

This playstyle allows you to benefit from the naturally defensive stat lines of Walls and defenders while controlling the board and eventually turning everything into a huge threat, including Pramikon itself.

There are a lot of Walls in this game. And I mean a lot. According to Scryfall, there are 115 cards with the Wall creature type and 271 with the defender keyword. There is a lot of crossover here but if we consider anything that has defender to be a "Wall" then we have 271 cards to work with.

We could dig really deep and run your Alabaster Walls and your Angelic Walls but what we want is a core of Walls with strong effects and then build in some control cards around it.

Blasphemous Act is in 34% of all decks that can run it making it the most common red card in Commander with Chain Reaction also having a very good showing in 5% of all red decks.

To get around these kinds of effects we can use Crystal Barricade to make sure our board survives any noncombat damage, so not only the damage-based board wipes but also any Terror of the Peaks triggers or any shenanigans from cards like Brash Taunter.

We can also use our Walls to help us to cycle through our deck, like Wall of Omens, to protect us from attacking threats and even to find other Walls Shield-Wall Sentinel.

Some of the other Walls can act in a slightly more aggressive role. Wingmantle Chaplain allows the creation of a large board of fliers that can help to block incoming attackers or even to chip down your opponents or their planeswalkers.

This becomes more powerful with the addition of cards like Wall of Stolen Identity which is great for doubling up on powerful Wall effects or even locking down your opponent's creatures from tapping.

The previously mentioned Brash Taunter is also a defender, landing it squarely in "Wall" territory and making it a great addition to this deck.

Protecting Yourself

This section writes itself in a White, Blue, and Red deck. The obvious cards are absolute slam dunks with Teferi's Protection, Perch Protection, and Take the Bait all being in 29% or more of Pramikon decks. But we can also dig a little deeper.

Since we care about Toughness and Walls Fog Bank and Guard Gomazoa are both fantastic blockers that can pretty much infinitely block your opponent's creatures and with something that gives hexproof like the new Restricted Office//Lecture Hall they can only be removed by a board wipe.

Aether Membrane is another underrated Wall that protects you on the turn it blocks and then forces them to replay it that turn or wait another turn to be able to attack with it.

While not a full-on removal spell this can mess up an opponent's curve pretty severely and cause a lot of annoyance, especially when you can control the flow of combat with Pramikon. With that in mind, another way to protect yourself in this deck is to be able to replay Pramikon multiple times.

This means you can consistently control who is attacking where and keep yourself as safe as possible. Cards like Deadeye Navigator and Soulherder are really good at doing this but I've become more and more of a fan of Dour Port-Mage which both allows you to bounce your own creatures while getting some additional value out of them.

While less mana-efficient than some flicker spells or abilities the added card draw has been really good in the games I've seen it in.

You can also use the old-fashioned way of protecting yourself by removing all of your opponent's creatures. While spot removal is very good and I'd recommend having a fair few of them in your deck, Walls have the benefit of being very good with a lot of the white board wipes that care about creatures with small power.

There is of course Fell the Mighty, Slaughter the Strong, and Dusk//Dawn that are all destruction or sacrifice-based removal but by having access to red this deck can also run Solar Blaze which is another powerful option that more often than not plays like a one-sided board wipe.

Ending The Game

Ending a game of Commander can be really difficult at the best of times, but when your creatures are unable to attack without a lot of additional support, and they often have zero or one attack that makes it seem even harder.

Luckily we've had 16,791 cards printed in Pramikon, Sky Rampart's colours, and that gives us a big pool to pull from.

If you decide to go with an actual Walls deck (cards with the creature type Wall) then you can use Rolling Stones to allow all of your Walls to attack. In combination with this, you can use Rammas Echor, Ancient Shield to turn one of your Walls into a huge threat, and with the number of flying Walls you have access to such as Wall of Denial, Hover Barrier and even Pramikon itself, you can very quickly take down other players life totals.

If you want to play some better creatures and not just rely on playing a lot of bad Walls you can focus a little more on creatures with defenders or non-defenders that just have a high toughness.

Plagon, Lord of the Beach allows you to draw a lot of cards (also benefiting from flicking/bouncing) and can, for the low cost of one mana, allow a creature to deal combat damage with its toughness, turning defenders into lethal bodyguards and other creatures with a high toughness the ability to attack.

But we can't rely on just having a bunch of [ek]Kraken Hatchlings[/el] so you can get your defenders to attack with High Alert and Wakestone Gargoyle to help close out the game.

Whichever of the two decks you want to play Moonshaker Cavalry is an amazing finisher that does a very good impression of Craterhoof Behemoth, allowing you to, in combination with something like High Alert, turn all of your Walls into huge threats that can likely finish the game on the turn Moonshaker Cavalry comes into play (and if it doesn't, don't forget all of that flickering you've got for Pramikon)

Red

I said earlier that "Red comes into play a little later" but so far we've only seen a few red cards. This is now later. The biggest benefit of red in Pramikon is the huge amount of ways to force your opponents into attacking. This works perfectly with Pramikon's ability and a few ways to redirect it.

The original is Disrupt Decorum, one of the first and still one of the best ways to goad the entire board to force your opponents into hitting each other. This has been iterated on but for me, it has been perfected by Taunt from the Rampart.

One of the biggest issues with goad is that your opponents can simply agree to block in ways that are beneficial for them, the powerful part of Taunt from the Rampart is making creatures unable to block.

But it's not just our opponents that have creatures that can attack each other, this deck can also run Alexios, Deimos of Kosmos and Slicer, Hired Muscle two powerful creatures that have keywords allowing them to attack into most boards without worrying about dying.

The only issue with Alexios is that your opponents can choose to put all of the damage onto the blocking creature and not trample over, but let's hope our opponents are a little more bloodthirsty than that...

Lastly are some of what I think are two of the more underrated goad cards, Spectacular Showdown and Death Kiss. I've talked about Death Kiss before and it was something I raved about over on X but so far I've not been able to make it perform to the potential that I know it has.

Its main issue is that its goad ability is very expensive and opponents can just choose to attack you instead making it a very expensive "do nothing" unless you monstrous it. I know there is a world in which this comes into play and you use the Monstrosity ability in the same turn and basically one-shot someone but I've never seen it happen.

Spectacular Showdown is very similar in that you need your opponents to have a board when you play it, it's expensive and if it doesn't win you the game it leaves one of your opponents with a board full of double strikers.

 

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Pramikon, Sky Rampart as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Pramikon as the commander tick. Let me know in the comments below if you play Pramikon, Sky Rampart, if you want to build a Pramikon, Sky Rampart deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!