Super excited that I've finally built a $30 commander deck to go up against my friends with!
Commander is Pramikon, Sky Rampart, and the theme is forcing attacks/pillow fort/politics.
Decklist here, and I also want to highlight some things that I can't wait to cast, but first I want to preface this with how this kind of thing came to be.
So, as a part of the regular Magic: the Gathering club at my school, I play a lot of commander. Now, with the nature of commander, power level varies a whole heck of a lot. You can't put a cobbled deck made from commons and uncommons, a precon, and a cEDH deck together in the same pod. It's going to suck getting stomped on, and it's going to suck stomping (if you're not a bully). So to remedy that, one of the people at the club decided to start making $20 decks. It hadn't really caught on with most of the club, and even today it's evolution (we bumped up the price, sue us) is pretty limited to me and my suitemates, but it's a way of making sure that the power of decks is significant in a way that doesn't screw people over. It's also worth mentioning that this isn't really $30 dollar commander, because we exclude the price of the commander as well as the price of basics, as well as using the lowest price for the card (on moxfield). Because of this, it's really easy to come up with a first draft of a deck, since you have $30 for roughly 64 cards (presuming you run 35 basics) and each card has to be around 47 cents.
But with that, let's go to some of the cards in the decklist!
First is Time Wipe, this 2-color five mana board wipe is a bit of an investment, but considering you're able to keep your commander from going back to the command zone, I'd say that it's worth it.
Second is Wall of Stolen Art Identity, usually a pretty decent way to try and copy a player's creature for yourself while keeping the original down, but if you copy Pramikon and choose the opposite direction, players can't swing with anything, and keeping the board locked turn 6 is very fine with me considering Approach of the Second Sun and Azor's Elocutors are also slotted in.
Finally we have Trove of Temptation, which is a card that I've been wanting to try and put in ever since I got it. I love it, but it's unfortunately a terrible card in commander, what with having three people attacking you instead of one. However, paired with Pramikon, you lower the number of swinging player's back down to one, or potentially less if your have enough Propaganda-style effects or the aforementioned Wall of Stolen Identity.
All in all, I can't wait to start playing with this, and hopefully my one suitemate's Negan doesn't enter with me in the crosshairs too often, haha!