Do you like goldfishing and playing solitaire? Do I have the deck for you!
What is Praxis combo?:
Praxis combo (or rebuild combo) uses its namesake card to ramp using a ton of fire influence. And ramp big. Once you ramp with all the excess mana, you knock out your opponent with some obscene power sink burn card dealing a ton of damage to them in one turn. Even without the finishers in your opener, rebuild gives you a ton of mana to quickly churn through your deck with card draw spells and find said finishers.
The pieces:
Most of the units in our deck either give us fire influence (ramping us) or replace themselves in some way to dig deeper in our deck. With those units are a suite of card draw spells to find our rebuilds and finishers. Big shoutout to
Deeptrail Vanguard. This card allows us to rebuy Rebuilds from the void and combo easier in case we brick the first time or find the necessary power for lethal.
Finishers:
Our main finisher is
Pyrotech Explosion. This card requires the least power to lethal at needing 18 power for 32 damage (or kicked 3 times). It also pierces face aegis which is basically free for any primal based deck. Def the best finisher, but be wary of the niche counterspell.
Solfire: Solfire is also quite a good finisher, but is more mana hungry. You need 27 power to deal 27 damage. Usually you'll need a double rebuild or Deeptrail Vanguard buyback to achieve this easily. The upside is that this beats counterspells, face aegis (for more power at 30) and can emergency kill enemy boards if you brick terribly and can't lethal.
Other finisher options include:
Detonation Cannon: This beats counterspells, but loses to face aegis. It requires 23 mana to deal 28. The less mana means it might be worth it over Solfire, but face aegis completely bricking your finisher is pretty bad.
Tongue Lasher: I've seen some versions run this card but I don't recc it. It loses to face aegis, requires prob the most mana at whatever your opponents deck size is at the time and requires a primal splash. It's also extremely BM to have both of you watch each card get milled 1 by 1 :p
Kairos, Grand Champion: Old versions used to run this as the finisher of choice, but he's kinda outclassed now. The light unit count in our deck and their wimpy size means he's not burning your opponent out or drawing a lot of cards. I have him in the market, but even then I think I grabbed him once in about 30 games.
The market:
Excavate: Basically just to buyback rebuilds from the void.
Purify: This is emergency removal against hate cards that stop us. Hate cards to watch out for will be discussed below.
Arcane Restraint Basically just secret tech for the mirror.
Nahid's Distillation: More card draw. Not sure how useful this is. I've grabbed it once.
Kairos, Grand Champion: As said above, this is kind of a finisher. I've been disappointed in him however. He might be better as relic hate like
Unmake
I also believe having no market at all might be a decent call as you streamline the deck and make it faster. However, you're basically defenseless against hate cards.
Hate cards or screw this deck, how do I beat it?
Combrei Lawmage: By far our #1 enemy. This single handily shuts our deck down. You must use lure away or purify to kill this guy on sight.
Void Hate: I.E. cards like
Katra, The First Seal,
Adjudicator's Gavel,
Kickflip Monk: These cards are also rough, but not unbeatable like lawmage. They often require double rebuilds from hand to beat through. Often these are worth taking care of, especially if you have Deeptrail Vanguard.
Arcane Restraint: Literally unbeatable for this version of the deck (why relic removal might be nice in the market), but no one runs it so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯,
Onoris Roa and
Authoritarian Creation: Also extremely rough cards, but no one plays them.
Hand discard: I.E.
Exploit or
Ziat, Steelwarren Reeve: These are rough, but the new promo Tight-Lipped helps a lot against these effects and protects us. A tip for those playing against this deck is to often snipe card draw or a finisher over rebuild if you see both in the hand. Rebuild needs draw or it's finisher.
Grand Suppressor and
Deans' Chamber: These can be problematic if they come down early since they hurt your fire influence gain. If they come down late though or not backed up with pressure, you can often just ignore them.
Matchups:
Kira: Kira is problematic due to having our arch-nemesis Combrei lawmage maindeck. Otherwise, we often are faster than Kira and they can't interact with us other than him.
Xenan Reanimator/Dredge: Grouping these together for the most part. We're faster than them on average. Just watch out for smelly Katra.
Midrange soup decks, I.E, Creation midrange or Kerendon midrange: Easy for the most part as they often are slow to apply pressure and get setup. Be careful of shadow based decks with discard cards though.
Ramp decks, I.E Combrei equalize/ramp: Prob our better matchup. They have no pressure and often do nothing for a while. Be careful of
Equalize shredding your hand or
Builder's Decree locking your cards however.
Control decks, I.E Hooru Control or At Any Cost combo: Often these require a careful dance since they might be running counterspells if they are primal based. Usually you have the advantage as you have inevitability and they have dead removal most of the time. Always go for it if they are tapped out.
Aggro decks, I.E Mono Fire, Skycrag, Stonescar, PS rat spear: Easily our worse matchup and sometimes being on the draw means it's lights out. Aggressively trade your units for theirs and hope for something like double rebuild with card draw to eek out victories.
Trail Scourge in the market might be worth consideration to deal with aggro decks possibly.
With so few hate cards compared to MTG, and now main-deckable 2-for-1's that break discard, this uninteractive goldfish pile can simply play more of its cheap recurrable removal to kill the narrow hate-bears against it. Not to mention a ton of blockers and lifegain to stall creature decks.
Half the market options are narrow, too slow, and useless in other matchups.
Why is there a version of seething song that you can play for free over and over again that also gains life? I simply don't know. Here's to hoping I don't play against this boring, 10-minute-solitaire eggs deck very much.
This is not the type of deck I came to Eternal to play against, without being armed with Force of Will, Thalia, Mana Denial etc...