With so much control in the meta, it's time to stoke some horns. This is a Combo Midrange deck that relies on the synergies between
Flamestoker,
Dawnwalker, and
Shepherd's Horn.
Your early game is spent deploying your
Shepherd's Horns and killing small units with
Torch and
Purify until you can land a
Sandstorm Titan.
Midgame plays like regular Praxis Midrange, slinging back to back
Heart of the Vaults and Worldbearers to overload their removal, and reloading with Friendly Wisps when possible.
Shepherd's Horn helps you maintain tempo by giving you discounted threats and gaining you life to win races.
Obliterate deals with most threats and is a pretty good deal when it costs 4 and gains you 3 life. Killer Dawnwalker is also a powerful engine that wins games singlehandedly.
Lategame you'll be gaining 3 life per turn for every Horn or
Flamestoker you have. If you have Dawnwalkers around they'll trigger Horn too, gaining you truly absurd amounts of life. Xenan Obelisk should let your
Infernuses punch through large opposing units.
Good matchups: hard control decks fold to Flamestoker and have a hard time dealing with Dawnwalker.
Medium matchups: Aggro matchups are of course a coin flip. If you can deal with two of their early units and can gain 6 life off a Horn you should be in good shape. If you're on the draw you will probably lose.
Bad matchups: Midrange decks with better card quality that aren't playing useless relics will run you over before you can assemble your synergies. Anybody playing
Sabotage is also very bad news for us as it hits a good portion of our deck.
This deck was an absolute blast to play in set 2 and has a surprising range of strategies it can use. I think that this is a meta in which it can perform very well.
Do you think this deck would work in gauntlet?
Knowing gauntlet, I would say no. This deck doesn't have any kind of board clear or other way of dealing with the wide strategies that gauntlet AI tends to use. And when the AI does go tall, you might not be able to remove their units with Obliterate or Torches. That said, traditional Praxis tends to do pretty well against the Gauntlet, so you can certainly do worse than this list. And after all, the point of Gauntlet is to have fun, right?