Budget Commander: Ramos Lucky Charms | $60
Hey friends, welcome back to Budget Commander! Today we're revisiting one of my favorite budget brews, Ramos, Dragon Engine Lucky Charms! There's a ton of sweet upgrades for the deck that we got fairly recently in Dominaria United that has sparked my interest in bringing this powerhouse back in 2023, so let's check it out!
They're Magically Delicious!
Lucky Charms is a cute little archetype that leans heavily on the Charm cards, modal instants with "charm" in the name that pop up throughout Magic's history: these cards range from trash (Ivory Charm) to very good (Boros Charm) in Commander. Since all of these are modal spells with a huge variety of abilities, decks that load up on them become the swiss army knife version of a Control deck: you probably have an answer to any given situation in your hand, even if that answer isn't the best!
I've been running Lucky Charms for many years now to great success (you can see me play it here, here, and here last year), coming back to update my list whenever there's a new "multicolor matters" set release. While many Lucky Charm Purists will run every single Charm card printed and leave it at that, my build focuses only on the best multicolor Charms and counts all modal instants as honorary "charms" too (e.g. Brokers Confluence), cutting the weaker monocolor Charms and baking a "Multicolor Matters" subtheme into the deck. The reason for this is because of our commander: Ramos, Dragon Engine rewards us heavily for casting multicolor spells, providing us both tons of ramp and an excellent lethal flying finisher to reliably take out opponents. With Ramos leading the charge, our silly Lucky Charms deck becomes a truly feared threat at the table!
Since all our Charms are instants, we can run a ton of instant/spellslinger payoff cards: Archmage Emeritus and Whirlwind of Thought draw us cards, Storm-Kiln Artist and Wilderness Reclamation provide us with huge mana boosts, and Melek, Izzet Paragon and Double Vision copy our spells!
And since most of our spells are multicolor, we can run some super cool multicolor payoffs, making beefy tokens with General Ferrous Rokiric, zapping creatures with Mana Cannons, and making treasure with Widespread Thieving!
Once Ramos enters the battlefield, our goal shifts from playing Control to protecting our commander and ending the game. Ramos provides the deck with so much mana that we can dump it into huge haymakers like Primeval Spawn, Meeting of the Five, or a huge Epic Experiment! And he grows so huge that you don't need many swings to take out all opponents!
And that's the deck! We play Control for the beginning of the game, stick Ramos, and then win the game!
$60 List
The $60 brew has everything you need: all the best multicolor payoffs are here, a solid manabase that's also cheap, and ramp to ramp out Ramos and win!
One question that pops up is whether or not you should run Jegantha, the Wellspring as your companion: the deck almost meets Jegantha's requirements already, so it doesn't take much swaps to add this companion. The upside here is that you start the game with essentially an extra card in your hand (you have to pay 3 mana to put it there) and Jegantha is explosive ramp. The downside is that you need to cut some sweet cards in the deck to make it happen, like Double Vision.
Ultimately whether or not you run Jegantha is purely up to personal preference. I don't think there's much difference here in overall power level. Here's how I would make the deck with a Jegantha companion:
Further Upgrades
There honestly isn't many interesting cards left to add to the deck in my opinion, just the boring manabase stuff to make it more consistent:
- Mana Confluence, City of Brass are the two best lands
- All 10 fetchlands and at least 5 triomes in my opinion are ideal
- Nature's Lore and Three Visits once you've added more Forest duals
- The only non-mana card that I'd really want to add is Farewell, as the deck wants more board wipes than usual and that's simply the best wipe out there
That's All, Folks!
I feel obligated to brew some Phyrexia: All Will Be One commanders, but as much as I love the set both in limited and for sweet pickups in the 99, nothing excites me much as a commander so far. I'll keep mulling it over though. Thanks for reading!
