Magic: The Gathering has an absurd number of playable cards, especially in Commander. In fact, there are over 30,000 cards legal in Commander alone. That’s way too many options for even the most astute MTG players to keep track of. For better or worse, this can cause some interesting Commander options to be forgotten and overlooked.
Bramble Sovereign, a cheap $2 card that can empower any green creature-focused Commander deck, is yet another example of this. Despite the card seeing little play in Commander, the Battle for Baldur’s Gate powerhouse has a lot of tricks that you can take advantage of.
Bramble Sovereign
For four mana, Bramble Sovereign offers an average-looking creature with a very powerful ability. Copying any creature that enters play for two mana is an absolute steal, especially considering that many MTG players will play spell versions of this effect already. So long as you have the mana to copy your creatures as they enter play, Bramble Sovereign offers an incredible amount of value. You can even copy your opponent’s creatures to try and gain some political favor with them, or to build up a board state that takes pressure off of Bramble Sovereign itself.
While Bramble Sovereign excels in any deck that can consistently use its effect, the creature is a bit better in a few specific themes. Blink decks, for example, are primed to take advantage of Bramble Sovereign’s enters trigger. Not only are Blink decks incentivized to play powerful enters effects, which Bramble Sovereign can effectively double, but flicker effects like Ephemerate can cause Bramble Sovereign to trigger multiple times on one card. Sweetening the deal further, Sovereign combos particularly well with popular Blink creatures that use alternate casting costs like Solitude and Quantum Riddler. In Riddler’s case, if your hand count is low, you can draw four cards and acquire a 4/6 flying body for just four mana, which is a steal.
Bramble Sovereign also plays well with cards that can enter as a copy of it. Sovereign may not trigger on tokens, but that won’t stop the card from recognizing the likes of Clever Impersonator and Sakashima, the Imposter. This interaction can allow you to start making token copies of Bramble Sovereign, essentially making multiple copies of creatures that you play in future turns, so long as you can pay the mana.
Perhaps the most unhinged use of Bramble Sovereign occurs when you want to copy gifts that you’re giving to your opponents. The Beamtown Bullies excels at giving your opponent creatures with disastrous downsides, forcing them to swing at other players. Making a copy of a gifted Inverter of Truth, for example, will essentially turn your opponent’s graveyard into their deck twice, emptying their library.
Despite all of these uses, Bramble Sovereign sees very little play in Commander at the time of writing. According to EDHREC, only 0.81% of Commander decks are trying to use the card, which seems quite low for a card as widely applicable as this one.
Best Bramble Sovereign Commanders
While there are a lot of ways to do cool things with Bramble Sovereign, the best Commanders for the Dryad directly amplify the efficiency of its triggered ability. Effects that improve Bramble Sovereign’s token capabilities, for example, can easily use the Dryad to snowball the game in your favor. Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice and Adrix and Nev, Twincasters are two powerful examples of this. Trostani can store a lot of life from Sovereign’s triggers before Populating the tokens it makes, while Adrix and Nev is a Parallel Lives on a stick, copying any token created under your control. In a similar vein, Ghired, Mirror of the Wilds can use its own abilities to create more copies of the tokens that Bramble Sovereign starts, creating a massive exponential amount of value.
Commanders with valuable Panharmonicon-esque effects also work extremely well with Bramble Sovereign. Yarok, the Desecrated, for example, will not only copy Bramble Sovereign’s effect when something enters play, but it can also copy the effects of whatever Bramble Sovereign is copying. This can similarly work well with Blink cards, but Yarok can also double the effects of any other cards that trigger when Bramble Sovereign’s copies enter, making the card a lot more powerful than normal.
A Bargain Deal
Honestly, we’re shocked to see that Bramble Sovereign is only worth $2. Other effects that create temporary copies of creatures, like Molten Duplication, are worth $10 at their cheapest despite the token dying at the end of the turn. It’s not like this card has been reprinted to oblivion, either. Besides its original printing in Battlebond, Bramble Sovereign has only seen one printing in Battle for Baldur’s Gate as a Mythic Rare.
All of that said, the biggest downside to Bramble Sovereign is the amount of mana you need to use it. You need to be able to pay for your creature and an extra two mana, outside of Blinking it, which can be a difficult ask in some situations. Either way, even with this restriction, Bramble Sovereign seems like a decent addition to many Commander decks.
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