Edhrec: Top 5 Card Combos

Why Edhrec Card Combos are important

hello and welcome to the edhrec, my name is joey schultz and i'm joined as always by my fantastic co-host. first up he's the guy who goes to infinity and beyond it's matt morgan. last week we got one from zenika rising already so straight into my veins i managed to survive five whole days with no new cards.

So it was tough but i got through it this is the edhrec cast, edhrec is the best deck building resource on the web for the commander format compiling data from deck lists all over the internet to provide helpful recommendations for new commander decks. today we're going to talk about the most popular combos in edhrec.

that is right we've actually got a new feature to help folks out if they are looking for combos in the commander format. we can let you know what the most popular combos are among all of the different possibilities in commander.

if you want to get some of cards that we're going to talk about today maybe go infinite uh to infinity and beyond or you just want to flat out win the game and deal all the damage you can get all these cards and more at tcgplayer.com and cardkingdom.com.

just click on the price links on edhrec that'll take you right to your website of source and also if you've you know gotten a little salty maybe playing all these cards and need to buy list them back both tcg player and card kingdom have amazing buy less prices as well so both of our great sponsors tcgplayer.com and cardkingdom.com.

now let's get to our main topic the most popular combos in the commander format. eva track has a new feature that will help you navigate all of those. you can find it at idiatrack.com combos and it will show you all of these combos broken down by color combination a whole bunch of stuff there to help you find the combos that exist in the commander format.

yeah we have to give a huge thanks here to commander spellbook a commander combo database they collected over 3000 combos for us to use in this new feature. you'd find them at www.commander.com they provided a huge encyclopedic version of it. basically and then what we did is took all of those combos that they had come up with and actually looked through the data to see which ones actually show up in decks so that's what this feature is here to help out to show you how popular those different combos actually are on the page.

the combos are sort of broken down and assembled by color combination so for example if a combo contains a blue card and an artifact card that will show up under the mono blue combo section even though that combo can most likely be played in like any deck that contains blue but if you are looking for specific combos that way that's how you can find them broken down by those different color combinations.

once you find a combo, this is the really cool part. this is what i really like when you find a combo you can click on that combo that collection of cards there and it will take you to another page and on that page it will have a description of how the combo works a small step-by-step guide that shows you that you do this action then take the next action and then this next action and boom your result is you've produced infinite mana or you've produced infinite damage in this way.

so there is also a description of each of these combos not just the card images which i think is really great but then it goes one step further too. after you're looking at a combo page you can then click on a specific card within that combo.

it will take you to that cards combo page to show you all of the combos that that card is a part of so it's very comprehensive thank you guys again uh at the commander spellbook you did an awesome job with this.

Combo No. 5

let's get started and take a look at those the combos that show up in the greatest number of decks let's start off with number five so number five we've identified in over 4700 decks and that is going to be the combo of basalt monolith and rings of brighthearth.

now this one is an infinite mana combo where you tap basalt monolith to add three mana to your mana pool and then use rings of brightheart's ability .

So whenever there's an activated ability you may pay two mana and if you do you copy that ability so you tap basalt monolith for three mana use two of that mana to copy the ability then use three of that mana to untap basalt monolith and then you repeat the process all over again it's a little tricky and the timing is kind of weird but it's actually a really easy way with just artifacts that just can go into any deck to generate infinite mana.

it's a pretty powerful combo and we actually see it quite a bit showing up in urza lord high artificer one of those very salty commanders that typically will do a lot of crazy things with artifacts sounds like um well you know i was about out of habit i was about to say it sounds like a lot of fun but let's be real that actually sounds.

really deadly i'm not sure i want to see that across the table well one thing that's interesting too is um with double masters it just came out we got a basalt monolith 3 print but we also got the first foil basalt monolith and and you can generate even like by it being foil it's an even better combo generates extra mana.

people don't know that but it absolutely works that way that that is i have heard that rumor dana that actually yeah foils do add a quarter mana more it's it's an un un mana type of addition.

Combo No. 4

let's move to the number four combo the next most popular this is the combo of kikijiki mirror breaker and zealous conscripts kikijiki. ofcourse this is the awesome goblin that can tap to create a copy of a non-legendary creature that you control and that will have haste.

then the card zealous conscripts is a really fun card that when it enters the battlefield you can gain control of a creature and untap it and it gains haze so when you make a copy of the zealous conscripts. you can then untap the kikijiki for kikijiki to make another copy of it to then untap and then make another copy and then untap and make another copy and they all have haste.

the kikijiki and the splinter twins of the world are really famous combos in uh formats like modern or at least they were before they got banned sorry modern players i didn't mean to run salt in the wound there. but this is a well-known combo and it shows up in over 5400 decks out there ,definitely um a really spicy one.

if you ever encounter that in the wild against any red decks well and one thing nice about this combo and i guess this is true of most of the ones that are really popular. we're going to talk about both the cards involved in the combo are quite good on their own you don't need to feel like you're running a dead card on your deck.

just to hope you hit the combo kikijiki is a great card dell's conscripts is a great card you can feel just fine playing them on their own and you have to have the combo then you you know win the game but they're really really useful even apart and that's true of most of their cards we're going to talk about for these really popular combos.

yeah that's a really really good observation the and especially here um one commander that might illustrate that i think really well the most popular commander that runs this combo in the 99.

you know because kikiji is legendary creature you can absolutely run zealous conscripts in the 99 and have this as a specifically combo deck that uses your commander but if you're looking just for within the 99, the commander that runs these cards in the 99 .

most commonly is grenzo dungeon warden who can get these creatures into play for free using his activated ability and those are just both really good creatures that a grenzo deck would want to run because they have low power and really powerful effects that can steal creatures from other players and make good copies of good creatures.

so yeah absolutely these are really powerful just in the context of grenzo deck and they also happen to go infinite. yeah i was gonna i was going to take a gander actually that this might be a little bit higher just because if you're putting a combo piece in the command zone kind of like we talked about with engines and in wind conditions.

if you have one of those in the command zone typically you don't need a lot of support around it. so i would have thought kikijiki just being legendary we probably would have ended up with a little more decks with zelda's conscripts around gotcha.

Combo No. 3

let's move now to our number three what is the next most common combo that we see in commander that was a lot of alliteration there do you know what do we got our next most popular combo here is exquisite blood and the sanguine bond in roughly 7400 decks.

they're both enchantments both black so it's easy to run them both this was a blood reads whenever an opponent loses life you gain that much life again that's a card that's just quite good all on its own sanguine bond is kind of the inverse of that whenever you gain life target opponent loses that much life.

so if both of those are in play and an opponent loses life you gain life which causes an opponent to lose life. basically once you have those in play you need to get a trigger of either someone losing life or you gaining life and it just goes infinite and kills everybody uh it's a very simple combo using two cards that are very popular and work well on their own.

you can't play a life game deck without these cards and they also like even if they didn't combo i feel like i would want to play these cards in a life game deck. i mean i exclusive blood sat at like 20-ish dollars for a long time.

so i would guess that's probably one of the barriers there it's just that one half of the combo is expensive but yeah i was actually would have guessed this was number one yeah well and there's also the new commander vito thorn of the dusk rose who does sort of a similar ability to this because he also has an ability where whenever you gain life an opponent will lose that much life.

so there are a lot of different interchangeable pieces to this one as well there's veto. there's also i think the card vizcopa guildmage has a similar ability that can give you something like this for the turn.

so there are just so many different ways that you can pull off a combo like this that don't have as big of pieces it's a very classic combo even when you're using different cards for it and i'll quick share an anecdotal story about this combo.

i was in a game one time where someone dropped this combo and didn't have a have a way on board to deal damage or gain life but but myself and the other person so it was a down to a three-player game both had manic crypts in play and we both won the coin flip two turns in a row and we're able to take him out of the game that is impressive and lucky yeah it was no skill on anyone's part at all but it was.

it was hilarious well that explains how you win games of commander then dana no skill involved at all that was a bad that just makes me sound really mean i'm just salty about you uh beating me consistently on our stream.

Combo No. 2

okay let's just move on to the number two combo well so we talked about this exquisite blood and sanguine bond combo we probably thought there would be more this is one that i haven't seen in ages and ages and that is going to be the deadeye navigator and peregrine drake combo.

so dead eye navigator is the six mana spirit that has soul bond when it comes to the battlefield. you bind it. i guess, with another creature and then you can pay one in a blue to flicker the creature that is soul bound.

so peregrine drake happens to be a another five mana two three uh drake and when is when it enters the battlefield you untap five lands so this just uses two mana to flicker perrigan drake peregrine drake comes back in you untap five lands then you tap all those lands to float mana.

use two of it again to flicker peregrine drake untap those five lanes again and you just go crazy from there it's another one of those it's basically how blue ramps you either do it. very very slowly or you go crazy and go infinite .

so this is a combo that we're seeing actually quite a bit um 8300 decks are still running the deadeye navigator and peregrine drake combo and there's going to be some heavy hitters you know yarok the desecrated loves enter the battlefield triggers so of course that's going in there but brago king eternal also has quite a bit of this combo in there and we're actually seeing any as the gale force the the flying tribal commander from jumpstart is playing it in over 10 of the deck so far so it's even new decks that are getting built are playing this combo.

when deadeye navigator was considered to just be a menace of the commander format but i think you're absolutely right it has been ages since i've seen it.

i think the last time that i saw it was when i was trying to build a rune of the hidden realm deck to be perfectly frank um yeah i just remembered this being a really really famous one but it has also really dropped off the map.

Combo No. 1

so it's interesting to see that its popularity has definitely maintained itself. it's one of those weird things too i don't think it dropped off because it's no longer powerful people i don't think i got bored of it or or what the situation was but yeah it's been years probably something that i navigator in the deck.

one thing i will note here is this is true of quite a few of these combos but especially this one there are a lot of variants on this that urza's set where peregrine drake came from there's multiple other blue creatures that do the same thing a great whale palincron.

this is just probably the most efficient way to do it. peregrine drake is a relatively cheap card to cast compared to the other two it's relatively cheap to buy compared to the other two.

so this was just kind of the most efficient version of that comp but there's a bunch of different branches you can use this is what you want to do. yeah absolutely yeah perrigan drake being literally pennies on the dollar compared to palincron probably helps with its popularity quite a bit yup well and correct me if i'm wrong but wasn't peregrine drake also at one point