This article is part of my ongoing series covering the best combos for each of the ten three-color combinations in Magic. If you read the Temur article, you may be wondering how I might deal with some of the overlapping combo types. In general, I wanted this series to mostly focus on combo types that were somewhat unique to the color combination in question, and I think we can talk about Bant landfall without stepping on what makes Temur landfall unique, for example. Let's not get bogged down in making sure these combos are unique enough and look at what makes them different and therefore interesting in their own way. In fact, I'll lead off with Bant Landfall since I already brought it up.

Before I launch headlong into combosplanation, however, I want to talk briefly about where I did my research. Commander Spellbook is a community-driven archive of Magic card combos. What started as a project on Discord now has its own website. I used Commander Spellbook to look at the hundreds of Bant combos in their database to see if I could group any into classes. It seemed daunting at first, but the website is easy to use and has lots of filters so you can order the combos based on how many cards they take to work, how many steps - you can even sort by price to find budget-friendly combos.

All that out of the way, let's look at which combos Bant lends itself to in Commander.

Landfall

As we discussed in the Temur piece, Landfall has a lot of overlap with these two color combinations and while Red gives Temur something Bant lacks, source of damage like Impact Tremors and Purphoros, White can give Bant some unique landfall payoffs of its own. Specifically, White gives us Admonition Angel and Emeria Shepherd and Angel. These aren't quite as much fun as dealing them a bajillion damage with Pademonium effects, but they're a different kind of fun as anyone who has ever wiped their boards with Admonition Angel can attest to.

The enablers for landfall are pretty standard for Simic-containing color combinations - a way to untap a creature with a landfall trigger and a creature that taps to put a land into play. Bouncelands are integral to doing this the easy way, and Bant has access to Selesnya Sanctuary and Azorius Chancery in addition to the Simic Growth Chamber. Retreat to Coralhelm is still our big enabler here, but there are a few other cards unique to Bant that deserve some special attention. Knight of the Reliquary pairs so well with Retreat to Coralhelm that I got to do those shenanigans in MODERN of all formats. I never had the gumption to waste one of my few opportunities to play paper Legacy to do it there, but I'm such a fan of Knight I would if encouraged even a little. While Knight doesn't go infinite like Sakura-Tribe Elder or Scaled Herbalist, it can use Retreat to search for lands like Dark Depths and Thespian's Stage, a sub-combo if you will, and one heck of a fun way to make a big creature but not quite end the game. White also gives us Ruin Ghost and Murasa Rootgrazer, the latter of which can help us by picking lands up if we need to go off without the aid of a bounceland. Ruin Ghost can also go off with any land that taps for White and doesn't come into play tapped. Bant has a lot of its own shenanigans to pull, and you can take a page out of Admonition Angel's book and Roil Elemental their whole board in both Temur and Bant, and who wants more than that?

Chulane

Chulane is somewhat regarded as a mistake and it's not hard to see why - Chulane is a combo enabling machine. The reason that Chulane is so powerful is that he rewards you for doing something you were going to do anyway by both advancing your board and drawing you a card. If you aren't looking to dump a bunch of creatures out into a Wrath but would rather play, say, Shrieking Drake a ton of times so you draw a bunch and dump a lot of lands into play, Chulane does all of that without you having to pay any mana to activate an ability. If you DO activate Chulane's ability, you can rebuy a creature with an ETB ability. Intruder Alarm untaps Chulane if you want to rapidly gate the same creature over and over, Eternal Witness is a good target for a loop like this. Chulane can't go quite infinite since you're required to draw a card, but it's that requirement precisely that makes Chulane a tempting target for someone to get their Thassa's Oracle fix since that wins you the game on the spot if you start going off.

If you use the advanced filters on the Commander Spellbook page, you can go to a page just for Chulane combos, and there are quite a few. Half of them are some variation of the Shrieking Drake engine, which is very cool and very fun (for you and only you; your podmates might not agree) and the other half are VERY cool because there are some wacky cards that I hadn't heard of before. Pop quiz, hotshot - what do you get when you cross Wormfang Manta, Chulane and Scroll of Fate? That's right, infinite turns. There is a lot of overlap between the cards that benefit from Chulane and that are part of our landfall package and you should honestly just lump all of them together in the same deck. I know this is unpopular with my opponents, but I run Chulane in Omnath, Locus of Creation and it does everything you want a card to do in a landfall deck. However combos like Chulane and Village Bell-Ringer to untap all of your mana producers don't require landfall to give you a ton of mana. In fact, you could do a lot of work with Chulane in a deck with no landfall that worked with creatures that tap for more than 1 mana. This whole guide is like one big Venn diagram, because that segues me right into the...

Mana Producing Creatures

...section of the guide.

White gives Bant decks cards like Faeburrow Elder to give you more than just Bloom Tender to combo with a card like Freed From The Real. Freed From The Real is a huge combo piece in Bant decks, as are other versions of it like Pemmin's Aura. Untapping a creature that taps for more than just a Blue mana allows you to make as much of that other color of mana as you want. Alternatively, you could use Freed or Aura or another similar card to untap a creature like Stone-Seeder Hierophant or Bloom Dryad to untap a bounceland like Azorius Chancery. You could even use Hope Tender to go off with lands that aren't necessarily boundelands, giving you some real flexibility. Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy is very useful in a deck like this, and since Kinnan can't be your commander in such a deck, why not Pheldagriff? Both the Questing and Legendary version of the hippo monster can go off with just a mana creature or two and an Intruder Alarm. If you can't get your Faeburrow Elder in time, maybe try Nature's Revolt to untap all of your lands every time you give your opponent a 1/1 green Hippo since your lands are 2/2 creatures now? Intruder Alarm combos are rife in Bant land and Bant gives you some interesting payoffs, like a gajillion 2/1 Dwarfs from Warchanter Skald. Bant excels at finding ways to untap creatures that make mana and having creatures that make mana. Bant creatures can make so much mana that some decks are running an expensive untap outlet like High Alert. It costs four mana to activate, but there are six Bant creatures that are up to the task and some of them are cute like Axebane Guardian and some are familiar like Selvala, Heart of the Wilds. A lot of them require you to do some work to make the creature tap for at least 5 mana, but being able to go off with just a High Alert shows how powerful the color combination can be.

Blink

The blink combos seem to be either Emiel-based or Derevi-based. Both have their upsides and of course both engines likely inhabit the same deck, likely with Derevi as the Commander unless you want to hide what you're doing for more than ten seconds. In fact, Emiel plus Derevi basically ends the game if you also have a Chromatic Orrerry. Blinking gives you a lot of different ways to benefit - if you have anything that triggers when a creature either enters or leaves the battlefield, you'll be doing that a lot in addition to untapping a bunch. If you're looking for "slower" loops, ones that you only do once a turn, Roon of the Hidden Realm is also an option for your deck since you can get back a spell like Time Warp by recasting a creature like Eternal Witness every turn. Every turn will be your turn because you cast a Time Warp every turn. Please have a way to kill people very quickly if you do this.

There are a few more individual cards other than Chulane that popped up more than once in the database that are worth discussing.

Estrid, the Masked

Estrid can go off with more than just The Chain Veil, now. It may have escaped notice that both The Peregrine Dynamo and Sanctum of Eternity can also work with Estrid to give you as many untaps of your Enchanted permanents as you'd like, and more cards are bound to be printed soon.

Amareth, the Lustrous

Amareth has about a dozen ways to make Sensei's Divining Top cost 0 mana to cast from the top of your library, in case you wanted to draw your whole deck. Can you cast it enough times to Brain Freeze for the win before you draw your whole deck?

These are the larger categories of combos, however, the database is still worth perusing when you get the time to do so. There are a lot of "1-off" combos in all of these color combinations that are fun but which wouldn't synergize much with the other combo pieces you'd play in these other decks. Thanks for reading and if this is new, I'll be back with another one next week. If this is not new, thanks so much for digging this out of the archives. I hope I was helpful. Is there still twitter when you're reading this? If so, you can feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. Thanks for reading - until next time!