Readers!

I am hanging in there, making evergreen content for the next 8 weeks and I have to tell you all, it's been a relief. New cards are previewed every day, but the fundamental ways that a Sultai deck chooses to combo off in Commander hasn't changed that much. Sure, we're constantly getting good, new tools, but if you dig deep into lists of Sultai combos, patterns emerge and you realize a lot of the cards synergize with each other very well.

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 Sultai 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.

Maze's End

Maze's End shenanigans are far from unique to Sultai, but there are two very good reasons we see lots of Maze's End combos on Commander Spellbook in Sultai and far fewer in other colors to the extent that I can call it a Sultai thing - Archelos and Nine-Fingers Keene. Archelos. Lagoon Mystic allows you to put your Maze's End into play untapped so you can tutor for it with something like Reshape the Earth and win on the spot rather than hoping you make it a turn cycle so you can untap and use Maze's End. Nine-Fingers Keene exists to remind us that now you have a ton of Gates, so many that you don't need to play more than Sultai colors anymore. You could have played Amulet of Vigor before and not needed Archelos, but you have both and Sultai still has Maze's End combos firmly in its camp.

Landfall with Sac Outlets

I started with the Blue/Green variants because it's not against the law and that means this is the third week in a row I have mentioned Landfall in an article series that is supposed to talk about what's unique about each color combination. While Red gives Temur damage as a way to win and White gives Bant access to cards like Admonition Angel and Ruin Ghost, Black gives us perhaps the best Landfall combo piece of all time - Bloodghast. Triggering Landfall gives you a creature to sacrifice again and again, creating loops with cards from Ashnod's Altar to Citanul Hierophants. Quite a few of these decks have Zimone and Dina at the helm, giving you a repeatable sac outlet that can be reused ad... well, ad finitum, but enough to get the job done. All you need is something like Thornbite Staff or Intruder Alarm. Black also has Ob Nixilis, the Fallen as a way to kill people when you get the loop going. We also have the typical bounceland plus Retreat to Coralhelm shenanigans with Walking Atlas creatures, and those turns can involve you snuffing out the table with Retreat to the Hagra or Ob Nixilis. Zimone and Dina can make sure you draw every land in your deck, but other commanders have a lot of ways to rebuy your Bloodghast, including one of the most combo-tastic commanders of all time...

Muldrotha, the Gravetide

If you want to just Mindslaver someone a bunch, that's a two card combo right there. However, Muldrotha lets us reuse the same card over and over, provided part of the loop involves "refreshing" Muldrotha so you can play a Lotus Petal from your 'yard eleventy trillion times instead of just once. Luckily, sac outlets and cards like Kaya's Ghostform are here to save the day, allowing you to use Muldrotha's "once a turn" as a "once per this particular Muldrotha existing" ability, which is way better. In addition to sac outlets, we have cards like Displacer Kitten to "refresh" Muldrotha as well. If all you want is to be left alone, Muldrotha makes some dandy loops with The One Ring and a sac outlet like Krark-Clan Ironworks or Claws of Gix - you might even use the new bargain mechanic to keep putting on the ring and turning invisible.

We might as well put "Infinite turns" as a subheading of Muldrotha, because while there are a lot of ways to take infinite turns in Sultai decks, Muldrotha is the quarterback of a majority of them, and with a lot of redundant cards in those individual listings, we can put together a pretty nice infinite turns package in a Muldrotha deck. We can use Vannifar to keep finding Timestream Navigator, keep exploiting Sidisi, Undead Vizier to keep finding our Beacon of Tomorrows, or give Living Lore haste and let it keep hitting a defenseless opponent to give us copies of a spell like Time Warp.

Infinite Turns, continued

However, Muldrotha doesn't have the monopoly on infinite turns loops because there is a card that Sultai can exploit best - Time Sieve. With myriad ways to make enough artifacts to keep sacrificing to the hungry Sieve ranging from Bootlegger's Stash and Old Gnawbone to ignoring Time Sieve altogether and looping Seasons Past and Demonic Tutor with your Time Warp (Time Walk wouldn't even work with this combo because it has the same mana value as Demonic Tutor, confirming that Time Walk is trash and could easily be unbanned, right?).

Looking at infinite combos in Muldrotha decks made me realize there is another Sultai commander that is just as big a troublemaker and which is responsible for a lot of the combos on the Sultai page. I bet you can guess who.

Yarok, the Desecrated

It pays to have your commander be a living Panharmonicon. Effects that were merely good before are game-ending when doubled. You can use Venser to bounce itself and a permanent like Treachery, netting you a mana each time. You can loop Cavern Harpy a ton, gating itself and another creature, usually something like Peregrine Drake or Ukima. Aluren makes "gating" creatures like Harpy into free value machines with the trigger doubled since you can play both bounced creatures for free. Doubling the trigger from a card like Dire Fleet Ravager takes an enormous bite out of them - consider pairing with Archfiend of Despair to end the game on the spot. If you like the card Endless Sands, here are 12 different ways to go off with Endless Sands in a Yarok deck and I bet we could think of a few more. If you do, submit them, would you?

Thassa's Oracle

Dimir decks run this often enough that you didn't need me to tell you about it, but I would also be remiss if I didn't. There are a lot of reasons to play Thassa's Oracle in a Sultai deck, and one reason is that you don't always need Demonic Consultation to pull off the win. You could use Cadaverous Bloom, Nemata, Grove Guardian and Skullclamp to turn your cards into mana into creatures into cards until the library is empty and you win. You could use cards like Biomancer's Familiar or Training Grounds to make draw your whole deck with Diviner's Wand instead. It almost feels like it's 1996 again looking at the Sultai page for Thoracle decks because a lot of them run Cadaverous Bloom and/or Unfulfilled Desires as value engines - there is even a way to win with Oath of Lim-Dul, a Kirkland brand Necropotence. If you want to do something as simple as draw your cards and discard them for more mana to draw the rest of your cards, go right ahead. If you're bored of winning with Demonic Consultation and want to build a Rube Goldberg machine with Mana Severance and Undercity Informer, you can do that, too. The beauty of Sultai is that there is a ton of synergy with your combo pieces and you can just jam them all in the same Yarok deck. If you do, however, remember to say "this isn't that Yarok deck" which is true - it's not. It's much, much dirtier.

Sultai is a great color combination that combines superlative mana generation, card drawing and mana generation which are all the ingredients you need for the turn to end all turns, literally or figuratively. Older cards are just as useful as new ones in Sultai combo decks and you'll be able to go infinite game after game without using the same exact card combo, which should keep things exciting for longer. Thanks for reading, and be sure to tune in next week to see which color combo is next. Until next time!