Readers!

How funny would it be if I did 9 of these in a row and then wrote about a random creature from New Capenna? A combo breaker in a series about combos? How funny to... well, mostly just me, probably. It's a little too close to prop comedy for my comfort, so I guess I'd better just play it straight and talk about combos, this time in Naya decks.

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 Naya 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.

Mayael's Aria

Mayael's Aria was in bulk boxes until 2014. After people had generally glommed onto EDH as a format, and basically when they told us to start calling it "Commander" and everyone but me and the others at EDHREC did, this card was under $2. It's wild that this was slept on for 4 years, but once people realized how much potential this card had as part of 2-card combos, it finally got the respect it deserved. Aria and Helix Pinnacle both set a doomsday device on the board and dare your opponents to disarm it before the world blows up and you spend the rest of your days stomping around with dinosaurs because all of the other Wizards are dead. Since Aria sets the condition "you win if this is still around next upkeep" you don't need any sort of outlets. Aria IS the outlet, so naturally it is part of a LOT of 2-card combos, and ones that aren't fairly redundant. I counted 10 separate combos that win the game with Mayael's Aria and only one other card, and 36 combos that won the game with between 2 and 4 cards. It's hard to group the cards in those 36 combos together, either - this isn't a case where something has 100 combos and 90 of them are the same combo with a different kind of Llanowar Elves. Aria wins with cards like Storm Herd, Eldrazi Conscription, Devilish Valet, and Raised by Giants. Even when the combo is only two cards, neither one of them start in a zone where you can always find them and the opponent can interact by killing either the Enchantment or the Creature. It seems easy to pull off, but it also seems way more fun for the table than you winning on the spot.

Shalai and Hallar

Again, a lot of these combos only involve one other card. This time, though, Shalai and Hallar can be your commander, which means you only need to find one other card, usually something White that has scary words like "whenever" and not "this only triggers once per turn." White has a lot of ways to gain life, which puts counters on things, which triggers things that happen when things get counters put on them, which deals damage and then it loops until they get big mad that they lost to a topdecked Ajani's Pridemate and stop coming to your house. 13 of the 20 combos including Shalai and Hallar in the database only involved 1 other card. That's 13 cards in your Shalai and Hallar deck that win the game on the spot if you can gain a single life or deal a single damage. That might not sound like a ton of fun, but in this card's defense, it rewards you for putting counters on stuff in a way that ends the game through trigger damage rather than forcing you to attack like some color combinations that don't have access to Red. This is an incredibly powerful commander and I think it might be fun to pull one of these goofy combos off in a pod a few times before it got boring. Shalai and Hallar win the game instantly in conjunction with a card called "The Red Terror," you can't pretend that's not way more fun than a Thoracle win in a Dimir deck full of tutors.

Marath, Will of the Wild

Marath is both the outlet and a combo piece, which should make things easy. However, Marath doesn't have any legal combos with just it and one other card. Marath requires two things to do more than break even in value, however. You need to do some sort of doubling, whether it's doubling the counters Marath gets, generating more than one mana for making a 1/1 for one mana, somehow you need a way to turn a 1/1 token into two mana or one mana into 2 1/1 tokens. Magic is full of cards that can do that - everything from Hardened Scales to Cryptic Trilobite can fulfill those conditions one way or another. Marath is a huge combo engine and while early adopters of the format have bad beats stories about this card, newer players might have missed that day in class and they can surprise their playgroup next time they meet.

Zirda, the Dawnwaker

Zirda, the Dawnwaker is an answer to cards like Training Grounds that we don't have access to in Naya colors. Creatures that can tap for mana then untap for less than that amount of mana can generate infinite mana, and reducing those activation costs are a big part of how netting mana each iteration is possible. Suddenly you can add Umbral Mantle and Sword of the Paruns and even a Wood Elemental can generate infinite mana.

Infinite Damage

This is easily the most frequent line of text in the combo database for Naya. Naya loves to win on the spot, usually with really goofy creatures. There are over 100 Naya combos in the database with the result "Infinite damage" and quite a few of those combos have overlapping cards. The damage outlets really vary; since Naya can do quite a few things over and over fairly trivially with a small number of combo pieces, any card that can break those loops and give you a payoff for them usually synergizes with a Naya combo deck. Sometimes the damage is what initiates the combo, which is always interesting - Polyraptor is a common way to turn the card Pyrohemia into a value minting machine, for example. Another common damage outlet is Hateflayer, a card with an untap ability that deals damage meaning if you can tap it for enough mana to untap itself to deal damage, you don't need to do anything else.

Blink

This is a fairly brief category because Emiel the Blessed goes infinite with just about half of Magic: The Gathering, sometimes with just one other card. Unfortunately, we want Red involved if we want to end the game violently, which means Emiel can't be your commander in those instances. Naya decks have cards like Mana Echoes and Dockside Extortionist which help you generate more than three mana every time you blink the creature making it profitable to loop the creature. Naya is a very capable Blink deck color combination, and is a little underestimated because Blink decks usually contain Blue mana. Use this to your advantage!

Landfall

One thing that Naya landfall lacks that other color combinations have is Blue, specifically cards like Intruder Alarm and Retreat to Coralhelm. Naya makes up for this deficiency by using creatures that aren't required to tap for their ability to work. Kodama of the East Tree is a common way to loop landfall triggers with a bounce land rather than by tapping and untapping a Walking Atlas. Felidar Retreat is the most powerful of the Retreat "cycle" and it and Retreat to Emeria give you infinite creature tokens which you can use to end the game with Impact Tremors and friends. You have to rely a lot on drawing Kodama of the East Tree or another enabler and you don't have quite as much redundancy as you'd have in a deck with maybe a half dozen Walking Atlases and you can't use Murasa Rootgrazer basically at all, which is a shame, but you can still generate a ton of value in ways Blue decks can't. I personally prefer to Admonition Angel every permanent in play to killing them with Purphoros, but there really is no wrong way to win the game with infinite landfall triggers, is there?

This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are the broad categories I noticed perusing the database. There were a lot of cards I had to read - Sunstrike Legionnaire which is a kind of reverse Intruder Alarm, for example. Do any of your decks contain a copy of Thermopod? Maybe they will now. Thanks for reading - until next time!