If you're reading this and it wasn't brand new on the site this week, welcome! If you're here, you came looking for some combos and you're hoping I have a list of them. Rather than offer a list that won't be exhaustive, I tried to group them into classes to show you which cards or techniques are most often built around. Showing you a list of cards that combine with another list of cards is OK, but I would rather talk about the synergy surrounding Jeskai Ascendancy so you can also add the other cards that work in the same combo - understanding why the cards go in means you can add the rest of the cards yourself without having to keep referring to a list.

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 Jeskai 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.

Jeskai Ascendancy

You might expect me to have started with this card because it combos with the most other cards, but you would be surprised, as was I, that nearly every combo in the database in Jeskai colors that combos with Ascendancy also included Emry, Lurker of the Loch. It's the U to Emry's Q. Perhaps it's the other way around, because while Emry is the center of lots of really nasty infinite combos in Commander, Jeskai Ascendancy isn't in too terribly many combos in Jeskai that don't involve Emry. However, there is a bright spot - Sorcerer Class turns all of your creatures into mana dorks, meaning they are all set to combo off if you can keep playing spells. Any spell with Buyback will do - I like Capsize but you could kill them with Searing Touch. Elite Arcanist is another fun card to use with Jeskai Ascendancy. At their core, they're all using a spell with buyback or looping a 0-cost artifact that you can sacrifice for 0 mana. A deck that tutors for Ascendancy could have a lot of redundancy built in, and you can do Kiki-Jiki shenanigans as well. A lot of the Ascendancies in that cycle are super fun and this one is no exception. If you have access to Green in your deck, it's even more fun, but that's outside of the scope of this series and I'll have to rein it in because I could go on all night about decks like that.

Kykar, Wind's Fury

It was fairly predictable that Kykar would be featured in enough combos in the database to be considered an entire genre of combo. Kykar is typically going to be your commander in a deck like this, meaning you really only need to find 2 other cards. One of those cards is usually Sensei's Divining Top, which is great at finding the other card. One thing about Kykar combos, though, is how much diversity there is. Cards like Crown of Flames, Glitterfang, Solemnity, and Magus of the Future all combo with Kykar to do something absolutely busted but the pieces from those combos won't work with the others. There is much less synergy between the pieces in combo decks than in almost any commander we've written about previously, but since everything synergizes with the one combo piece you always have, it usually works out fine. A $20 Kykar deck jammed full of cards like Expedite is a threat at a table, imagine what sort of nonsense you can jam in a deck that rewards you for spending your mana by giving you more mana.

Zedruu, the Greathearted

Zedruu wins by giving them an Enchantment that will make them lose the game. It's not terribly fun to do to a person more than once, but the first time someone got me with a donated Transcendance I was genuinely charmed by it to the extent that I didn't warn members of a future pod what was coming. Zedruu combos aren't super numerous, but the "hot potato" style deck where you saddle them with a cooked grenade like Nine Lives deserves its own category. A lot of group hug type decks are built in this vein, and Zedruu sometimes makes surprise appearances out of decks like Kynaois and Tiro. This style of deck only appears in Jeskai and Rakdos, which is funny to me. Jeskai decks miss out on the really truly nasty Enchantments that a Black-based deck can give them, like Demonic Lore, but Red gives Jeskai decks cards like Harmless Offering and Bazaar Trader that give Jeskai decks an edge that Inniaz the Gale Force decks don't have.

Infinite Turns

Jeskai is far from being alone in that they enable quite a few loops that result in a player taking an infinite number of turns, but Jeskai excels in that it's the color combination with the most infinite turns combos that only require two cards. Medomai the Ageless can be inserted into combat with a card like Ilharg, the Raze-Boar, Soulfire Grandmaster turns any Time Warp into the Rocky Horror Time Warp because you do it again and again. Chance for Glory is easier to loop safely when you have access to cards like Transplant Theorist to loop Angel's Grace for you, or Narset's Reversal to Copy Chance for Glory and put it back in your hand. If taking Infinite turns is a thing you like, Jeskai decks have a lot more opportunities to do it using Sunforger, a statement that got a certain kind of deck-builder's undivided attention.

Possibility Storm Shenanigans

This is an entirely different animal as far as combos are concerned - there are several combos in Jeskai that prevent your opponents from playing spells. Possibility Storm in conjunction with Lavinia, Azorius Renegade and Teferi, Time Raveler to basically make the game unplayable. Unless you can wrap things up very quickly, maybe you shouldn't, though. But you can. You can also use Moderation and Knowledge Pool to make them unable to cast more than one spell per turn with an empty hand when you give them Moderation with Harmless Offering. Some of these are a real Rube Goldberg machine and they end with someone just unable to play Magic. If you're looking to be a bummer or if you have a friend who deserves it, the Commander Spellbook site has you covered.

This list was by no means exhaustive. More than the color combinations I've covered previously, Jeskai had the most combos that were just 2 to 4 cards that are unassuming on their own but combined to do something really unfair. Almost all of the Jeskai preconstructed decks commanders had at least one infinite combo engine that they were part of. Jeskai makes tons of treasure tokens with ease, draws lots of cards, has a lot of ways to abuse The Chain Veil with a pile of random Planeswalkers and is really good at giving them an Enchantment they don't want. It has all the landfall of Bant, all the infinite damage of Temur and even the group hug decks pack haymakers. Thanks for reading, until next time!