Readers!

It's been nearly 3 months in the making, but we are finally wrapping up our series on the best combos for each wedge in Commander. Am I inclined to start another series with 2-color pairings, or 4-color? Seems unlikely - working on this series has earned me a long break. That said, there is nothing I could do for you to help you more than reminding you to use Commander Spellbook. More combos are being added every day and the database is free to use. I used it as my primary research source (the secondary was EDHREC and the tertiary was google because I cannot remember the names of cards) for this series and I can't recommend it enough. Or, anymore, as this series is coming to a close. I suppose since this is the last opening paragraph, this is my last chance to link the Commander Spellbook website and encourage all of you to use it. I found a lot of combos I would never have considered and while I'm not the foremost expert on the subject, I was confident enough to write 10 articles about it so I bet you'll have as much fun as I did messing around with all of their custom filters and search criteria. And now, the result of what I find when I went looking for the best combos for Abzan decks in Commander.

Right up top, It's really going to be impossible to exhaustively link all of the wild Reanimation stuff that decks like Karador, Ghost Chieftain can pull off. Abzan has it all - Green for cards like Eternal Witness, mana generation and token doubling. White for more token doubling, and cards like Karmic Guide and Luminous Broodmoth. Finally, Abzan has access to Black, THE Reanimation color which gives us cards like Buried Alive and cards like Animate Dead, which is basically the opposite of Buried Alive. Notice I didn't say "Reanimator" because that's not quite exactly what Abzan does. We aren't discarding cards early to spend a bunch of life reanimating one big creature before they can deal with it - this isn't Legacy where that will fly. Instead, we create loops of creatures dying and being reanimated to trigger cards like Blood Artist and Suture Priest. A lot of the classifications I list here will feel like they tie into this theme a lot, and it's Abzan's main asset, with life total shenanigans being a distant second. I feel like we can't classify Abzan decks without getting that out of the way - these may all feel like variations of the "creature dies and comes right back a lot" approach and that's a good thing, I think. Let's start with the most popular troublemaker in Abzan, Myrkul, Lord of Bones.

Myrkul, Lord of Bones

It's not super difficult to see why a commander like Myrkul might top off our list given how much potential Myrkul has to reward us for using creatures that can work themselves to death. Specifically, cards like Burrenton Medic, Devoted Druid and Cinderhaze Wretch. However, Myrkul does more work than that, fundamentally changing how some cards were meant to be played. Ondu Spiritdancer has the caveat that its ability only triggers once per turn to keep it from getting out of hand. However, Myrkul creates new copies of Spiritdancer which proliferate themselves infinitely, unlocking Spiritdancer's full potential. Verdant Succession, a card that rarely shows up anywhere is showing up in Myrkul decks on EDHREC where it combos with Riftsweeper and any sacrifice outlet to give you infinite ETB and LTB triggers and usually infinite mana, counters, scry triggers or whatever your sac outlet provides. Myrkul is the most combo-tastic Abzan commander in terms of number of inclusions in decks, although there is a lot of redundancy built into the engines that can go infinite with Myrkul's help and Myrkul is close to the top in terms of number of unique combos. It's popular for a reason - it's really fun to go infinite.

Ghave, Guru of Spores

Myrkul might be near the top of the commanders with the most unique combos, but THE top, number one with a bullet is Ghave. Built as the cornerstone of the Abzan deck in the first batch of Commander decks, Ghave has two abilities, both of which are 1 for 1 until you find a way to double either the input or output. You can make infinite mana, infinite ETB triggers, LTB triggers, life, death triggers or +1/+1 counters on lots and lots of creatures, most of which are very unfair. Ghave turns counters into creatures and creatures into counters and all you need to do is find a way to turn one of those things into mana and you have yourself a deck. Ghave was printed long before creatures with the Undying ability but pairs very nicely with a lot of them, allowing you to turn a durdly loop into damage with cards like Zulaport Cutthroat and Corpse Knight. Black is very useful in these combos as Black plays a similar role as Red does in other combo decks, giving us a way to turn an advantage engine into a damage engine. Cards like Karmic Guide and Juniper Order Ranger were made to be paired with a creature like Ghave. If you want a deck that generates a ton of advantage with basically any of like 50 different enchantments, Ghave is a good place to start.

Food

Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar aside, Abzan is the king of food, with the Abzan The Lord of the Rings preconstructed deck exploring that space fully. Wilds of Eldraine gave us some delightful new goodies to experiment with and Abzan builders are gorging themselves on the delicious possibilities. With Samwise Gamgee to infinitely loop Cauldron Familiar, Pitiless Plunderer to turn those poor sacced creatures into value, new cards like Farmer Cotton and old cards like Krark-Clan Ironworks, Abzan is the best starting point for the culinarily-inclined. Jund and Mardu decks dabble in food themes, but you really need Green for cards like Peregrine Took and Doubling Season and White for cards like Leonin Elder and Cleric Class. White helps you turn gaining a ton of life into a win with cards like Test of Endurance if your Black cards can't get the job done. Starting with the The Lord of the Rings preconstructed deck and adding a few key cards to help it get really nuts is advised - Halloween is coming up and looping Cauldron Familiar will really help you get in the mood, and using Starburst as food tokens will remind you to sac one of them for life every now and then.

Persist

An issue that Abzan persist combos have is that they lack a card like Murderous Redcap to make things very simple. When you are forced to resort to looping a card like Kitchen Finks, it's a little tougher to get the job done on the spot. However, Abzan decks are accustomed to having to turn a lot of life into an actual advantage that you can measure in a format where the 21st damage from a Hope of Ghirapur kills you as dead at a million life as it would if you were at 1. We can end the game with cards like the aforementioned Test of Endurance or Felidar Sovereign. Alternatively, Abzan decks can use artifacts to turn the Kitchen Finks loop into a chance to mill them out with Alter of Dementia rather than even care about the life you're gaining. Tayam, Luminous Enigma decks in particular make great use of Kitchen Finks looping with cards like Melira, Sylvok Outcast, Solemnity, Vizier of Remedies or a few other solutions White brings to the table. What we lack in Red's access to Murderous Redcap, we more than make up for in the sheer redundancy we have in our combo pieces. White gives us so many ways to go off you won't miss Redcap a bit.

Colfenor, the Last Yew

One hallmark of Abzan combos is that the Commander usually has an activated ability or two that you can keep activating to crank your advantage engine. Colfenor is an entirely passive engine that brings a small creature from your graveyard to your hand, one that you can cast for one mana and immediately sac to Krark-Clan Ironworks or Ashnod's Altar. However, you can also supplement Colfenor's ability to go off with X cost 0/0 creatures like Stonecoil Serpent and Shifting Wall because you need 2 of them and a sac outlet with an entirely novel approach. Eldrazi like Sifter of Skulls can allow you to go off with a single x/x creature.

Stax

While these aren't typical "insert combo and mana, win game" combos, combos that ice our opponents down are legitimate if unpopular, and Abzan has a unique approach. We have no access to Blue so you might not think we'll be able to keep them locked down if they can play around our cards like Gaddock Teeg. However, there are a few things combining the colors of Abzan gives us, namely Black's ability to shrink creatures, White's ability to keep creatures from using all of their abilities and Green's ability to make Lands into small creatures. See where I am going with this? Cards like Life and Limb that make their forests into creatures get scary when you can make all of their lands into forests with Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth. Suddenly their lands are locked down by Drana and Linvala or murdered by Ethereal Absolution. If you're with a pod who enjoys the challenge of battling with Stax, you might surprise a few people with how Staxy Abzan can be. Then again, who hasn't had a miserable game against a Dragonlord Dromoka or Yasharn, Implacable Earth deck? It's unlikely adding Black to that mess will make the deck play nicer.

That does it for me, everyone. Thank you for reading, especially if this is the tenth one you've read. I'd like to thank the folks at Commander Spellbook one last time for working tirelessly for free all these years to manually create a centralized database of curated, community-submitted combos. I'd also like to thank all of you for your support for nearly a decade of writing here at Coolstuff. It's been a genuine pleasure.