Commander Combos: How to Find Combos in Your Deck

Basically, a combo is a group of cards that interact in a way that creates a very powerful result, usually something you can repeat or something that simply wins the game.

That can mean:

• Infinite mana

• Infinite damage

• Infinite life

• Infinite tokens

• Drawing your entire deck

• Milling everyone

• Repeating ETB or death triggers forever

• Or creating a loop that eventually wins the game

The classic example is something like Exquisite Blood + Sanguine Bond.

With both enchantments on the battlefield, an opponent losing life or you gaining life can start the loop. If the triggers can resolve and nobody interrupts the sequence, life loss and life gain keep feeding each other and can finish off your opponents.

Two cards, a starting event, and the right conditions. Always check the prerequisites.

But Commander combos can also involve three, four or even more cards, and that’s where finding them manually becomes much harder.

No.

I definitely don’t think every deck needs to become a combo deck.

There’s a big difference between building your deck around finding a combo as quickly as possible and having a combo somewhere in a deck where all the pieces are already useful on their own.

I personally like the second type much more.

If I’m playing an enchantment deck, for example, and three cards that already make sense in the deck happen to create an infinite loop together, great. That’s another way the deck can finish a game.

That doesn’t suddenly mean the whole deck has to become tutors + combo pieces.

Commander is much more fun when the deck still feels like your deck.

This sounds easy until you have 100 cards in front of you.

You might recognize the obvious combos you intentionally added, but there can be interactions between cards you didn’t even know existed.

That’s why I added combo detection to MTG Master.

When you open one of your Commander decks, MTG Master can check the cards in it against known Commander Spellbook combos and show you the lines whose pieces are already in your list.

This also works with public decks and supported precons, which is quite useful when you’re looking at a deck you didn’t build yourself.

For each combo, you can see the cards involved and check the mana, prerequisites, steps and outcomes. Having all the cards in your deck doesn’t necessarily mean you can execute the combo immediately, so checking how the line actually works is important.

But finding combos you already have was only half of what I wanted.

What I really wanted from a Commander combo finder was something that could also tell me which combos I was close to having.

This is the part I find much more useful when improving a deck.

Imagine your deck already contains two pieces of a three-card combo.

You probably don’t know it.

But adding one card could suddenly give you another win condition or a very strong engine.

That’s why MTG Master also looks for possible combos you’re missing cards for.

So instead of only telling you:

“You have these combos.”

it can also tell you:

“You are one card away from these combos.”

And that’s a completely different way of discovering cards for a deck.

You’re not searching for generically popular cards for your commander. You’re finding cards that have a specific interaction with cards you’re already playing.

Open New possible combos and you can explore the combo lines that need exactly one new card.

That missing card might be something you had never considered for the deck.

One card away is usually the sweet spot.

If I already have 2 of the 3 pieces of a combo, I’m definitely interested in seeing the missing one.

But sometimes it’s also interesting to look a little further.

MTG Master can search for combos where your deck is missing exactly two cards as well.

This can be useful when you’re still building a deck, changing its direction, or just curious about what other combo packages could fit.

I wouldn’t blindly add every combo the tool finds. That’s not the point.

Look at the missing cards and ask yourself:

Would I play this card even if I don’t draw the combo?

If the answer is yes, that’s usually where things get interesting.

MTG Master also filters suggestions based on your commander’s color identity and deck format, so you don’t waste time looking at combos you couldn’t actually add to the deck.

And of course, finding a possible combo doesn’t mean it’s automatically good for your deck. The results are based on known Commander Spellbook combos, but whether a combo actually fits your strategy is still up to you.

There’s another reason I like checking decks for combos: sometimes you don’t want them.

Maybe you’re building something casual and discover you’ve accidentally included an infinite loop.

Or perhaps your deck has slowly changed over time and is now much stronger than you thought.

Knowing the combo exists doesn’t mean you have to remove it, but at least you know what your deck can actually do before sitting down to play.

That’s especially useful when you’re trying to estimate your Commander bracket or explain the deck to your pod.

This is also fun with preconstructed Commander decks.

Open a supported precon in MTG Master and check which combos are already there and which ones are only a card or two away.

Precons often contain pieces with lots of synergy, so adding one missing card can sometimes unlock an interaction that wasn’t included in the original list.

It’s a nice way to look for upgrades without immediately replacing twenty cards.

My approach is pretty simple.

First I check the combos already present in the deck. I want to know what I’ve actually built, including interactions I may have missed.

Then I look at one-card-away combos.

Those are the ones I pay the most attention to.

If the missing card fits the strategy and is useful outside the combo, it becomes a serious candidate for the deck.

After that, I might explore two-card-away combos, but mostly for ideas. Once you start replacing half the deck just to enable a combo, you’re basically building a different deck.

And sometimes that’s exactly what you want.

Sometimes it isn’t.

Either way, I always check the prerequisites and how the combo actually works before changing anything. A combo might look great on paper but still not make much sense for the deck I’m trying to build.

If you already have a Commander deck in MTG Master, open it and check the detected combos.

Then open New possible combos and see which combos you’re only one card away from completing. If you want to explore further, you can also search for combos missing two cards.

You can try it with your own decks, public decks and supported precons.

You may already have more combos in your deck than you think.