Of all the different deck types that make up the Commander format, combo is by far the most controversial. While it’s a totally valid way to play, the quick victories combo decks can achieve often lead to games feeling anticlimactic, or that those victories weren’t “earned” as they should’ve been. A lot of this issue is also down to combos being difficult to stop in most MTG Commander games. Thankfully, there are solutions available if you’re struggling with Combo decks in your pod.
Thought Prison
Combo decks in Commander come in many varieties, but many of them involve looping spells over and over again to win. Whether it’s building up to a big Storm finish or casting Mishra’s Bauble repeatedly to win with Aetherflux Reservoir, this strategy is fairly common.
These combos tend to be hard to stop in MTG Commander, since they don’t often provide a single point of interaction for counterspells or removal. One way to address them, however, is with cards that punish your opponents for casting a ton of spells, such as Thought Prison. Provided you can Imprint the right card on it, this artifact will hit your opponent for two every time they cast their key spell. More often than not, this will kill them before they can kill the rest of the table.
While it’s expensive to cast at five mana, Thought Prison immediately rips a card out of an opponent’s hand, so it’s never a “dead” card. It also has the potential to damage the other players at the table, incidentally, making it a nice tech card for aggressive strategies.
False Floor
Another style of combo you’ll see regularly in Commander is the one that aims to generate an infinite board of Hasty tokens. These combos have always been possible with Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and friends, but they’re much easier now. Heck, with all the token generators and doublers we have access to, these decks can often win through sheer mass without actually going infinite.
Stopping these decks is tricky since board wipes tend to be sorcery speed, but False Floor is a great way to do so. By forcing all creatures to enter tapped, it prevents players winning from nowhere with a Hasty army. It even doubles as a one-time board wipe itself, exiling every untapped creature for just two mana. Even if it only hits half of the creatures in play, this is still a wild upside on an already solid tech piece.
While there are several effects like this in white, Authority of the Consuls and Blind Obedience, False Floor is the only colorless equivalent. This makes it a great hedge against explosive creature strategies in non-white decks, especially if they’re creature-light themselves.
Weathered Runestone
No matter where you go in Magic, the graveyard is a constant source of combo shenanigans. Whether you’re pulling off Underworld Breach lines in cEDH or Perigee Beckoner nonsense in Pauper, there are endless degenerate possibilities available. For this reason, graveyard hate cards are some of the most useful combo prevention tools in the game.
There are plenty of prolific examples in this category, from Tormod’s Crypt to Ghost Vacuum. One that has flown largely under the radar so far, however, is Weathered Runestone. For one extra mana, this is essentially a better Grafdigger’s Cage, preventing all nonland permanents, not just creatures, from entering via the graveyard. This shuts down the largely artifact-centric Underworld Breach combos, while also stopping everything that Cage did as well.
While it may look dull compared to other options like Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, there are some significant advantages to running Runestone in your deck. Since the effect is always active, you don’t need to worry about timing your exiles right. It also incidentally hates on many more decks than Grafdigger’s Cage, meaning it’ll have plenty of utility in fair matchups too.
Amulet Of Safekeeping
One of the big problems with running cards that stop combos in your MTG Commander decks is that they often don’t do much else. This means you’re essentially risking a slot a lot of the time, hoping that the deck you’re targeting shows up. Amulet of Safekeeping is a great example of a card that bucks this trend, however, giving you two excellent protection effects for the price of one.
The first ability is the big draw here, essentially giving you Ward 1. This prevents Aristocrats opponents from whittling you down one Blood Artist trigger at a time, which is a combo strategy you see a lot of in Commander. It also shuts down Storm decks trying to win with Grapeshot or Brain Freeze, by forcing them to pony up mana they don’t have. What’s nice about this effect is that it only protects you, meaning the rest of the table can still die to these combos if they’re around.
Amulet’s other effect is also incredibly relevant, softening up every creature token in play. In some cases, this can actually stop infinite token combos, provided the tokens only have one power. Most of the time, it’ll just give you a bit of extra breathing room against aggressive players, but that’s more than good enough as an incidental upside. While it’s somewhat meta-specific, Amulet of Safekeeping certainly deserves to be in more decks than the 2,500 it’s in right now, according to EDHREC.
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