With Secrets of Strixhaven spoiler season right around the corner, Magic is about to see its third major shake-up this year. While this often means the previous expansion has more or less had its day, in this case, it’s at least getting a proper send-off. On the eve of Strixhaven’s Debut, enterprising MTG players have discovered a new combo with Don & Leo, Problem Solvers from TMNT. While this combo is unlikely to make a dent in our current savage Standard, it has serious Commander potential.
The Don & Leo MTG Blink Combo
The Don & Leo, Problem Solvers combo was discovered yesterday by the ever-reliable MTG Creative Combos. To pull it off, you’ll need the duo itself, Kirol, Attentive First-Year, and Watcher of the Wayside. Once you have all three pieces in play, you can choose to blink Kirol and Watcher with Don & Leo at the end of your turn. With this ability on the stack, you can tap Kirol and Watcher to Kirol’s ability, copying the blink trigger.
The copied trigger will then resolve, blinking Kirol and Watcher, and you can tap them on re-entry to copy the original trigger again. You can repeat this infinite times, resulting in infinite mill and lifegain as Watcher enters over and over. This represents an instant win on its own, but it’s worth noting that you can sub in any artifact creature for Watcher here. You can get infinite 1/1 tokens by using Mechanized Ninja Cavalry, for example, or infinite drain with Pactdoll Terror.
As a three-card combo, it’s not too difficult to slot this in in Standard. It’s also quite flexible in terms of color, with all the pieces technically being castable in Mono-White. You’ll have an easier time dropping Don & Leo and Kirol in a Jeskai brew, however, and as luck would have it, there’s a blink-focused Jeskai deck in the mix right now.
While it’s not a major part of the metagame, we have seen Jeskai Blink put up some reasonable results in Standard recently. This deck uses the likes of Parting Gust to get extra value out of Quantum Riddler and Shiko, Paragon of the Way. Don & Leo gives the deck another blink source, so we could well see Jeskai Blink adopt this combo in the near future.
A Hostile Environment
While it has a solid built-in home, we’re still very skeptical about this combo’s chances of success in Standard. The format is extremely aggressive right now, with Izzet decks and Landfall putting everything else on a tight clock. While winning on turn five is good, chances are you’ll be under too much pressure to do so in most games, unfortunately.
This fact is perhaps best evidenced by the relative obscurity of Bant Airbending in current Standard. This is a similar infinite combo deck, but it can win up to two turns earlier, and with more generally playable combo pieces. Despite all these advantages, Bant Airbending barely sees any play in the metagame right now. If a better version of the same concept isn’t working, then the Don & Leo combo feels like a major long shot.
That said, this combo does have a good chance of seeing play in Commander. You have a lot more room to breathe in that format, and a lot more non-green ramp to get the pieces out earlier. You also have a greatly expanded range of artifact creatures you can combo with, including Solemn Simulacrum and Triskelion.
While you need to be in Jeskai colors or above to run all the pieces, Commanders like Cayth, Famed Mechanist can support it no problem. With both key cards serving as solid standalone value engines, this is a combo I see a lot of Commander decks trying out in the near future.
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