Often times, when you hear about an infinite combo in Magic: the Gathering, you often expect to find it in a format like Commander or Modern. Formats where the card pool is much larger often can lend themselves to more infinites. Well, today we have a new infinite combo, but in Standard! I’m calling this one the Kid Cudi Combo. We’ll take a look at how it works, and see how it compares to the other infinite combo in Standard.
The Kid Cudi Combo
The combo is called the Kid Cudi combo because this combo lets your change it from Day to Night and back an infinite number of times. Here is how we do this.
The combo revolves around having 2
Component Collector
Component Collector
If it's neither day nor night, it becomes day as this creature enters.
Whenever day becomes night or night becomes day, you may tap or untap target nonland permanent.
s in play,
The Celestus
The Celestus
If it's neither day nor night, it becomes day as The Celestus enters.
{T}: Add one mana of any color.
{3}, {T}: If it's night, it becomes day. Otherwise, it becomes night. Activate only as a sorcery.
Whenever day becomes night or night becomes day, you gain 1 life. You may draw a card. If you do, discard a card.
and a mana creature that can generate multiple mana, which
Accomplished Alchemist
Accomplished Alchemist
{T}: Add one mana of any color.
{T}: Add X mana of any one color, where X is the amount of life you gained this turn.
is the best option. Then we loop creating mana with Accomplished Alchemist, activing the Celestus, and untapping both with our Component Collectors. We’ll gain more mana each time we do this since the Celestus gains us a life each loop, and so Alchemist will net more and more mana each time.
This gives us infinite life, infinite mana, and we can draw our entire deck. That is great and all, but that doesn’t win us the game. So how can we win the game from this?
Our Win Conditions
There are a couple of cards that can help us end the game in one fell swoop, both of which are red.
Light Up the Night
Light Up the Night
Light Up the Night deals X damage to any target. It deals X plus 1 damage instead if that target is a creature or planeswalker.
Flashback—{3}{R}, Remove X loyalty counters from among planeswalkers you control. If you cast this spell this way, X can't be 0. (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)
and
Crackle with Power
Crackle with Power
Crackle with Power deals five times X damage to each of up to X targets.
are both mana dumps, and we can point these spells right at our opponent’s face. We can even play cards like
Lier, Disciple of the Drowned
Lier, Disciple of the Drowned
Spells can't be countered.
Each instant and sorcery card in your graveyard has flashback. The flashback cost is equal to that card's mana cost.
to make sure that our win condition can’t be countered.
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How Do We Build this Deck?
The way that I’d look at building this deck is running it base blue, with a ton of counter spells and draw. We could play this Temur, with green as a splash for the Accomplished Alchemist. This gives us some decent mana, since we don’t need to run very many green mana sources. Izzet has some of the best control tools right now given that Izzet Turns is basically a combo control deck.
We could also play into Bant Control. Bant has really good mana having the better cycle of dual lands, and gives us access to sweepers like
Doomskar
Doomskar
Destroy all creatures.
Foretell {1}{W}{W} (During your turn, you may pay {2} and exile this card from your hand face down. Cast it on a later turn for its foretell cost.)
. Now if we go down this road, we now have to consider if we want to play this combo, or if we want to play the
Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset
Teferi, Who Slows the Sunset
+1: Choose up to one target artifact, up to one target creature, and up to one target land. Untap the chosen permanents you control. Tap the chosen permanents you don't control. You gain 2 life.
−2: Look at the top three cards of your library. Put one of them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.
−7: You get an emblem with "Untap all permanents you control during each opponent's untap step" and "You draw a card during each opponent's draw step."
and
Lithoform Engine
Lithoform Engine
{2}, {T}: Copy target activated or triggered ability you control. You may choose new targets for the copy.
{3}, {T}: Copy target instant or sorcery spell you control. You may choose new targets for the copy.
{4}, {T}: Copy target permanent spell you control. (The copy becomes a token.)
Combo instead. Let’s compare both of these combos and see which is better?
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Which Combo is Better?
If we decide that Bant is our path, we need to consider the other infinite combo with Teferi and Lithoform engine. Both of these combos function nearly identically, gaining and infinite amount of life and making an infinite amount of mana with Accomplished Alchemist. They can also use the same win condition spells as well. But there’s pretty distinct pros and cons with each strategy.
The Teferi combo needs less cards on the board to go off. It also will take less clicks to generate the mana we need to win because we do gain 1 more life with Teferi. Also, we don’t have to play multiple bad creatures, That being said, this combo doesn’t have card draw baked into the combo, so we will need to chain draw spells together to find our kill spell, or already have it in hand.
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Are either of these two combos top tier? No. They’re definitely suited for your best of 1 ladder on Magic Arena. There’s too many moving parts and the current state of Standard is pretty solidified right now, and I can’t imagine that these combos are going to be good in the current climate. But if you’re interested in a spicy little combo that you can even implement in Commander or Historic, then this might be just what the doctor ordered. If you’ve tried this out, let us know what you think!