Readers!

I wanted to try something a little bit different today and make some evergreen content. While a list of combos is good until some of the cards get banned, there is the possibility that some of these cards become obsolete. Better cards coming along, some of which might take a four card combo and make it work with three cards, for example, doesn't make the other combo not work, but it makes it less desirable. That is why today, I am going to focus on the types of combos that are good in Temur decks. That way you can get an understanding of what kind of goals you should be striving for when you play Temur combo so that a new card coming along will catch your eye since you'll be a Temur combo expert. That's not exactly precisely evergreen, but it's not exactly not and not exactly not is good enough for me.

Before I launch headlong into combosplanation, however, I want to talk briefly about where I did my research. Commander Spellbook is a community-driven archive of Magic card combos. What started as a project on twitter, and grew to a Discord now has its own website. I used Commander Spellbook to look at the hundreds of Temur combos in their database to see if I could group any into classes. It seemed daunting at first, but the website is easy to use and has lots of filters so you can order the combos based on how many cards they take to work, how many steps - you can even sort by price to find budget-friendly combos.

Without further preamble, here are the kinds of things Temur does best and how you can build around it.

Landfall

I put this first because Landfall combos are very much not specific to Temur. However, Temur does add something that Bant, Sultai and Simic don't - damage outlets. Everything you do in a Simic Landfall deck is pretty fair - you're likely making infinite mana or infinite creatures, which is cool but fair. Adding Red allows you to use cards like Temur Ascendancy to give those creatures haste, cards like Purphoros, God of the Forge or Impact Tremors to end the game as soon as you go off and lots of ways to make temporary copies of creatures for 0 mana. It also gives us access to Gruul Turf and Izzet Boilerworks, 2 more bouncelands than you have in a Simic deck.

Common ways to get infinite landfall triggers involve a few different kinds of cards - something to put a land into play, something to make that thing able to do that more, usually with a landfall trigger and a way to put that land back into your hand.

A sample combo would be Sakura-Tribe Scout, Retreat to Coralhelm and Izzet Boilerworks or another bounceland. Scout puts a land into play, that land puts itself back in your hand and Retreat to Coralhelm untapped the Scout with its landfall trigger. Rinse and repeat. You still need a way to win the game with infinite landfall triggers, but you're a Temur landfall deck, you have that. Take all of their stuff with Roil Elemental, kill them with Angry Omnmath and a sac outlet or Purphoros or just fill the board and give them a turn cycle to stop your army. The deck will need some ways to deal damage if you want to end the game when you combo off, but luckily the engine has plenty of redundancy. There are a half dozen Sakura-Tribe Scout variants, but not too many substitutes for Retreat to Coralhelm. Luckily, landfall gives you a lot of triggers so you could use Intruder Alarm to untap your Scout or other similar creature. There are combos involving Kodama of the East Tree - 22 of them as of today just within exactly Temur identity. There are hundreds of combos but with so many of them being the same combo differing only by the name of the damage outlet or creature that puts the land into play, this engine could work with a lot of different cards in a dedicated deck.

Untapping

There is a very small number of creatures that have abilities that are activated by untapping, and while adding Umbral Mantle means that you can make any creature into one of them, it's much easier to use one of the creatures from Eventide. While the untap creatures in other colors are cute and Gilder Bairn makes an appearance in a lot of decks, Red gives us access to creatures that can end the game on the spot themselves - Crackleburr and Hateflayer. Everything else requires you to do extra steps to turn untapping a creature a lot into something useful.

These combos are best in Temur decks, however. Jeskai Ascendancy has been used in other formats to mill with Altar of the Brood, but Green gives us something we need much more than those shenanigans - a way to tap the creature and get mana. Green gives us Citanul Hierophants, Cryptolith Rite, Jiang Yanggu, Song of Freyalise - all cards that allow you to tap Crackleburr or Hateflayer for mana to pay for its cost when you untap the creature to do damage. You usually need a third part of the combo, however, because these creatures require more than 1 mana to activate. Make Hateflayer cheaper with Training Grounds, perhaps, or use Crackleburr instead because while it requires another card, that card can be any creature you control that isn't summoning sick. This gets an entire section because there is a lot of redundancy here, only Temur can really pull it off easily and there is a lot of redundancy which is great when you're trying to pull off a 3 card combo in a 99 card deck.

Animar

Animar is uniquely Temur and there is a raft of combos that only work with Animar because Animar can make Artifact creatures cost 0 mana. When that happens, you can either play them for free and have a way to bounce something else, or you can simply use Ancestral Statue or Primordial Mist or Palinchron - all of those are 2 card combos with Animar. This isn't exactly groundbreaking info for some, but if you're newish to Magic or just newish to Commander, most people who play Commander started after everyone forgot about this combo so you can catch people by surprise. For more complicated Animar combos involving cards like Temur Sabertooth or Cloudstone Curio to enable infinite ETB triggers, Red is a big help because sometimes we'll need to tap a creature that just came into play to use its ability and use it multiple times that turn. Red has lots of ways to give our creature haste and we're lucky Animar is the colors that it is.

Biovisionary

Making a lot of copies of Biovisionary is fun, easier to do than you might think, and Temur is the perfect color combination for it. Red gives us lots of ways to make all four copies at once. Sure, you don't need Red to kick a Rite of Replication on your Biovisionary, but if you don't draw that stuff but you do draw a Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer, Increasing Vengeance or Dualcaster Mage, you can pull it off just the same. Get a Rionya, Fire Dancer and you can just cast some Instants and Sorceries during your main phase, make the Biovisionaries before combat and win on your end step. Temur decks have Double Major to copy Biovisionary on the stack and Red has ways to copy that double Major so one copy can copy your Biovisionary and the other Double Major can copy the Dualcaster Mage that is casting the fork that is copying Double Major. The best part of this combo deck, though, is that you don't need to rely on infinite engines since you only need 4 copies of Biovisionary. This is all very Riku deck stuff to be doing but other decks can get in on the fun, too. If you don't draw ways to make a lot of Biovisionaries, though, the rest of the deck has myriad ways to abuse cards like Dualcaster Mage and get infinite ETB, LTB and Magecraft triggers. You'll be playing Mythos of Illuna in the deck either way, why not go off with just two cards?

Infinite Turns

The last category I want to cover seems to have two distinct engines - Sage of Hours or Timestream Navigator or River Song as a creature-based way to do it or Seasons Past and Invert // Invent to keep copying a spell like Time Warp.

The Seasons Past combo is sort of dusty and obvious, but it's basically two cards plus any Extra Turns spell that doesn't exile itself or go away on resolution so you jam it in the deck. The other combos, though, are a lot more fun.

Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and other variants like Fable of the Mirror-Breaker // Reflection of Kiki-Jiki give Temur a huge advantage in infinite turn combo decks. While Ezuri, Claw of Progress players have been taking infinite turns with Sage of Hours for a while, Red gives us a lot of redundancy and Kiki-Jiki can go infinite with a card like Zealous Conscripts so you won't need to make sure everything stays in play every turn so you can continue to take an extra turn on every extra turn. River Song, similarly can go infinite with cards like Capture of Jingzhou but Green helps us out with cards like Anurid Scavenger if you don't draw Soldevi Digger.

I am sure there are some I missed, but I feel like I nailed all of the important ones with multiple entries indicating a lot of redundancy with cards that have similar abilities but different names. Redundancy like that is good in a singleton format and you can build a Riku, Kalamax, Animar or lots of other decks that have a lot of different ways to combo off, multiple combos or payoffs that are more fun than just hitting everyone with creatures. I hope this got you started with your love of Temur combos and your love of the Commander Spellbook site, without which this article would not have been possible. Thanks for reading. Until next time!