Combos in WOE Limited

Wilds of Eldraine is a format with a lot of synergy and cool interactions between cards. While some decks will be drafted toward a core strategic game plan (all my creatures attack well) and others will be drafted around a core mechanical theme (My U/W deck has payoffs for tapping my opponent’s creatures and many ways to tap them), many decks will be built to take advantage of synergies and interactions between some specific cards. Here’s a list of several cool combos I’ve found in my first several drafts with the format:

Stockpiling Celebrant has combos all over the place–any card that does something when it enters the battlefield is a good combo with Stockpiling Celebrant, but the more of the card’s total value is contained in an enters the battlefield ability, the better the combo, which means that it’s especially good with Hopeful Vigil, which is a smooth curve of two white commons that you can play on turn 2 and turn 3, and you should get used to seeing this start.

As an alternative, you can do basically the same thing with Hopeless Nightmare in black. Note that these two are not part of a larger five color cycle, there are only these two Vigils.

You can also use Stockpiling Celebrant to return any creature with an adventure to use the adventure again.

Stockpiling Celebrant can also return a saga before it completes–due to the timing of Sagas, you’ll have to return it the turn before you’d get to the final chapter, but some Sagas have final chapters you’d rather avoid. This comes up most often with The Princess Takes Flight, which you can return to keep the creature exiled forever and then play again to exile something else. It’s recommended that you find a way to avoid the third chapter then also (most commonly sacrificing to bargain).

This same thing can work with The Apprentice’s Folly, but it’s a little better because you can copy a Stockpiling Celebrant you already have in play to return The Apprentice’s Folly to your hand, just make sure that you have a way to get rid of your Stockpiling Celebrant token before trying to use the same trick again.

My favorite card to pair with Stockpiling Celebrant is Woodland Acolyte. It’s probably less powerful than returning one of the previous sagas, but I love that they can endlessly loop each other as long as the Celebrant dies and the Woodland Acolyte doesn’t.

Combos that involve multiple rares don’t come up very often, but one combo that I’ve put together that was very strong was Spellbook Vendor with Faunsbane Troll, which allowed me to put a new aura on Faunsbane Troll every turn so that I could keep fighting more creatures.

Imodane, the Pyrohammer basically just does what it says it does, but if you don’t know all the burn spells in the set it can be hard to know how much damage you can expect to get out of it if you take it early in a draft. The best spells to combine with Imodane are Frantic Firebolt, which can scale up to huge amounts of damage in dedicated spells decks, and Stonesplitter Bolt, which lets you bargain to deal 2X damage to your opponent, which is a good way to end a game.

The best combo of two rares is Yenna, Redtooth Regent with Three Blind Mice–Yenna can make a copy of Three Blind Mice, and then that Three Blind Mice can make a copy of itself every turn–in the end, you get a lot of mice, and then those mice get very big. If that’s not enough, there will be more bigger mice on the following turn.

Curiosity isn’t a bad card to put on a flier in limited, but in this format you can do a lot better–specifically, you can put Curiosity on Unruly Catapult and draw a card whenever you play an Instant or Sorcery.

Necropotence is a very bad card in limited because it’s hard to keep gaining life and it’s hard to use a sudden burst of cards, so you end up paying too much life and locking yourself out of the game by skipping your draw step. While I’m not optimistic about Necropotence in this format, it’s quite a bit better if you can quickly sacrifice it to bargain after using it for one or two turns to minimize skipping your draw step. You can also take advantage of food to gain life, but I think you’re better off trying to convert it to a one time card draw if you do want to try playing it.

On the subject of bonus sheet cards, many of them are constructed cards that have no real purpose in limited, so it can be hard to tell which cards you can really take advantage of in limited. Goblin Bombardment, Impact Tremors, Raid Bombardment, and possibly even Shared Animosity are playable if your deck makes enough Rats.

The line between a synergistic interaction and a notable combo is a blurry one. I’ve had some very good experiences with Frostbridge Guard and the uncommon payoffs for tapping your opponent’s creatures, for example, but to me, that’s just the point of those uncommons. I suppose it’s worth noting that Solitary Sanctuary and Sharae of Numbing Depths have enough support that they’re very strong in the right deck (I think Solitary Sanctuary needs a lot of support while Sharae is pretty good with minimal support).

You can certainly draft successful decks around the supported themes by just taking all the cards with clear synergy, but this format also has a lot of flexibility–there’s good mana fixing and a lot of cross synergies between different archetypes. When you can blur the lines and explore hybrid strategies or just play all the cards you like, it can be important to know some potent combinations you can assemble with only a pair of cards, even when not all of your cards work toward the same synergies.