So here's Vannifar EDH, as competitive as we could make it (for now). Huge thanks to the Vannifar discord for putting up with my insane ramblings as we hammered out these combos and this decklist, and to everyone who gave feedback or suggestions here or on Reddit. If you find a better combo line, or some cool tech, or try out this or a similar list and want to share your results, I'd love to hear it. Good luck and happy podding!
- Blue and Green are easily the best colors in EDH, giving you access to a powerful set of options despite only being in two colors.
- Having a 1-card combo in your command zone makes going off very consistent.
- Only being in two colors gives you substantially fewer options than other decks, which don't need to compromise as heavily on card choices.
- In exchange for its consistency, your combo is slow and vulnerable, requiring you to untap with your commander and then go off at sorcery speed, giving you opponents ample time to interact.
- Lots of combo pieces means high concentration of dead draws.
- Library-centric combo means that drawing a combo piece may be worse than dead, and actively hinder your combo options.
All of our combo lines start from a 2 CMC creature and an untapped Prime Speaker Vannifar. However, with Vannifar out, any creature can be used to reach this state with the following lines.

Line Requires: 2 Forests and 1 Green Fetchland


  • Crack fetch for Dryad Arbor
  • Pod to Quirion Ranger - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  • Pod to Scryb Ranger - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar

This line gets you to the 2 drop creature and an untapped Prime Speaker Vannifar to transition into a combo line. Note that for the Peregrine Drake combos, you will need three lands total, which between the three of them, produce both colors.

Line requires: mana | 3 Lands in Play | 2 CMC Creature

Cards used:
- Trophy Mage
- Thousand-Year Elixir
- Fatestitcher
- Peregrine Drake
- Deadeye Navigator
- Body Double - any 2 CMC Creature


  1. Pod to Trophy Mage for Thousand-Year Elixir
  2. Cast Thousand-Year Elixir - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  3. Pod to Fatestitcher - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  4. Pod to Peregrine Drake
  5. Unearth Fatestitcher - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  6. Pod Peregrine Drake to Deadeye Navigator - Soulbond to Prime Speaker Vannifar
  7. Flicker Prime Speaker Vannifar
  8. Pod Fatestitcher to Body Double, copying Peregrine Drake - Soulbond to Deadeye Navigator


You now have infinite mana flickering Body Double as Peregrine Drake


This line is used if Thousand-Year Elixir is unavailable for some reason, or we think our opponents' interaction targets artifacts. Especially useful vs an untapped Yisan, Wanderer Bard. It requires an untap available (Crop Rotation or Minamo, School at Water's Edge or Wirewood Lodge or Kiora's Follower already in play).

Line requires: ++cost of untap | Untap in hand/play | 3 Lands in Play | 2 CMC Creature

Cards used:
- Spellseeker
- Crop Rotation
- Minamo, School at Water's Edge or Wirewood Lodge
- Fatestitcher - Peregrine Drake
- Body Double
- Deadeye Navigator
- any 2 CMC Creature
- any Untap


  1. Pod to Spellseeker for Crop Rotation
  2. Cast Crop Rotation into Minamo, School at Water's Edge - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  3. Pod to Fatestitcher
  4. Use untap in hand/play
  5. Pod to Peregrine Drake - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar with Minamo, School at Water's Edge
  6. Pod to Deadeye Navigator
  7. Unearth Fatestitcher - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  8. Pod to Body Double, copying Peregrine Drake
  9. Flicker Deadeye Navigator - Soulbond to Body Double (Peregrine Drake)


You now have infinite mana flickering Body Double as Peregrine Drake


This line plays around graveyard hate (but not Cage, Cage just straight hoses us no matter what). Like Backup 1, it requires an out-of-had untap or a Wirewood Lodge or Minamo, School at Water's Edge, and also requires an additional creature in play to start. Obviously this is not ideal, but neither is playing a combo deck into Rest in Peace. This line doesn't need a specific number of lands, but needs plus the cost of your untap in total to go off. Fetching Peregrine Drake as your 5 can reduce down as far as 1UG.

Line requires: +cost of untap | Untap Available | 2 CMC Creature | 0, 1, or 2 CMC Creature

Cards used:
- Trophy Mage
- Thousand-Year Elixir
- Fatestitcher - Peregrine Drake
- Deadeye Navigator
- Selvala, Heart of the Wilds
- any 2 CMC Creature
- any 0, 1, or 2 CMC Creature - any Untap


  1. Pod to Trophy Mage for Thousand-Year Elixir
  2. Cast Thousand-Year Elixir - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  3. Pod to Fatestitcher - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
  4. Pod to Any 5 CMC Creature - Use Untap
  5. Pod to Deadeye Navigator - Soulbond to Prime Speaker Vannifar
  6. Flicker Prime Speaker Vannifar
  7. Pod your other creature to Selvala, Heart of the Wilds (You can Untap by Flickering Prime Speaker Vannifar
  8. Flicker Deadeye Navigator - Soulbond to Selvala, Heart of the Wilds

You now have Infinite Mana by Flickering and Activating Selvala, Heart of the Wilds


Draw your Library by Flickering Deadeye Navigator
Remove the opposing Graveyard Hate Piece

1. Depending on your graveyard state, pod Body Double as a 2 CMC Creature for Spellseeker or Flicker Body Double as Spellseeker
2. Spellseeker for Green Sun's Zenith and Ponder (or any other cantrip} 3. Cast Green Sun's Zenith for Eternal Witness
4. Loop flickering Eternal Witness with Deadeye Navigator to loop Ponder and draw your deck.
You'll have drawn your deck, so you'll already have access to all of the cards you need.
This ender is quite simple. You have infinite mana and deck in hand, cast all of your creatures and Finale of Devastation for an arbitrarily large number and attack for the win.
Start State: Infinite mana | Body Double paired to Deadeye, Vannifar in play | Haste Enabler in Play | 2 drop creature in graveyard


  1. Flicker Body Double, copying 2 CMC Creature
  2. Flicker Deadeye Navigator - Soulbond to Prime Speaker Vannifar
  3. Flicker Prime Speaker Vannifar
  4. Pod Body Double into Eternal Witness, returning 2 CMC Creature
  5. Cast 2 CMC Creature
  6. Flicker Prime Speaker Vannifar
  7. Pod 2 CMC Creature into Spelleeker
  8. Flicker Deadeye Navigator - Soulbond to Spellseeker
  9. Flicker Spellseeker for Green Sun's Zenith
  10. Flicker Spellseeker for Winds of Rebuke
  11. Flicker Deadeye Navigator - Soulbond to Eternal Witness
  12. Cast Green Sun's Zenith for Scavenging Ooze
  13. Cast Winds of Rebuke on Eternal Witness
  14. Activate Scavenging Ooze to Exile all Opponents' Graveyards
  15. Cast Eternal Witness returning Winds of Rebuke
  16. Repeat from (13)
  17. Win Game

Start State: Infinite mana | Body Double paired to Deadeye, Vannifar in play | Scryb Ranger in Graveyard

  • Deadeye Navigator

  • Body Double
  • Scryb Ranger
  • Selvala, Heart of the Wilds
  • Eternal Witness
  • Scavenging Ooze
  • Winds of Rebuke

    1. Flicker Body Double, copying Scryb Ranger - Untap Prime Speaker Vannifar
    2. Pod Body Double into Selvala, Heart of the Wilds, Soulbond to Deadeye Navigator
    3. Flicker Deadeye Navigator to Draw your Deck
    4. Cast Eternal Witness
    5. Cast Scavenging Ooze
    6. Loop Eternal Witness+Winds of Rebuke to Mill all Opponents
    7. Use Scavenging Ooze to Exile all Graveyards
    8. Win Game
    I've cut timetwister from the deck as I feel this ender is unneeded. However I'll leave this here for posterity in case you feel you would prefer to play twister loops.

    If Eternal Witness is inaccessible for some reason, you can use this alternative line. It is technically a more complete win than the other two enders, exiling opponents' graveyards as well as their fields and libraries, and causing them to lose the game on your turn, rather than in their respective draw steps. However it requires the very expensive Timetwister and is much more complicated and time consuming to execute.
    Start State: Infinite Mana | Deadeye Navigator in play

    1. Depending on your graveyard state, pod Body Double as a 2 CMC Creature for Spellseeker or Flicker Body Double as Spellseeker
    2. Flicker Spellseeker to find Mystical Tutor, Winds of Rebuke, Green Sun's Zenith, and Ponder
    3. Cast Green Sun's Zenith for Scavenging Ooze
    4. Cast Mystical Tutor for Timetwister
    5. Cast Ponder to draw Timetwister
    You'll have drawn your deck, so you'll already have access to all of the cards you need. Cast Spellseeker
    1. Cast Winds of Rebuke on an opponent's permanent
    2. Use Scavenging Ooze to exile all cards in opponents' graveyards
    3. Cast Timetwister
    4. Flicker Spellseeker to find Winds of Rebuke, Noxious Revival, and Ponder
    5. Cast Noxious Revival on Timetwister
    6. Cast Ponder to draw Timetwister
    7. Repeat from this process until all opponents lose the game drawing for Timetwister from an empty library.

    Coming Soon
    Because our primary combo line is a land-based combo, we run only the best mana rocks available. Chrome Mox provides colors and acceleration, while Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, and Sol Ring all provide large amounts of colorless, which can especially help casting our Commander and our Thousand-Year Elixir, allowing our lands to stay up for interaction. Carpet of Flowers is a cEDH autoinclude, with a huge majority of decks being blue, and can provide a powerful and fast mana advantage. The rest of the land base is built with a focus on consistency, as our primary combo needs at least one source of each color, and can be very forest-intensive if Quirion Ranger and Scryb Ranger are needed to bridge the pod chains. Wirewood Lodge and Minamo, School at Water's Edge give us additional ways to untap our Commander, and let Spellseeker into Crop Rotation act as an untapper in pod chains. Utopia Sprawl and Wild Growth act as an additional 'land' for the purposes of comboing off with Peregrine Drake, as we need lands that tap for 3 total mana. Lastly, we play every 1-mana dork we can, and the best 2-mana ones in our colors, allowing us to cast our commander early and start our pod chains.
    Our counter suite is tuned mostly toward protecting our combo turns, with as many cheap and free counters as we can fit, while maintaining their usefulness in stopping our opponents' action as well. Our removal is mostly generic bounce spells and artifact/enchantment removal, and Winds of Rebuke doubles as pieces of our combo win loops.
    Not a ton to say here, all the best draw engines and 1 mana draw spells we can play, tutors for action spells or protection. Eternal Witness and Spellseeker feature heavily in combo lines but can also just be cast for value if drawn. Timetwister isn't needed for most combo lines and is played primarily for value. It can definitely be cut in proxy-less paper decks for budgetary reasons.
    - Intruder Alarm/Faces of the Past/Thornbite Staff: the obvious "level 0" combos with Vannifar. While incredibly powerful and much less limiting in their combo lines, allowing for the cutting of 'bad' combo cards, the lack of good tutors in Blue and Green make them too unreliable for a dedicated combo deck. Either you build your deck to go off without them, and accept that you have to make suboptimal inclusions, or build your deck to go off with them, and sometimes brick out. For this deck, we've chosen the former, but there are certainly options to be explored with these cards in other builds.
    - Flash/Hulk: the boogeyman of cEDH, Flash and Hulk lose a substantial amount of their power in a Blue Green deck, with all the piles that win the game requiring a huge number of terrible cards (Ezuri, Claw of Progress+Sage of Hours) or pieces outside of the pile itself (Grand Architect+Pili-Pala+Rootwater Diver+Walking Ballista). There's a flash hulk pile that backdoors into the primary combo line, but it's not a good enough reason to run two cards that are dead on their own.
    - Pestermite/Deceiver Exarch/Bounding Krasis/Breaching Hippocamp/Disciple of the Ring/Tidewater Minion/Chakram Retreiver: Although these cards featured heavily in early drafts of these combo lines, the centralization around Thousand-Year Elixir and Fatestitcher simply made them obsolete. Trophy Mage into Thousand-Year Elixir gives us an untap on 3 and the best untap we can have on 4. Spellseeker with Crop Rotation into Minamo, School at Water's Edge or Wirewood Lodge give us another good untap on 3 that also turns our Peregrine Drake on 5 into an untapper. The other untappers don't do anything that we don't already get from better, more flexible, or more essential cards.
    - Beast Within: this card was in previous drafts of the deck, but is currently absent from my list. While Beast Within/Reality Shift give us the most complete victory possible by removing our opponents' lands, and circumventing Eldrazi Titans and Gaea's Blessings, Beast Within itself is a clunky enough card that I'd prefer not to include it if possible. Scavenging Ooze serves the same purpose in conjunction with Winds of Rebuke against those effects, and also provides some extra grave hate and a 2drop body to pod from. If you really want an extra removal spell this would be the first one I'd add.
    - Ghostly Flicker: this can serve as a backup for Deadeye Navigator, albeit not a great one. It lets you combo off with Eternal Witness+Peregrine Drake for infinite mana, and has a somewhat straightforward combo line for this (Scryb->Trophy->Stitcher->Double on Scryb->Seeker for Merchant Scroll->Unearth->Peregrine->Flicker Seeker for GSZ for Ewit), but it is mana-intensive and doesn't combo with Selvala. If you're in a meta with a heavy presence of Praetor's Grasp, this lets you still combo through a grasped Deadeye Navigator. If wotc printed something like a UU sorcery version of this effect I'd play it mainboard, but as it is, the effect doesn't make the cut.
    - Compost: this is an amazing draw engine in a black-heavy meta, so much so that it frequently gets included in cEDH primer stock lists. I don't like including it here because I personally don't play in a meta with enough black decks to include it, and I want this list to be as universal as possible. However, the card's power level is not to be overlooked, and if this card is good in your meta it will be one of the best cards in your deck.

    Suggestions

    Updates Add

    It's been quite some time since the last update to the deck, but honestly with over a year of cards I only made 3 changes reviewing the list.

    -Timetwister
    +Finale of Devastation
    Twister loops were a secondary wincon anyway, the pricetag of twister scares people away even though proxying it should be the norm regardless, and it was a questionable cast to run out "for value". Overall I prefer to not have it in my list, but it's certainly not unreasonable to play it. In its place I've put in Finale of Devastation as both a decent tutor and a much cleaner wincon than our looping options. I prefer to build these kind of decks (infinite mana+deck in hand state) "winconless" and Finale's non-wincon utility is a bit questionable but it can be relevant enough of the time to warrant a slot.

    -Mana Drain
    +Fierce Guardianship
    Not much to say here. Cutting the counter I'm least happy with and adding a new one I like a lot. It was Drain of Misdirection, but straight UU cost is just too much for me to want to play.

    -Reality Shift
    +Veil of Summer
    Same as above. Cut the worst piece of interaction with one of the best. Was always trying to fit Autumn's Veil in this deck and then we just got a better version of it. Happy to slot it in.

    Besides that, I think that with some upcoming cards, namely Jeweled Lotus, the land-restrictive Deadeye Drake line is reaching the end of its lifetime. In its place we see a few options, namely the Hulk pile I discussed in my previous list, which trades a slightly higher number of cards in the combo for those cards being less useless on their own. It also isn't bound to having a certain number and kind of lands in play, which makes Lotus' ability to have explosive early turns more appealing. It also makes room for other explosive mana like Mox Diamond, Lotus Petal, and Elvish Spirit Guide, since lands aren't quite as paramount. Overall I think the deck is slightly more explosive at a negligible loss of consistency. The combo is also a lot easier to assemble "manually", which gives better backups to Vannifar getting Elked or the like.

    Perhaps the most interesting new printing, however, is Ashaya, Soul of the World, which has not only opened up several combo lines already, such as replacing Deadeye Navigator and Peregrine Drake with Ley Weaver to generate infinite mana, and she brings along her own outlet, too! (The combo line for these is a bit rough and probably a bit worse than current options, but it's always exciting to see new options. Also in the works with Ashaya is a hulk pile involving her to generate infinite landfall triggers, which notably doesn't need any Haste enabler in the line, ending our dependence on Thousand-Year Elixir and opening up the ability to play more stax pieces, as well as having less fear of artifact removal. Most exciting about Ashaya, however, is that at 5 CMC, she sits at a comfortable place in pod chains to potentially open up combos with new cards. Her interactions with lands and creatures mean that a wide variety of new effects could potentially open up combo possibilities with her, broadening the scope of potential Vannifar upgrades.

    I'm going to try to have up decklists for both the GraftHulk line and the Ashaya lines sometime in the next few days, although full-on primers to the extent of this one may have to wait for bigger breakthroughs.

    As always huge thanks to the Vannifar discord, in particular Chuck and Lizzy Wylde for brainstorming new tech with me and keeping the dream alive. Vannifar may never be tier 1, but she's a deck that has new and exciting possibilities in every new set and, especially with Ashaya in the mix, who knows when we'll get The Card that changes everything. Until then, I'll keep my eyes turned toward the future.

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    60% Casual

    40% Competitive

    Top Ranked
    Date added 5 years
    Last updated 3 years
    Legality

    This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

    Rarity (main - side)

    8 - 0 Mythic Rares

    41 - 0 Rares

    22 - 0 Uncommons

    20 - 0 Commons

    Cards 100
    Avg. CMC 1.96
    Tokens Bird 2/2 U, Frog Lizard 3/3 G
    Folders Cool Lists, NetDecks, Decks to consider building, vannifar research, Deck ideas, EDH ideas, General, Commander/EDH, favorites, Primer
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