Your Bracket Now Counts Combos

You’ve been there. Everyone agrees on a Bracket 2 night. Your opponent’s deck looks gentle: no Game Changers, no extra turns, a pile of vampires. Then Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood land on the same board, and the game ends in one trigger loop.

Nobody lied. The deck really has no Game Changers. But two cards that win the game together change what kind of game you’re in, and until now Icarian’s bracket didn’t see them. Our help page even said so: tutors and two-card combos weren’t counted, so use your judgment.

Now they are. Icarian checks every deck against the combos in Commander Spellbook, and a combo in your deck counts toward its bracket.

Every known combo, checked by card

Commander Spellbook is the community’s database of Magic combos, with more than 100,000 Commander-legal combos, each with its exact cards, its steps and what it produces. We bring in its full list every night, so a combo added there shows up here the next day.

Then we match your deck against those exact card lists. No guessing from card text, no “this looks combo-ish.” If every card a combo needs is in your deck, the combo is in your deck.

A combo raises the bracket

Spellbook rates each combo with the bracket it belongs in. A slow, clunky loop might be fine in Bracket 2. A fast two-card infinite is Bracket 4.

Your deck’s calculated bracket is now the higher of two answers: what its Game Changers, extra turns and mass land denial say, and the strongest combo it holds. A deck with no Game Changers and Sanguine Bond plus Exquisite Blood comes out Bracket 3, not Bracket 1, because that’s where that combo plays.

Combos only ever raise the bracket. They never lower it, and they never set Bracket 5. We still leave cEDH to you, since competitive play is about the metagame, not just the cards.

See which cards did it

Click the bracket chip on your deck’s banner to open the Bracket breakdown. Next to Game Changers, extra turns and mass land denial there is now a Combos card.

It lists each combo your deck holds: the cards, with their images, what the combo produces (infinite life drain, infinite mana, whatever it is) and the bracket it’s rated at. Each one links to its steps on Commander Spellbook, so you can see exactly how it goes off. Sometimes that’s a combo you built on purpose. Sometimes it’s one you didn’t know you had.

We won’t count what we can’t check

Some combos don’t need one specific card. They need “any creature with an ETB untap ability” or “a sac outlet that costs no mana.” Spellbook describes those slots with a search, and we run each one through our own card search to see which cards fit.

Most work, including the broad ones that match thousands of cards. For slots Spellbook describes only with its own tags, or with no search at all, we wrote our own. Some still use search features we don’t support yet. When a combo needs one of those, we still show it under Also needs a card we can’t check, with the slot it’s missing, but we don’t count it toward your bracket. We’d rather show you a possible combo and let you decide than raise your bracket on a guess.

Your playgroup still has the last word

The calculated bracket is a starting point for the Rule 0 conversation, not a verdict. If your table sees a deck differently, pick your own bracket at the bottom of the breakdown. Your choice replaces ours, and visitors see that it was set manually.

The breakdown isn’t a secret. Anyone who can see your deck can tap its bracket and see why it landed there, combos included. If you set the bracket yourself, it says so.

Thanks, Commander Spellbook

All of this combo data comes from Commander Spellbook, built and maintained by its community. They did the hard work of cataloging how cards win together, and they publish it openly. If you’ve ever found a combo there, you know how good it is. Go say thanks.

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Curious what bracket your decks really sit in? Sign up for Icarian, import a deck and open its Bracket breakdown.