Ethan Coover Explores the Best Aura Combos in Commander, Part One

Auras are everywhere in Magic, but their combo potential in Commander is seriously underexplored. Wombo Combo, the regular hub for Commander-legal combo cards ranked by EDHREC and Commander Spellbook, turns its lens this week on the most prolific subclass of enchantments: Auras. Ethan Coover is starting a two-part look into the Auras with the most combo potential in Commander. Coover has been an avid EDH player since 2014, joined the Commander Spellbook project in 2021 as an editor and later head-editor and moderator, and has since assisted in the curation, updating, and uploading of over 70,000 unique Commander combos and over 50 articles covering Commander's best combos.

Auras attach themselves to something, somewhat like Equipment. While Auras typically attach to creatures, there are Auras for all permanent types, players, and even cards not on the battlefield, with Spellweaver Volute serving as a prime example of that last category. Auras are very prevalent in Magic, which is precisely why this series needs two installments to get a full picture of what they offer.

Part One covers entries #20 through #11 on the ranked list. Here are the three entries spotlighted in this first section:

Curse of the Restless Dead joins a group of landfall-style cards that make a creature token when a land enters. What sets it apart is that you get to choose which player it attaches to, meaning you can attach it to a Landfall-playing opponent to generate large amounts of tokens. That flexibility to target opponents rather than yourself opens up political angles most Auras simply cannot offer, and with 62 registered combos on Commander Spellbook, it punches well above its modest 0.66% deck inclusion rate.

Presence of Gond lets any creature tap to make a 1/1 Elf Warrior creature token. The classic pairing is with Midnight Guard, "which'll untap itself as the creature enters," turning a two-card combination into an infinite token engine the moment the Aura resolves. Intruder Alarm also untaps the creature in the same fashion, and Thornbite Staff can untap the creature on the token's death. Beyond those go-to partners, Coover notes there is a wide range of creatures that can untap themselves and work well with Presence of Gond with some support, including Devoted Druid and Morphling, among others. At 81 combos and appearing in just 14,775 decks, this Aura is dramatically underplayed relative to its combo ceiling.

Wheel of Sun and Moon edges out Presence of Gond by a single combo count, logging 82 total combo lines while sitting in only 4,113 decks, a 0.24% inclusion rate that makes it the most criminally underplayed entry in this section of the list. As an Aura that replaces graveyard placement with cards going to the bottom of its controller's library, it enables recursive loops that are virtually impossible to interact with through typical graveyard hate, giving it a unique resilience angle that the 82 registered combos reflect.

This concludes the first section of Wombo Combo's look into the best Aura combo cards. Part two is on the horizon, where the series will close out with the top 10 Auras for Commander combos. The gap in raw combo count between #20 (62 combos) and #15 (82 combos) across just five ranking spots signals that the upper half of this list is going to be a steep climb, and if an Aura sitting at #15 can generate 82 distinct combo lines, the top 10 should be a genuinely shocking read.