Ghave-Crusade-Altar: the $20 combo everyone snubs

Everyone will tell you that serious infinite combos cost a fortune, require ritual tutors and three-turn backup plans. That's wrong. Or rather: it's wrong if you're still buying the wrong cards.

Here we have three pieces, Cathars' Crusade, Ashnod's Altar and Ghave, Guru of Spores, that together do one of the most obnoxious things in the format — infinite mana and tokens — for 19.64€. That's not a typo. It's just that nobody bothers to read Cathars' Crusade carefully until someone who's already lost to it explains it to them.

The mechanism, no discounts

Ghave, Guru of Spores has an ability where you remove a +1/+1 counter from a creature to create a 1/1 saproling token. With Cathars' Crusade on the battlefield, every time a creature enters under your control, all your creatures get a +1/+1 counter. So: you create the saproling, Cathars' Crusade triggers and puts counters on everything (including the newly-born saproling and Ghave itself).

Now you sacrifice that saproling to Ashnod's Altar for two colorless mana. Ghave has one more counter to remove — thanks to the Cathars' Crusade trigger — so you can repeat the activation. Every cycle: a saproling is born, everything gains a counter, the saproling dies for two mana. The loop is self-sustaining because Ghave never loses net counters: it removes one to create the token, but gains one back (or more, if you have other creatures) from the Cathars' Crusade trigger.

The result: infinite colorless mana, and if you have an outlet that wants multiple sacrifices or a way to convert mana into damage/card draw, you've won the game right there on the table.

Where it belongs (and this isn't a minor detail)

The color identity here is Abzan — white/black/green — because that's exactly what Ghave is. Don't try to force it anywhere else; it doesn't work by color texture but by direct synergy with the commander:

• Ghave, Guru of Spores itself as commander is the obvious choice: the combo is literally built around its ability.
• Karador, Ghost Chieftain if you want an additional reanimation engine built around the tokens you sacrifice.
• Teysa Karlov to double up death triggers and turn every sacrificed saproling into a small value event.
• Meren of Clan Nel Toth if you'd rather steer toward a slower value engine instead of an immediate kill.

All four share Abzan or a coherent subset of it, so the mana base philosophy doesn't change.

Lines of play: how not to get your plan blown up

Here's the point people underrate: the combo only holds up if you protect the three pieces separately, not together.

Cathars' Crusade is the most fragile piece — a Vandalblast or a wrath sweeps it away, and with it the loop stops (though it doesn't regress: the counters stay). Ashnod's Altar survives a creature wrath, so if you've already accumulated counters you can sacrifice whatever's left without regenerating anything — useless without Ghave active, but it's still a decent mana engine on its own.

The correct in-game sequence: play Ghave early, build up your board, then introduce Cathars' Crusade once you already have a critical mass of creatures (the multiple triggers make it devastating even without Ashnod's Altar). The Altar can come in last: it's the only piece that, on its own, doesn't look suspicious and is rarely removed in response to anything.

Budget vs Premium: there's really no choice here

The beauty of it is that this combo is already the budget version of itself. There's no "premium" version that makes it more efficient — Ashnod's Altar at 13.30€ is the priciest piece and it's still affordable. If you want to spend more, it's not for the combo itself: it's for protection (counterspells, tutors to find the missing pieces, redundancy with other sacrifice outlets). But the heart of the machine stays exactly this, always.

The verdict

People buy $80 combo pieces thinking the price is a guarantee of power, and ignore this $20 setup because "it seems too simple to be good." Bracket 3, three cards, under twenty euros, infinite mana verifiable in two minutes of reading. If your pod plays at a medium-to-high level and you don't already have Ghave in the right deck, the problem isn't the combo. It's you not having properly checked what Ghave actually does.