Turn six. There are five lands on the table, all untapped, and two creatures that look about as harmless as a doodle in the margin of a notebook: a green-blue frog with reach unfurled like an umbrella, and a heron-dragon that looks like it wandered out of a minor bestiary. The player taps Lilysplash Mentor, pays 
, targets Peregrine Drake. Exiles it. Returns it to the battlefield. The Drake enters again, untaps up to five lands, and the mana needed for the loop is right back where it started, ready for the next go. No counterspell in sight, no surprised faces across the table — just a mana counter climbing and refusing to stop.
What it does: the infinite mana mechanism
The loop rests on just two lines of text, no more. Lilysplash Mentor has an activated ability that costs : exile another creature you control and return it with a +1/+1 counter. Peregrine Drake, when it enters the battlefield, untaps up to five lands. Chaining the two together means spending three mana to get back at least five, provided the untapped lands produce enough colored mana to cover the Mentor's activation cost again.
The detail that makes this real rather than just theoretical is the timing: Lilysplash Mentor's activation is "only as a sorcery." That means the loop resolves entirely on your own turn, during main phase, when the stack is empty and nobody can interrupt it midway with an instant while the lands are still tapped. This isn't infinite mana that erupts unexpectedly in response to a removal spell — it's an operation you set up and execute, one iteration at a time, for as long as the lands hold out.
What it costs: a two-week collapse
Over the past two weeks the price of this pair has dropped almost comically. Peregrine Drake has lost 43.8%, going from €0.32 to €0.18. Lilysplash Mentor fared even worse percentage-wise, -33.3%, from €0.15 to €0.10. The total for the entire combo, today, is €0.28 — less than pocket change, for an engine that in many Simic decks replaces entire packages of ramp and mana rocks. There's almost no other infinite mana combo in Commander that costs this little per piece, which makes it one of the most natural picks for anyone building a budget deck around commanders like Tatyova, Benthic Druid or Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy.
How to assemble it: game flow and constraints
The setup isn't quite as trivial as the price tag suggests. You need at least five lands on the battlefield that can actually be tapped for mana — not just present, but ready to produce — because the loop only pays for itself if the Drake's untap generates more mana than the Mentor consumes. With exactly five lands and available for the first activation, each loop iteration costs three mana and returns five: a surplus of two, enough to keep the cycle alive and to build a growing pool of colored mana for the rest of the turn.
It's precisely this surplus, combined with the "only as a sorcery" restriction, that explains why this combo is classified as bracket 4 rather than bracket 3. It isn't unstable or accidental like some two-card combos that trigger on their own; it requires a precise board state (five untapped lands, two living creatures, available mana) and deliberate execution, repeated manually for as long as the player chooses to keep going. It's a combo you assemble with intent, not one that simply goes off by chance — which makes it feel more like a declared game plan than a casual-table accident.
How to protect it: the failure points
The weak spot is as obvious as the payoff: before the loop gets going, both Peregrine Drake and Lilysplash Mentor are just ordinary creatures, vulnerable to any targeted instant-speed removal. A response during your main phase, a surprise kill on the Mentor before activation, and the whole plan collapses without producing anything. Even a counterspell aimed at the activation itself — which is, after all, an ability on the stack, and therefore a legal target for effects that counter activated abilities — shuts everything down mid-loop.
The cheapest protection in runs from targeted, low-cost safeguards: Snakeskin Veil for a single mana grants hexproof and a counter, perfect for shielding the Mentor at the critical moment. Essence Flux pulls double duty, since it can preemptively blink one of the two combo pieces out of reach of an already-declared removal spell, while also serving as a backup for the loop itself in a pinch. For those who want to armor the whole package, Padeem, Consul of Innovation doesn't protect the creatures, but it does make supporting artifacts like Simic Keyrune untargetable, which is handy if your mana ramp plan also relies on those.
Alternative variants: Deadeye Navigator vs Lilysplash
Anyone already familiar with this type of loop probably knows the Deadeye Navigator version: same principle, recursive blinking of the Drake, but with a recurring activation cost of just instead of , and without the sorcery-speed restriction — which makes it instant speed and therefore considerably more explosive, but also pricier, since the Navigator alone is worth several times the entire Drake+Mentor pair. There's also the three-card line with Ghostly Flicker, which uses the instant's flashback to regenerate mana and repeat the cycle, but that requires an extra piece and more coordination in hand.
Compared to both, the Drake-Mentor pair remains the lightest option on the wallet: just two cards, less than thirty cents, a sorcery-speed restriction that makes it bracket 4 instead of bracket 3 but also more predictable to pilot well. Back at that table, the heron returning to the battlefield for the tenth time in a row is no longer just a decorative detail: it's proof that sometimes the cheapest engine in the deck is also the quietest.
Written from Mana Forge's card data and Cardmarket prices, and reviewed by hand before publication.
Forge Insights content is automatically generated and manually reviewed, for informational purposes only: we don't guarantee its accuracy or completeness, and it isn't professional advice. Prices are indicative and change over time.