Everyone will tell you that infinite turns are a cEDH luxury, something you build with reserved list cards and proxies disguised as "budget alternatives." That's wrong, and demonstrably so: Timestream Navigator and Extravagant Replication together cost 70 cents today and do exactly what they promise, with no discount on the final result.
What It Does: The Infinite Turns Mechanism
The loop is more elegant than the price tag would suggest. Extravagant Replication triggers every upkeep and creates a token copy of another nonland permanent you control. Target Timestream Navigator: on your upkeep, a token copy of the creature is born. That copy already has the activated ability — and if you have the city's blessing, you use it immediately: 
, tap, put the creature on the bottom of your library, take an extra turn.
The detail that keeps the machine running: you put the token on the bottom of the library, not the original (tokens simply cease to exist when they leave the battlefield, so the question of "which copy" is practically irrelevant). On the next extra turn, Extravagant Replication triggers again during your upkeep, creates another copy, you activate it, another extra turn. The loop feeds itself for as long as you have mana to pay each time — and with infinite turns, you'll always find the mana to pay it.
The constraint lies entirely in the word "Ascend." Timestream Navigator's ability only activates if you have the city's blessing, which you get by controlling ten or more permanents. This isn't a cosmetic requirement: without those ten permanents, the creature on the battlefield does absolutely nothing beyond being a vanilla 2/1.
The Price: €0.70 and Falling
Over the last 14 days, Timestream Navigator has dropped from €0.57 to €0.43, a 24.6% decline. Extravagant Replication fell from €0.36 to €0.27, down 25%. The full combo, which cost about €0.93 two weeks ago, now goes for €0.70. This isn't a typo: that's what a two-card combo that closes out the game is actually worth on the real market.
For budget builders, this means one thing: there's no more alibi of "infinite turns aren't for my €50 deck." They are, literally, for less than the price of a coffee.
How to Build It: The Ascend Prerequisite
The real cost of this combo isn't measured in euros, it's measured in permanents you need on the battlefield. Ten permanents in a Commander deck aren't a distant milestone — you typically hit that number around turn 5-6 in a normal game — but you need a plan to accelerate toward it, not just wait for it to happen.
Detective of the Month shares the same Ascend mechanic and, once you've secured the city's blessing, generates 2/2 tokens every time you draw your second card in a turn: two birds with one stone, since those tokens count as permanents and bring you closer to the threshold while you're already benefiting from it. Deeproot Waters does similar work in a Merfolk shell, churning out 1/1 hexproof tokens with every tribal spell — useful both for the permanent count and because those hexproof tokens are hard to remove in response to your plan.
Ascendant Spirit deserves a mention because it costs and stays relevant throughout the game, evolving with snow mana: another cheap body that fills a slot in your count toward ten while doing something on its own.
Sol Ring, treasure tokens, low-cost artifacts: anything that puts permanents onto the battlefield without costing you the game works fine. Ascend doesn't ask for quality, it asks for quantity.
How to Protect It: Instant Speed and Shroud
A two-card combo is also a two-target combo, and the fragility here is real: neither Timestream Navigator nor Extravagant Replication has any innate protection.
Shore Up is the most direct answer for the creature: one mana for instant-speed hexproof, and your opponent's removal becomes a wasted card. Expel from Orazca does double duty — it protects one of your targeted permanents by returning it to hand (or to the top of your library, if you already have the blessing, keeping tempo on your side), and it shares the same Ascend mechanic, so it's never a dead card before you've activated your plan.
For the enchantment, the situation is different: there's no dedicated instant-speed hexproof in this list, so the real defense is redundancy — more pieces that generate extra turns or copies, less dependence on a single removable target.
Variants and Alternative Combos
Timestream Navigator isn't monogamous. With Helm of the Host you get the same output — copies of the creature triggering infinite turns — by paying a heavy equip cost but without needing the six-mana enchantment. With River Song, the combo shifts color and flavor entirely: every time an opponent scries, surveils, or searches their library, River Song gets a +1/+1 counter and deals damage equal to its power, opening up a more aggressive plan beyond the simple turn loop.
None of these variants cost less than the Navigator/Replication pairing. And that's exactly the point: when the cheapest version is also the most straightforward to assemble, the "budget alternative" stops being a compromise and simply becomes the best choice.
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.