Infinite Turns for $8: The Combo "Serious" Players Turn Their Noses Up At

Everyone will tell you that infinite turn combos are cEDH stuff, glossy decks with mortgage-worthy manabases and three-figure finishers per card. That's a comfortable fairy tale for people who want to justify their shiny cardboard. The truth is that with a mere $8.36 you can put together a loop that, if left unanswered, wins the game on its own. It's not even a new or secret combo: it's just underrated because it doesn't make noise on Twitter.

The mechanism, no frills

The foundation is simple, almost embarrassingly linear:

1. Cast Time Warp: take an extra turn, and use most of it to develop your board.
2. On any turn (even the extra one) put Archaeomancer into play: its ETB retrieves an instant or sorcery with mana value ≤3 from the graveyard — namely Time Warp, back in your hand.
3. With Crystal Shard on the battlefield, pay 2 mana and bounce Archaeomancer back to hand during your extra turn, before it ends.
4. Recast Archaeomancer, pick up Time Warp again, cast it once more, take another extra turn. Repeat indefinitely, as long as you have the mana for the loop (2 mana for the bounce, Archaeomancer's recast cost, and Time Warp's cost).

With infinite mana in the deck — and in many blue-green decks this isn't a problem — this becomes a loop that gives you endless turns until you decide to close out the game with an attack or another win condition. Without infinite mana, you still get several consecutive extra turns, which is often enough to overwhelm the table.

Where it fits: Izzet-Simic color identity (UR + UG)

Let's be honest here: the three pieces together require blue (for both sorceries and the bounce) and don't force any other color, but Archaeomancer is often splashed into shells that also want green for the ramp that sustains the loop. So the actual operative color identity is mono-blue, with natural support in Simic or Izzet:

• Kalamax, the Stormsire — multiple copies of Time Warp with makeshift flashback, direct synergy with the instant-heavy theme.
• Zaheer (if you're building around time control, less direct but consistent with the extra-turns theme).
• Riku of Two Reflections — classic Simic, copies ETBs, so even Archaeomancer's ETB becomes a second recursion.
• Tatyova, Benthic Druid — doesn't synergize directly with the loop but provides the ramp needed to sustain it, and the extra turns let you draw cards/gain life multiple times.
• Urza, Lord High Artificer — if you want a mono-blue commander that loves stacking up incremental value pieces like Crystal Shard.

You don't need a deck built specifically for this: any blue deck with enough of a body to protect the board state until the loop gets going will do.

How to protect it (because otherwise it's just cardboard for the recycling bin)

The real problem isn't assembling the combo, it's keeping it alive. Three weak points:

• Archaeomancer is a 2/2 creature. It dies to any removal, and if it dies before Time Warp returns to hand, you've wasted a turn.
• Crystal Shard is a 2-mana artifact, an easy target for artifact hate. It has no built-in protection: if it gets removed, the loop stops cold.
• The sequence requires multiple steps in the same turn, so you're vulnerable to instant-speed interaction in the middle of the combo — a counterspell on the second cast of Time Warp leaves you with wasted turns.

Play the combo when you already have a secure board or open mana for protection, not the moment you happen to assemble it. If you have counterspells available, save them to protect the second or third cast of Time Warp, not the first: that's when your opponent figures out what's happening and reacts.

Budget vs Premium

Here's the fun part: there's almost no difference between budget and premium — the three pieces already cost next to nothing ($0.41, $7.48, $0.47), and the only way to "premiumize" the combo is to buy foils or old-border editions of Time Warp, which raise its price for purely aesthetic reasons, not functional ones. In practice, this is already the budget version, and the premium version coincides with it: the only real expense is Time Warp itself.

My verdict, just to be clear

People ignore this combo because it doesn't have a cool name and doesn't show up in "top 10 cEDH combos" videos. But an infinite-turns loop at bracket 4 with under nine dollars of investment is objectively more efficient, dollar for dollar, than any glossy Thassa's Oracle package. If your table plays at bracket 4 and nobody has instant-speed answers ready, this combo closes games. Period. The only reason to snub it is snobbery itself.