Aerid Konstrari's $11 Combo Has a Catch. A 93-Cent Card Fixes It.
Agatha of the Vile Cauldron went from $3.99 to $11.16 on TCGplayer in the eighteen days after Aerid Konstrari came out, because the two go infinite together. The catch: Agatha needs power 5 first, and a 93-cent Equipment that 30% of Aerid decks already run gets her there. We break down the line, the Roxanne trick that lowers the bar to power 4, and what the combo does to your bracket.
You untap with Aerid Konstrari and Agatha of the Vile Cauldron on the battlefield. You pay one mana and make a Heartwood. You tap that Heartwood, pay one mana, make another. Somewhere around Heartwood number forty, the Reckless Fireweaver you played two turns ago has dealt forty damage to each opponent, and the game is over.
That line is why Agatha stopped being a $2 card. In our price history she sat at $3.99 on TCGplayer the day Aerid released, October 2. On October 20 she was $11.16. And EDHREC already lists her in 2,955 of 4,995 Aerid decks, 59%.
Here's the part the spike coverage skips: the combo only works if Agatha has power 5. She's a 1/1. What gets her there, and whether you need her at all, decides what this deck costs you and what you have to tell your pod.
The loop, card by card
Aerid is a 5/4 flier that makes a Heartwood token when it enters or dies. A Heartwood is a red and green artifact with ": Add or ." The engine is Aerid's last line: ": Create a Heartwood token. Then Aerid Konstrari gets +X/+0 until end of turn, where X is the number of artifacts you control."
Agatha makes activated abilities of your creatures cost less, where X is her power, and stops at one: "This effect can't reduce the mana in that cost to less than one mana." So with Agatha at power 5, Aerid's costs , and the loop writes itself:
- Pay , activate Aerid. You get a Heartwood, and Aerid gets +X/+0 for every artifact you control.
- The new Heartwood didn't enter tapped, so tap it for or .
- That mana pays the next activation. Repeat as often as you like.
Every pass is mana-neutral, and nothing in the loop is mandatory, so you stop whenever you want. What you have at the end is a pile of artifacts and an Aerid with as much power as you care to count. On its own that's a huge flier that kills one opponent, provided nobody has a flying or reach blocker. Fireweaver, in 58% of Aerid decks, is what turns it into a table kill: "Whenever an artifact you control enters, this creature deals 1 damage to each opponent."
The fine print: Agatha's power 5
Commander Spellbook files Aerid and Agatha as two cards with a prerequisite, "Agatha has power 5 or greater." EDHREC's combo list shows the two names. Our own combo engine mirrors Spellbook's combos but doesn't check their prerequisites yet, so it counts the pair as complete too. Agatha needs four extra power, and that's the third piece of the combo.
One thing the early write-ups got wrong: at six power Aerid's ability does not become free, and Agatha alone never makes mana. Her own text stops the discount at one mana, at any power. The base loop breaks even and nothing more.
So what gets a 1/1 to 5?
Improvised Arsenal is the cheap answer. It's a $0.93 Equipment with "Equipped creature gets +1/+0 for each artifact you control" and Equip , and it's already in 30% of Aerid decks. Count it out: the Arsenal is an artifact, Aerid brought a Heartwood, and Sol Ring and Arcane Signet sit in roughly 80% of these lists. That's four artifacts, so Agatha is a 5/1 for one red mana. Equipping is sorcery speed, but Aerid's ability isn't. Equip on your turn, and you can run the loop whenever you like after that.
The other two routes are in more decks, but they're slower:
- Craterclaw Colossus (in 67% of decks, $10.19) gives your creatures +X/+0 for each artifact you control when it enters. It counts itself, so three other artifacts put Agatha at 5. That's seven mana for the Colossus plus to start the loop, all in one turn.
- Kessig Wolf Run (43%) works, but X = 4 costs plus the land's own tap. It's a land ability, so Agatha doesn't discount it.
Three cards look like they help more than they do:
- Return of the Wildspeaker gives +3/+3 to "Non-Human creatures." Agatha is a Human Warlock. That instant is in 47% of Aerid decks, and it does nothing for this line.
- Agatha's own pump hits "Other creatures you control." Never herself.
- The Reaver Cleaver is +1/+1, not the haymaker people remember. It gets you one of the four points.
Roxanne lowers the bar to power 4
This is where the deck you actually own matters more than the combo database. Roxanne, Starfall Savant is in 80% of Aerid decks, as many as run Arcane Signet, and her second line rewrites the math: "Whenever you tap an artifact token for mana, add one mana of any type that artifact token produced."
With Roxanne out, every Heartwood taps for two mana. The loop only needs each activation to pay for the next one, so a activation is enough. That means Agatha at power 4. At power 5 the activation still costs but returns two, so you net one mana per pass, and that's your infinite red and green mana. (It's also an honest version of the "infinite mana" claim in the spike coverage. It comes from Roxanne or a token doubler, not from Agatha's sixth power point.)
Token doublers do the same thing from the other side. Parallel Lives (45%) and Doubling Season (32%) turn each activation into two Heartwoods.
| On your battlefield besides Aerid + Agatha | Mana back per activation | Agatha needs power | |---|---|---| | nothing | 1 | 5 | | Roxanne | 2 | 4 | | Parallel Lives or Doubling Season | 2 | 4 | | Roxanne + one doubler | 4 | 2 |
Spellbook only lists the base case. The other rows are our reading of the Oracle text, worked out step by step in our data notes, so check them against your own board before you call a win.
What the line does to your bracket
We ran EDHREC's average Aerid list through DeckCortex's bracket model. It has zero Game Changers, zero fast mana and zero tutors, and it still lands at Bracket 3 (Upgraded). The reason is two complete combos in our engine: this one, and Orthion, Hero of Lavabrink plus Craterclaw Colossus. Spellbook files that second one as "near-infinite," because five hasty Colossus copies is a big number, not an endless one. That's a floor from the model's countable signals. The power-level part of the model isn't applied here.
Meanwhile, 181 of the 602 Aerid decks that carry a bracket tag on EDHREC call themselves Bracket 2. That's 30%. The official bracket rules say Brackets 1 and 2 have "No intentional two-card infinite combos." Spellbook files Aerid and Agatha as a two-card combo, and if you sleeved Agatha in an Aerid deck, it's intentional. So either your deck is Bracket 3, or Agatha comes out. Both are fine. Pretending she's an innocent cost reducer isn't.
Our model is stricter than that sentence. Take Agatha out of the crowd list and it still says Bracket 3, because Orthion and Craterclaw still count. Take both out and none of its signals are left, so the deck's power level decides between 1 and 2. If your pod plays by the official text, cutting Agatha is enough. If you want the DeckCortex number to agree, Orthion goes too.
The $11 question
| Agatha of the Vile Cauldron (Wilds of Eldraine, regular) | Oct 2 | Oct 20 | |---|---|---| | TCGplayer | $3.99 | $11.16 | | Cardmarket | €1.65 | €2.10 |
That's ×2.8 in the US against ×1.3 in Europe over the same eighteen days, according to our price history. Card Kingdom's buylist tells you how the US market reads it: they paid $0.75 for a copy in late August and pay $5.00 now. In Europe the card hasn't followed. That's a gap, not a forecast.
Whether you pay depends on what you want the deck to be:
- You want the combo. Agatha is the only discount in Aerid's colors that gets there. Training Grounds and Biomancer's Familiar knock off but they're blue, and Heartstone only takes off one. Add Improvised Arsenal for under a dollar and you have the whole line for about twelve dollars more than the deck without it.
- You want a Bracket 2 artifact-ramp deck. Leave Agatha out (and Orthion, if you go by our model). Aerid still makes a Heartwood every time you have six mana spare, and Craterclaw, Fireweaver and the token doublers still do their jobs. You just don't get the turn where one mana ends the game.
Build the list in DeckCortex before your next game night. It'll show you both combos, the bracket, and what each card costs.
Data: EDHREC Aerid Konstrari page and average deck (4,995 decks, fetched 2026-10-21; inclusion figures are EDHREC's casual decklists, not DeckCortex metagame data; bracket tags are self-reported, n = 602). DeckCortex price history for Agatha of the Vile Cauldron (Wilds of Eldraine #199, retail, regular), last point 2026-10-20; Card Kingdom figure is buylist. Prices are paper and move daily. Bracket = DeckCortex's deterministic bracket-fit model on EDHREC's average list as imported 2026-10-21; the combo count is a signal, not a final rating, and our engine does not model Spellbook prerequisites. The Roxanne and token-doubler thresholds are our reading of the Oracle text, not a Spellbook entry.