Combat in cEDH

CEDH is primarily a combo-focused format because combos are the most efficient way to win a game against three other players with a combined 120 life total. However, when games go long, life totals can get low. Taking advantage of your ability to kill even just a single player who is either threatening a win of their own or interaction to stop you can enable you to find wins you otherwise wouldn't expect. 

It doesn't matter if a player is about to untap with 10+ cards in their hand if their life totals hit 0, but CEDH is horrible about teaching players to use combat effectively, and I've seen many games where people just don't bother with combat when their commander doesn't explicitly incentivise doing so. Combat is frequently unimpactful in games, so it's understandable that many players tend to ignore it, but in longer games it can be a key condition to finding your path to winning.

I played in the r/cedh discord's tournament recently, and of the five games I played in swiss, two of them were games that, if players were better about utilising combat, would have been losses on my end (to be fair, one of them would have been a loss anyways if we had 30 more seconds on the clock). The finals pod was also won by a player who understood how to use combat and ended with a pretty cool use of Derevi, Empyrial Tactician to activate Deathrite Shaman multiple times after Abhorrent Oculus put on a clinic.

cEDH Combat 101

The most common advice in cedh is to "attack the naus player." This puts a time limit on how long people can wait before attempting to resolve their Ad Nauseam, and it weakens the total strength of the spell. There isn't a huge difference between a naus from 35 life and a naus from 30, but the longer the game goes on, the more damage adds up, eventually turning naus from a win condition to "just" a powerful draw spell or even completely shut off a player's ability to cast the card without paying too much life.

This is similarly true for basically every card that requires you to pay a large amount of life to gain card advantage, like Sylvan Library, Bolas's Citadel, and Necropotence. Eventually, the powerful cards that benefit from having twice the normal starting life totals that Magic cards are typically balanced around will start to fall off. However, there's a lot more to combat than just hitting whoever seems to be the most likely to trade their life for cards.

I primarily play Tymna/Jeska turbo naus myself, so my perspective is skewed towards finding my best outs to win the game rather than preventing others from winning with their own copies of naus. Putting pressure on opponents who want to make the game go long, whether they're stax players or simply midrange players who prefer a very grindy game, can pressure them into attempting to win before they're able to get enough counter magic to push their attempts through. 

You should also look at how the game is likely to end. Can you win the game by beating down the table and denying their wins? This is a common threat that some decks, like Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow, will present: you don't have to spend resources on winning the game, you have that on board. Destroying your board likely means your opponent won't be winning the game that turn, leaving them more vulnerable to your own Oracle combo.

If I'm consistently hitting the same person with a Serra Ascendant, they only have a few turns to win the game or find an answer to the Serra Ascendant before they lose to a 6/6 in the air (With Jeska it gets a little silly, but it's pretty rare to be in that situation). A lot of slow midrange decks aren't able to effectively stop this in time and can be forced to win before they're ready.

I've also removed players from the game who I think have a hand full of countermagic that would prevent me from resolving my combo but that haven't yet found a good enough answer to my board; after killing them, I have a much easier time resolving my combos to kill the other two players.

Deciding Who to Hit

There are a lot of factors that weigh in on deciding who to attack. I personally prefer to go after the deck that I think is most favoured to win in a long game, where the successive attacks will add up. This doesn't always work out, and sometimes they do win before the combat becomes relevant, but there are a nonzero number of games where some players just aren't able to win fast enough and the life totals start to get dangerously low. 

If there are multiple decks at the table that can effectively use combat through some combination of large bodies, evasion, and commander damage, you can try to politic the table to attack a player who you believe is going to be either the biggest threat to win the game or roadblock preventing you from winning yourself. Pointing out how many cards someone has drawn is an easy way to present them as the most threatening player.

As I mentioned earlier, hitting the naus player allows you to turn off some of their powerful win conditions or value pieces, which might be a more attractive prospect if you think that your deck is naturally very advantaged in a longer game and the only threat that you're concerned about comes from your opponents killing you early.

By limiting the options your opponents have available to them to steal the game away from you, you're putting yourself in a much better position; however, make sure that you're still able to find a way to push your advantage, either through winning the game or developing more and more value engines that will drown your opponents in card advantage. 

You should frequently reassess the table, and, if you see that one player is likely to start to snowball the game in their own favour, consider trying to convince the table to pressure them in combat to give yourself an out. Utilising combat is just another way to politic the table.

Combat-Focused Decks

There's a subset of midrange decks that are focused on using combat to accrue value, such as Yuriko and Tymna. Despite using the combat step however, it's actually not hard for these decks to end up getting pressured by the rest of the table hitting them, as they usually don't have anything large enough to disincentivise attacks. Tymna blockers can become Tymna killers if you can either hold something else up to block or if the Tymna player has an evasive threat that they're using to get in.

Kraum and other large evasive commanders are the best at enabling combat pressure against your opponents. Unless you're playing against a deck specifically designed to win combat, such as Winota, these commanders are generally what allows decks that don't have a huge focus on combat to actually pressure or kill your opponents. 

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people with large commanders make is not using the combat step effectively. Sometimes they'll hit the naus player or someone with a Sylvan Library out, but frequently they'll just sit on their commander as a deterrent. However, with something like a Kenrith, you should be actively looking to kill your opponents with him. 

Growing Kenrith or another creature can frequently be better than drawing a card, because pumping him twice is enough to make his damage lethal in three hits. Drawing cards is always nice, but the ability to pressure your opponents on a different axis in the command zone is an important part of Kenrith's late-game plan. 

There was a lot of interplay between stax decks and turbo naus decks a few years ago where stax decks ended up playing cards like Kor Haven as a way to prevent Kraum or other large commanders from killing them. Sometimes you might have to spend removal on a commander that isn't doing much just to prevent yourself from dying to them.

Some decks where the commander uses combat, especially Mardu Tymna, will add some cards that gain even more advantage from combat than just what Tymna herself can provide. Cards like Grim Hireling and Professional Face-Breaker can provide a mana advantage as well as extra utility in the form of uncounterable removal or card advantage respectively, and Loyal Apprentice can guarantee that every turn Tymna becomes an Ancestral Recall.

These cards can let Tymna decks gain a ridiculous advantage from the get go, and they help ensure that they have attackers that can push through some cluttered board states. Other decks can have similar cards, such as Chatterfang in Najeela (though that's also a combo piece). Though they aren't usually the same power as a built up Thrasios with a Seedborn Muse, these cards don't require as much to get going.

Combat with Stax

Stax decks and combat go hand-in-hand, and the combat for stax decks is much harder. You're naturally inclined to hit the ad nauseam decks, but you need to be concerned about the blue decks that will take advantage of you slowing the game down and then cast a Cyclonic Rift at their leisure. 

For stax decks, I'm a fan of hitting the players who are more likely to take advantage of the game going long than I am of hitting the naus players who should be mostly answered by your stax pieces. Stax decks should naturally have favourable combat against most decks, though some commanders can invert this dynamic and actually pressure stax deck if their commander isn't inclined towards combat. 

Early on, you might want to chip in against the naus players to play around them removing your stax pieces and then going off, but be ready to quickly pivot to attacking decks that are better able to play through your stax pieces. Pressuring your opponents' life totals to increase the likelihood of them making mistakes or trying to win at times that aren't optimal is a big part of playing stax, but you also need to make sure that you're actually killing opponents at the best times as a stax deck. 

Sometimes you need to make sure that two of your opponents die at the same time so that they can help stop each other because you're not able to effectively stop them yourself. These games can be hard to recognise, but when you're thinking about killing one player who is playing a very interactive deck you should consider if you can stop the rest of the table without their help. 

Niche, But Useful

While combat isn't always relevant in games, there are very frequently occasions where you can use it to your advantage to turn a game you are losing into a winning one. By paying attention to the flow of the game, you can find situations where you would be able to take one or more players out and steal a win from people who aren't prepared for that style of gameplay. At the end of the day, player removal, or even just the threat of it, is one of the strongest pieces of interaction you have access to, and by not taking advantage of it when you can, you end up leaving wins on the table.