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Combo deck

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Combo deck is a term for a deck that revolves around a specific set of a relatively small number of cards that instantly or very quickly win the game when combined (hence the name "combo").[1] Because of this win strategy, a common motif among combo decks is an emphasis put on the ability to find specific cards quickly and win as fast as possible. Good combos make use of mana acceleration, card drawing and engines.[2][3][4][5]

Combo history and development

Combo decks have a wide breadth of potential in terms of how effective they are and what sort of result occurs. A bad combo deck could be a four-card interaction that maybe wins the game the following turn, whereas a broken combo deck will win within two turns and likely needs banning. What differentiates combo decks from other decks is how little interest they have in the normal flow of Magic gameplay of playing lands and casting spells to either accrue tempo or card advantage. If a deck takes actions that seem like it is doing neither but still wins, it will often be called a combo deck. Some combo decks can be readily evident by merely looking at the decklist: Goblin Charbelcher and Vintage Dredge decks have a single-digit number of lands, which non-combo decks cannot support. On the other end of the spectrum, a deck like Devoted Company does not look particularly different from any other creature-midrange deck, but amongst the list of creatures is the Devoted Druid-Vizier of Remedies combo that produces infinite mana.

The nature of the combo greatly informs the structure of the deck. Having spells that find the combo may be beneficial, but other pressures may prevent this from being a functional idea.

  • The above Devoted Vizier combo generates infinite mana, which in itself technically does not win the game, but finding something to put the mana into is often trivial. As such, it uses tutors to both find the combo and find its win condition, and many mana creatures to offset the cost of doing so. This also gives it an effective secondary win condition as a pile of creatures will inherently pressure, regardless of their size.
  • Thopter Foundry-Sword of the Meek combine to create a 1/1 flier and one life for one mana, which can stifle aggressive decks but still requires several turns to win; that means that the deck is built to play longer games and has its best matchups against decks that struggle to break through. The fact that both are generally not useful in surviving on their own makes tutors a weak prospect. While having access to blue mana means that it can bounce opposing hate pieces, the deck is more likely to win in a control fashion, like with planeswalkers or the optional but popular third piece of Urza, Lord High Artificer (which lets the combo go true infinite).
  • Scapeshift is an interesting case: technically a one-card combo as it tutors its other-half wincon Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, but to win it requires seven or more lands in play, which means it has to expend its resources ramping. This lowers the resources available to draw into Scapeshift, as does the stringent manabase: it must run all Mountains and enough green mana to ramp, neither of which is good at finding a sorcery. Its sideboarding is usually more to avoid dying early, as Primeval Titan is a typical main-deck include and manually triggering Valakut seven times is feasible in long games.
  • Storm combo is ultimately a three-fold combo headlined by either Past in Flames or Yawgmoth's Will: it plays rituals and card draw, which originally results in a low net resource loop, until it plays one of the aforementioned spells, which lets it double the resources the previous loop made. Due to how narrow the margins can be, the deck rarely has space for much else, but on the other hand, it can be one of the fastest combo decks, so it may not need to. It often has no secondary win con as blue bounce effects can usually manage things like High Noon or Leyline of Sanctity. It may only need to avoid lobotomy effects, which it does by using different Storm spells.

Hence, the metric one needs to consider is the winning turn of the combo relative to the format. If the combo is the fastest deck in the format, it often does not need disruption until after sideboarding. If the combo requires a substantial amount of resources - including the mana to cast its pieces - it often needs to either present alternative threats or have a suite of interactions to survive. Combos requiring creatures often lean towards being proactive with their shell, while noncreature combos lean toward being reactive, as their combo is less vulnerable in the first game. A major development in the history of the game is the general improvement of the creature base: historically, aggro decks were seen as unfavored against combo decks, as their power relative to their mana was low, and rarely could they win before the combo deck executed its combo. Nowadays, creature decks can win with three creatures, and one or two disruptions against the combo deck would be sufficient to win. A greater understanding of combo pieces also means Play Design is less likely to accidentally print powerful combos, though some healthy combo decks are permitted in Standard.[6]

Examples of Combo Decks

Channel-Fireball

Channel-Fireball is the classic example of early combo strategies because it deals exactly twenty damage, the amount required to win a game, and is playable on the first turn if the right cards are drawn in an opening hand. The basic strategy was to drop quick mana, including Black Lotus or Mox artifacts, cast a Channel and a Fireball, using excess mana to pump the Fireball up one or two damage, and using Channel to fuel the Fireball for the rest of the damage necessary to kill one's opponent. The ensuing 20-point Fireball would kill one's opponent and leave the caster with usually between 1 and 5 life. Because Channelball was quite vulnerable to essentially fatal disruption (e.g., a Counterspell, or retaliatory Lightning Bolt), it was superseded by more robust, fast, and powerful combo decks.

Prosperous Bloom

Main article: Prosperous Bloom

The first modern combo deck, the ProsBloom (or Bloom-Drain) deck, utilized Squandered Resources to cast an early Cadaverous Bloom. Prosperity is cast, and one's hand is discarded to gain a large number of cards. Successive Prosperities then increase your hand size dramatically. A card is thrown to cast a Drain Life, and ten cards are thrown to fuel the Drain for 20 points.

Fruity Pebbles

Main article: Fruity Pebbles

Fruity Pebbles used Goblin Bombardment to deal massive amounts of damage using a loop, in which a single play was repeated many times to the player's advantage. An artifact creature playable for no mana, for example, Phyrexian Walker or Ornithopter, designed as a cheap and expendable blocker, was combined with Enduring Renewal, a card that automatically returns dying creatures to their owner's hand. The player then sacrificed Ornithopter or some equivalent to Goblin Bombardment to deal damage to their opponent; the Ornithopter returned to their hand, was played for no mana, and the cycle repeated until the opponent was defeated. This combo was stronger than previous ones because its game pieces could be used to some effect even outside its combo. This principle, which suggests that combo pieces should be useful in as many contexts as possible, is a fundamental guiding principle in the construction of contemporary combo decks.

Kiki Combos

Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker is renowned for being especially easy to combo with, but is considered acceptable due to its fragility: a five-mana, triple-red, 2/2 legendary creature has many facets of vulnerability. Its ability is to create temporary copies of creatures with haste, which meant that untap effects, blink effects, and other copy effects would mean infinite attacking creatures for the turn. One more recent was Conspicuous Snoop, as the ability only restricts against legendary creatures: the Snoop would begin copying on the opponent's end step to kill on their own turn, all without casting the Kiki-Jiki.

A Standard variant was the combination of Splinter Twin, another Kiki-like effect, with Deceiver Exarch. While found immediately and noted to be very powerful given the Exarch has Flash, New Phyrexia was released a year after Rise of the Eldrazi, and rotation was due in a few months, deeming it overall acceptable. However, Modern eventually found the pressure too high and banned Twin in 2016.

Standard Copy Cat

Main article: Standard Copy cat

A combo deck admitted having been missed by R&D, Saheeli Rai's Kiki-like ability was used on Felidar Guardian, a creature that blinks another permanent when it enters. However, unlike Splinter Twin, both of these were in the same block of rotation, which meant that without a ban, it would always loom over the format. Immature forms of the deck were pushed out of the top tables of Pro Tour Aether Revolt, but the Energy shell that dominated the format later would give the combo the legs it needed, leading to a ban of Felidar Guardian both in Standard and later on in Pioneer.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom and nondeterminism

For many combo decks, the beginning and end states are well-defined and obvious when a resource loop has been determined. However, a small group of combo decks relies on the library's contents to loop and, hence, are not entirely guaranteed to succeed. One of the previous culprits of this was known as the "Four Horsemen" deck, which used Grim Monolith and Mesmeric Orb as a way to mill one's entire library. At the time of the deck's popularity, Laboratory Maniac effects were ineffective ways to win due to the "draw a card" clause, which meant that a player needed to win through other means. Many options were available, but most players also needed to use an Eldrazi shuffle trigger (usually Emrakul, the Promised End) to refresh the library. This meant that if Emrakul was milled before the winning combo was found, the process needed to start again, something that had a chance of recurring and technically could happen every time, leading to a stalled game. The printing of Thassa's Oracle made this issue somewhat less prevalent, as it meant that in the rare situation that the Oracle player's opponent beat the winning trigger, the game would end either way.

A different issue arose with the printing of Nadu, Winged Wisdom, whose power dominated Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3. Two specific wordings on Nadu's ability made for a potent but infuriating combo with 0-mana targetters like Shuko: first, every new creature gives two triggers; and second, the lands enter untapped, giving more mana. With Springheart Nantuko, a creature that produced more creatures with landfall, each land on top of the library produces a large number of resources (two cards and the land's mana). Hence, each land pushes through two more spells to find the next land, and each creature spell found would also give two cards but subtracts from the mana gained. On average, every sequence of three spells and one land would be free to draw, but four or more spells is likely to stop. However, because the Nadu player is never expending any real resource in the two-card combo of Nadu and Shuko, the deck's idea of "whiffing" is drawing four to six cards for no mana. This made for the ultimate problem with the deck: it wins by an overwhelming number of resources and never expends them the way some other combo decks do, so answering the deck as a whole was difficult enough to warrant a ban on Nadu in Legacy and Modern.

Historical combo decks

Because the actual deck combos are hard to understand without detailed knowledge of Magic: The Gathering rules and actual decklists vary greatly, there is no easy and encyclopedic way to present information regarding specific combo decks. However, for reference, here is a list of combo decks that have been prominent in Magic: The Gathering history.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Mark Rosewater (September 27, 2004). "Combo Platter". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
  2. ↑ Shuhei Nakamura (March 31, 2007). "Your First Combo Deck". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-09-22.
  3. ↑ Jeff Cunningham (June 16, 2007). "Playing Against Combo". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-09-22.
  4. ↑ Aaron Forsythe (October 01, 2004). "Combos? What Combos?". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-01-22.
  5. ↑ Gavin Verhey (January 5, 2017). "Building Your Engine". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-03-30.
  6. ↑ Melissa DeTora (June 14, 2019). "Play Design Q&A". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2019-09-15.

External links

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