Why combo decks?
Maybe it’s the idea. But surely the answer can’t be just the idea. The idea is not the same as the deck. “Decks” are defined by capability and speed, not simply ideas. Bad ideas have turned into good work; conversely, there may be nothing more frustrating in all of Magic: The Gathering as the attribution and misassignment of an idea.
Ideas Are Cheap
In one lecture, Sanderson tells a story about a young Jim Butcher (writer of the wonderful Harry Dresden novels) that finely illustrates this point:
- Butcher: Give me the two worst ideas you can come up with and I will write a book about it—and it will be awesome.
- s0m3 D00d: Okay, your ideas are Pokemon and the Lost Roman Legion.
… So he wrote this book called Codex Alera, which eventually became a big bestselling epic fantasy series!
Combo decks, then, must compel their fans (terrible people that they are) for something more than the idea that propels them.
I do think that at least some combo players are idealists. They actually enjoy the feeling of non-interactive helplessness that overcomes certain of their opponents when playing them. I know that even when I am prepared, I am always more on edge and uncomfortable playing against combo than I am against a commensurately fast beatdown deck. Similarly, I also know when I play combo that one of the things that fuels me is the prospect of my opponent being potentially helpless.
For some of the greatest combo decks, they espouse some of the greatest ideals of Magic itself, implemented so purely that they can only be combo decks.
Consider:
Lands (21)
Spells (39)
- 2 Stroke of Genius
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Counterspell
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Impulse
- 1 Intuition
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- 4 Frantic Search
- 4 Turnabout
- 4 High Tide
- 4 Time Spiral
Sideboard
This is perhaps the purest control deck imaginable. Brainstorm, Impulse, Thawing Glaciers; Counterspell, Force of Will, Pyroblast. It’s nothing but card drawing and counterspells. Despite having only 21 maindeck lands, it’s built to hit land drops every turn. Against an underprepared control deck…when do they have an opening to play themselves?
“Your opponent lays a first turn Thawing Glaciers… What turn exactly do you expect him to miss his land drop?”
-Erik Lauer, 1999
Contrast Turnabout to Sleep; its defensive cards help it go off. Think about Time Spiral for a moment; even when it fails and fizzles, High Tide can leave itself in a position via Turnabout, Time Spiral, and repeated Thawing Glaciers that the average control player would envy: everything untapped!
The High Tide deck is so relentlessly pure that it HAS to be a combo deck. Any other way to win would simply take up too much room. Consider a more familiar contemporary control deck with Entreat the Angels, Thragtusk, and Tamiyo, the Moon Sage. Think about all those cards, all those cards that aren’t just card drawing and Counterspells. Think about how much more land you need to play when you have such big and clunky finishers.
Lands (21)
Spells (39)
- 2 Brainstorm
- 3 Vampiric Tutor
- 4 Duress
- 4 Force of Will
- 1 Firestorm
- 4 Necropotence
- 3 Mana Vault
- 4 Dark Ritual
- 4 Donate
- 1 Lim-Dul's Vault
- 4 Illusions of Grandeur
- 4 Demonic Consultation
- 1 Hoodwink
Sideboard
Last week we talked about different models and templates for building decks in different kinds of formats. Trix was a powerful combo deck that could gain 20 life in the middle of executing its combo (Donating to you a tick-tocking Illusions of Grandeur), but perhaps more important than that, the execution of the deck may be the purest, Platonic, crystallization of playing the Top 10 cards in a format ever.
Forget about how a deck is supposed to win for a moment; imagine you were allowed to play with Brainstorm, Dark Ritual, DEMONIC CONSULTATION, Duress, Force of Will, Mana Vault, Necropotence, and Vampiric Tutor… How many cards do you think you would be able to play in a format that are anywhere near those cards in terms of Top 10 quality? That list of cards is like rattling off a history of banned and restricted cards.
There was a fair stretch when some Trix players actually started Phyrexian Negator + Skittering Horror in place of the Trix combo because the other seven or so slots were so powerful regardless of how you were planning to win. They could dominate the opponent with a first turn 5/5 then side into the two-card combo kill.
Paul Jordan won his first ever PTQ siding Phyrexian Negator in against Sligh, blocking—bloodily sacrificing five permanents—but coming out of it with a blue envelope. Off, so far off, the deck’s original plan.
Trix, too, looks like what a great idea wants to be when it grows up.
So… Why combo?
Good combo decks offer us something that we love or appreciate about Magic but in sharper detail than some other options. Speed kills; some of the best combo decks can put an opponent away on the first or second turn. No amount of card quality can undo poor player behavior, and the fear of losing out of nowhere will often break the focus of frightened Mages. Deceptive and hybridized combo decks can win extra games by putting the opponent on the wrong path.
Various combo decks have punished opponents for having dead creature removal (High Tide), or not having relevant creature removal (Goblin Electromancer Storm with Empty the Warrens), or not having creature removal they should have had (Trix, sideboarded). Or it can punish opponents for preparing three degrees the wrong way (Cifka’s Second Breakfast) or being completely unprepared for The Next Big Thing (Memory Jar). But from the top of the pyramid or the end of the rainbow, there are particular combo decks that can simply do more than everybody else.
- Second Breakfast can do an unlimited amount of damage two points at a time.
- High Tide doesn’t care how much life you’ve gained since it wins by decking you.
- There is more than a small difference between producing four 1/1 tokens and drawing and cycling through a limitless number of cards.
You know how some people say life isn’t a destination but a journey? I think that tends not to be true for combo decks. Not only do you really, really care about where you are going, but you will often fill your deck with every available Preordain, Ponder, and even Wooded Foothills to make your deck smaller and smaller, maximizing just the cards you care about.
Yes, there are many reasons.
Here’s one that I like:
Creatures (16)
Lands (25)
Spells (19)
Though I never personally did much with it, this has always been one of the combo decks I liked and appreciated most. I’m a big fan of decks with a legit Plan B… That, by the way, can also smash you with some relentless combo (probably why I gravitate towards hybrid combo decks like Innovator Breakfast or Shoal and Tell when I play Legacy).
Stoll’s PTQ winning deck is a very passable Zoo deck. A slow Zoo deck sure, but a Zoo that was very good at fighting and beating other Zoo decks. With Jitte it could win attrition wars; additionally, this was one of the first big format decks to exploit Bloodbraid Elf (contemporaries Baneslayer Angel and Ranger of Eos had already been winning in Austin or setting up Elves). In fact, it incorporated the Punishing Fire + Grove of the Burnwillows combo that defined Kibler’s win.
So you have this deck, this perfectly reasonable Zoo deck that can explode into the one-card combo of Scapeshift. Two ways to win. Put too many eggs in the anti-one basket and the other plan would get ya. Gerry Thompson masterwork Thopter Depths from the same era is perhaps the best deck ever at this, a remarkably admirable effort.
Today’s tech contribution in the second section very much echoes the spirit of Stoll and his Scapeshift.
So… Why combo?
Ultimately, you don’t need reasons if you have results. And successful combo decks produce returns beyond and in excess of their “fair deck” contemporaries.
The thing that makes Battle of Wits such a compelling first domino in its various lines of exploration is that persuasive return: five mana, win the game. That’s it. Wow. Sure, Battle of Wits makes you jump through one big hoop to get to that payoff… But wow, what a payoff.
The Kernel of the Combo: The “Asking Better Questions” Edition
Last week I got the gears turning following this catalyst from Travis Allen:
@fivewithflores Funny to see a BoW list, because I was just wondering if another ‘bad’ card could be viable: Door to Nothingness.
— Travis Allen (@epic_travisty) November 2, 2012
Battle of Wits and Door to Nothingness—to my mind—are such different cards. Yes, they are both Standard-legal cards that can win the game by themselves, but their Return on Investment is so different.
Battle of Wits is five mana…wins the game. That’s it.
Door to Nothingness is almost the opposite. It’s just such a bad return on investment on its face. Fifteen mana—committed heavily across all five colors and over two turns to boot—essentially three times the cost for the same effect.
But it gets worse.
If cards are more-or-less as good as each other, there isn’t even that much of a hassle having to play so many.
But Door?
Why would you ever want to play that?
Well, that’s not a very good question. The payoff is essentially the same as Battle. Can we all agree that “Target player loses the game” is a potentially desirable effect that we might want to play if we can accomplish the cost?
Isn’t a better question maybe What do we have to do to pay that cost? followed by Now that we know, is that an unreasonable amount of work?
It turns out that once you actually put in the work to figure out what you have to do, the cost is surprisingly not steep.
After quite a bit of work and deliberation, I came up with this:
Creatures (13)
Lands (24)
Spells (23)
Cutting to the chase: this deck is a monster. An actual monster.
It offers many of the same advantages as the Battle decks I’ve talked about recently but doesn’t force you to play with 244 cards.
Midrange decks without some kind of over-the-top have substantial problems competing whatsoever. You can trade cards and trade advantages with most of them, but most of them don’t have your ability to chain Demonic Tutors into X-spells. You’re essentially the same deck—operating on the same idea through much of the game—as Junk Midrange, Jund, and so on…but all of them at the same time.
You are the Jund that can double up its 187s with Restoration Angel, the Achievement Unlocking Thragtusk-Blinking Bant Shell that can also follow up a Cyclonic Rift with Rakdos’s Return. Have you ever played against Supreme Verdict with one of those tightly capable but threat-fragile blue card advantage / tempo decks? Being on the wrong end of Supreme Verdict sucks… Door Number One’s midrange fellows rarely see that one coming, not with Farseek-into-Chromatic Lantern with nary an Island revealed early on.
The basic operations of the deck are the same as many other Standard midrange decks. You Farseek and Ranger’s Path to battlefield land advantage; you do some reasonably desirable good stuff. Unlike many midrange compatriots, you can contextually go over the top, leveraging your Ranger’s Path with Sphinx’s Revelation…grind the opponent down with Increasing Ambition…or go literally over the top with Door to Nothingness.
Increasing Ambition is the glue that sets this deck up and gives it its Napster-like ability to mold its ever-resource-increasing game plan to the opponent’s operations. Here are some common patterns that you’ll want to know:
- All other things held equal, the most common first target for Increasing Ambition is Sphinx’s Revelation. Against creatures, even if you’ve been trading, you might want to gain some life, and most beatdown decks just concede to a Sphinx’s Revelation for five or six when the game looks even. Figure out a way to stay alive, get in a good block or so, accelerate, and find the Sphinx’s…you’ll like where you end up.
- Supreme Verdict is the go-to “get out of jail free” card. Just remember you only have one main.
- Cyclonic Rift cures all ills. But as with Supreme Verdict, you have to correctly pick your spot. Cyclonic Rift (especially set up with a flashback Increasing Ambition to get both halves of the Rakdos’s Return combo) can potentially deal with anything, but you have to be careful about blowing the first Rift for value / not strategically. You only have the one. Case in point: before I understood the strategic implications of my own deck, I once blew a Cyclonic Rift for combat value against a Runechanter’s Pike, won combat…and then eventually lost to a boosted Moorland Haunt five or six turns later.
- Once you have the board more or less in non-lethal position, Increasing Ambition flashback can get you: Cyclonic Rift + Rakdos’s Return (7+ mana); whatever you want + your next Increasing Ambition; or Door to Nothingness and a way to stay live for one turn (say Cyclonic Rift or Supreme Verdict) (9+ mana in play).
The reality about Door to Nothingness is that in order to make it work, you essentially need sufficient time (you need fifteen mana over two turns) and a crazy spread of mana. That kind of tells you which kind of deck you have to play.
But that doesn’t indicate the kind of deck you have to stay.
The way I constructed the sideboard, you can morph into at least two other decks. In one scenario, you take out most of your creatures (leave Borderland Ranger) to add a ton of hand destruction and removal. You are now just a removal deck with card advantage. When all your Wraths are in, you don’t necessarily want all your expensive guys anyway. Even powerful midrange decks that don’t kill you immediately if you’re putting up a fight can’t really beat Cyclonic Rift + Rakdos’s Return when you have more than one of each in your deck. Against Craterhoof Behemoth decks, you have to make sure the little guys are all dead or you may be.
You can meet another midrange deck head on, essentially acting as a more flexible version of the mirror (fueled by an actual diversity of Farseek targets), winning after exhausting exchanges thanks to Rifts and Returns and potentially the Door. For that matter, it’s not actually necessary to ever reveal the Door in many matches.
Control decks often have relatively few ways to win and, these days, no excess of permission. How do you think one might fare against Slaughter Games, Rakdos’s Return, and Cyclonic Rift? You can beat many control decks simply by exhausting all their victory conditions while advancing your battlefield.
The one thing that I’m second-guessing is the number and type of Revelations. I have the second Sphinx’s Revelation in the deck the majority of the time after sideboarding. I always have the second against control, generally against other midrange, and as a necessity against fast beatdown (where it’s much better as a swap than Diabolic Revelation). On balance, using Sphinx’s Revelation as the test spell and actually resolving Diabolic Revelation has been repeatedly productive for me. I could easily see three Sphinx’s Revelation main (and no Diabolic Revelation).
Anyway, that’s what’s behind Door Number One: a monster.
LOVE
MIKE