General combo in cube: thoughts on the "showdown turn"

[safra]

thoughts on the 'showdown turn'

it's probably worth talking about "combo", and what i mean when i'm talking about it! two-card combos are boring (my very first pauper cube game i got presence of gonded out and it was just such bullshit, the deck went 3-0 and sucked) and are a rough proposition in big cubes so i'm gonna exclude them briefly. If anyone wants to drop some thoughts on those I'd be into it though! Also gonna try to draw a (faint, vague) line between "combo" and "synergy" decks, and I think the best way to do that is to look at engine combo.

Looking at some of the cards I think of as "combo" spells (lab man, cataclysm, dread return/rites, dampen thought, natural order, tolarian academy, pod, dredge cards) the common threads become clearer. These cards ask things of your deck's contents, leverage hidden info, and make you care about novel things during the draft. Dedicated gravecrawlers, pod, cataclysm, these incentivize drafters to care about type lines in a way that isn't super poisonous.

Other combo decks are about resource accumulation. Make a billion mana and USZ you for 61, infinity pestermites, whatever that myr combo deck was, the goal is to find a thing that bends a fundamental rule of the game (things cost appropriate amounts of mana, you can only cast spells once, 37c373r4)

laboratory maniac decks are sweet, because the lab man is an alternate wincon that doesn't suck (inasmuch as grey ogres don't suck). One thing lab man decks are pretty fun for, imo, is the "showdown turn" - i'm outta cards, gonna win this draw step, but maybe you'll bolt him on my upkeep? I have a counterspell but you might have two pieces of removal, I can brainstorm in response, etc...

This phenomenom, I think, more broadly applies to creature-based combo decks (and maybe non creature ones? Cards that take creatures off the board in the labman case act as a check on the combo, and even though i tried Mimic Vat as a sort of less stupid recur engine the lack of ubiquitous interaction made for some nongames of the kind that really piss me off). I'm looking for an engine that's either creature-based or sublime and that can be interacted with beyond counters and discard (let's not talk about storm here) .

Whichever combo is in your environment can push and pull aggro, midrange and control decks both to and against it. Aggro-control is neat but kinda hard to make work sometimes. I'm fine supplementing it with aggro-combo (and vice versa), but really most excited about combo-control (think Tight Sight, or Vintage control decks like slaver). Cubes in general push the combat step as a means of interaction, and cubes here specifically tend to magnify that (15-dude control decks whaaaattttt) and combo-control or control-combo decks might make for Aetherking-style permission-heavy builds.

I'm worried about the problem this poses vis a vis the poison principle, which is why my cube barely supports what I'd call combo even though it drips with synergy. I'm looking for more TES than ANT, if that makes sense? A deck that does a single thing really well is cool but tbh emergent synergy (esp. the subtle kind) gives me such a boner


wizards has put deliberate combos in limited formats before (devoted druid / quillspike, dampen thought, the 5DN Stations) but nobody has made Cube engine combo work in a way that doesn't seriously hurt the draft process. I have tried, and failed, a few times. So have a lot of other people! It might be possible, it might not. But a methodological view can maybe tell us why.

Anyway this is the point where I use my cube thread to free-associate about design (god, what's the rest of this post been, then?)

SINGLETON FORMAT
-card advantage is an important part of combo plans. The traditional punishment of mulling to six because your first hand is total jank sucks, there has to be a way for combo decks to find what they need when they need it.
-at the same time, a combo deck should be able to win without ever using its combo. the carefully-managed redundancy levels are gonna fail at some point and snapcaster beats are legit
-not sure if investing a ton of resources into your combo and fizzling should lose you the game or just suck
-I think the connections need to be made at a mechanical level for engine combo. Not entirely sure why but it feels more investigative (because it mimics cards in play and not in decks?)
-Will look into cards that move other cards to other zones, briefly categorize, see where my cube's current strengths are, and design a combo archetype that nestles within them.
-guessing it'll be graveyard based, with flashback and mill filling in for other formats' tutors and serious card draw

QUESTIONS
How does engine combo work in your format? the Pincher cube is an inspiration but my karoos are staying in the land binder.
What have you already tried and why didn't it work?

 

[Eric Chan]

That post was amazing - it's put into words thoughts that I've had swirling in my head, but never quite been able to articulate, about layering combo into cube archetypes, whether that's aggro, midrange, or control.

I'm in complete agreement that combo in cube should be primarily creature-based, so as to provide the inherent interaction that's present in regular games of Magic. Your Doom Blade should be able to stop both their fast aggro beaters or their key engine cogs. Purely spell-based combos, like storm, are both heavily poison principle-y as well as providing for few means of interaction, so it's not something that I'm really interested in spending upwards of ten card slots on.

At one point, I was trying to make sure that combo had crossover with each of the aggro, midrange, and control archetypes:

• Aggro: Gravecrawler-based shenanigans, involving Blood Artist, Blasting Station, and other sac outlets. This allows the aggro deck to take its game outside of the combat zone once the board clogged up.
• Midrange: Nest Invader/Kozilek's Predator/Bestial Menace and assorted token producers in green, then Overrun or Overwhelming Stampede as a finisher. This was a way to give otherwise normal midrange, gum-the-board-with-bodies decks a way to close out games, while still having them play fair throughout. The problem is that both the green token producers and the Overruns can be anywhere from mediocre to useless on their own, and it was better just to play a normal aggro-midrange game with white's Glorious Anthems, rather than striving for the fancy one-hit kill.
• Control: Reanimator! This is a deck that I've been trying to make work for something like three years, with only very little success. It's much stronger when you run Demonic Tutor, Entomb, and Reanimate, but also not approaching anything fair or interactive. A toned down theme using Makeshift Mannequin, Dread Return, and Unburial Rites as the reanimation spells of choice, along with plain ol' Merfolk Looter and Compulsive Research as its discard outlets, is much more vulnerable to disruption, as well as being slower (turn four fatty at best).

There are other decks I haven't tried that fit somewhere on the aggro-combo spectrum, like equipment + double-strike, or auras + heroic. These decks function fine as regular aggro decks, though they tend to be more fragile, with the upside that they can have explosive combat steps where they take huge chunks of life off the opponent. The nice part, especially with equipment and double strike, is that these cards should have uses outside of the dedicated archetype.

I think the graveyard is a great place to start looking for more combo-like interactions, because it's a zone that's rife with unexplored potential. I suspect the power level of the format overall would have to be toned down, though - having tried supporting Life from the Loam, Worm Harvest, and Spider Spawning in cube in the past, I can say that the typical cube is way too fast to be durdling around with stuff like that.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I like combos where the end result is a gross acceleration of the usual axis of play. Playing a madcap skills on any old creature is acceptable beatdown, but playing it on a doublestriker gives your oversized returns. If you are attempting to kill your opponent with damage, smashing with a Fabled Hero for 12 is going to quickly bring the game to a close, but it isn't the game by itself. You still need to get the other 8 damage from somewhere else and its not like mapcap-hero is beyond interaction. The main thing is that you don't lose to just one thing happening once, there is some chance for counterplay that comes from playing the game normally. If you responded to the red/white decks one and two drop, then the deck still needs to find 8 damage to kill you. If just let the one and two drops punch you in the face, you're dead, but you should be because you aren't playing Magic against your opponent. Against things like Splinter Twin, you need to have to have already won or have a specific card type in a short window, or you just automagically lose. The incremental gameplay isn't there and it feels unsatisfying. Blood Artist loops again are a good combo: they are powerful, but require investment and don't negate the game up to the point they come online. You probably lose if you don't break them up, but the amount of time you get to do so is based how well you've done to that point in the game. Combos should assert pressure on how the game plays, not circumvent it. I find games much more fun when the vast majority of cards in both decks create situations that intermingle so the sequencing and usage of them has meaningful variety. When decks attack different axes, it often plays out as a silver bullet check or a pure race, neither of which justifies the time an expense of building/drafting a Magic Cube.

 

[Lucre]

I think building your deck to be able to fight on showdown turns should be a privilege you have to earn.
Combo is difficult to assemble and being proactive with disruption pressure and removal are as effective as ever against them.

 

[safra]

Quick reply while I'm waiting for a train, I'll add more later. Sorry if I cut off abruptly!

i think the "condensed play arena" metaphor for combo is useful here, yeah. Thanks for the feedback! Let's list more examples, as many as we can, and try to refine theory from the data.

Blood artist loops are an awesome example; repeated actions or whenever triggers are real important here for finding more oportunities. o:"for each" is probably also a good search to run.

The one control/combo deck I'm currently trying to support is an exhaustion/mill deck. The mechanical identity (shuffle your graveyard into your library at some point and then don't lose / mill them a little and then don't lose) means that the knobs players can twiddle aren't {artifact removal, land destruction, shuffle their own graveyard} but are instead "win against hard control". Since the goal is 'don't lose', you just have to find a way to make them lose. Sounds just like Magic, but the control player can still win with beats "regularly" if their plan doesn't come together. It's not quite getting to draft Miracles, but one day I'll come close.

Speaking of things coming together! Combo is difficult to assemble because it's always been difficult to assemble; the interactions aren't always apparent, and sometimes it's an emergent property in a good enough format. Infinite Spider Spawning didn't get worked out until near the end of triple 'strad iirc, and that's another great example of what I'm looking for.

I think building your deck to be able to fight on showdown turns should be a privilege you have to earn.
Combo is difficult to assemble and being proactive with disruption pressure and removal are as effective as ever against them.

Lucre, can you elaborate on the "privilege you have to earn" bit? Is this just 'your opponent will of course bolt the lab man, you have like two cards' or is it 'game 2 i'll be prepared if they cataclysm'?

 

[blacksmithy]

This is a great post, and what I'm about to say should in no way be taken as an attempt to refute it, but anyway:
My playgroup actively asked for lots of two-card combos while I was building my initial Cube list. So I tried to accommodate that desire. If you want to press the "I win" button in my Cube, you can do:
the Lark-Guide thing
the Splinter Twin thing
the Channel-Emrakul (or Channel-Tempt with Vengeance) thing
the Mike-and-Trike thing
or the Muzzio's Preparations-Persist dude-Sac outlet thing.
Plus you can build around Balance, Cataclysm, Tinker, Upheaval, Recurring Nightmare, Living Death, Sneak Attack, Form of the Dragon, Birthing Pod, Life from the Loam, Skullclamp, Smokestack, and Memory Jar—and I'm probably missing a few of the big synergy engines.

Now, some of these combos have come together (we usually see 1 combo/synergy deck per Cube session in a group of 4 players and 1-2 combo/synergy decks in a group of 6), and they've always performed well. But my playgroup likes them—heck, I like them.

I don't really remember the point I was trying to make, but I guess it's just that an abundance of combo options, even insta-win combo options, doesn't necessarily equate to a bad play experience for your group. I don't claim to know what factors affect how a group will react to combos, but I will say my group leans towards the Timmy/Johnny sides of the psychographic triangle and so far has enjoyed having combos available in the draft.

 

[Eric Chan]

I think you're onto something here, in that the very high powered cubes, with their abundance of broken cards and insta-win combos, actually appeal more to the Timmy and Johnny personalities than the lower powered, but ostensibly more 'balanced' lists, which cater towards the Spike crowd. Channel into Emrakul, while perhaps unsatisfying for an opponent looking for a fair fight, still makes for big, splashy theatrics, which is what some people come out to draft for. Everyone's definition of fun is different, and your post opened my eyes a little more into the mindset of folks who swear by the highest powered cubes they can find.

 

[Lucre]

This is rough for me because I recognize the problems regarding combo and disruption through cube and through the colour wheel. I don't really want to talk your ear off about that though.

Honestly when I said that, it was because I thought of finding myself in a spot where I had made sure I would have a lot to say on a "special turn" if it came down to that. I often look at my deck and think, okay, I have two counterspells, a venser, a riftwing and a resto in this deck, I'm probably going to have something to do when this goes down, but I wana make sure I save one.

The sad thing is, it's more difficult for other colours, especially in the environments we tend to support, where naturalize and disenchant are often feeling like niche cards. I think thats where what I said about proactive pressure disruption and removal are important. Take notes from jund decks.

The combos I tend to see in cube aren't really game-sealers, but they are big sources of tricky advantage, infinite profane command is a good example. Stronghold Assassin and Gravecrawler are also a tight group, conscripts and aristocrat also make a great team. There are also turns that are pretty much damning but aren't combo kills like Wildfire, Cataclysm, Architect of Thought, Rude Awakening, fast Craterhoof. It's pretty rare you see someone actually trying to win with a storm count anymore or with a weird tooth and nail or ascendancy combo in cube.

I do sorta wish colours other than blue had more reactive answers. Purely proactive cards like Ooze or DRS are sorta stifling. I'd love to see more charms or something with cremate as a flavor. Vendillion cliques, Acidic slimes, oblivion rings, bolts and scullers are all pretty sweet in terms of pro-activity and damage control but I'd love to see more shit like this


Creature - Human Wizard
Flash
When NAME enters the battlefield spells target player plays cost 1 more until end of turn.
2/2

Etc

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

To repeat and expand a bit from what I learned from my own experiments with combo, which is one of the only data points we have.

The combo must be:

1. Organic to the structure of the cube.
2. Reasonably disruptable.

That deck was super resilient, and didn't really care about the power level of removal (of which that cube's selection is excellent). It also was a synergistic, creature based, combo deck in the lowest powered format here. The players that found it most unsatisfying were my Johnny type players, because its existence would have forced them to strongly meta their drafting style to beat it. It was made up of multiple parts, rather than a 2 card combo (I dislike 2 card (modern style?) combo, because they always feel to me incidental to the deck rather than a vintage or pauper style engine).

I have versions of it that cover the full spectrum: aggro, ramp, midrange, control--which I can post if anyone feels it would add the discussion. The deck was difficult to draft in the sense you needed specific cards, but it was so organic to the cube's structure that if you missed out on key cards, you could still produce a fine deck. 0% of the cards that it consisted of were poisonous. Cloud of faeries could go in tempo or ramp, ghostly flicker could go in essentially any deck running blue, archaeomancer in control or tempo, bouncelands are always great etc.

It also was an incredibly fun, skill testing, and exhilarating deck to pilot: if every deck in my cube felt like that to pilot, I would be very happy.

Familiar combo was something I had in mind when designing the format initially, and was one of the main attractions to going with such a low powered format. To quote:

Pauper is an interesting format in the sense that even though it would be accurate to say that it’s a format defined by commons, it would be much more precise to say that it’s a format defined by pre-NWO commons, and by that I mean, Wizard’s mistakes. The end result is a format executing powerful interactions but fueled by the daintiest of engine pieces. If Vintage and Legacy are the wild guys at the party, Pauper is like their nephew whom you had such high hopes for, until the day you caught him generating infinite mana on turn four in the garage. There is a tremendous amount that Cube can learn from Pauper, as Pauper’s creature-based bizzaro take on a degenerate eternal format offers a unique perspective for cube—itself a creature based, bizzaro take on degenerate eternal formats.

The tools that you use in vintage to make combo tick have issues in cube, e.g. rituals. The realization that I could go to the opposite extreme of the power curve and--paradoxically enough--stumble into a world of high-powered combo interactions was appealing. In vintage, individual powerful cards produce high-powered combos; while in pauper, low-power synergy produces high-powered combos--except the pauper formula was something I could port to a cube, unlike the vintage one.

So why did I have to cut down on it? For reasons that’s been hinted at--it was a deck that paid lip service to strategic interaction and condensed the format too much.

1. As a synergetic creature based deck, yes it could advance a fair game plan, but it always could tutor for or get a sequence of draws, that would allow it to abruptly negate the unveiling of each players strategic plan. This was exciting for the pilot, but jarring for the opponent. It created a feeling of illusory magic: where you were investing in a game that the other player was only grudgingly allowing you to play, and would end at any time based on random sequencing.

2. Because of its ability to kill switch, it forced drafters to meta the format, which they hated. Familiar combo is an intimidating deck to play against, and requires a combination of disruption and pressure to beat. Its existence would place an invisible limiter on the types of decks and cards you could draft to stay competitive, forcing them along a narrow strategic line of closing the game out early, backed up by disruption. Cube draft is usually very casual, and this just made things too cut throat for my drafters.

Which is actually kind of funny, and part of why I kept the bare minimum for the combo in. If this sounds vaguely like mainstream players crying out for the instant ban hammer on xyz "broken card", that’s because it is. They just don't want to have to adapt to deal with these decks, especially when it means (oh god the horror!) that they might have to aggressively draft aggro-control for a while rather than trying to draft "durdle durdle I'm a turtle" midrange.

------------
Now, combo decks that I've ran that have worked great are the self-mill combo decks (laboratory maniac and living death), and aggro combo. One type of combo that always seems to work well is very slow combo-control, because it doesn’t condense the game at all. These are just control decks with combo inevitability attached as a win-con rather than frost titan + counterspell.

Straight reanimator never seems to really pan out, but I think that’s mostly because of the movement away from hexproof, shroud, and protection creatures we've been having. If I'm going to go with a midrange unburial rites based reanimator strategy, I need to be able to stick the creature, or I might as well have just gone the ramp route.

Aggro-combo I really like. I know there are some people here that dislike it, but I love how it forces people to play around the threat of perceived pressure, and leverage that perception to their adventage.

One thing that all of those decks have in common, that makes them feel acceptable to my drafters, is a sense that if you lose to them, it’s because theylet the game state get to that point. They know what fabled hero and laboratory maniac do, and if they want to take the risk of letting the game get to zero hour, well, that was their call. With the familiar deck, cloud can just come down anytime they are tapped out and close out the game—which they hate.

 

[Diakonov]

Great thread, safra. I'm really glad you brought up Vintage Slaver since that's the sort of thing I've been tinkering with recently. It began as desperately trying to find ways to make red more interesting, but then remembering how fun welder is I realized that an artifact theme centered mostly around red wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

I've intentionally avoided reanimator (and using welder like a reanimator). Reanimator is a strange beast in that building an engine around it is tremendously fun, but then actually reanimating a fatty into play and ending the game with it is just...such a waste. You can't lower the creature power level too much without affecting many other archetypes, and if you make the reanimation spells more costly the whole thing starts to feel like a hassle. Thank you to Eric and Grillo for better articulating that feeling.

But let's turn back to the most fun part of reanimator: using discard or self-mill in conjunction with recursion to gain an advantage. See Deep Analysis, Oversold Cemetery, Life From the Loam, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, Goblin Welder, Trading Post, etc. Winning the recursion mini-game is just so satisfying.

Therefore, my current solution is to encourage players to use discard/recursion to accrue incremental gains, which is easier to incentivize with repeatable recursive effects. I make sure that my higher-costed artifacts that want to be welded aren't TOO immediately proactive, such as Staff of Nin and Spine of Ish Sah. Note: I keep a couple of efficient reanimation spells around for kicks since they're interesting midgame cards, but not enough to support a dedicated engine.

Lemme jump tracks here *HUP*

Paving over plain aggro with aggro-combo has been one of the most useful developments I've gained from Riptide. Having aggro around creates a wonderful tension, but power-max cubes tend to have very simplistic and boring aggro decks.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Very nice read so far. Do you have a more formal distinction between comboaggro and synergistic aggro? Is it the positioning for the show down turn?

 

[Dom Harvey]

I have versions of it that cover the full spectrum: aggro, ramp, midrange, control--which I can post if anyone feels it would add the discussion.

Yes please!


To echo Diakonov, moving from conventional aggro towards aggro-combo both makes aggro more interesting (and removes the cap on cards you want to play but can't because together they make the format too hostile for Savannah Lions Dragon Hunter) and lets players draft combo while still having to interact and 'play Magic'.

Another way to support combo without it feeling forced is to push the boundaries of existing strategies. I have reanimation effects, but most of those are meant to be played 'fairly'; however, you can draft around a card like Wake the Dead that isn't normally good but has an incredible upside. Ramp is a staple in Cube, but you can support hyper-ramp with Eldrazi or Mirari's Wake or X-spells, or something like the Standard/Modern green devotion decks, or Turboland:

Spoiler

GW Titania Combo

Rg Bees from CubeTutor.com

(actual deck had Wayfinder over Loam but this is just to give an idea)

To tie this back to the OP, what I like about these 'incidental' combo decks is that there's no fundamental turn: there's no 'find your one piece of interaction by turn 4 or you're dead' that you get in some Constructed formats/matchups or if you include cards like Tinker or Twin. Most of these decks play straight-up Magic until the pieces click together and they start doing crazy things.

 

[James Stevenson]

But let's turn back to the most fun part of reanimator: using discard or self-mill in conjunction with recursion to gain an advantage. See Deep Analysis, Oversold Cemetery, Life From the Loam, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death,Goblin Welder, Trading Post, etc. Winning the recursion mini-game is just so satisfying.

God damn it Vonokaid, that was the only one I checked in this whole stupid thread.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Yes please!

Lets go in order, here is the original midrangy version that could beat down with a golem tribal plan, or combo out with infinite golem tokens or mindshrieker activations.

Spoiler

Esper Splicer Storm

Here is an aggressive U/W heroic/tempo deck. Scry from the battlewise hoplites act as the primary card selection pieces. If the heroic creatures fail to win the game, you have a "reach" plan revolving around making infinite mana. If you have mindshrieker, you can win on the spot. If you have auriok salvagers, you can use a chromatic star to draw your entire deck, finding either mindshrieker (or remember the fallen if mindshrieker is dead) and winning from there.

Spoiler

U/W Flicker Tempo-Combo from CubeTutor.com

Here is a ramp varient of the deck. It has very good selection pieces, but I would have liked at least one more mana sink/fattie for it. It can produce infinite mana, than wipe all of the opponents lands, make infinite golem tokens, or just come over with a giant jeskai elder.

Spoiler

BUG Combo-Ramp from CubeTutor.com

This is from an older iteration, drafted by Modin, but is the best of the control varients i've seen i.m.o.

Spoiler

UBr Combo Control from CubeTutor.com

Than there is Rasmus' accidental monster

Spoiler

Bant Golem Control from CubeTutor.com

 

[safra]

How fast is a 'showdown', anyway?

King of the hill showdown turn - land a threat, win if you protect it (jtms, assemble the legion, jeskai ascendancy).
Accelerated showdown turn - both players fight with their held interaction, and at the end the dust has settled and somebody's dead. Lab Man, omnitell
Disaster showdown - a terrible calamity befalls the board, and one player's deck is better suited to the new world. Cataclysm, wildfire,
Recursive showdown - accumulates resources through virtual copies of the same card, spends them to 'cheat' on additional costs when the cards come together. (blood artist, infinite Profane Command)

what should combo pieces ("cogs") look like?

Creature cogs can be interacted with through normal removal, so they're 'fair', and should make up some (most?) of the cogs available
most of these reward you for building your deck with greater focus (good, imo)
accordingly, noncreature cogs should be used when worth it, and only when the environment has been seeded with the tools for their destruction
noncreature cogs that turn things into other things are a good idea because they let the combo player use their broken commodity to break the exchange

you may already run, for example:

 

[safra]

Loving everyone's posts, this has been way more of a response than I thought this would get! I'd be interested in what you think about my above attempt to get more definite with the idea of a showdown turn. Did I miss something? Probably a lot, honestly. But I still think this is helpful and explains a bit more where I can lead my environment and how I can better integrate the combo I already run.

 

[MCMcEmcee]

+




+

 

[MCMcEmcee]

(honorable mention: Stuffy Doll)

+


(honorable mention: Skred)

(+ Azorius Charm/Whip of Erebos/Swift Justice + Boros Charm/Ajani's Presence)

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

How fast is a 'showdown', anyway?

King of the hill showdown turn - land a threat, win if you protect it (jtms, assemble the legion, jeskai ascendancy).
Accelerated showdown turn - both players fight with their held interaction, and at the end the dust has settled and somebody's dead. Lab Man, omnitell
Disaster showdown - a terrible calamity befalls the board, and one player's deck is better suited to the new world. Cataclysm, wildfire,
Recursive showdown - accumulates resources through virtual copies of the same card, spends them to 'cheat' on additional costs when the cards come together. (blood artist, infinite Profane Command)

what should combo pieces ("cogs") look like?
[/ci]

hmmmm...I'm not sure I'm following all of the terminology. For most players, a "combo" strategy is a strategic axis that instantly, or very quickly, wins the game via assembling a small number of cards. The "showdown" turn is the turn where you are going off. A numebr of the catagories you've created seem to move away from that strategic axis of one decisive turn where you win now. Blood artist, wildfire, and assemble the legion all have a lot more game to be played after resolving, while Lab man, cloud of faeries, or fabled hero will typically just win the game on the kill turn.

An important element that makes a combo strategy a combo strategy i.m.o., is that it has to condense the game--a real combo deck should always be leveraging the threat of the combo.

I agree with your assessment of the combo pieces in most of our cube environments. With enchantment and artifact destruction fringe playable, only a small subset of cubable targeted discard, and color distributions that limit the availability of counter spells, it makes much more sense to have creature-based combo pieces

 

[RavebornMuse]

(honorable mention: Stuffy Doll)

+


(honorable mention: Skred)

(+ Azorius Charm/Whip of Erebos/Swift Justice + Boros Charm/Ajani's Presence)

Since I'm complete trash I run Spitemare to support red combo-burn-win with Blasphemous Act and similar big burns. I've never seen Harvest Pyre, it looks great! I may just put it in my first big update.

 

[safra]

hmmmm...I'm not sure I'm following all of the terminology. For most players, a "combo" strategy is a strategic axis that instantly, or very quickly, wins the game via assembling a small number of cards. The "showdown" turn is the turn where you are going off. A numebr of the catagories you've created seem to move away from that strategic axis of one decisive turn where you win now. Blood artist, wildfire, and assemble the legion all have a lot more game to be played after resolving, while Lab man, cloud of faeries, or fabled hero will typically just win the game on the kill turn.

An important element that makes a combo strategy a combo strategy i.m.o., is that it has to condense the game--a real combo deck should always be leveraging the threat of the combo.

I agree with your assessment of the combo pieces in most of our cube environments. With enchantment and artifact destruction fringe playable, only a small subset of cubable targeted discard, and color distributions that limit the availability of counter spells, it makes much more sense to have creature-based combo pieces

Excellent points, thanks. I think you're right, I was overly loose with my examples. A condensed turn is the best predictor of whether or not a deck is comboing off, if I understand you? Seems reasonable as a heuristic but it's probably worth looking at the pace and timing of that turn further.

How do we (regulars, lurkers, guests, whoever!) feel about the following guidelines for creature-based combo?
-requires multiple pieces (increasing the odds an opponent can interact with one of them)
-creatures should be playable outside of combo (obvs)
-noncreature cogs don't have to, but it would be nice (many of the more interesting ones shape your deck and are already less versatile cards - see earlier post. the distinction Grillo draws early on between pauper engine combo (individually weak cards, gestalt) and vintage engine combo (single powerful cards that interact with your deck to win) is probably helpful when determining your power level and what kind of combo to support.)
-require setup/investment (so that the other player can proactively interact with the combo. Balancing this with "always threatening combo" is likely the most delicate piece here?)

I'm still interested in a framework that lets us get closer to understanding Wildfire, Upheaval and Cataclysm, as well as other cards that "equally" redefine board states. They don't fit in your definition but they follow a similar structure of prepare>big turn>win game (admittedly the winning takes a few turns) and guide deckbuilding too. Not convinced an environment needs more than one of these (if that?) but I think they're interesting and an easy way to add a totally alien set of priorities to your draft dynamic.

What makes combo unfun?
I think that the biggest problem is when opponents feel "cheated", that they didn't have a chance to fairly interact with the combo.
-Too fast (you have to play reactively, not proactively, and then they just slowroll you)
-Too slow (not a combo deck)

Thinking about things like Fabled Hero heroic, the summoning sickness of the creature cog does a good chance of making sure the other player gets a chance to untap and react. Familiar combo flashing in during the end stepgoing off the turn CoF appears leads to a fear of tapping out (unfun) - does this mean we should look more at using the combat step to win games? I'm worried this lacks strategic depth in a discussion about engine combo, though.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Disclaimer: that pauper vs. vintage comparison was a crude oversimplification. A better metric would be the decks speed and resiliency vs. the formats disruption and pressure.

If the players don't have access to good disruptive tools (free counterspells, cheap targeted discard--all things we don't have an abundance of in cube) than the combo deck becomes too fast or resilient (free counterspells are important to prevent tapping low or tapping out from being a game ending mistake). This is why all of our "vintage cube" threads fizzle: people realize everyone would need to be given 4 copies of FOW for the format to work.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, good disruptive tools might exist, but the deck might have traded speed to become too resilent for the format, which is what happened with my familiar combo deck. It wasn't so much the surprise element (cloud of faeries dosen't have flash) as the decks ability to stubbornly rebuild regardless of what you did to it.

I agree with most everything you said about what makes combo unfun, but not sure about the last one--it being too slow. Slow combo control decks like e.g. spider spawning are probably the least offensive type to run.

Aggro-combo is a very different breed from storm combo. If you want to pick apart the latter you want to analyze not just the speed and resilency, but also the mana engine that powers it. Back in the day, pauper had three mana source engines to power its storm combo decks: invasion sack lands, rituals, and bouncelands. All I did was shift the mana engine to something that I felt could work in cube.

 

[safra]

Okay, I think we can start narrowing this down. Here are some kinds of combo:
aggro-combo

slow combo-control

engine combo

and here are some kinds of 'synergy' decks, as we add distinctions:

disaster turn (single card pseudocombo like wildfire)
n-part cog effect (blood artist loops, Infinite Profane Command. these are sometimes aggro-combo depending on the deck!)
'monstrous archetype' (a normative archetype but so much bigger it becomes an explicit synergy deck. cf eldrazi ramp, fatigue control)

How can we look at the base resources of the game and find a way to convert between them? My temple should be overrun with moneychangers, like Post, Mindshrieker, Hero, Pyromancer, etc. With more options for resource conversion, players can act optimally and push a little harder on the ones they value and ignore the ones they don't. On-board complexity doesn't hurt formats right???

Disruption, imo, is going to actually be easier to select once we've thought about this (match yr answers to yr threats, always always). Some card types are always going to be disruptive to combo, because they interact with cards and not permanents. Counterspells, targeted discard, Meddling Mage effects, these are the background radiation that we can always count on being relevant.

I'm gonna use the guidelines from my last post, if you have an issue please mention it:

-require setup / investment in multiple cards to combo
INTERACT: remove one of those cards before it's relevant

-gives you new draft priorities
DESIGN: create competing draft demand for a relevant section of cards
INTERACT: hate-draft

-don't be too fast
DESIGN: playtest
INTERACT: proactive removal

-isn't too slow
DESIGN: condense the game somehow. i keep talking about my stupid mill deck but if it was straight control and no mill it wouldn't be combo!
INTERACT: please

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Actually, one thing I wanted to bring up (and maybe you can comment on) is the counterspell suite. I usually find 3 mana counterspells to be pretty boarderline, and 4 mana counterspells unplayable. The problem is that leaving mana up is too punishing--there are no real draw go mechanics. In addition, most of us have tried to condense our formats down. This leaves me forced to play a small set of 0-2cc (more tempoish) counterspells. In addition, the best targeted discard in cube is thoughtseize.

Unfortunatly, that becomes a problem when you start looking at combo decks, as most of the unconditional disruption is sparse or non-existent. Its like supporting powerful aggro decks while running hardly any removal.

I've wondered if part of the solution is supporting big counterspell decks--decks which play a draw-go game and have ample EOT uses for mana. I have no idea what to do about the lack of discard, though maybe the pool of playables expands to include cards like duress once you have these types of decks.

 

[safra]

Actually, one thing I wanted to bring up (and maybe you can comment on) is the counterspell suite. I usually find 3 mana counterspells to be pretty boarderline, and 4 mana counterspells unplayable. The problem is that leaving mana up is too punishing--there are no real draw go mechanics. In addition, most of us have tried to condense our formats down. This leaves me forced to play a small set of 0-2cc (more tempoish) counterspells. In addition, the best targeted discard in cube is thoughtseize.

Unfortunatly, that becomes a problem when you start looking at combo decks, as most of the unconditional disruption is sparse or non-existent. Its like supporting powerful aggro decks while running hardly any removal.

I've wondered if part of the solution is supporting big counterspell decks--decks which play a draw-go game and have ample EOT uses for mana. I have no idea what to do about the lack of discard, though maybe the pool of playables expands to include cards like duress once you have these types of decks.

I could write a much, much longer thread on counterspells. It's worth remembering that if you can make a spell fizzle that's just as good.

Here's what I like/have liked, and I'll go over what these spells do for environments.

4+ mana:


3+ mana:


2 mana:



0-1 mana:


Rune Snag is a really bad card, y'all. I guess that's what you get when a selesnyan devotee tries to build a counterspell suite(cold, dog). Here are the other things I feel strongly about, vis a vis counters:

-You should have gold counterspells in your environment! These 'float' to the drafter who needs them, and some of them are sweet, too.
-The more proactive/tap-out your control decks are, the cheaper your counters should be. That way, you can pay for a spell and leave up mana even in the early turns.
-Ideally, my counterspell should cost me fewer resources than the thing it's countering. The spell itself is a proxy for this attrition war.
-counters either stop you from falling behind (stifle) or keep you ahead (essence scatter). Think about which each counterspell will do more often and try to balance these demands.
-Taxing counters are strong early everywhere, but in Cube, as we curve out / can finally play that five-drop we've been sandbagging, they're still useful. I don't really like Force Spike / Mana Tithe because they don't do enough to be worth a card imo, compared to some other options at the same costs. Plus they scale awfully and that's just not kosher for my 1s.
-Disrupt is my baby and nobody else runs it, but they really should.
-Dissolve is great if you don't want Counterspell. Reactive decks really like the scry, too.
-When you leave open mana with the intent to counter a spell, you're committing it to your opponent's turn. If you only have a situational counterspell, that mana is useless and unspent. But if you have two situational counterspells, you can pick the one you need on the fly.
-Counterspells that do other things are great because they're never dead.
-Activated abilities come close to having instants when you need to spend unused counter mana, but they're more fragile (opponent blows it up, you activate in response, then they cast their spell)
-A lot of players have this weird emotional thing where counterspells are the worst, most unkind cards in magic. Eject these players from your group! Or I guess keep playing with them until they win against control anyway and stop having feelbads. Definitely do not neuter your counter suite.

edit - re: disruption
Duress is fine but IOK is better if you're not running 4+ mana counters or a bunch of wraths
you can disrupt taxing counters with ramp
you can also re-cast spells to run your opponent out of countermagic