Listening while I type out a monster post. Dragon Quest = Pure Class.
I enjoy combo. It's fun to try to assemble and it's fun to watch other people go off. When they're complicated and intricate and risky they create stories about how smart the players are. So I tried out a lot of stuff despite my massive singleton cube being full of durdles rather than combo enablers. Sadly the more complex combos just don't ever happen in a cube this big, and as a result there's not so much of a 'combo deck' as there are decks that have the option of combo for value.
The most fun part of magic for me is discovering synergies between cards.
My cube originally contained the following stupid combos:
Iridescent Drake +
False Demise +
any sac outlet: This one is something I do in casual constructed and so I was eager to see how it would work in cube. The drake could fit in an aura-based beatdown deck and the aura could fit in value creature builds (inspired by the surprisingly effective
Man-o'-War and
Augury Owl rebuying I was doing in casual) and sac outlets are always good. Sadly the aura deck was never playable due to the high density of good spot removal and the value deck doesn't want to throw away three mana and a card to
maybe get value when they could cast a card that certainly gets value. So this deck never happened, ever.
Illusions of Grandeur +
Donate: Everyone was too scared to go deep. Both cards appeared together in multiple drafts but it didn't take. The problem is that people don't want to waste a pick on a card that does nothing unless you find its soul mate.
Storm: A singleton 800 card cube will not have a storm deck with anything that could be considered akin to consistency. Random
warrens for 6 or 8 happened once or twice but the decks that were capable of it were typically much worse for their inclusion of rituals or
ignii.
It still contains these stupid combos:
Quillspike +
Devoted Druid: This one is a personal favorite of mine from Shadowmoor/Eventide draft, because both cards were reasonably good and synergistic in that environment. That's slightly less true in my cube; the druid is awesome but there's not nearly enough focus on -1/-1 counters for the spike beastie to get his pick quality going on. I've picked it in my cube when I already had
Murderous Redcap and
Twilight Shepherd and that seemed like around the right amount of upside. But it's fine to have a card that's usually unplayable because at least it will wheel for the deck that can use it (like
Lion's Eye Diamond for storm or
Progenitus for
Show and Tell). It's also not at all oppressive when it works because you have to attack to kill people.
Channel: This is being watched carefully. It hasn't happened since I added
Eldrazi Conscription or
Teeka's Final Aeon and they're by far the least fair things you can do with an early
Channel in my cube.
Channel Fireball is pretty fair in my cube because against aggro decks it's hard to be up on life and against control decks you'll get your stuff countered, so almost all the time there's an interactive dance to make it actually happen, even game 1.
Joraga Treespeaker into
Channel for
Genesis Wave is strong but it's three cards and you still die to
wrath. I think
Channel is fair when nothing like
Myr Battlesphere,
Karn Liberated, or giant Eldrazi are coming out on T2.
Big Cheats: This deck has been good exactly once in my cube and it went off in spectacular fashion. Still holding out for
Dream Halls +
Griselbrand being an actual thing. The cheats themselves are inconsistent but they overlap so well with ramp decks and control decks that they don't feel particularly bad while they're going around. Also my cube tends to create the occasional battlecruiser matchup in which having a cheaty card in your sideboard is big game. It's very fun when it happens and doesn't make the game less fun by existing so it can stay.
Palinchron +
Mirari's Wake (or
Bloom Tender +
Freed from the Real): Bant ramp is already a thing so having the option of infinite mana is always nice. I'm hoping that someone gets to make an arbitrarily large
Jenara, Asura of War, only to have it stopped by
Ray of Command with a follow-up
Reins of Power.
Reanimate: Not as a combo card because it isn't consistent, but as an option for blue/black control decks to just randomly have their finisher earlier in the game.
So really there's all sorts of stuff that has a combo 'feel' but doesn't actually define its deck, and that all goes back to the restrictions imposed by a large cube.
