Combo-cooking class with GiorgioCombo

Lesson 1: distinguish fresh ideas from rotten ones

Sometimes it's not enough to just serve an existing recipe. Sometimes you really want to amaze your diners or to make someone fall in love with you. Well, we all know cooking is great, but now you need an idea. You already have one? Nice! But how to turn a cool idea into a special meal? I'm GiorgioCombo, brewmaster in MTG and in the kitchen. Today is the day you learn the secrets of cooking combos. Today is the day you start the course to become a true combo master chef!

STEP 1: identify your diners

Please, note that this series of lessons are about Gourmet combo-cooking in Pauper. Sure, some of these concepts still applies to other formats, but many things are different in different environments.

Before you even start thinking about what to cook, you really need to identify the goal: are you trying to break the format, to build a fun deck for the upcoming tournament or just to brew for the sake of it? That's really important, because that's the premise upon which you build your entire process. It would be very hard for me to give you advice if your goal is just to create a new combo deck with no competitive goals in mind.

In that case, the best thing I can say to you is: “go for it and build what seems fun to you”. You see, here we are talking about optimization, and optimizing something means making it function in the best way possible. “The best way possible” for what? If you want to win, then we can have numeric answers, but if your goal is to be creative and/or have fun, that's something that's not possible to optimize objectively, right?

Here I am focusing on the competitive aspect of the game, so I talk with this premise in mind. I need to be honest with you from the beginning: if you want to make a delicious meal, some ideas are just not workable (unless you really are into Futurist cuisine).

Before we move on, please ask yourself: for whom am I cooking tonight? For a competitive player with an insatiable appetite for nothing but the best in town, for a creative with refined tastes or for a gentleman who's mostly just seeking some company for a fun dinner together?

STEP 2: get a good idea

Every successful meal starts with an idea. Sometimes you see a nice deck played by the new guy at the LGS, sometimes you see a new card that combos with something else. Other times you just rummage through your collection or memories and you notice a nice synergy between some cards. Before you dive into the workshop, it's better to think a little bit about the combo in and on itself. Successful combos share some similarities and, even though there are exceptions, most of the time you see a pattern.

How many cards do you need for the combo?

That's pretty simple, right? The bigger the number of cards required, the harder to find them in a timely fashion.

1 card combos are exceptionally rare but also extremely appealing. Spy is the prime example of such a combo, in fact it's already a contender in the metagame. When I developed the 5 Lands Spy deck I was stubborn on making the deck work because I know how good 1 card combos usually are. Most of the time, they need some strict requirements to work, so the hard part there was not to decide if the general idea was worth it, but how to properly serve the dish.

In theory, 2 cards combos are the ones you should look for: throughout the history of the game, A+B is the most widespread type of successful combo. The problem is they are typically so strong and easy to spot that if such a combo exists, then it's frequently either already played or very bad for various reasons (Midnight Guard + Presence of Gond comes to mind here).

If 1 and 2 are very hard to find, and 4 is typically too many, the 3-cards group is the ground where you often end up finding your supplies: make sure they are not rotten, though! Here are some tips:

• They get significantly better if you have more than 4 copies of at least one of the pieces (like Devoted Druid + Guac & Marshmallow Pizza + Retraction Helix/:MagicCardTooltip{name="Banishing Knack" image="https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/7/371a769a-ddae-47f6-b2c2-957de5c18417.jpg?1783942692"});
• They also get better when they are 2 card combos for infinite mana + a random mana sink (for example Pili-Pala + Careful Cultivation), because most of the time you can just use the mana to dig through your deck with the draw spells you already play or you can turn good cards on their own into finishers (Nyxborn Hydra, Stormshriek Feral, etc).

Even though neither Pili-Pala nor Pizza Combo are groundbreaking decks, sometimes you see them around, while I bet you never saw anyone doing well with Zhur-Taa Druid + Orochi Leafcaller + Freed from the Real. As I said, pretty simple: prioritize combos that require fewer cards. But it's not that simple, actually, because the Pauper format has seen Familiars and Altar Tron being Tier 1 decks (even Tier 0, if you ask me) at some point. How is that possible? Well…

What digging engine do your combo fit in?

When Altar Tron was super strong, the main spice came not from the “Altar” ingredient, but from the “Tron” one. By being a colorless combo, it naturally benefits from playing Ancient Stirrings, which also synergizes well with Tron lands. Once Tron is assembled, drawing cards is easy, for you have a lot of mana, and that's why a 4 cards combo is usually assembled by turn 5 or so.

Ask yourself: if I play this combo, which draw engine will this combo benefit more from? It's not like we need to reinvent the wheel: we all know that Pauper has some card advantage mechanisms that are better than others. The Ichor Wellspring + dispute effects is by far the best one, up there with the creature-centric Lead the Stampede + Winding Way. The rummage effects + Eidolons is one that has been floating around since the downshift of Izzet Charm, but just recently it was put into fruition thanks to new printings like Abandon Attachments and Pursue the Past. There is also the Pursue the Past/Flashback cards mechanism that you find in the Naya Cazzate deck popularized by Tommaso Loss and Lorenzo Montana, but that's more for midrange decks with, maybe, a combo as a plan B.

If you think about it, the best combo decks of the last few years relied on one of those engines: Glee Combo and Altar Tron on disputes, Walls Spy on the green one and Boros Tribe on Eidolons. Seeker of Skybreak+:MagicCardTooltip{name="Hawkeye's Bow" image="https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/8/485be72b-d784-4886-bb3a-48cff8f781c6.jpg?1783902931"} lived for just a week, and it won multiple tournaments in the Naya Cazzate shell. It also won a challenge in the golden hands of Alessandro Piraccini: we cooked a list that relied on a shell very similar to my version of Pizza Combo, using Perilous Research + Cryogen Relic, basically the blue version of the dispute package.

The ability of most combo decks to win games is mostly predicated on their ability to see cards: you need to find your combo pieces in time and you need to find ways to beat interaction. The more you draw, the more likely for those 2 things to happen. If your deck is kinda forced to play a subpar draw engine, that's a red flag. As an example, look at Tribe Combo: it has been a very strong deck in the UW version while Gush was legal, but after that it became less and less played. After many years in limbo, it returned as a better deck in the Boros Spirit archetype.

Are the combo cards useful outside of the combo itself?

Another metric that makes the difference. Sometimes you fill your deck with cards that are unplayable in draft, and I must admit it's very satisfying when they become a game winning combination if put together. But sometimes your life is easier, because you get to play with individually “good” cards.

The Pizza combo deck is a prime example of that:

• Devoted Druid is a mana dork;
• Pizza can be used to create a surprise block or as a protection spell vs opposing Lightning Bolts, it even sticks around to be used to combo later: yay!
• Helix can buy time by bouncing opposing creatures or draw cards by rebuying Ichor Wellspring and Cryogen Relic.

That's the reason Familiars has been one of the best contenders in the metagame so many times: yes, every combo they have access to is very slow and it requires many cards in order to be properly executed. But every single card in there is good in the control game Fams is willing to play in most matchups.

Is your combo resilient and fast?

Everything we said so far was speculation upon the consistency and speed of a deck. Consistency is a metric of the ability of the deck to find the cards to execute its plan; speed can be thought to be the turn your opponent should assume they are dead on average if they don't interact with you.

When evaluating combos, there's another axis that should be taken into account, and that's resiliency. Resiliency is the ability to beat interaction, and it's influenced by many factors. First, you need to understand on which axis a combo could be fought against. Does it get stopped by creature removal? Every removal would do, or do they need a specific one? Maybe it dodges red ones? Or at least Lava Dart, or maybe it gets around Snuff Out by using black creatures? What about graveyard hate? Here's a list of the most common things that people throw at you. It's by no means a complete collection, just a quick way to summarize things.

In the table below, you'll also find some examples with a number between 0 and 2.

• 0 stands for “useless form of interaction against this combo”;
• 1 is for “works but it's not super effective” and
• 2 stands for “very good vs the combo”.

Looking at the table, you see that Glee Combo is the one that can be interacted with in more ways yet is the strongest. Why is that? Firstly, as already stated, resiliency is not everything. Also, resiliency is not just a function of how many cards are relevant to you in the abstract, but also of how much they are played and how hard they are to overcome.

If you play Spy, you mostly just care about KCS and graveyard hate, but the first one is really devastating, and the second one is ubiquitous. Also, Spy has consistency problems that should be taken into account, but that's another story.

Glee, on the other hand, has a lot of “1”, because no card is super effective against them. Sure, a timely removal spell could, in theory, stop the combo, but given the number of cards they see, the number of protection spells they have and the pressure they put on you by threatening the combo as soon as turn 3 without summoning sickness, it's very hard you would beat the deck with just 1 or 2 removal spells.

So, the matter is complex and you may start to grasp how speed, consistency and resiliency are different axes but also intertwined. I will not go into more details here; that will be the subject for another lesson.

Recap

When evaluating if a combo can be turned into a “real” deck, prioritize combos with fewer cards required. Ask yourself if the cards would be good outside the combo. If the answer is “no”, try to evaluate if the combo is resilient and fast enough to be worth it anyway. Lastly, ask yourself which draw engine would fit better as a side dish for your main course: if the answer is “a very bad one”, I suspect it would not make for a gourmet meal.