Combo-cooking class with GiorgioCombo

Lesson 2: combo cards and draw engines, the main ingredients

Welcome back to the Combo-cooking class with GiorgioCombo! In lesson one, we saw how to guess if a combo is interesting enough to try some new recipes just by the smell of it. This time we will see how to mix the main ingredients to lay the basis for a good meal!

STEP 3: give a proper form to your idea

You had a promising idea; now what? Well, now you need to find the right shell for the deck. The first thing to decide is if it will be a full combo deck or a hybrid deck.

The former is a deck that focuses solely on the combo with close to zero B-plans, while the latter is usually a control or midrange deck with a combo in. Before we dive into the topic, let’s settle some nomenclature. I like to call the combo pieces with capital letters, for example, Glee combo is A+B, while Pizza Combo is A+B+C.

Many times I heard people say you could build combo decks as full combos or hybrid ones according to your “playstyle”. Let me be clear on this: I really dislike this view. If you want to win, then it’s not a matter of playstyle. Some decks work better in a certain way for reasons briefly explained in the previous lesson. Yes, you could try to build a Familiars deck as a full combo deck with fewer control elements and ways to speed up the kill, but you will just win fewer games in a competitive setting. There are times when a different approach to a certain combo deck is better than another, but that’s also not a matter of playstyle, just a little thing called metagame: ever heard about that? When you walk into my kitchen, you make sure to have your hands clean, your work uniform proper and, for God’s sake, leave the “playstyle” thing out!

In this article we focus on the full combo decks, for things are easier: such decks tend to be linear, i.e., they try to do the same thing every game. For the examples, I will use 4 deck lists built by me that, I think, are great at highlighting the focal points. The decks are my takes on Pizza Combo, Life Combo, Life Combo with Commune with Nature and Altar Tron with Giant’s Boulder.

For reference, here are the lists:

How many combo cards?

You start with the combo, usually maxing out the 4ofs and, if possible, playing excess copies of what you can. How many copies of the combo cards should you play, given the choice? It depends on other factors, let’s see them with some examples.

I could play more than 6 copies of Retraction Helix, but I don’t see the benefit of having a million copies of C if I lack A or B. I much rather have more draw spells to increase the chances of having A and B faster.

Here I do the opposite, and here is why: since I can have up to 8 copies of A, B and C, it makes sense to play fewer draw spells to make room for more combo pieces, because the chance of having an A, a B and a C in the top 10 cards of the deck is very high. The goal is to have the combo faster, and with this density, the better way is to just maximize everything and fill the remaining slots with some draw power for when you lack something. It’s also important to consider that if you are searching for a 4of, let’s say, for the sake of the argument, Guac & Marshmallow Pizza, then every draw spell has a smaller chance of finding it; hence, you will need more on average. But if you are searching for an 8of, then it’s likely a single draw spell will find that one for you, so you need fewer.

As further proof, look at the latest iteration of this deck I am playing: here I show Commune with Nature, which is not a combo card, just to make clear the difference with the other version. The former doesn’t have the green cantrip. The idea is that, since the 4 mana En-Kor is significantly worse than the one mana alternative, I try to play more cantrips in order to find the better one more often. It’s also clearly better to have Commune instead of Spirit En-Kor when you already have an En-Kor and you need a B. So here I trimmed on A and, as a compensation, I also cut B to fit an additional Commune with Nature. The 4th copy of Commune is a replacement for another card in the deck, but that’s not the point here. Again, I don’t benefit from having a B if I don’t also have an A, so it makes sense to trim on both halves of the combo for additional draw power. Of course, I did not trim on C because that’s the only part of the combo Commune with Nature can’t find.

Admittedly, this is part of a list I actually never played, for it is built around Giant’s Boulder, a card not legal at the time of writing. You can look at the combo as an A+B+C because Myr Kinsmith can grab the 2 copies of Myr Retriever you need for the combo (if you have an Ashnod’s Altar, you can play Kinsmith to grab Retriever, then sac Kinsmith, play and sac Retriever to get back Kinsmith and replay it to fetch a second Retriever).

This configuration of 4+6+8 seems to contradict my previous statements, but there’s a reason for it. In this deck, Myr Retriever is also a way to protect your combo from artifact removal and graveyard hate but, most importantly, if you have the Boulder, your combo ends up with 2 activations of it, one from the Boulder itself, one from the Myr Retriever you end up with in hand after the loop. Every Myr Retriever after the ones required for the combo means another activation of the Boulder.

In the past, Altar Tron used to play Makeshift Munitions or Pactdoll Terror to deal with situations in which you could not just make infinite golems and pass. Now, thanks to this new artifact from the set The Hobbit, if you destroy enough permanents, you can make sure they won’t fight back most of the time, and that’s just using combo pieces. For this reason, the C in this deck gains a lot more value. For that reason, I also went so far as to add a copy of Workshop Assistant! Deciding how many copies of the combo you want to play is a delicate balance, and the answer is not always “the full amount.”

Tutors

Tutors do a great job at adding consistency. Unfortunately, there are no good tutors in Pauper. In some decks you could play something like Trinket Mage, transmute cards or Mystical Teachings, but those cards are so slow that they will very rarely be useful in the faster matchups. And guess what? Faster matchups is where you need them the most, for in slower matchups a proper draw engine will mostly do just fine without tutors. There are some rare exceptions, Goblin Combo being one, but for the most part there are no good decks for the good tutors available.

Here’s a list of interesting tutors in the Pauper card pool. I consider these cards to be worth keeping in mind, even though they don’t have an excellent house at the very moment:

• Trinket Mage: 3 mana is a lot, but at least it is a blocker. It could also be reanimated or blinked for extra tutoring power. 0 and 1 mana artifacts also make up for an exciting toolbox, for they include graveyard hate, removal spells (Pyrite Spellbomb), protection spells (Welding Jar) and, notably, artifact lands.
• Wirewood Herald: if you have a clean way to kill the guy, it’s a Demonic Tutor. There are some possible combos involving Elves, for example Pizza Combo or decks relying on Evolution Witness, but those decks don’t combo with other elves. So, it’s not really a tutor, more like additional and slower copies of the main elf. It’s a good dispute target and can also get interesting shapeshifters like Masked Vandal and Nameless Inversion. Vandal is particularly sweet because the Herald is also the creature you exile from the graveyard to feed the Vandal.
• Hobbit Hole: this card is absurdly good… if you find a combo with Halflings. Notably, shapeshifters are so. The opportunity cost is basically 0 because it’s almost on par with most of the mana fixing around; It takes no slots in your deck because it will easily be an integral part of the manabase. I’m eager to find a good combo deck where this card fits.
• Step Through: 2 mana instant speed tutor is very good. As for the above, you need wizards or shapeshifters.
• Merchant Scroll: incredibly good if a deck can support it. Do you remember High Tide?

Refining the draw engine

As I said in the previous article, which draw engine you play mostly depends on the combo itself: for example, the Spy deck needs to have many creatures in order to cut lands and to provide lethal Lotleth Giants. It is also forced to play green because of Land Grant, so it’s only natural they play Lead the Stampede and Winding Way.

Most of the time the path is clear on what to play, but that doesn’t mean deciding the actual numbers is easy: you know you will put fresh onion in the sauce, but how much you will put in and how big you will slice it is a refined taste. In order to properly solve this puzzle, you should consider the Pauper metagame as it is now. The strongest and most played decks are Jund Wildfire, Affinity, Mono Red Madness, Mono Blue Terror and Naya Gates.

Except for the last one, the others are divided into 2 clear categories: fast mono color decks and grindy black-based decks. You could argue that Mono Blue Terror and Mono Red Madness are also interactive decks, for they have counters and ways to interact with creatures. However, they are still decks trying to kill fast more than they are trying to interact. I know it’s a simplification, but I think it’s a reasonable and useful one. Since you will face decks that will try to beat you very fast and decks that will try to grind you out, you should divide your draw ingredients into 2 categories. One of them should make you go fast, the other one should give you the ability to grind. Do you remember the BG Glee lists floating around right before the banning? They had a lot of disputes, but also 4 copies of Malevolent Rumble.

Let’s see the examples:

For just 1 mana, Preordain and Ponder let you see up to 3 and 4 cards, meaning they are very good at finding specific cards fast. The Perilous Research + Ichor Wellspring/Cryogen Relic package means you have 10 “draw 2” in your deck for when you need to outvalue your opponent.

That’s a pretty good configuration for game 1, but you will usually change that for game 2 in order to properly fit the matchup. I often side out at least a Wellspring vs fast decks, for example.

Here I have a surprisingly low amount of draw spells, but as stated before, that’s because this deck has so many combo pieces that you will find them naturally most of the time. Also, since the creatures tend to protect themselves and the sheer number of copies you play means you will usually have backup ones, you don’t need specific protection spells most of the time.

Still, you see cards that dig faster and cards that grind more. This is the reason I play Lembas instead of Ichor Wellspring in this deck. One could argue that Lembas is still 2 mana to look at 2 cards, but I consider it faster than Fanatical Offering because it doesn’t need another card to be played before. Also, it doesn’t need a specific color of mana.

In this version of the deck I try to go faster, so I cut the 4 mana and 3 mana combo cards for a 1 mana card that has a reasonably high chance to find the ones at 1 and 2 mana. Still, I have Fanatical Offering and Nihil Spellbomb for when being fast is not enough.

Different deck, same pattern: the Scry cards and stirrings are the faster ways to find specific cards, while Bonder’s Ornament and Eviscerator’s Insight are really powerful on the card advantage axis.

If you compare these 4 examples, they all play different cards, but the pattern is still the same: some kind of card advantage and some cantrips. How many cards you devote to speed and how many to the grinding power depend on many factors. For example, how useful are the cards for reasons other than the drawing power? In Altar Tron, Eviscerator’s Insight is also a way to kill Myr Retriever, thus getting back an Ashnod’s Altar that got countered. If it wasn’t for that extra utility, I might have just played 1 or even 0.

Note that some amount of card advantage is also a way to go faster in a sense: if you play ways to go up on cards, you can mulligan slow hands at 7 or 6 even vs an unknown opponent. If you play little to no card advantage, you tend to keep slow hands in G1 and hope it’s a slower MU, for you wouldn’t recover from a mulligan.

Recap

After you settled on an idea, it’s time to make a proper list. Even though there are exceptions, in my opinion it’s usually correct to start with the number of combo cards you want to include. You frequently max out the 4ofs.

If you can play more than 4 of certain combo cards, things get interesting. Don’t cut too many draw spells if there’s a 4of you really need to find. Instead, max everything out at the expense of the drawing power if you can play more than 4 of every part of the combo.

Tutors are great, but only if they are not slow as cooking spare ribs. Play a good draw engine and make sure to devote some of those slots to card advantage and some of those slots to digging fast: no point in cooking a masterpiece if you deliver it while the dinner has already ended.