Combo-cooking class with GiorgioCombo

Lesson 3: protection spells and other condiments

Welcome back to the Combo-cooking class with GiorgioCombo! In lesson one, we saw how to determine if a certain combination of cards makes for an interesting set of ingredients. In lesson two, we saw how to treat the main ingredients: combo cards and draw spells. Today we will focus on how to dress the meal with protection spells and some other spices.

STEP 4: protecting your combo

When you intend to assemble a combo, people will get jealous and they will try to stop you. I know it sounds awful, but that’s what people actually do these days, especially if creatures are involved. It’s like you are cooking and, for some reason, someone tries to stop you from doing that… Before we dive in into how to determine the perfect protection suite, one needs to envision ways the combo could be stopped.

Is it vulnerable to removal spells? Can it be taken apart with Duress? If so, how bad is Duress against the deck in general? What kind of counters do something against the combo? What about artifact removal spells?

It’s very important to note that, even though different combos could in theory be interrupted by the same card, not every combo is weak to a specific card in the same way. If, for example, you need a creature without flying for your combo to work, then Krark-Clan Shaman is a way to upset the apple cart, but there’s an enormous difference between a 1 and 2 toughness creature: if you aim at protecting Devoted Druid, you can just let the pesky goblin die to his own ability and, before the second damage is dealt, you grant indestructible to the Druid. Now that the goblin is dead, your opponent cannot activate it another time in response. This line is not possible if you try to combo with Vedalken Engineer, for example.

It's also critical to note that redundancy could act as protection is some specific cases: if your combo doesn’t involve auras or targeted spells, you could just let one of the pieces be interacted with and play a second copy. That’s the case with something like the infamous Seeker of Skybreak + Hawkeye’s Bow combo but not with the also infamous Basking Broodscale + Sadistic Glee one.

Lastly, as a rule of thumb it’s not worth it to splash a color for protection spells: adding chromatic constraints is a huge cost in Pauper, since every color fixing recipe enters tapped or costs mana. The good news is every color has reasonable tools and, when that’s not the case, you can always borrow some Apostle’s Blessing from the Infect fridge.

I will divide the thing into 2 main categories: how many you should play and which one you should play.

How many protection spells?

First, you need to decide the number of protection spells you need to be playing. It depends mainly on 4 factors:

How much of a blowout is if they interrupt your combo?

If you play something like Glee Combo, then a timely removal spell is a 2for1, while if you play something like Seeker Bow combo, then a removal spell is just a 1for1. It should not surprise you that the former really wants to avoid being caught by surprise, while the second could more easily just go for it and see if they have it.

The card advantage angle is not the only angle to consider when we try to evaluate what a blowout is. A deck like Seeker combo just plays 4 copies of the elf card, and it’s also a summoning-sick combo, meaning more often than not, if you lose the Seeker, then you risk being too slow to find another copy before it’s too late. Things are very different if you also play, like, 4 copies of Wirewood Herald, because the chances are you will find another copy in a timely fashion.

Just as an example, you very often see Show and Tell players go for it on turn 2 with no protection, for if they get a Force of Will, it’s still a 2for1 in their favor, and they usually play up to 8 copies of the “Show and Tell” effect, so they don’t really need to pack that many counters. That’s another format, and deckbuilding rules are different, but the logic still applies.

How redundant is your combo?

Sometimes you play a very redundant combo. It’s rare, but it’s great when it happens, and the reason is that if you play more combo cards and your combo is not a 2for1 if interrupted, then you can just throw combo cards until one sticks. That leads to faster kills, because sometimes they just bluff an answer and if you really don’t want to be interrupted you can’t really go for it, risking the game. But if you have multiple combo pieces, you just present the combo and they will just lose on the spot. You also get bonus points for pretending you read the bluff.

The level of redundancy of a combo can vary, and accordingly does the number of slots you devote to protecting it, but in general the idea is you can win a game with an unprotected combo, while you will never win a game with a very protected nothing.

How good are the protection spells at stopping the opponent’s plan?

Sometimes you will draw a lot of protection spells while you patiently wait for your combo to be ready to serve and silently watch your opponent beating you down. That’s a very sad occurrence, but that’s bound to happen sometimes. You would much rather turn those cards into something useful in that spot. The best is if the protection cards could be cycled, but that’s ultra are unless you chose to play cards that cost a lot of mana. More often, those cards could “cycle” by delaying the end of the game by some turns, so that you will draw more cards and maybe assemble your meal.

In most combo decks you usually see approximately half the protection cards being Duress, Dispel or something like that. The original UW Tribe Combo is an interesting exemplar: that deck used to play 4 Circular Logic, 3 Dispel, 0-4 copies of Prismatic Strands, and just 1 or 2 copies of a card that gives Indestructible. That’s great, and it was actually one of the reasons why that deck was so good in my opinion, but that’s not always possible.

How good is your plan B (if you have one)?

Sometimes you have a perfect way to win that doesn’t actually involve comboing out. In that case, it’s usually reasonable to cut some amount of protection spells, partially because you need them less, partially because you need slots to fit in these other cards. Note that a very threatening plan B could, sometimes, work as a protection of sort, because it’s something your opponent needs to take care of.

Jund Glee used to have 4 Writing Chrysalis alongside some Krark-Clan Shaman and a couple Makeshift Munitions. That, powered by the massive card advantage the deck was capable of, provided enough pressure to exhaust the opposing defenses right before deploying the actual combo.

As a rule of thumb, I typically go for 9+ in a Glee-like deck if some of those cards are Duress or Dispel, for they can also be good at stopping the opponent if you happen to have redundant copies in hand. I just try to go for 6-7 instead if I don’t have use for those cards except for the combo protection element. In a deck with a strong plan B I usually go for 4-6, depending on how much they contribute to the plan B and I usually include some more in the sideboard for when I want to pivot into a full combo deck. I go for 4 at best in a deck with a very high amount of redundancy, for I prefer to present combo after combo until they run out of answers. That’s because protection spells are useless in race matchups, while more combo pieces mean a faster combo on average when you really need to go fast and you are willing to mulligan for a speed kill.

Which protection spells?

What to protect from?

Another important aspect is what to protect from. A combo deck trying to stick a small creature usually has a harder time than a deck trying to win with just artifacts. Pauper is a format defined by creatures, so everyone is prepared to face some amount of them. Not every removal spell is the same, though: Krark-Clan Shaman is very different from a Cast Down, for example, and the very presence of Lava Dart in the metagame makes some combos really hard to achieve.

As a general rule, you really need to have answers for KCS, so if you are planning to combo with a 2+ toughness creature, you should consider something that gives indestructible or protection from a color, because that’s a protection spell that works against the pesky goblin: they stack the triggers, and you let the first one happen so that the goblin dies and they cannot activate it again. At that point, you cast your card, and the creature survives all the further damage taken. In a deck like Seeker of Skybreak combo, I and Alessandro Piraccini ended up playing maindeck Hydroblasts, because that’s a clean answer to KCS but also a pre-sideboarding vs Mono Red Madness, historically a hard matchup for creature combo decks.

What protection cards do fit better in the shell?

The cards that you put in the deck can gain or lose value depending on the context of the deck. If you have Merchant Scroll in your deck to tutor for a combo piece, then you are incentivized to play at least 1 blue instant speed protection. If you have Malevolent Rumble, you might want to consider something like Blessed Hippogriff.

In a deck with Writhing Chrysalis as a plan B, having Duress to play the control game has some upsides. In a deck like Life Combo, which doesn’t need to tap its creatures to present the combination, Orim’s Cure is a particularly potent card. Try to maximize the value of your cards in general: there are so many good protection spells that you don’t need to play the ones that don't really play all that well in your deck just because they are the most common ones.

Examples of protection suites:

Let’s now see some examples form my decklists:

Here I have 9 proper protection spells plus some combo pieces that sometimes work as protection cards. As I said, when I play this many, I want some of them to be able to interact with the opponent outside the combo protection ballpark, so Dispel is a natural fit here. Also, Dispel works just fine vs counterspell.

The 1of Origin of Metalbending is a concession to the fact tha Jund Wildfire and Grixis Affinity both have a single copy of Makeshift Munitions, which is otherwise unbeatable g1. The nice part is that Origin is also a protection spell when you don’t face the red enchantment.

The fact that Pizza and Helix do sometimes pump or bounce your creature in response to a removal spell is a pleasant upside, but not enough for me to want less than 9 protection spells. If you play 3+ copies of Wirewood herald, you could cut maybe 1 or 2 protection cards. But be aware that if they wait for the Pizza to be on the stack to remove your creature, then having another copy of Druid won’t save you from a loss. 2for1.

I group them all together because they are the same when it comes to protection cards. You see 9, but in reality, it’s mostly 4: a playset of duress. That’s because this combo is not easy to 2for1 and, as stated before, redundancy acts as a protection engine of sort if the combo can’t really be 2for1ed.

For that reason, Crawl is an interesting addition to the deck because I can get back the creature and combo again after a removal spell, but’s also a card advantage mechanism given the Flashback keyword. But mostly the card is there to beat a Spy deck trying to mill your 1of Balustrade Spy to then let you deck out. If Spy is out of the metagame, Crawl can go.

Sheltering Word has the nice upside of being a protection spell, but it’s there for being a combo card. Again, since this deck doesn’t really need many protection spells, I want the ones that I play to be able to do something to the opponent for when I don’t need to defend my combo.

The protection suite here is just some more combo pieces and a land. That’s because Altar Tron is a deck that’s hard to interact with, especially game 1, and for the graveyard hate we also have Giant’s Boulder. Since the deck has a demanding 4-card combo, it’s useful to have your protection cards be also combo pieces, because you need more slots dedicated to the redundancy needed for acceptable consistency. Fengraf is very nice to have, because it can save a Myr Retriever from exile and because you can tutor for it with Expedition Map. Myr retriever is also the way you beat counters, given the fact that every combo card is an artifact.

STEP 5: round out with some more spice!

Sometimes you have some flex slots in your deck, and while having some more cantrips or lands is always a good idea, now that the main course is ready, you can try to go spicy with some fancy garnish. It can be anything, really: a silver bullet for your tutors, a sideboard card that you want to have access to in game 1, or even a Transmute card or a Charm of some kind for added versatility. Most of the time I end up cutting those cards once the deck is refined, but I always start with 1 or 2 crazy ideas just to try them and see how they feel: 1 out of 100, you find a hidden gem!

Recap

A good chef will protect his kitchen from every pesky visitor trying to disrupt their masterpiece, so remember to devote some slots to your defensive arsenal. The number of cards you want to be playing for this goal depends on how many ways your opponent has to stop your combo on average, on how hard it is to recover from a stopped combo attempt, how redundant is your combo, and how good is your plan B. The nature of the cards you chose depends on which kind of card fits better in your shell, what you need to protect form, and which defence lines up better against opposing offenses.

Lastly, you frequently have free slots: I advise you to go nuts in the experimental phase, but also to be real, because most of the time the boring “just play more cantrips” is the correct answer. But you should still try: the delicious and counterintuitive Caprese salad wasn’t invented by thinking inside the box.