Combo Heat

Last weekend I got nuts about Magic comboes and designed a couple of combo decks.

At first I should talk a bit about the basics of combo decks. First of all many of the combo decks include something that's called an engine. Engine is usually something that converts one resource into another. In addition to the engine, combo decks also need a body. You know, a car with an engine doesn't move without a body. Body is something you use to exploit the engine to do neat stuff. Lets take an example. Lets talk about my Hunting Pack combo deck. The engine is a basic land equipped with a bunch of Fertile Grounds. The body is Dream's Grip-style cards that let me tap the land to make tons of mana many times a turn.

Of course the engine and the body aren't enough if the combo deck doesn't have some sort of a win condition. Mine's winning condition is Hunting Pack as most of you already know. In addition to the things above combo decks have tons of card draw, cantrips and tutors to dig the combo out. My deck has a full set of Mystical Teachings to search for the essential parts.


As I mentioned on the very beginning of this post, I designed some combo decks. The basic idea of two of them are explained below. I didn't include decklists because I know no one would've read them anyway :D (Just tell me if you want a full decklist). I would like to hear your thoughts about 'em.

Let's roll...


Fluctuator Combo

This deck is a good example of combo engine and body. The deck casts Fluctuator and then starts drawing tons of cards for free since most the deck is filled with cycling cards (Remote Isle for example). Fluctuator is the engine and cycling cards are the body. When I get Fluctuator, I draws cards until I get Niv-Mizzet. Then I draw even more cards to deal damage to the opponent with Niv. If it looks like the opponent is running high on life, I can cast Paradigm Shifts to be able to draw the library again and again. In my opinion the idea of the combo is really cleaver since basically the whole deck is card drawing because of cycling ability and getting Fluctuator into hand shouldn't be a problem.


Broodrush

This combo deck uses the full advantage of Rush of Knowledge. The combo is basically to play Myr Enforcer or Spire Golem and then cast Rush of Knowledge to draw shitloads of cards and play affinity creatures like Frogmite for free. Casting Rush of Knowledge should get you another Rush of Knowledge in hand or at least some other card drawing spells to draw it and play it again on the next turn. Later on the deck can cast Battered Golem and equip Paradise Mantle on it to add mana to the mana pool each time an artifact comes into play. Since the deck has so many affinity creatures the player with with two Battered Golems with Mantles in play usually gets enough mana to play multiple Rush of Knowledges during the same turn and play four Broodstars for maximum fun.


If you read the two comboes above please comment which one do you prefer.

Last but not the least I want to encourage everyone to try to design a combo deck. In my opinion combo decks aren't as fun decks to play as some of the other archtypes since they play each game similary and after a couple of games the deck becomes boring. But here are the good news.. First of all designing a cleaver combo is rewarding but its also just so cool to get 46 4/4 beast creature tokens in play in a single turn. And even more funny, to loose them all during the very same turn. Combo decks don't usually win all that often but when they do win, they do it with attitude.. Or lose with attitude. One day I was at PKP and faced a combo deck against my Hunting Pack deck. He did his combo AND I did mine on the stack. I failed the combo for getting no Hunting Packs in hand and I could've lost anyway since I can't attack with them on my opponents turn. But anyway, I had more than 20 mana in my mana pool. He had 9456478394632 mana in his pool and Psychic Drain in his hand. We both decided to mana burn just for the fun of it and the game ended in draw.

What do you think? Are comboes lame, stupid, boring, powerful, epic or great fun?