Well, here we go. From the top...
Welcome back to Play Design. Today we're going to be talking about combo decks and R&D's guidelines and philosophy behind them. The first thing I want to point out is that we don't have hard and fast rules for combo decks, just guidelines that we follow to meet our goal to create a fun environment.
I didn't initially think I'd have anything to say about the first paragraph, but since I'll be nitpicking everything, I want to note that while this doesn't sound like a false or wrong statement, it is actually pretty weird. "We don't have hard and fast rules for combo decks." Well, they don't have hard and fast rules for any particular archetypes or strategies! WotC does publish tournament rules and the rules of the game, but those govern all decks. Once a deck, any deck, is legal under the rules of whatever tournament/format/event/whatever it is in, it's legal and that's all there is to say on the matter. No one from WotC, let alone R&D, is going to go, "Um, excuse me, but your deck is a control deck and it has too many three-drops for a control deck under our hard and fast rules for control decks." The default assumption is that the same rules that apply to all other decks apply to combo decks, and that no other special rules are added just for combo decks. So yeah, it's a very minor quibble, but the whole thing starts off down a strange path. Anyway...
What Is Combo?
A combo refers to cards that interact with each other in a way that's significantly stronger than the sum of their parts. For example, a single
Pestermite by itself isn't very impactful. A single
Splinter Twin by itself doesn't do anything. However, these two cards in combination create an infinite number of creatures. That interaction is significantly stronger than the two cards individually.
Sure. If we're being technical, then "significantly stronger" is left undefined, and providing a single example of a combo is insufficient to describe the
philosophy of combo. But I assume that this is written for a general audience, and exhaustive attempts at classification might be uncalled for. I have no objection to the point that Pestermite + Splinter Twin constitutes an example of a combo.
What Is Synergy?
Synergy refers to cards that work well together and enhance the value of each other. Decks that are high in synergy are sometimes combo decks, but not always. For example, Goblin Tribal is a synergistic deck, but not a combo deck.
Ooh, this one is a bit trickier than it looks. I suspect that when most people think of "Goblin Tribal" they think of aggro decks. In reality, in Legacy tournaments, Goblins decks have also been combo decks and control decks, and have passed through some of the territory in between all three at various points. Until recently, the niche Goblins had in Legacy was that of a control deck, getting many of its wins by grinding out Miracles, the most dominant control archetype in the format.
I think Melissa DeTora's reasoning here is sound, but it's a bad example. There's nothing precluding Goblins from being a combo deck, as there are so many goblins with strong abilities that some synergies even go infinite.
A combo deck is a type of synergy deck. You are trying to assemble a group of cards that gives you a powerful effect all at once. Usually this effect is your win condition. We think it's healthy to have both combo and synergy in Magic because it allows for exploration and makes deck building fun. However, some combos are not healthy in Magic and some are even oppressive.
Here's where it starts to get bad. Longtime Magic players (of which Melissa DeTora is one) should know that the reason combo decks are healthy to have in Magic isn't because they "make deckbuilding fun." Rather, they help balance competitive play. For example, in an environment devoid of combo decks, if I have a control deck, I need defensive measures to keep aggro decks from taking me out, mostly protecting myself from overwhelming creature swarms in some way. If those same defensive measures are also effective against more midrange and hybrid archetypes as well, then all I need to do is use them, get to late game, and win. If I can do this well enough, I have a dominant deck. But if combo decks are in the environment too, then they present a different type of threat. My defensive measures might not work against them, and even if I can stall and reach a late game in which I could have an effective wall against aggro, a combo deck might have some tool that gets past my deck. Like they might have one of those cards that makes it so I can't play spells this turn or whatever. It's likely that I can't bank on the notion that if I survive the first few turns intact, I can establish control of the board and remain secure in my position. A control deck might even have the tools available to stop the combo deck, but in order to use those tools, it has to diminish its usage of tools that make it dominant over aggro decks. And even if it can find a balance to shore up both, is it really still going to be strong against other control decks too? In that world, it's a whole lot harder for one deck to achieve dominance.
Here are some of the guidelines we follow for making combo fun and healthy.
Speed
It's not healthy for combo decks to be faster than the fastest aggro deck in a format. It forces aggro into a pure race they can't win, as they have zero interaction. When there is no interaction, combo versus aggro is not an interesting matchup because both decks are essentially goldfishing; the matchup is lopsided and not fun. When combo is faster than aggro, it removes the role of aggro in the metagame.
Melkor already covered this one. If combo decks are too slow to beat aggro decks, then why would anyone ever want to play a combo deck? As far as the old rock-paper-scissors idea, it was always more complicated than that, but as a generalization, there was some truth to it. It's not as though it's a 100% thing. Combo doesn't
always outrace aggro. But it provides that threat. If you go all-in, full-force pure aggression with an aggro deck, well then, shouldn't you lose to combo? Why not?
An example of this is Zoo versus Storm in Legacy. There was a time when Zoo was one of the fastest aggressive decks in the format, but Storm combo was just a turn faster. Zoo had very few ways to interact with Storm, and soon Zoo became nonexistent in the metagame. In current Legacy, we don't really see much pure aggro because it can't win faster than the combo decks.
Time for a bit of a history lesson. Combo used to be pretty bad in Legacy, because the original Banned list curtailed all the best known combo options at the time, and it took a few years for enough card to be added to the pool for combo to become a real threat. There was the occasional Belcher deck or Doomsday deck or a bad storm deck fueled by Ill-Gotten Gains (called IGG-y Pop). But they were inconsistent and easily disrupted by control decks. Eventually, the best combo deck became "Solidarity" High Tide decks, but it was slow and kind of tricky to play. Aggro decks were diverse in the early years of the format, but after Alara Block came out, white/red/green decks running cheap, efficient beatdown that mostly happened to look like animals (hence "Zoo") was fast enough that it rose to the top. It had access to burn spells for clearing blockers or finishing opponents off, and it could run all manner of cheap disruption to deal with whatever bombs the slower decks in the metagame would try to use to stop it. But better still, it consisted of monetarily inexpensive cards and was very easy to play, so it became extremely popular as well as powerful.
Zoo had its reign as the most popular deck for several years, and for a small window of time it might even have been the actual best deck (probably not), but its performance gradually dipped as its simple strategy encountered increasingly vicious predators. Goblins, Fish, The Epic Storm, Survival, and so on. Other decks just kept getting better, but because Zoo was so affordable and established, it kept showing up at tournaments in large numbers. After it finally died off, there'd be a lot of discussion of what killed Zoo, and the real answer is probably that it wasn't just one thing, but a bunch of factors. The important point, though, is that it wasn't Storm specifically. Storm wasn't anywhere near as prevalent as some other decks that beat the crap out of Zoo, such as Vengevival.
In current Legacy, we don't really see much pure aggro because it can't win faster than the combo decks.
Combo could be completely excised from the Legacy and people wouldn't be moved to swap out their Delver of Secrets for Wild Nacatl. If your thesis is that fast combo is pushing aggro out of the metagame, then what has to happen for that to be true is that when aggro is employed, its bad matchups are all combo. That isn't the case.