[Question 24] Where's the Combo

[Bardo]

Technogeek5000 asks this relevant question:

"Several months ago Cephalid breakfast was a tier one deck... it had multiple top 8's at nearly every tournament. Belcher preceeded Breakfast and had a large number of top 8's... and before Belcher, TES was putting up impressive results.

"Occasionally you will see a combo deck in the top 8 of a tournament, but there are no combo decks currently in the format that are higher than tier 1.5. Solidarity fell off the radar and Aluren will occasionally place. Control decks and aggro decks dominate top 8's, but it seems that combo will only put one (1) player into the top 8 of a medium/large-sized tournament or sometimes none at all. Why is this?"

[Bryant Cook]

Combo just doesn't have the numbers it needs to compete with Aggro and Control. Nonetheless competent pilots to play good combo decks. Combo's numbers have never been too large in Legacy; at the rise of TES and fall of traditional Iggy Pop, it was averaging 3-4 top 8 slots. Since then it's settled at 1-2. Which isn't too bad considering combo is such a small portion of any given metagame. I wish I had a long winded answer, but that is basically it.

[Tacosnape]

The lack of combo decks could have something to do with Counterbalance hurting them, Extirpate hurting them, Stifle hurting them, Chalice of the Void hurting them, and 3/4 of the metagame consisting of decks that pack enough hate to have a fighting chance against combo. Hell, even combo packs combo hate, in Force/Seize/Chant/Abeyance/Leyline/whatever.

However, Wastedlife is right to a significant degree. Measuring decks by their top 8 results alone doesn't provide an accurate gauge of how potent a deck is in a metagame. All it does is tell you what you can expect to face in Top 8's.

To measure the potency of a deck, you have to measure its results in a ratio with how frequently it's played. Back when it was the deck to beat, Goblins often appeared in the Top 8 of every tournament despite hate being rampant. What was never accurately measured was how many other Goblin decks were being played that finished .500 or worse. Nor could we measure the skill of the Goblins players accurately, since so many people were playing it. So we don't really know how good Goblins was and when. Regrettably, there isn't really a way to measure this accurately, or we'd be doing it already. Skill is hard to measure, and keeping track of top 8 results and deciding which tournaments to count is difficult enough without factoring in what doesn't top eight and how often it top eights versus failing to do so.

Decks like TES, Ichorid, or Cephalid Breakfast dropping out of the DTB Forums periodically in favor of decks like Burn and MUC doesn't mean for a minute that Burn and MUC are better decks. It just means either they're being played more, being piloted by more skilled players, not being hated on at all, or just plain got lucky.

Hate is probably the biggest factor. Nobody hates on Burn or MUC, but decks like Ichorid and Cephalid Breakfast have to face obscenely disproportionate amounts of graveyard hate, much how Solidarity was overhated when it was big despite only a couple people playing it per tournament.

I think it's just that people hate losing to combo. I know I do. Deep down, when I play in a tournament, if I have to take a loss, I don't want it to be to the combo player. Maybe it's because they're always so smug and act like they accomplished something. I like to see them lose, and horribly (Despite the fact that I play combo about 1 out of every 3 tournaments I'm in. I'm such a hypocrite.)

[Illissius]

When Goblins was the top deck, decks which lost horribly to Goblins were sidelined. Now that Threshold is the top deck, decks which lose horribly to Threshold are sidelined. This explains the dearth of Storm combo, and seems perfectly normal to me. It doesn't explain the decline of Ichorid and Breakfast, which (the former at least) are actually good against Threshold. Maybe, with Loam and friends as well, we've reached such a critical mass of graveyard based decks in the metagame that everyone feels the need to run four of either Leylines, Extirpates, or occasionally Crypts in their sideboards, and it's proving too much for the graveyard-based combo decks, whose strong suit isn't resilience, to overcome. Or maybe people just don't like playing these decks, I dunno. I am pretty surprised by Cephalid Breakfast falling off like this, though.

[Nihil Credo]

The major hypotheses have been covered; I'd like to add one more thing:


I think it's just that people hate losing to combo. I know I do.

I think that people also loathe losing to hate while playing combo. When you lose a game between two decks that fall between aggro and control, it usually involves getting overpowered in some shared aspects of the game. Maybe he dealt you more damage and faster. Maybe he drew more cards than you. Maybe he had better card quality than you. Any way, there was a competition involved.

When combo, however, squares off against a non-combo deck, it can be: a goldfish (eh), a fizzle (awful), a fair game against countermagic or discard (good), or playing against permanent hate, which is a really unpleasant way to play Magic since it devolves the game down to a single card - not the sort of games you enjoy much after you've spent months mastering every little twist of your intricate concoction!

CounterTop's ubiquity only compounded on the situation, because now even most blue-based decks fight you through lock pieces, reducing a lot those enjoyable resource battles down to the 'nothing happens until this one goes away' situation.

Note that the above applies to the current lack of TES and Breakfast as much as it does to the relative scarcity of, say, IGGy Pop and Belcher back when they were the top combo decks around.

[Eldariel]

One factor that also contributes to combo's success, or the lack thereof, is that it's very easy to screw up with a combo-deck. More precisely, a weak pilot playing combo will probably fail to put up any sorts of numbers with the decks, mostly because he's going off at all the wrong times, never playing around anything, making technical mistakes in the motions themselves and overall making unsound choices. Now, Threshold is a deck that greatly rewards playskill as are most of the other strong decks in the format, but combo-deck is basically 'one strike and you're out'-kind of deck. You can afford to play your Brainstorms wrong and counter too aggressively/passively with Threshold, you can even afford to play spells in the wrong order and you'll still have a solid shot at winning. Since combo-decks generally revolve around resolving an exact sequence of spells into a finishing spell, if you screw up the motions, you just gave up any chance of winning.

I'd say that one reason combo isn't doing so hot at the moment is the relatively scarcity of competent pilots willing to take the decks into tournament, and the number of weak pilots not picking the deck up since they keep losing in testing, and the rest of the weak pilots scrubbing out.