Discussion Forum

Infinite combos are legal in tournaments. They aren't particularly easy to pull off and just like any dominant strategy, if they become too powerful, steps will be made to bring it back to a balance.

As far as combo taking away some of the fun of the game... "different strokes for different folks". I tend to agree with you but not everyone enjoys the same things.

Yeag I guess you are right, this is only my opinion. I want to win a game, without recurring to an inifinite combo, but I I also respecto players who like this kind of play.

Although I could use this combo Vizkopa + exquisite blood, I have choose not to. Thanks for the information.

If the combo is strong it will become a dominant strategy or at least it will have a strong presence in the given tournament meta and people will prepare to go up against it, which we call "hate".

I've played Show and Tell for about a year which is one of the major decks in the legacy tournament meta and it's a strong combo deck that plays a lot of counterspells to defend itself. If people were not armed against it they would lose all the time but it's just not like that. People play counterspells and other hate cards in abundance to stop or at least delay combo strategies and it's usually very hard to win.

When a combo deck proves to be almost unbeatable within the given meta then usually cards get banned to restore balance to the format. When 1 deck takes over and splits the field into 2 deck types, the given deck and decks that are build to break the given deck, they call this phenomenon warping the meta and cards get banned immediatly. It has happed a lot in the past.

The new Modern format for instance had a lot of bannings in very short time and still people come up with new combo decks.

It's not so much that combo isn't fun, it's usually very difficult to play (taking into account everything that can go wrong and playing around that) which makes it a challenge which in turn makes it appealing to some. Another benefit is that you get a share of "easy" games. If you play 9 rounds at for instance a GP it's very exhausting, staying focussed for 9 hours non stop. If you play control for instance you play every round the entire 50 minutes because that's the nature of control decks, they are slow and unforgiving. Which means you don't have time to take a break. Straight Aggro on the other hand is fast but then you have to deal with the frustration that you have a bunch of matchups that are autolosses because you just don't have the means to interact with your opponent. Combo is the elegant inbetween, sort of, it's fast (not always but at least 50% of your games will be fast) and depending on the combo deck you usually have a great deal of control.

The problem with your combo is that it requires a lot of mana and is easy to disrupt. Don't think you have an easy win there, just build something and try it out at FNM, you'll see :)

I have tried my hand on a deck with this combo, a black and white lifegain EDH deck,

Black has a lot tutors, but one i normally sets this combo in motion is academy rector.

So if you are playing in a format that allows academy rector, abuse it.

Since I am newbie I dont have much knowledge of cards, so I investigate a lot of decks, but my preference gos to Standard deck, since I like participating in Friday night Magic.

But I like aggro deck with use of good combos, not infinite, but its just my opinion.

A good way to learn how to build effective decks is to draft a lot, it's very skill intensive and might be frustrating when done with more experienced players but it does do several things for you:

- it's low cost, usually the price of 3 boosters, yet very skill intensive and highly competitive where as playing competitive standard requires you to own a deck with lots of expensive cards.

- every time you draft you learn how to build a deck, you should also talk to other players after a round and have them examine your deck and give you advice. You'll pick up new things at an accelerated rate.

- you develop a collection of cards which you could, if you wanted to, sell to fund your draft sessions.

- you get lots of opportunities to try differnt strategies and archetypes

Some FNM places have a Cube they draft from (cubedrafting), this makes drafting free and although you don't get to take your cards home with you you do learn the same foundation of deckbuilding you would when booster drafting. It's just more interesting because a good Cube contains only interesting cards where as a booster does not.

Totally agree, draft helps you in every way, you get experience building decks, you get experience playing with and against several tipes of deck archetypes, you get new cards, you can trade new cards to make your decks, and so on and so on.

thanks for the tip, I wil try one draft near my residence, everyone has told me the same as you. Thanks for the tips.