Since the introduction of Theros Beyond Death, combo decks have taken hold in Modern. Druid Combo has adopted Heliod, Ad Nauseam has new tools, and Underworld Breach is inspiring entire new builds. With these decks on the rise, it’s time to talk about understanding combo.
Let’s dig a little into what it means to be a combo deck. Fair Magic is based on interaction. Whether your angle is value, card advantage, or mana advantage, typical play involves interacting with your opponent and coming out ahead. If you out-advantage your opponent over the course of the game, you’re likely to win. Combo decks break this paradigm. There aren’t exact boundaries between what is and isn’t a combo deck, but that’s how I think about them when I’m brewing.
The first thing I do when analyzing a combo shell is identify how it’s breaking the rules of fair Magic. From there, I look at a few features that can make them strong and determine what I want to lean into and build towards those goals. The important factors are speed, consistency, resilience, and fallback plan. Let’s analyze a few Modern combo decks on those axes.
Speed
Neobrand. Neobrand is built around playing Allosaurus Rider for its alternate cost, Neoforming it into Griselbrand, then proceeding to draw its deck by repeatedly activating the big demon and casting Nourishing Shoal for its pitch cost to avoid running out of life. Once that’s done, Labratory Maniac finishes the job. This can happen on turn one, making Neobrand the fastest combo deck in the format.
That speed lets Neobrand get under a lot of disruption, but the deck is weak on every other axis. It’s inconsistent, requiring a specific combination of cards with almost no hand sculpting to find them. With its library in the wrong order, usually no Shoal in the first 14 cards drawn with Griselbrand, Neobrand can lose to itself. It has some resilience by virtue of its speed, but it can fold to a single Thoughtseize. Its entire fallback plan is one Pathable Griselbrand. This is a hefty price to pay for turn one kills, but that’s the choice that you make when you play the BlackJack of Modern.
Neobrand violates a principle I keep in mind when brewing combo: avoid playing bad cards. Drawing a hand full of Autochthon Wurm and Chancellor of the Tangle isn’t a great feeling. All the cards in the deck are dedicated to Neobrand’s singular plan; outside of that they’re effectively blank. If you’re going to include cards like that in your combo deck, you need to be very aware of why you’re doing so and if there are alternatives available that have utility when you’re not going off.
Consistency
Gifts Storm. Storm is a very consistent combo deck and a perennial player in Modern. It primarily wins by casting a lot of rituals and cantrips, reusing them with Past In Flames, and then Grapeshotting the opponent out of the game. It’s reasonably fast, usually killing on turn three or four if undisrupted, but it really shines in how rarely it fails once it gets started.
Storm is moderately hate resliliant. The big concerns are tax effects like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Damping Sphere, and it essentially can’t win through Eidolon of Rhetoric. That said, graveyard hate is only somewhat effective. There are a lot of sideboard options (Aria of Flame, Pieces of the Puzzle) that can make Storm less graveyard-reliant. Backup plans such as Empty the Warrens are okay, but still rely on casting several spells quickly.
Storm’s speed and consistency make it strong against decks that bring little interaction to the table. Storm’s positioning in the metagame has recently improved due to the the popularity of Primeval Titan decks and rise of combo in general.
Storm’s consistency is a consequence of its wealth of hand sculpting. Just the opposite of Neobrand, almost no cards in Storm are textless outside of its combo turn.
Resilience
Ad Nauseam and Modern Inverter. Ad Nauseam has always been an oddball. Classically, it casts its namesake card in combination with Angel’s Grace or Phyrexian Unlife to draw its deck, cast Lightning Storm off Simian Spirit Guides, and pitch a pile of lands to burn its opponent out. Alternatively, cast Thassa’s Oracle if direct damage isn’t an option. The combo is instant-speed and very difficult to interact with. Ad Nauseam packs Pact of Negation to push through countermagic.
Recently, related Naus-like lists have been appearing that forgo the namesake card in favor of Inverter of Truth and more copies of Thassa’s Oracle. These builds give you more redundant combo pieces, and have been using Wishclaw Talisman to tutor for them. Classic Ad Nauseam needs six mana to combo, but Inverter can win with less. Thassa’s Oracle with Angel’s Grace and Spoils of the Vault is only four, and Inverter lets you split your mana requirements across turns more often. This makes Inverter a bit faster on average than Ad Nauseam. Moving away from Lightning Storm doesn’t allow Inverter to win at instant speed, but it gains consistency by narrowing the circumstances in which you lose to an unlucky Spoils of the Vault.
Both Ad Nauseam and Modern Inverter are really good at evading hate. Creature removal and graveyard hate do nothing. Stony Silence and tax effects are speed bumps. Discard is difficult to deal with, but Inverter can even get around Eidolon of Rhetoric, which is nearly impossible with classic Ad Nauseam. These are my favorite decks for hate resilience, and they are fairly consistent, but they have absolutely no backup plan. When you play Ad Nauseam, you combo or you die.
Fallback Plan
Heliod Combo. Heliod Combo is the creature combo deck of choice right now. Some builds have melded with Druid Combo, while others forgo it. Heliod, Sun Crown combines with Walking Ballista for infinite face damage or with Spike Feeder for infinite life. These decks have been supported by Once Upon a Time, Collected Company, and Ranger-Captain of Eos to dig up their pieces. Finale of Devastation joins the Devoted Druid builds as a tutor as well as another win condition if you find yourself looking to spend infinite mana. Druidless builds have Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit as somewhat of a Heliod/Vizier of Remedies hybrid, granting access to yet another combo if you repeatedly sacrifice Kitchen Finks to Viscera Seer.
This archetype has another feature I aim for whenever I can when building combo decks: multiple overlapping angles. The pieces available combine in a lot of different ways to break the rules of interactive Magic and abruptly end the game or pull arbitrarily far ahead. That feature adds both consistency and resilience by overwhelming your opponent with must-answer combo components, though creature removal is still problematic and common in main decks.
The speed of Heliod Combo is variable. You can assemble something infinite on turn three with a strong draw, but not all of those angles close the game in a metagame where infinite life doesn’t necessarily cut it. What I am a huge fan of in Heliod Combo, is the strength of its fair plan. Its creature components form a respectable combat plan when it doesn’t go off, along with incidental life gain to stay out of reach of fast aggro. Think about this feature when you’re evaluating combo lists.
Whirza. This represents an entire space of decks that win by combining Urza with Thopter Foundry and Sword of the Meek for an arbitrarily large number of thopter tokens and life. More combo-oriented builds have fallen out of favor since the winning teams of SCG Richmond and Philidelphia both ran it in the Modern seat. That deck is not primarily a combo deck at all, but rather a reactive deck with a combo finish. This deck is not built for speed at all, but rather to play a reactive game until your opponent has no way left to stop your combo (or get beaten down by Urza’s constructs). This is easily comparable to the Pioneer Inverter deck. While not combo-focused, these decks should make you think about what you plan to be doing when you’re not popping off.
Brewing
We need to talk about Underworld Breach. My previous article went over a variety of ideas for cracking this card’s combo potential, but a lot has happened in the last two weeks. Pascal Maynard posted a Grinding Station Breach list that caught fire. It’s fast and focused and I do not like it. Let’s talk about why.
Jeskai Breach by Pascal Maynard, Face to Face Games Tour, Top 8
This list goes for the throat and it does that well, but Cryptic Command and Mystic Sanctuary are disjoint plan that doesn’t help you be proactive. Comboing with Breach is mana-tight until you’re already going off, so backing that up with countermagic is awkward. This is especially true game one where your opponent will have little useful interaction and you already have access to Teferi, Time Raveler.
The manabase is trying to support three colors, snow, Mystic Sanctuary, and a colorless land. That is really pushing it for me. This list also has no proactive backup plan and is not resilient to hate. It folds to a resolved Surgical Extraction. You have to bounce Stony Silence, Rest In Peace, Grafdigger’s Cage, Damping Sphere, Eidolon of the Great Revel, and Eidolon of Rhetoric; there’s no winning around them.
Maynard is getting results with this list, though. He’s mentioned on Twitter that he has plans to write about it. I am looking forward to reading how he thinks about its play patterns, but it hasn’t been the approach I’ve liked to Breach combo. What I think Maynard got very right, though, is Teferi. Silence on a stick is unreal in a sorcery speed combo deck. You can’t beat Breach without instant-speed interaction, and Teferi bounces permanent-based hate. He’s an incredibly good choice for Breach decks. I’m interested in trying the sideboard Hope of Ghirapur from Maynard’s list on similar grounds.
For comparison, here is my current Breach list:
Jeskai Urza Breach by Urchin Colley, Test List
Though the primary self-mill combo is the same, this build takes a different approach. You have a secondary combo with Thopter-Sword and Urza that works around cards like Eiodolon of the Great Revel. Urza is also an inherently powerful card, especially with Grinding Station, and it’s hard to convince me to leave him out of an artifact deck in Modern. Urza, Sai, and your sideboard creatures give you a legitimate way to win without your graveyard or with your artifacts shut down. Approaching Breach Combo with Urza ticks all my boxes. It has card quality, multiple angles, reasonable speed, moderate resilience, and a fallback plan.
That said, I think this list is premature. Turbo lists similar to Maynard’s will crush a few major events before Modern players learn to adapt their play and card choices to fight back. Once that happens, a more robust list like this one will be a strong response as the metagame adapts. I’m personally pretty slow to call a deck broken, but as these Breach shells get dialed in, I think some version will become one of the best decks in Modern. You need to start thinking about how you plan to beat them.
I hope this deep dive helps you next time you’re looking at a combo list. Now go forth, break the rules of interactive Magic, and crush it!