Combo Masterclass w/ Jim LaPage (CAG, The Spike Feeders) | Command Zone #435 | Magic The Gathering

greetings humans you have entered the command zone your destination for all aspects of elder dragon highlander enjoy your stay how's it everybody welcome to a new episode of the command zone podcast i'm sitting here with a i suppose a different jimmy a different gym it's jim lepage from spike leaders how you doing thanks for joining us thanks thanks for having me so jim is part of a youtube channel called the spike feeders you are known for sort of a more competitive leaning channel in some circles yeah in some circles in the competitive circles maybe not as much well you know it's funny um competitive players love saying things aren't competitive okay we'll leave it at that jim is also one of my fellow members on the commander advisory group so he does help advise the rules committee about the rules for the format jim thanks for joining us we have a very exciting topic today you know there's a commander scenario that i think most players are familiar with the game's kind of moving along everything seems to be fine your life totals fairly high nothing looks super scary out there and then boom one player just out of nowhere puts together a series of cards and they're like i'm going to do this and i'm going to do this and that's going to untap this and then i'll do that this whole thing again and you see what's happening here i'm just going to do that five million times and you're all dead yeah and you're just sitting there you're like anybody get the license plate number so today we are going to talk about uh combos and and we have jim here because cdh players are sort of known as being experts on combos you talk about it a lot on your content and whether you're a combo player or you're the one trying to stop the combo player on this episode we're going to break down sort of the ins and outs how combos work how to build them or how to identify them and then how to prepare for them how to stop them or maybe how to sneak them in for the win if you you want to be doing the combo yourself basically everything around combos we're gonna discuss on this episode um but first we gotta talk about our sponsors channelfireball.com command that's the place to go if you wanna order any magic product singles anything at all you know they have a new marketplace i don't know if you've checked it out yet jim i have they have a ton of vendors on there they vet all their vendors they make sure that they are licensed businesses means there's a ton of lgs's that you're supporting when you use the channel fireball marketplace means the inventory is very high the prices are very competitive i've used it a bunch now and it's been very fast i've gotten a very good experience the cards have come in great condition i really can't recommend it high enough channelfireball.com and the great thing is if you forget to put in the affiliate link they have this cool feature where you get all the way to the checkout and you can just input the code command in the lower right 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that for deck boxes and binders and all kinds of other things ultra bro really does make the best stuff to protect all of your game pieces and the final way to support all of our content is directly if you go to patreon.com command zone you get all kinds of perks you can hang out on our discord chat with jimmy and i actually every day you also get to watch game nights next returns a day earlier than everybody else and ad free and we also shout out one lucky patron every single episode and this episode is dedicated to zach marcus zack you rock you stole my line but i like it good job i was like does he know the line he knew the line i've watched the show answer twice all right let's go to the main topic here um okay combo talk combo conversations anatomy of a combo we had a lot of possible titles we went with combo combos um okay listen i want to get something out of the way really quick we know a lot of players don't like combos but they are a thing in commander that you can do and basically every format of magic has combos right there isn't there isn't anything that doesn't maybe every once in a while limited format doesn't but most of them do uh so there's something you should expect that you are going to at least occasionally see around the table no matter how it is that you like to play um even at the most casual of tables occasionally people will just sort of accidentally assemble a combo like this happens right if you have enough synergy in your deck a combo is almost inevitable yeah well especially with how often people steal permanents or copy permanents and stuff like that you might find that you didn't even build a combo into your deck but you still end up getting to play it because you stole something from somebody else right very good point yeah so first of all be sure to have the rule zero power level discussion with your pot or your play group before you begin the game so you can set expectations about the type of game you want to play if you don't want combos involved then that's a discussion you want to have with your with your play group um and then secondly you know don't yell at us because we're talking about combos on this episode every time we mention an infinite combo in like a set review like hey growl knocks out and you should watch out for well this is not infinite but like hermit drew it into thousands oracle people get mad like oh you're telling people about c8h and it's like this is a thing they're on the internet watching content they are going to find combos like this like that is not hard information to find it's not an intellectual contagion that we're trying to like keep under wraps here you you can choose to play however you want to play so so save your angry comments it's like the the the moral of that story okay they're not gonna save their angry comments jim spoiler alert that's fine all right anatomy of a combo so this is the first step that we're gonna talk about and this is um we're gonna just sort of go through how combos work and this i think will be helpful to identify them to build them and just kind of getting a baseline for like what a combo is and essentially what makes it tick so you had a really cool line in the outline when we were discussing it jim before the show and i'll let you read it right here yeah all actions are transactions now this is it maybe sounds a little esoteric and it does it sounds cool it's like copy it yeah it's a good ad copy all actions are transactions there are transactions and really what a transaction is means you're giving something you're getting something in return right right yep you pay a cost and you get an effect yeah you think you go to the corner store you give them a dollar you get a chocolate bar right right as a transaction right because it's two-way yeah and i think people can see that when they see the magic cards like rampant growth you pay one in a green what do you get for it oh you get a land in a play tapped like there's a cost and i get an effect so yeah just like you went to the store can i have a land please yes the answer is yes i would even expand that a little bit more and say you've you've done one and a green you get to land into play but you've also spent a card in hand and you're getting a card in your graveyard right so there's an additional cost of a card and there's an additional benefit sometimes of sorcery in graveyard too which also could matter yeah for delirium or for spell mastery or whatever right yeah yeah there's also costs on cards in addition to the cost of castle card so let's take it like a planeswalker like oogan the spirit dragon right of course it's eight mana to just get it out there so that's the cost we just talked about with rambo growth but he also has other costs associated with different abilities on the card yes so and this is something a lot of people don't know about planeswalkers but even the plus abilities are a cost yes the cost is just to add a loyalty so even if you plus ugin and lightning bolt something uh that is a cost of adding one loyalty to ugin and that is i think obvious to most people that that is a cost but the other cards like um my favorite the tim right you play tim uh it obviously costs a mana to cast him and you get a you get a one-on-one creature but then when summoning sickness is gone you can also tap tim and deal one damage to something so the cost of that is like i can't block with tim um so i've used him once i can only do that once by himself so now i've used it and if somebody else plays another one one that i want to kill i can't do it now until my next turn so yeah and some some costs are you know there's magic cards on every magic card under the sun has a different effect right and some effects can get really weird like a personal favorite card of mine is braid of fire oh yeah and that has a possibility cumulative upkeep add mana to your mana pool right add one then two then three then four on successive turns yeah cumulative keep uh used to have i mean it was around when mana burn happened so that was kind of supposed to be a downside eventually it'll get to be seven man and you can't spend it and like that never happens actually you could always spend the mana yeah because it's during upkeep it's only on instance and stuff that's a really interesting one i also think like just a land tapping it for mana is is similar to tim is the cost of you of getting the mana is using the land yes yeah so i've used it now and i can't use it again later until my next turn so it's it's just like closes the window of opportunity for you to use it at another point yeah either to make mana a different point or maybe you've got a land that has a mana ability as well as a non-mana ability so you can tap it for mana but the cost is the opportunity of utilizing the non-manageability later on in your turn right now i can't turn it into a creature or i could but it will be tapped and it can't block or whatever uh i think even like actions like attacking have a cost i think obviously when you tap the creature to attack we're tapping it and using it but even if it has vigilance i still think there's the cost of attacking which is you only have one attack step so whenever you attack you've now used your attack step and that is the cost of of attacking something there's also cards that care about whether you've attacked yep or have an attack and we've all been in that situation where it's like this card cares about whether i attack or not and i would like to attack before i do it so i can get this ability but if i do that that's better than for some other reason so now i just have to play the card and don't get the extra effect yeah or your commander might care about attacking something like tim and the weaver or naheb to make mana in your post combat main phase stuff like that where you know again like you say it's really important from a sequencing standpoint um to make sure that you're taking the correct actions in your pre-combat main phase then attacking then taking advantage of it in your post combat main phase because if you do too much in the pre-combat or too much in the post combat you're not taking full advantage of utilizing that attack step so this uh this sort of tug and pull between you know the transaction cost of an effect like what do i pay what do i get is like one of the foundational pieces of what makes magic what it is and why it's a strategy game because you're constantly sort of being like is that effect worth the cost right now is it the best thing i can be doing in the best order i can be doing it which is interesting so let's talk about sort of how this relates to combo okay so in the notes you put down um effects pa effect pays the cost of an action that is sort of how combos work from if you boil it all the way down then what the way combos work is the effect that you're getting you know at the end of the combo actually pays for taking the action yeah it's or to put another way it's self-sustaining right in that you're putting in a certain amount of whatever and you're getting at least that much out of it of the same time type and quantity of what you put in at least that much right so that's allows the action to be taken quote unquote infinitely right as many times as you want to because the game doesn't have a natural stopper on unless it says like can only be activated once per turn or something on an action it just says do you have the ability to pay for it yes then you can do it um so usually these don't come on the same card sometimes they do so to create this type of transaction you have to combine like multiple actions usually or play cards that alter or modify the cost or the effect or the effect yeah yeah until it sort of does what you need so a simple a very simple example of this it does occur on one card it is basalt monolith so if you look at basalt monolith uh it's an artifact that taps and adds three colorless mana to your mana pool and it also has an ability that allows you to untap it and that the cost of that untap is three mana so you can technically tap the basalt monolith and then pay the mana to untap it the mana that it created as many times as you feel like you can just always do that if you're a memo if you're a meme lord like me i just do that in games sometimes you know i'd like to respond by uh tapping my basalt model to untap it yeah okay what else are you doing you just got to feel like you're doing something again some games you know you technically just don't stall the game to a draw if you want to so you can um it depends who you ask if you ask and i'm sure there are going to be plenty of judges in the comments sounding off about this but if you're not advancing your game state at some point you do have to do something else don't do that everybody yeah don't do that yeah once or twice is funny but that's about it um okay so basalt monolith can tap it on tap itself as many times as you want but it doesn't do anything inherently and there aren't really any cards that say whenever um you know an artifact you control becomes tapped do this but that is a way that you could turn that into a an advantage right because i can tap and untap it as many times as i want and now if i can play another card that gives me some sort of marginal advantage from doing that now it suddenly becomes well any marginal advantage multiplied over infinity is going to be a large advantage and we can see this with cards like and basalt monolith needs no introduction right it has notorious yeah but keenan bonder prodigy makes any time you tap an artifact for mana it creates one extra mana so hey but monolith doesn't make three anymore makes four right but it only casts costs three to untap it so yeah we can see where that leads right you just do that a million times i got a million mana yep yep so you're amplifying the effect in that situation right so it still costs the same but you're getting a little more out of it each time now another way to go about this is to make it cost less to untap the basalt monolith and zerta the dawn waker does that it makes the ability cost less uh it's not the ability of tapping it to make three mana but the ability of untapping it so now you're getting three but you're paying less than three to untap it that is also a recipe for infinite mana right same net effect right you're reducing the cost or increasing the the effect by one in both cases rings are bright hearth is another one that'll do a similar thing in a different way it's actually copying the untap effect so now you basically pay five mana to untap it twice yes but it costs six but it gives you six mana when you untap it twice so again you're up one mana and you just say i do that a million times um another example of this is and this is different because it doesn't it's not two cards or sorry there's no single card in here that goes infinite with itself but two cards ago infinite together is savage vent ma and aggravated assault savage vent ma will create on attack red red red green green green and then aggravated assault says oh if you have red red green green you can pay that and create an extra combat step and untap your creatures so just by swinging with savage bent mod you create the mana that then pays for you to have another attack which allows you to swing again with savage vent mod and create the mana to have another attack and you can see where that leads yeah so you can kind of see the overarching theme here is you've got an action you want to take that cost you some amount and then the result of taking the action is enough to keep doing it right yep yeah the same theory kind of with godot and helm of the host right where it's like oh make another goto that allows me to attack again then when i go to attack again i make another godo which allows me to attack again and it's the same idea yeah um okay i wanted to do a talk about another kind of combo here that people will talk about in the combo space and most of this episode is really dedicated to what we call infinite combos combos yeah but there are a combination of cards that um don't go infinite but they're still combo-y they lock out the game for your opponents generally so i'll call them opponent lockouts um and we don't mean synergy right there are cards that just work really well together and have a big effect but they're not infinite it's not like you're taking in action five thousand times yeah it's just taking one action that's very very big and this is kind of maybe more similar to that but i just wanted to address it um opponent lockout combos people don't tend to like these they tend to be kind of mean because they usually end in like your opponents can't do anything yeah it's a very frustrating place to be yeah very very frustrating but these are combos that i would say are worth looking out for it's like lavinia azores renegade uh with four to fairy mage of zelfire yeah with knowledge pool knowledge pool and oma machine so these basically say hey opponents you either can't play spells at instant speed or you can't play spells at no mana cost and then there's another card that sort of forces them to play it into speed or cast spells without paying their mana cost instead of whatever they're casting and it just the the net outcome of both of those is opponents can't do anything they can't cast any spells yeah they could still activate abilities i guess they're on board but if there are if those aren't already killing a lavinia or to ferry well then you're you're done yeah you're not going far yeah um there's also like the new aerith tormented prophet which instead of drawing cards you um exile two cards from top of your library and then you play them and then possess portal which stops people from drawing cards but you're not drawing cards so it's the same thing like hey nobody can draw cards for the rest of the game except you tends to win you the game uh there's arkon of ameria and possibility storm this is another lockout combo that makes it so just because your your opponents can only play one spell each turn but the way possibility storm is you cast a spell then says instead of that spell cast a spell out of here and you're like i already cast my one spell return though so i can't cast that second spell so that that locks out you go one and that's it yeah and then there's of course like stasis locks which are just like nobody on taps anymore yes well sometimes except for you yeah yeah very commonly played into revvie where it allows you to untap your lands to pay for the cumulative upkeep of stasis just to keep it out so you're just like hey i can keep stasis up forever and y'all are all tapped out so yeah down here you've got some other way to untap things like an unwinding clock you're untapping your mana rocket cast stuff or whatever yeah is a real jerk about this kind of stuff isn't it it's very the different versions real cool in-game character real oppressive in-game character turns out okay but we're not going to talk about lockouts as much and these type of combos we're really concentrating on infinite combos here so why is this useful to know about the infinite combo stuff i think you know understanding this idea of like hey if i can get the cost of something to be the outcome of the effect of the thing that i paid for originally then i might be onto something as far as a combo yeah yeah so like when i'm looking through new sets new magic sets right i can look at a card and be like oh that combos with something i don't know what yet but it comes with combos with something because this has the ear marks of what would make a combo pop yeah yeah or same thing when you're playing in game yeah yeah you can be in the middle of the game actually i like what you said earlier which is like hey you're often stealing stuff or i don't know i've i've built decks for sure before where in the middle of the game i realized like i didn't design this or think of this but this is going to go infinite now that's really satisfying yeah it just means you had a lot of good synergy but very often you're like oh orvar this happens to me all the time and i've purposely tried to build my orvar deck so it doesn't go infinite and it's so hard to do that because it goes infinite in so many ways i'll just be in the middle of something go oh crap i'm infinite because when i do this it's actually going to reset me to a point where i can just do that again yeah but i like what you said there it helps with building around uh cards or cards that you like too you know it's the road matched with what you need to make a combo like i'm like my tim deck that i talked about a little bit earlier um you know that is not a powerful strategy right it is tapping creatures to do things that is slow and one of the ways i get around it is yeah there are combo type things you can do with staff of domination and other things too like so you can actually attain victory and tim everybody to death technically yeah so in that situation you're taking the the cost which is tapping your creature and then you're somehow coming up with an outcome that says i'm going to untap my creature get back in the state it was before and still have all the resources to tap it again and get it back yes exactly it also i think helps with threat assessment and game if you understand how combos work big time you know certain cards sort of can look innocuous in a vacuum and are notorious combo pieces that's a line he wrote by the way uh yeah so some examples are draw scorpion yep that's a notorious combo card is that the one that when an artifact dies you untap something you untap something anything that says when something happens to tap something untapping is a combo intruder alarm is another untapping thing yep uh stuff like peregrine drake though which is like etb untapped five lands this is a way to create often infinite mana with certain combos um so in game if you see a draw scorpion come out and they say past turn you have to like the spider sense has to really be tingling at that moment right yeah especially when they're older cards like if it's a pre-con if it's a combo piece that happens to be in a recent pre-con maybe a bit of a different story but right they went out of their way to find draw scores draw scorpion is not in pre-cons today so you know that they put in their deck for a reason and nine times out of ten that's gonna be common 99 times out of a hundred you can quote me i don't think i've ever seen a draw scorpion that somebody's just like i just get value with it i wanted to leave the door open just in case somebody's gonna be like my scorpion tribal deck uh one more scorpion and that was it if you have a scorpion travel deck i want to see you in the comments i want to know about somebody's and not just you can't just say yes i have one you have to give you have to provide a link to the entire deck list including draw scorpio yeah yeah okay um i like what you said about helping with new card evaluation sort of during preview season because we do this every single set both of us right because we are content creators so when new cards come out we're constantly like evaluating and trying to do our best job to help present our evaluations to the to the audience so that we can hopefully help you all along and figure out what is possible with a lot of the cards um i think king kenrith is like a super good example of how to sort of think about a card in a combo space because king kanreth has a bunch of abilities that you can basically repeat as much as you want if you get infinite mana you know if you listen to limited resources or something like that they're they're assessing these cards within the context of a limited environment and i think when you're assessing cards in the context of edh combo viability or combo potentiality if you want to call it that is a huge part of assessing cards in edh because you need to know what's out there right even if you don't intend to play it yourself knowing what you might come up against in a game is really really important yeah because we're constantly threat assessing what's going on and so i want to know like how easy or hard is it to combo with that card almost every card there is a conceivable combo you could come up with once you get to four five six right cards other cards working with it but that's not like a scenario that you really have to be worried about is there a two or three card you know is there one other card that just combos with this card or is there two other cards together that come with this card that that is legitimate to worry about so looking at kenrith um canada's abilities and if you're watching youtube it's gonna be a little easier because you can look at it on screen but let's look at like a second ability which is one in a green put a one one counter on target creature okay good ones yeah so the first thing let's say the you look at this card for the first time ever yep what are you thinking what's your thought process with how could i combo with that specific ability so i i would definitely go to a space where we're using plus one plus one plus one counters as a resource for something right something like crystalline crawler where you're removing the counters to get mana yeah um maybe a card i don't know it's a green grub from stranglehold i don't know what it's called um hold on it's uh i think it's called spike feeder is that the reset reel yeah oh do you remove manner you remove counter sports and mcmahon it's yeah um yeah a notorious combo card spike feeder actually uh removes uh uh plus one both one counters to gain life uh so if you can work that in somehow okay so your move counters make life and if the make life could you could pay life to make some mana maybe through something like treasonous ogre um a lot of these are are like they're lossy you know what i mean in that like bleed off a little bit of the resources as you go yeah so you need some piece in there to sort of modify it to bring it back in line so that you're getting out what you're putting in but ultimately you're trying to turn the plus one plus one counter into enough mana to pay for krannerth's plus one plus one counter ability and if you can come out even or ahead on that exchange yeah imagine there was a creature that said remove a plus one plus one counter create you know three man of any color so we uh something like cryptic trilobite there you go that makes two to make two to activate abilities and that feeds into kenworth's ability obviously you need the green obviously so you got to jump through some additional hoops but that's a way that you're going to be yeah mana even right or maybe you're playing something like uh uh what are we microsoft lattice does that allow you to activate abilities with any color or mana players may spend mana as though or man of any color period so you can totally do so with the cryptic trilobite and and microsoft lattice that's just self-contained there but it will only it will only net you even right right so like i pay two put a 1 1 counter on it remove the counter get 2. that's so that's not actually doing it yet yeah but the other way to go is to is to create in the transaction make it so that i'm getting more than one plus one plus one counter so hard in scales doubling season something like that sure will make it so that oh i paid two but actually get two plus one plus encounters yeah and now with cryptic trilobite i'm moving you know one counter to stay even and one's staying on so i'm kind of getting somewhere with all of this right and the great thing about kenrith is if i do get somewhere i can turn that into all his other abilities as many times as i feel like gain infinite life yeah or whatever yeah and i think from here the real question becomes like the most efficient way what are the cards that get you there with them you know the least amount of cards and the least total mana cost among those cards right and in your colors too because one of the things that channel doesn't have to worry about it when we're talking about um uh you know certain combos in certain color combinations certain cards are more available in certain colors than uh like you know artifacts are great in blue right um but you know if you're looking at rakdos it might be kind of tough to reliably or consistently get an uh an artifact into play yeah it could be tough right but if you're in five color if you're in kenrith then you know obviously the world's your oyster but that's one of the reasons cameron is very good let's talk about some uh other examples from recent years that are sort of obviously comboy and why that's the case so heliod's uncrowned comes to mind hey that combo is with a green ground from stranglehold wow from the stronghold it definitely does um okay so heliod i'm not gonna read the whole thing but it says whenever you gain life put a 1-1 counter on target creature or enchantment you control and then you can pay one in whites to give another target creature lifelink until end of turn we know what this combo is with triskelion walking ballista a lot of stuff when you saw this card for the first time though what was your thought process my thought process is um it's got a trigger that's repeatable and this is actually something that that watsi has been changing in recent sets in terms of design is they've been making things only trigger once per turn yeah and that's a deliberate design choice to limit the combo potential of cards right so when something like with heliod gaining life repeatedly in a turn is generally something that you can do fairly easily right even outside of a combo right you might have ten one one tokens with lifelink right ten game triggers right so when you're looking at something uh a a trigger that's easily triggered and can be done repeatedly over the course of a turn high combo potential just in general um plus one plus one counters just as we mentioned in the last example um also very high combo potential because there are plenty of cards that allow you to convert or or transact you know uh plus one plus one counters for some other resource you know and draw cards off of them you can create mana off of them you can fog off of them you can like all kinds of stuff yeah yeah it's a it's a a currency that you can use for a lot of different effects yeah so so heliod the first thing i thought of was like oh well if i can have the creature that's dealing deal damage by using the counter yeah right and that's that's and that is how we found a lot of the combos actually end up getting used but again like you said well as soon as it's got lifeling it's got lifelink forever so putting a counter on it is you know is uh put there because of the damage then all i need now is the damage to be because of the counter exactly and then now i've got that loop you talked about yeah you've improved your exchange rate there right yeah and because the damage will ultimately itself lead to the win i don't need another step i don't need to create mountain out of it i don't need to be i can be even with that transaction one damage one counter one damage one count or one damage one counter well the damage will kill my opponents yeah that's pretty cool a port razor is another newish card that just keeps popping up as like it combos with this and that and i think a lot of it has to do with the particular wording on port razer that's different than a lot of cards like this yes uh we actually just did a video on this on port razer with um with olivia gobert hicks oh our friend uh yeah with port razer the interesting thing uh one of the things that you can look at when you're trying to assess combo potential with a card is uh you can look at restrictions that are put on a card to prevent combo viability which in this case port razer it only allows you to uh attack one player per turn with or sorry one player each player one player once per turn right it's here i'll read it real quick when p when per razor deals combat damage to a player untap each creature you control after this combat phase there's an additional combat phase port razor can't attack a player it has already attacked this turn so in a four player game nominally it should mean you can only attack jim once jimmy once and then megan once and then that's it it's attacked each other players so it should have to stop now yep but if you can uh move it to a different zone and move it back then it's a new permanent resets the counter so uh olivia crimson bride actually does this card from uh crimson val uh it will actually you can sacrifice it if you have a sacrifice outlet you can sacrifice it after it does damage in your end of combat step and then uh olivia crimson bride will bring it back and you can uh attack again in your she brings it back on attack yeah and then says oh you're here now will you please once you deal damage i'm gonna get another attack and then before that attack i'll just sack the port razor so it's back in the graveyard again right and you can just sort of do that forever provided that you have uh open attacks yeah the game treats it as a new game object it has no memory of who it attacked as it was uh you know in previous lives uh jessica's will is another card that continuously pops up and this one i gotta admit when i saw poor razer and helio at sun crown and i was like yep infinite combos i can see them jessica's will i thought it was really good but the more i played with it the more i was like oh crap it does all this other stuff does it ever it might actually end up being the best card from um commander legends even if you count jeweled lotus opposition agent and whole breacher which is now banned i actually think jessica's will is a better card than a whole creature yeah i would hope this is sort of stronger at its strongest but in your average deck you want jessica's will in all of them i don't know jessica's will hmm i might take some heat for this but i'm i'm going out on a limb i would say that jessica's will is stronger than hulk breacher yeah i think so too i was talking with gavin verhey about it and he was like i was like it's i think it's the most powerful card since dockside extortionist that's been printed i think that's a fair statement yeah sure so he was like really i think he asked on twitter and it was close but i think oh it's wild to me especially since you know with these cards where they're not color gated they can come down a lot earlier in games because it's so easy to make colorless man of soul ring right and turn one and suddenly turn two your desk is willing with a little bit of mana left over yeah and uh yeah it's got high compound potential just because you know there's stuff that lets you play instance from your graveyard you can get instance back if you can make a ton of mana and then maybe um what do we got argumancer to return a sorcery to your hand recast it you're just sustaining that loop right you might need a way to sack and replay the arguments or bounce it back to your hand or something but it also combos with a lot of things that manager do like reiterate and things like that if somebody's got seven cards then you can be mana positive on a reiterate and you can go infinite on mana with just as well and simultaneously drawing your your whole deck while you do that so it also gives you the cards to play with the mana that you're creating yeah that one was not as obvious i got to admit but those are things to look for all right let's talk about um the next step of sort of figuring out how combos work and building combos is figuring out what are combo friendly effects so there are certain effects that in magic are sort of easier to combo with than others like scorpion tribal is pretty hard to combo with um but plus one plus one counters which we've talked about a bunch already are very easy to combo with so that is a known thing that like hey if you're dealing with plus one plus encounters you're probably gonna have some ways to go infinite in there um other ones are card draw card draw always yeah that's another one of those things that you can treat like currency right we've got things like uh yeah familiar uh real quick scourge familiar is four and a black for a three two flyer but you discard a card and you get uh black mana a black mana yep right so that's another one of those situations where you can treat your cards like resources yep just trade them for mana yeah straight up one to one so now if you have a thing that's going to let you draw a lot of cards it's going to create a lot of mana and lets you cast the cards yeah kind of like the jessica's will example right yeah interesting yeah etb effects are also notorious for sort of going infinite because it's not that hard to find a way to just constantly blink it like dead eye navigator or eldrazi displacer um you know just brago in general will just allow you to yeah well i'm kind of in the port raiser example moving zones kind of resets a lot of things that are designed to prevent combos so though that act of blinking or sacrificing creature and reanimating it just moving it to a different zone and then bringing it back is a really good way to reset that combo counter yeah i can break a lot of the safeties that they have in place the safeties yeah yeah um and you'll notice also like not just combo friendly effects but there are combo friendly cards just cards that sort of come up over and over in combo discussions we've already mentioned a lot of them um but the alters astronauts alter for exam alters uh food chain is a card that just constantly comes up on every cdh board i feel like every commander that comes out that has green in it is like there's a it has to be discussion about like is this a better food chain community than the other communities out there like it's like i mean they can't all be the best ones that happened in rapid fire succession we went from tazri to uh niv reborn to the first sliver in the course of like three months every new commander is the best food commander i guess um then there's like helm of the host often comes up in combo stuff because it's doing something that's not meant to be done which is like copying legendaries and allowing you have more than one of them yep and because of you it's not that hard to get additional combats uh sage of hours is one that comes up a lot because now you're trading 101 counters for extra turns and infinix returns is a very easy way to win the game that's a pretty powerful transaction some might say freed from the real is another one zora these are cards that allow you to trade mana for untapping a certain uh creature and that can obviously be broken so knowing sort of what the key notorious you know most wanted combo cards are they're on the board you know that the fbi's most wanted of like we all of these are combo are uh all these are wanted for their you know all the combos they've caused over the past you know the whole board of them is is important to knowing what's because if somebody goes food chain go i mean yeah first of all nobody would ever really do that but like if they did you are dead on your net their next turn this is alarm bells yeah it's a situation yeah yeah like there's no scenario under which you are alive if they take another turn so you just have to know what those cards are astronauts altar is a tricky one because they can play it so early i know yeah it's like well it's one of those free stack outlet things right yeah freestack outlets are our combo city yeah right astronauts altar forexian altar goblin bombardment even probably gonna die to that yeah viscera seer like all of these cards that allow you to move a creature from one zone to another and no mana cost no mana cost um okay there was another thing about anatomy of combo and we've kind of alluded to it here but i liked how you put this which was work backwards so combo is about resetting board states if you know what things look like sort of before and after you take an action then the trick in designing a combo is to get that the after to look like the before exactly yeah yeah so the olivia example i think is almost a perfect example of this right you have a board state and your board state is i have olivia i have a sack outlet and i have port razor in the graveyard i attack with olivia i bring port raiser back with her trigger and now i hit a a deal combat damage to a player and poor razer's ability triggers and i untap my creatures i'm going to get another combat phase now i'm almost to where i was before except port razer is still on the battlefield yeah so now if i just sack it it goes to the graveyard now i'm exactly where i was at the start of that right i haven't tapped any mana yeah and you've got a port razor that hasn't attacked that is the the beginning state of that combo right i guess technically you could go attack again another player untap attack again another player exactly untap then do the sacking yeah you don't have to do the sacking every time it doesn't really matter but i like the cleanness of like no mana gets tapped in any of that it's just like i need the port razor in the graveyard at the end of this and the sack outline sort of gives you that piece yeah i just want to get back to the beginning and and so that's where the the sack outlet piece comes in because you could look at olivia and port razor and say we're real close to a combo here right but what do i need to get it back to that original state of the port raiser in the graveyard and that's where the free sack outlet comes in and that's why a sac outlet like high market or something wouldn't work because it's going to be effective right it's going to deal more damage and you'll get more extra combats but because now i have to tap my high market to sacrifice the port raiser well the the after doesn't look exactly like the before close it's close but now i have a land tapped that i didn't have tapped at the beginning of this and that tells you that this is untenable even if they i had all high markets in some weird world where i could copy my lands or whatever um i would eventually get to none because none of this uh action is untapping any of my lands in anything right yeah yeah so i like that as a way to look at it if you can get the after to look like the before then you're probably on to some kind of combo all right coming up we are going to talk about how when you're in the game to identify that a combo might be coming uh in order to figure out how to stop it how to prepare for it or if you like combos and you're the combo player like if you are the bad guy at the table then maybe this will help you figure out how to sneak your combo in and sort of steal victory more often but 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playlists made every workout awesome blasting away my anxiety faster than a storm deck can combo off plus i never had to work out alone thanks to peloton's interest groups like peloton newbies peloton parents or peloton beefcakes of tharos i'm still petitioning for that one and when i got my bike it came with free access to peloton's app so wherever i go peloton is there to give me the structure and encouragement i need to attack fitness and transform into the battleforge hero i always knew i could be visit onepeleton.com to learn more or to learn how you could try peloton classes for free for the rest of the year go to onepeloton.com new members only terms apply peloton when your workout is a joy it's a joy to work out all right we're back we are talking about all things combo i've got jim from the spike feeders here with me today so we've gone over the anatomy of sort of how combos work and now we're gonna go to the next step which is taking that knowledge and applying it to the game um and i think that scenario that we laid out at the beginning where you know the game's just kind of going along you feel pretty good your lifetime's pretty high and then boom it just feels like somebody played a card and you didn't see it coming and i think this happens early in commander careers for a lot of people where they're like i don't even really understand what happened but i just died and it felt like the game wasn't close to over and i think because you haven't had that experience a lot it can just feel like out of nowhere right yeah it's kind of like that asymmetry of information right it's a you know some players are a little bit more opportunistic about this than others but um you know not knowing what's coming and then reflecting on the game and saying oh i would have done something differently had i known right right so this is something i feel really strongly about is that every commander player should learn this stuff so that they don't have those moments right even if you don't want to be a combo player knowing what's coming is a really important thing it's an important skill to have in the format um so that's one of the things that we do quite a bit is we say like this is how to this is how to do the combo it's how to execute the steps but then this is how to disrupt it you should know how to disrupt it too especially if you're playing the combo you should know how other people are going to disrupt it yeah it works from both angles yeah if whether you're doing it or or trying to stop it it helps you yeah um on the spike fighters channel there is a series called better no combo i actually did the voice for one of them uh and for the l show one ultra top yeah yeah and it's really helpful it will explain a combo to you but also even if you know the combo what i really like about is what you said it actually you guys go through and say okay but here's how you might disrupt it and stop it and you know for some combos it can be hard to figure out the sort of right moment because there's a lot going on yeah and they could have complex stacks where there's lots of things going on you say well i've got a spot removal what do i use it on or when i like the in the old dead eye navigator days before we really most of us learned how it worked it was this thing would happen all the time or would come out it would soulbound with something it would be like yep yep it's soulbound and then they'd be like okay i activated and i blinked this thing and you're like haha i'm going to kill the thing with my instaspeed removal and they're like cool activate did i again yeah and you're like oh well that feels unbeatable well then what that case what what my instant speed removal do and then we learned oh when the soul bound trigger goes on the stack before the soul bound trigger has resolved remove the thing and they cannot activate at that moment because the sole bound hasn't happened and i find it even gets a little bit worse because a lot of the time when somebody presents a combo and they say i'm going to win here people just scoop up their cards yeah they don't they don't iterate through the combo you find sometimes people don't even know how to execute their own combos right definitely been where the player's like i don't know i read that this wins but okay show me because i don't right yeah you got to do it like i don't know how that works yeah like we had a we had a gameplay episode once where bill was going off with uh karmic guide and felidar guardian right to blink the karmic guide bring it back into play reset it as a new object reanimate something and uh you know it just occurred to me i was playing a really weird deck and it occurred to me i said karma guide has protection from black right and he says yeah and his is japanese so we're like going by memory here and uh i said oh okay well i'm gonna cast magical hack and give it protection from white and now you can't target it with the fella guardian but it's that it's that knowledge of the steps of the combo and what needs to be in place for this to work and sort of leveraging what's what you have access to to be able to disrupt it okay but the first step of all this i think is identifying a combo like we need to know that a combo might be coming that we're you know getting near the part of the game maybe where would happen or that this player might be running some kind of combo and we have to start looking out for it i think avoiding that feeling of like i wasn't even aware that we were near the end of the game and this is this is about to happen so i think that's a useful skill is is having that you call it a spidey sense yeah the game of like the game is about to end we're getting close yeah how yeah your spidey sense needs to start tingling at certain moments we're gonna hopefully help you have your spidey sense sort of be more tuned so how can you tell if your opponent might be trying to combo how do you recognize which cards might be part a key part of that combo and i think there are certain warning signs that will kind of let you know that a combo might be coming and one of them is just add mana effects so i'm always worried if my opponent has something out that basically says just add mana it has an effect that says if you get infinite mana it like you're basically going to win and kenwood is a really good example of that on a commander so if they ever get infinite mana with some colored man of somehow mixed in there they're going to win with kenworth because they can gain an infinite life put infinite 1-1 counters bring infinite things back from the graveyard blah blah blah draw infinite cards and you know pass all the cards because they already have infinite mana yeah all of cameras visibility are good if you have infinite mana but there's a lot of cards that are like that thoracios is like this staphon domination is a notorious one aggravated assault which we mentioned earlier there's stuff like walking ballista which is just like oh add as many counters as you want remove all the counters kill everybody um deadeye navigator which we just talked about eldrazi displacer do you also need something to blink with those things so they're like a half a step removed but they almost never would play that card until the moment they're going to yeah do it anyway and especially if you've got that kind of effect in the command zone right like thrasios kanreth these are cards that you always have access to this is the eighth card in your opening hand or eighth and ninth if you're playing partners right so if it's always in the command zone that should be setting off your alarm bells before the game even starts yeah right just add mana in the command zone we're probably playing combos maybe not maybe not but probably so if anybody plays out an aggravated assault they're you know it costs a lot of mana to do what the aggravated assault combos generally do so oftentimes they'll try and sneak a piece out and sometimes it it is the aggravated assault if they do that those are just cards that you got to be aware if you let them untap with that card you may be dead yep everybody assault not necessarily but maybe yep that's it's high on the list but it's not as high as like stafford domination which i if somebody plays a staff denomination they almost know because it's not very efficient so they're almost never just like i'm gonna pay a lot of mana to draw a card with it go like they're generally like diminishing returns right the first activation is not good value yeah right five mana you know or i guess it's ten mana for your first extra combat with that graded assault right that's not a good rate but three extra combats you know it's a little bit of a different story because you might be able to just straight up kill somebody yeah you know yeah you don't need the combo out necessarily yeah um another thing uh that i would look out for if they play these types of cards as they might sort of herald in a combo on either that turn or a successive turn are repeatable zero mana cost effects so if some if uh they get something out or sorry if they can get something for nothing on repeat it's probably going to go badly for you later so the altars astronauts alter for action altar we talked about all the goblin bombardment all the free sack outlets yes that's big time yeah that's especially but that guy still outlets that have a cost i'm way less worried about so even if it's like one black man a sacrifice a creature do something the combo potential is way way lower because of the mana input that's required so now they need an additional step yeah i guess there are a couple exceptions we've got like grinding station blasting station they technically tap i guess but they haven't untapped themselves yeah yeah intruder alarm is a notorious one and this is one that they have to like ostensibly get a bunch of creatures into play to keep it going but again this is a thing that's just going to happen every time they do a certain effect and they don't have to pay mana for it let's say intruder alarm to get the effect cost one mana not even close to as good right right yeah you might still be able to combo but you need an additional hoop to jump through now yep exactly so i mean even even in those situations where you know if you can get intruder alarm just making a token let's say you can make a token for like one and a white but if you've got uh say a mana dork that taps for the man that you need to do that your intruder alarm every time the token comes in it's going to untap your mana door and you can do it again right yeah any mana dirk that could tap for two in some way yeah could do it or like the one that taps in on taps two lands let's say yeah so like i don't think i would call the mana dork a combo piece it is definitely used in the combo right but it's definitely not the engine that's that's running it it's the intro alarm if you remove that piece of it there's a lot of redundancy for the other pieces but there's not a lot of cards like intruder alarms because they learned don't make cards like that because people do crazy busted things another one is a card uh that we haven't mentioned yet i'm surprised is etherflux reservoir oh boy this card is great i love this card so much like let me tell you um with a flex reservoir one thing that i would look at for that kind of thing is you know if you're gonna gain life for casting spells then how many spells can you cast right how can you do this an infinite number of times to gain an infinite number of life and then have either flex reservoir be able to close out the game right that's the crazy thing about that card to me is that they were like also put the win condition on it that does it all so all it does is say yeah how many spells can you cast and there are a lot of ways to cast infinite spells we just talked about jessica's will reiterate manager reiterate uh there's bergy and any number of things concept or dramatic reversals another one so you can just easily well i mean quote unquote easily but it's not super hard to get um ethernet reservoir to just be like oh i cast as many spells as i feel like i have as much life as i want and i just laser beam all of you to death yeah or uh boluses citadel is a personal favorite of mine with top two and then you get ether flux and it pays for the um the life that you're spending the cast off yeah exactly right you're making the output look like the input in that situation um okay and the third category of how to identify a combo is if just somebody has access to a lot of mana so with enough of mana available players can often have no visible pieces on the board but they can deploy everything they need for the win in one turn so like if you're on turn four or five generally especially in casual not so much in c8h um if people have four or five mana available it's it's pretty difficult to get to a win from that starting position i think once people get about to about eight mana is when okay now they've got enough initial horsepower to get them over the hill to to to play two cards in a row that start the ball rolling and maybe kill us all right now yeah well if you think about the power level that you're playing at right think about the average converted mana cost of the decks that you're playing if you're playing at a deck that has an average converted mana cost or average amount of value i should say a four then that value is eight right that's your two cards per turn on average every turn yep and most of the stuff we're talking about is two cards right yeah there's some three but so you know you should know that by the time you get to eight mana available on board they can cast two spells on their turn without you getting to untap right in cdh it's the same thing but the average converter manicott values are one to one point five so that number is three mana yeah right or four mana yeah um yeah it's a little bit of a different way of looking at it but it's really the same concept just sort of truncated for for faster decks so once you a lot of times you'll be in games and somebody will go out to a super fast start they'll you know get their soul ring they'll go into a signet they'll maybe have one other accelerator on turn two and now they're on turn four with seven eight mana and you're it literally could be like lights out right then because that is possible now most casual decks aren't built to do that and if they haven't tutored or something it's unlikely they have the right pieces but that is when i would already start to worry like we could we could be dying it's not like i expect it you know in that scenario but it's definitely possible and even if it's not a combo could be something else right it could be some other giant advantage piece that you still need removal or disruption or counter magic or whatever to deal with you it should be setting off those same alarm bells whether it's for combo or for something else yeah if i have some way to get ready for this yeah i should surprise and it's going to be bad yeah whatever it is um you brought up another cool way to identify a combo um sorry that was the end of access to a lot of mana because i don't think it needs a lot of discussion right like i guess the only thing is like later in the game you get and we'll uh address this in a second to the point where everybody has a lot of access to mana so that it's like everybody could be winning at any time yeah and it's that's frequently the way it happens right is that uh you know you're sort of doing the standoff situation where everybody's like and then the game just ends right all right but the the the last category of sort of how you identify a combo that you brought up which i really like is pre-game discussions so if you're having the rule zero discussion the power level discussion before the game a great way to identify if people might have combos in their deck is just a straight up like ask them yeah you can ask you're allowed to use your words yeah and i think this is good too because generally like decks that are going to purposefully combo are powerful and probably more powerful than you would expect in a normal casual game and it's not saying like hey don't play that it's like oh that's good to know a lot of times i'll find that out like somebody bring out a deck and i'll you know they'll they'll bring out i don't know their um their rick smith's deck or whatever i'm like do you have freed from the real and pembenzor in there and they're like yes okay cool that's fine i'm not telling you not to do that but i need to play a different deck that i'm about to play yeah because this deck cannot you know is not going to win that early and it isn't trying to combo out and i'll go get my deck with a little more interaction or that's a little more powerful yeah so it sets kind of an expectation in your mind of like i have to be worried about this starting from turn five theoretically for eric smithey's right yeah because i could curve eric smith's into free from the real and then make infinite mana and potentially end the game somehow right right but it's saying i am playing a combo in this deck i'll give you a general idea of what it is and uh when it's coming right that that actually makes for a really good pregame discussion right this is what i'm doing this is about when i'm gonna do it and this is what you should be prepared for right i think you can also just do it during the game for sure so we had a game that happened the other day and uh one of our shawna who's one of our new editors she's playing a numerous deck another player casts telepathy okay and their hands get revealed and in her hand i see to fairy mage of zelfire and a vampiric tutor first of all i'm playing a jericho deck which suspends things that's very very bad for me but also yeah i'm like immediately i look at her hand and i look at her and i go are you playing knowledge pool or omen machine in your deck yep and she was like maybe with a big smile which meant yes you know if somebody goes like this maybe yeah you can interpret that as yes for sure and so i was like cool i'm not mad about it but i i'm glad i know that now because now we really need to figure out how to either stop the ferry for coming down kill it right away or stop that vampiric tutor maybe or like at least be ready yeah and you know i expressed this to the other players and you know we were we did manage to stop it but in that moment thinking now about it it's really tough for shauna not to give me the information i need because imagine what has to occur i have to ask her that question and she either has to bold face lie which is hard for most human beings to do to another human being like imagine you asked me a question and i was just like straight up was like no even in that situation i feel like you would still know like at least 30 of the time for sure yeah well you know it's uh i i find a lot of the time in in game especially or even in a social interaction a lot of the feel bads are going to come from the difference between expectation and result right so if you go in with a certain set of expectations the result is something totally different you're going to say oh man i wish that hadn't happened that way right right sometimes that's a good situation but a lot of the time it's bad if you go in and you say this is my expectation right now i'm going to ask you a question to see if i can kind of refine that a little bit and you outright lie you're setting me up to have an outcome that's different than my expectations right and it's kind of a kind of crappy thing to do you know the correct answer in that situation if you don't want to give the information is just you know i don't know you're gonna have to find out yeah which by the way that's a yes they have it in the deck i plead the fifth be ready for that question yeah um and you know you brought up another thing here which i think is really smart you can also just ask the other players at the table yeah they might know that player better than you they might know have played against the deck before they might just you know know things that you don't and you could be if they don't want to answer you can be like do you know does she have that combo in the back have you guys played against the second like how worried am i supposed to be yeah each player has three opponents right so if you said that you know you the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of situation right so if somebody is threatening to end the game right away you've got two allies to help you out with this situation yeah because they're going to lose too so it's in their best interest to at least give you the information exactly yeah all right this kind of leads us into our next topic here which is threat assessment so once you're in the game you might have an inkling that a combo might be about to occur you've identified it um and like i said it can be hard because later in the game everybody's got a lot of mana everyone's played a lot of stuff there's probably a number of things that you're like well that could combo that could maybe come with this thing over here combo like that there i've definitely been in games or it's like i don't know any person could win on their next turn what am i supposed to do how do you properly thread assess these situations and i think we've got some sort of bullet points that you can run down in your head to properly rank each of your opponents in your head as far as like which is the most threatening they have to watch out for the most yeah um the first thing that i kind of think about is how many cards has that player drawn so far this game because if i'm worried about specific combinations of cards and and let's be under the assumption they haven't snuck out a known combo piece on the board obviously right if they have a three flex reservoir on the table i don't care almost what what else is going on that player is the most dangerous right yeah i mean when you're in that kind of a situation any card that they draw could be the next combo that's right or they probably already have it because why the heck did they play it out there yeah you know a lot of things you're thinking about but let's say a situation where like i don't see any obvious well-known combo pieces out if a player has drawn 20 cards in a game and the other players have just drawn you know five to seven well the player that do 20 has a much higher chance of having the pieces bingo yeah yeah options are power and adh honestly like if you can increase your options by drawing cards and just having more things to do um you're always going to be in a better situation so they they might either have the cards assembled already or have a tutor and just be waiting sitting on it to do it you know they definitely have been biting their time and they've they've been carefully choosing what they want to do whereas the less the options are sorry the players with the less options they've had less choices of what to do and they and oftentimes you know when you just have less cards you're kind of like don't you may only have like i can either do a or b whereas somebody's got 20 cards is like i can do a b c d e f g yeah like i've got five mana and i've got a four drop and a three drop probably cast the four drop it's probably gonna give me a bigger better thing but i can't do both so i have one option right but if i have 12 cards in my hand i probably got you know three three drops a five drop yeah two two drops of one drop like my options were very very open-ended in that case and i've been choosing the best one each time so i'm likely to have been setting up more than the other players yeah so drawing a lot of cards spider sense tingling another one is have they tutored tutoring is a really interesting one because sometimes they have to show you what they're tutoring for and sometimes they don't yes especially the tutors that they don't have to show you you have to do but here's the thing i find especially at casual tables is people don't when somebody tutors they don't that's no mark on any scorecard of threat assessment anywhere for most players most players just totally disregard they're like yeah and then they move on to their turn and there's no nothing in their head that's like that player tutored you know what do i do with the information i did get i know they searched through their deck and found something right yeah you had a good thought process as far as tutors that i really liked yeah it was um with tutoring is interesting because it's an opportunity every time somebody tutors you have the opportunity to predict what they did right and you might not always know if you are correct or not sometimes you're making a prediction in game and then you know they just tutor and then they pass and then you're like oh that information is kind of obscured you could ask them in the post game chat if you have a post game debrief which i would encourage i think that's a great practice to get into but um you know if somebody says i'm gonna cast war of invention x equals three right right i'm going to find an artifact from my library uh with converted math cos three or less put it onto the battlefield i like to say you know what would i do if i were in their situation knowing what i know what's available to me all the free information on the board i don't know what's in their hand i don't know what they're thinking of doing all that kind of stuff but knowing what i know what is the best thing that i could pick out for this particular situation and i find this is a really good practice to get into for like honing your threat assessment is making predictions and then deciding whether they were accurate or not because if i can say they've got a flex reservoir on the field and they're playing a demir deck right and they say eighth uh were of invention x equals six bullets i'm thinking right it is right yeah um so from the perspective of the person who's watching tudor that's a good way to get into that but you can also throw off some sort of false breadcrumbs and say look if i'm going for something that's you know uh two drop instead right maybe i put a couple extra mana into my word invention to prevent my opponents from being able to accurately predict right although it's worth a mention it's coming on the battlefield so i don't know that that's that useful yeah it depends on whether you think they're going to counter it or not right but that's the kind of situation where predictions can make you a better player over a large number of games i like to actually say it so i will often like predict and be like what are you getting this and like a lot of times they're like yeah yeah yeah yeah that's fun i i think you can also like make some assumptions some educated guesses based on like at what point in the game the tudor is happening so very often a uh vampiric tudor on turn two into a aristic study that they then play on turn three is almost always that's what they went and got um uh but a vampiric tutor on turn one into a manic crypt on turn two is very odd very often the case too right if they tutor very early they're almost always getting a setup cards you know because that it's too early in the game to go for a win so they're probably not going to find a combo piece you know again you can't always know this because they might already have mana crypt in hand in which case maybe they are like i don't want to waste my one demand on my first turn i did get my combo piece but you can make educated guesses about what they're doing uh in the cases where they don't have to show to whereas turn six seven they've already got a lot of mana set up it's unlikely that they're going to find a man rock in that case right they're almost always yeah gonna they're either finding an answer they need a board wipe or or to kill something or they're finding a way to win probably yeah so like look at the information that you have available look at how much mana they have available right do they have enough mana to cast what they're tutoring for or is that the only two mana that they've got left um you know have they missed a couple land drops maybe they're tutoring for a land yeah you know people do that you gotta do it all the time right yeah you know you hit your first two land drops thinking i'll draw a third one probably you miss your third land drop you miss your fourth land drop and you draw a vampiric tutor and you're like i just need to make this land drop you know um so you think about the actions that they've taken previous to that and say given all that information what do i think they're gonna do and like you say call it out sometimes they'll be like yeah that's exactly what i'm going for you know or you find out later in the game and i would definitely raise them on my threat meter in those situations where they've tutored at a point where i'm pretty sure they didn't go get a setup card yeah so it's very it's unlikely that at this point in the game they went and found something creates more mana or something that draws them more cards they probably found like an impactful card and if they do have a combo in their deck it's a very good chance that they found one of the pieces probably the more key piece or the more or the piece that's more powerful sort of on its own but very often like they can sort of get a two front hey i might combo in i might draw into the rest of this combo but it'll be useful right now or i can sit here and wait on it and hope i draw the other piece or whatever um so yeah i really do think most players out there are not even factoring in how many times their opponents have tutored as part of their threshold at all if in the last three turns they've drawn six cards and tutored for two things you're in trouble i'm always counting like you've tutored three times now yep because only two or three times you're gonna lose to them they've just they found their three best cards in their deck like yeah you need to let the rest of the table know uh that that's going on so they can get ready too um another thing i think is uh a signal that a a a combo may be coming and you need to be careful of this particular players if they've self-milled a lot yeah there's easy i don't know why i think a lot of players also start a discount because it doesn't it's not on the battlefield doesn't feel like anything's happening but man if they have milled 25 cards in their graveyards looking like that tall you're gonna die to them they've they've got stuff in there and they've got other stuff to get it back and they're going to go into some kind of loop and they're going to beat you and assume most of the time that when people are doing things they're doing it intentionally yeah they're working towards something and with self mill um like graveyard players out there know it's like having a second hand yeah it's it's actually yeah that's a good point it's not similar to the player that's drawn 20 cards for sure if they milled 20 cards into their graveyard i would put that as like almost equivalent to having drawn 20 cards pretty close maybe not in every format but definitely in commander yeah um another thing to watch out for or think about is is their commander part of a known combo so if they've gotten to miss it if they've got i don't know they're they talked about godot go to prime for example goto actually tutors up the piece that needs to combo with right yeah well i mean if they're playing goto you've got to know from the beginning almost no matter what happens they're the they're the target yeah yeah you're in huge trouble but yeah if their commander is part of a known combo that a lot of people run that's why if they have a ricksmith these you can ask about particular cards niv mizzy can be like oh do you have curiosity curiosity in there like there's certain cards you could know to ask about um because that means they have to find less cards so you know even if they haven't tutored if they've drawn even less cards they could still have the combo because they started with a combo piece or if you dealt with it it's coming back yes right so you know if uh yeah yeah i think one of the things about sequencing combos is like we often try to like sneak out one of the combo pieces because it's so much mana to play both in one turn well if the commander is one of your combo pieces it feels very safe to try and sneak it out because if they're like kill it i didn't lose the combo piece whereas if you're like part of my combo is food chain and if i play that out there and they exile it or destroy it i have a real hard time getting it back then i have to hold that card until i'm about to go off yeah yeah but if it's the commander whatever run it out for value in the early game and it's there later if you want to combo with it but if somebody deals with it okay just wait and cast it again later yeah it just it set me back a little because i gotta pay two extra minutes when i try and combo but a big deal yeah it was worth the shot um well there's uh another little side note we put that is there a combo that is typically included in that uh commander's deck even if the commander's not part of that combo that's something they think about as well yeah and there's there's a bunch of these um especially once you get into higher power levels where you've got more generic commanders that are less involved in the deck you know they might just be a generic value engine in the command zone um but they run very typical combos you might look at thoraciostacks and say infinite magnetic combos right right so you might not know which infinite mana combo but if you see somebody you know i don't know a mystical tutor for dramatic reversal you've got a pretty good indication right they tutor for one half of it and you're like okay well that's half of an infinite manner combo you've got the infinite mana outlet in the command zone i think i know what you're going for here the combo is coming very very soon yeah that's a good point uh they can also do the oracle stuff too so you gotta watch out for them right yeah draw myself out and win with that way um and then i think the last maybe not the last but the last one we're going to talk about here is asking yourself the question what type of player they are and this is obviously going to be more useful in play groups or pods where you play with the same people over and over again you can get a sense of what they're like yeah so listen if we're playing with cassius kyle hill post malone these are all people that play very powerful decks and they play they don't have any problem like playing combo they're not ceh necessarily but their decks are near they're they're right in between casual and cdh yeah these are people that are perfectly willing to tutor for their combo and win on the spot where yeah they're not pulling any punches yeah yeah which is fine i i don't mind because i know them and i know that's the type of game i'm in for when i'm with them and you know we don't even have to have the rule of zero conversation anymore if you sit down and game with post you like bring good cards and good decks because he might comb off on you on turn five um so that can lead into it whereas if i'm in a game with you know a lot of people around here are more casual jimmy and i tend to skew more casually if we're not in games with you know caches and the like and so you don't generally have to be worried that jimmy's going to combo out on you on turn six or seven it's just not a thing that he typically likes to do um he he's going to play around and like try and attack you a bunch and like whatever but he's not going to create infinite mana and attack more incremental as opposed to repetitive right yeah i've talked about i literally tried to build my overall deck so it does not go infinite and once i learned all the easy infinite lines i took out that stuff so that i wouldn't and again nothing against combo people i just didn't like that gameplay experience for myself and i had a hard time doing it but that is the type of players that we kind of are and knowing that when you're sitting at the table means that you might be a little bit safer if i get near the eight nine ten mana range yeah than you would be against you know if cassius is at eight mana every single turn he takes from here for on to the rest of the game he will try and win if he can well i seem to remember a game nights episode where you know yeah with samud where he got off to a real quick start and dropped a uh [Laughter] that was the first time we watched him and we were like cassius marsh he's one of us knowing what type of player it is can help you lower them or raise them on the thread assessment as far as combo and i think that is just important to keep um top of mind and also like you can ask the other opponents this is a very similar thing to what we said at the end of the last uh discussion which is you know maybe you don't know them super well but the other two opponents might have played with them a lot yeah yeah so you might be like hey are they likely combo like how scared am i supposed to be of what they're doing and then you don't have to take their word for it right because a lot of the time in the game like you were saying there's kind of a tension between like i kind of want to win this game but how much do i want to mislead them or how carefully do i want to word this answer do i want a bold place lie to win this yeah generally that's going to hurt you more than help you in the long run or if somebody's like do you play free from the real and you're like no i don't because i play pemzora yeah i said i checked with my lawyers and they said i'm allowed to say no all right so you've threat assessed you've identified the combo it's coming how do you stop it oh this is a good question i mean and it's very hard in a general sense to talk about right threat assessment in general is kind of tough to talk about just because there's so much stuff that goes on in the game and more than in two-player formats right there's just four times the amount of stuff i guess two times the amount of stuff but it's exponential because of the way that sort of magic effects kind of stack on top of each other yeah because you don't have to you don't just have to worry about one opponent you have to worry about one opponent and how their stuff interacts with somebody else's stuff and interacts with your stuff right so in general it's a pretty tough um conversation to have but there are some sort of broad strokes good ideas so if your spidey sense is going off if you've got alarm bells or sirens going off in your brain the first thing you do is find an answer right if you have the capability of a tutor for something or to draw some more cards just see more cards right you got a sensei's dividing top out spin the top see what's on top you know yeah you might find a path textile or whatever that'll just you know get rid of that thing and now you don't have to worry about the combo yeah take stock of what you've got available to you and see if you can sort of funnel that into an answer right like you said sometimes it comes from uh places that you don't expect sometimes it's a magical hack to change your karmic guide right to protection from white right just take stock of how your resources what everything you have access to right now could go into stopping something from happening yeah i think a lot of players don't turn into like i need to be digging through my deck like quite early enough and you can tell good players because pretty early they'll just start doing stuff and it's like they're spending resources literally to just try and look through as much of their deck as possible because they know they're about to die yeah and like if i don't kill that thing like doubling season got cast and then they said go and it's like okay this is an emergency situation yes if they untap with that doubling season we're almost all certainly dead because that player would never cast telling season unless they also had the follow-up play right so now i'm in a situation where like i gotta kill that and if i don't have it i gotta do everything i can to find it otherwise we lose right yeah and you know it's it can be kind of tough because a lot of people love playing expensive interaction like expensive interaction is really flashy like if you look at uh what's the manager and that makes treasures instead of gives you mana that's one spell swindle that's the one right it's hard to leave a five minute it's a five mana counter spell right like who's got five mana yeah like if you've got five mana on your turn you you wanna do something you know well i'm not saying you get punished hard if you hold it in your hand and they don't cast anything that's at least five minutes right and so that's why you know one of the things that i do in my decks is uh i tend to run cheaper interaction even if it's a little bit more narrow um things like the hallmark of cdh yeah right like cdh you'll find it it'll play things like i don't know what's a good example paint a vapor mental claim mental mystery is a big one right dispel these are things that have like restrictions on what they can target but what do you think about washout where's washout washouts the cleave one mana counter commander spell counter a spell that wasn't classed from their hand and the three-man account or anything what does cleave do the cleave is allows you to counter it yeah yeah no i like it it's it's is that a cdhibble card i don't know if it's cdh one thing that was recent mystical dispute was a good one it's the one it's a three mana counter spell but it costs two less if it targets a blue spell oh yeah yeah i think that card's really oh because red elemental blast i play in like almost every day yeah right like nine times out of ten when you were looking to counter something it's blue it's it's like somebody's trying to counter your stuff and this is a one-man counter spell for that right so you see how he's um prioritizing the mana cost above utility almost which is not something we do as much in casual but i think one way to stop combo is to have the answer at the right moment and you're much more likely to be able to deploy the answer at the right moment if it costs less because you can hold chain of vapor up and still do stuff on your turn yeah whereas if spell swindle is your answer then you really really really have to know that it's going to happen for sure because you're risking your entire turn by holding up the man and stop it where it's way less risky to be like okay i got seven mana i'm gonna use six of it and hold up my answer and now i'm reasonably assured that like we're not just gonna die right like now of course they can have their own counters and they can set up but that usually takes uh you know now they have to have tutored and also have these answers in their hand they just need another piece yeah so if you're frequently ending the game with a card in hand that you weren't able to cast that would have stopped the game from ending this may be something you want to think about either you're being a little bit too aggressive on on pushing your own a game plan at the expense of being able to interact with somebody else's so maybe it's a it's a gameplay thing that you have to adjust or if you're looking to bump the power level up on your deck to match your pod i wouldn't say don't go too far past your pod but if it's something that you want to do to bump up your power level to match your pod then reducing the average converted mana cost of your interaction is a great way to do that yeah so cheap answers would make it more likely that you'll have the answer um another way to stop a combo is to recruit help we talk we keep talking every section has had a hey talk to people yeah answer and this is a good one right which is just point out that this is a problem and they should be scared of it right because not everybody knows when i said that to fairy uh when i saw the tafarian the vampiric tutor the other two players in the game were not aware that that was an issue they didn't one of the players was like what's knowledge pool and i was like oh if they get that out we don't cast any spells anymore and only shauna cast spells from the rest of the game and they're like oh that's bad yeah we don't want that to happen and i was like right and so they're like okay cool and then they could adjust in their thinking and the way like previous to that they were going to do something different on their turn and then they were like okay cool i will be ready for that yeah and so you've got more resources that that are helping you stop the game from ending yeah it's just a two more players that can find an answer if you don't have one yeah or also you can answer it even if you have the answer you know so i love doing this this this actually this is one of the things that happens people like to say quite frequently that uh politics doesn't happen on cdh right this specific thing happens a time yeah who's going to blink first because you don't want to use your resources the uh there's a term for it it's called priority bullying yeah and it's a situation where the person who's last to act in priority order is generally in the worst situation because if they say no it happens yeah so if i maybe you really got to be aware that they've got it though if you pass it to them if i'm first to act rather than saying that i've got interaction that's appropriate for this i'm asking people if they've got interaction so if you know food chain comes down and i'm like i've got a swansong in my hand or whatever and i'm going to counter this food chain um i'm saying does anybody have anything for this food chain right i'm first to act i don't have to give up any information right and then if somebody else has something for it they say well i can counter it and you say okay well i want to pass priority oh great because i didn't have anything it's funny how that kind of lying is fine because you never have to show it oh yeah ask somebody if they have a knowledgeable on their deck it's not okay for them to say no if the answer is yes yep oh listen human interaction is just you know that's just there's a lot of gray areas it also makes for some really dramatic moments if that person counters it and then the person who casts the food chain maybe counters their counter spell and you're like ha ha i've got a counter spell for that and then people didn't expect it because you passed priority initially has there ever been a move where like the last person in line has like an activated billy on something and can reset priority so they go listen i know you did you're bullying me because you think i but i don't so i'm going to tap this and give you a chance to use the answer i know you've got yeah long answer yes but it also goes both ways because i could potentially say i'm going to pass priority and then force you to activate an ability to reset priority orders so that the game doesn't end wow complicated yeah it's uh it's maybe a little too complicated but uh the moral of that story is you can recruit help although sometimes that help will be hesitant shall we say another thing and this is harder to pull off you have to have a little bit of acting skills and you can't overdo it otherwise people will catch on to it but you can bluff that you have interaction and i've seen this work a lot you just hold up mana and then you kind of posture like you're not worried um don't go overboard a lot of people are like i'm not worried about that you don't have to say things necessarily but i've definitely seen a lot of combos stopped by just the fact that somebody might interact with it you know what i do all the time this is my pro gamer move okay take notes at home um if you've got your mana set up your land set up and they're sort of in stacks separate the two off the two blues wait until somebody's about to start doing something then stack two blue and move it off to the side and don't say anything right just do it people notice that stuff right for sure that's one of my favorites of all time yeah in that same game where the very knowledgeable thing was happening there was a turn earlier in that game where a player's like you could tell looked at you know another player and looked at the mana they had and kind of sighed and did something and so was clearly like i can't risk the play i really want to make because i don't want that to get stopped so who knows i don't know if that was going to be a game-winning play but people are definitely paying attention to how much mana their opponents have available to them and what they might do with it how far they want to stick their neck out another favorite of mine is asking people questions yeah so you can say even if you don't want to explicitly draw attention to something this kind of plays into the last uh the last uh example which is recruiting help but if you want to point to something and say this is a problem you can say what do you got going on over there and have them explain it right same thing uh when you're talking about bluffing you could say if you wanted to bluff that you have a fluster storm in your hand right you could say what's the storm count at yeah right it's just a little stuff like that that makes people sort of second guess and then why are you asking me that then they're thinking why would what is it insane that cares about storm count right and so sometimes we we just meme about it and say you know what's your devotion to blue over there asking somebody a question can you know make them think twice about what they've got uh you had an interesting turn or phrase here that i really really liked that you called interaction deadlines yeah so do you want to explain this thought process i think i have a similar thought process but i never gave it a name before so first of all good marketing and secondly yeah what is interaction deadlines so this kind of plays into what we were talking about earlier when it when we're talking about sequencing combos and the best time to act right so an interaction deadline say you've got a piece of interaction you've got a sword supply shares in your hand right you're looking at the board and you say yeah there really aren't any juicy targets maybe it's a bunch of managers i don't want a swords of mana torque right so i'm going to say in my head mentally i'm going to draw a line in the sand and say i'm going to use this when something big comes up right somebody something big is attacking me or i might even say when something big comes down but you also don't want to swords the creature the second it comes into play if it's not going to affect you right because if if my opponent right in front of me is going to be attacking the person to my side then you're actually taking out something that's on your side yeah it's advancing your game too because they're my opponent as well so i don't want to blow that interaction because interaction is really valuable in commander i don't want to blow that before i absolutely have to and like we were talking about before more options and more information is more power so when we've got interaction in our hand we want to say okay what is that line in the sand and then with every new piece of information that we get we're revising that deadline so um you know if if i've got that swords and a creature comes down and say that's kind of big but we'll wait to see what happens with it if you see a combo piece come down then think about what the combo is how it works and what is the last possible moment that i could interact to make best use of that piece of interaction yeah i actually think i look at my interaction as a little game of like how long can i wait to use this i don't actually even look for juicy targets i'm literally like if i can make it to the end of this game and win without using it i i did a good job yeah if i have to use it it's because i have to use it i really don't want to use it unless it's absolutely necessary because what you find and if you think back to a lot of games that you've lost i guarantee this has happened something occurred near the end and you really are like i wish i had that removal spell that i used on that other thing earlier and that other thing was bad but but it didn't end the game it wasn't gonna win the game yeah and and if i just would have had it not turn later still that sure player c would be ahead in the game because i didn't destroy their thing but i'd probably still be alive and have a chance exactly whereas we just lost because i didn't have that thing anymore and i use it on a juicy target but not a necessary target yeah yeah so having an intimate knowledge of how the combo works the mechanics and the the steps involved allows you to make a really accurate assessment of when to use that interaction it puts a good deadline on it um we're going to talk about maximizing the disadvantage here in a second because that's our last point but real quickly i wanted to take it aside and we had discussed um before recording about countering tutors specifically and there's a general uh conventional wisdom out there which states that you should counter not the tutor itself but what they tutored for yeah and this is something that jimmy and i have talked about on the show before and you actually think that that's not true all the time yeah there's some situations where uh because the the general knowledge behind that is that it's a two for one right so um you let him get the thing you counter the thing you counter the tutor and the thing exactly because they got no benefit out of it right there their transaction was not fruitful right but a lot of decks and edh like we mentioned before especially with graveyards they treat them like a second hand so tutoring a card unless you're unless you're sorry countering a card unless it's countering it to exile like something like summary dismissal or mine break trap but all those are expensive yeah um but unless it's putting it in excel it's putting it in the graveyard right and if you're playing against a graveyard deck that makes it relatively accessible for them so you know if somebody if i'm if i'm predicting what somebody's going to get if i'm saying you know what there's a lot of artifacts on the board i think that they're tutoring for a dockside extortionist right i don't think i want that dockside extortionist to go to the graveyard if they're playing black right right because then they're just going to be able to reanimate it and now the dark side's back in play right i mean a lot of the combos with dark side involve sacking it and then reanimating it anyway so yeah so countering the tutor in that situation leaves it in their library and makes it less accessible for them to use later right they might get the tutor back but then it's still two steps away at the very least it's not gonna it's gonna be more telegraphed yeah i like that a lot um and and these days especially i think that there's almost no decks you run into that don't interact with their graveyard in some way every green deck is going to have a regrowth or an eternal witness alligator validated recovery is just an every green deck now um all the blue decks are going to have you know our archaeomancer or maybe a snapcaster or something like that or like echo of eons yeah back in the library white's all got all these regrow things now too that are like especially for low cmc stuff but people are on to the fact that like i'm gonna have key things in my uh in my deck and if they get thwarted in some way i want to be able to have another shot at it right and and also just the fact that like as the game goes on the left the graveyard gets bigger and bigger and so anything that gets anything out of your graveyard is closer to tutoring than drawing a card because you're choosing from from a lot of different things right options yeah so i i like that a lot think about the deck that you're playing against especially if it's creature recursion based then you do not want to wait till the tutor resolves yeah think of it okay let's talk about maximizing the disadvantage so use you mentioned a second ago about like thinking when's the last possible instant i can deploy my interaction to a have the most information so that i know for sure as much as i'm going to know about what's happening but i think also we want to make sure that when we do stop a combo we hurt the combo player the most possible yeah we set them back the most amount so it is choosing the right target at the right moment so that you make it as hard as possible for them to recover from this stumbling block that you've just thrown at them yeah but it also buys you a little bit more time to deal with it right because a lot of the time when you stop a combo you're not doing it in a really final way yeah it's like something like you're kicking the can down the road here you know yeah so when you do have the answer sort of having a general concept of how combos work will allow you not only to stop it but leave them in the worst possible position i have a couple examples here and i wanted to talk through like where you would deploy you know where in the process so let's say it's kikijiki kikijiki they got kikijiki out they play zealous conscripts yep now you have a path to exile on your hand at what point in here do you deploy the path to exile is it with zealous constrips on the stack do you let those contracts conscripts resolve and then target something usually an opponent's creature with the first trigger and wait for kikijiki to activate targeting the zealous contrib so you kill zeals then do you wait for the first token i don't know why you would but maybe to be yeah yeah at what point in there there's a lot of choices do you target kiki cheeky or zealous conscripts which one yeah you can actually look at it like a decision tree right so you can say you know there's a certain opportunities that you get to interact yeah right so in this situation if we assume that keep key cheek is in play we're casting zealous conscripts and zealots conscripts the spell is on the stack right at this point um if you remove the kikijiki then uh they won't be able to activate it at all right those zealous consequences is going to come into play they might get some value out of it they're gonna steal a creature but that's it yeah so that's a pretty good situation to be in they're still gonna get a creature out of it if you allow the spell to resolve then the zealous concept enters the battlefield you get priority again with the trigger on the stack they've already selected their target for it they're going to pick kikijiki to untap it right so in this situation the um trigger is going to resolve either way or sorry it's not going to resolve if you remove the key keys because there won't be anything to untap but you could remove the zealous conscripts and still have the kikijiki untapped that's not a great situation to be in who knows what their follow-up play is or what else they've got on board yeah that's probably worse than the first scenario right in that they've still got the kikijiki now it's untapped for some reason i would want to let them do that um you could with the trigger on the stack to untap the kikijiki remove the kikijiki then they've got the zealous conscripts in play and they didn't get anything out of it because the trigger will not resolve because it doesn't have a valid target right i mean their first trigger's gonna be somebody else's creature and then they're gonna activate kiki right uh usually it's uh yeah because there's no reason for the first trigger from zealous too so it's uh so in that situation now they've just got zealous conscripts in play right they yeah and like you said they might uh they might pull an opponent's creature or something like that um if you let it enter the battlefield and let the trigger resolve say they've got an opponent's creature in play they're going to activate kikiji targeting zealous conscripts right that's the next step in the combo in that situation you could remove the zealous conscripts the kikijiki trigger will not resolve it'll be tapped that's probably your optimal point to interact at this point because in this situation they really they don't have the zealous conscripts anymore the geeky geeky is tapped so they can't make another copy of something and that's better than the previous scenarios that we uh talked about in general terms depending on especially if kiki's their commander because you'd really prefer to exile sales conscripts because if you leave them with zelle's conscripts on the battlefield but no kiki they can they can solve that situation by just casting yeah so you you you've really kicked the can very little down the road if you remove kiki which is what you have to do if zelda contributes is on the stack yeah um although i will say there are some other arguments what if there's a blue player that you suspect might have a counter but is um but is uh what'd you call it's priority bullying priority bullying yeah or trying to bait out your interaction well and then there's always the the possibility that they have an answer for your initial interaction so if you if zealous is on the stack and you use sword splash shares on kiki and they do something that stops your gives it protection from whatever or you know maybe they're in blue too and they counter your swords with zealous on the stack the blue player still has a chance to now go okay fine i'm going to step in here and counter the zealous conscripts in that situation i would probably be a little bit more vocal like we were talking about before and recruiting uh you know allies in that situation i'm gonna bluff that i have no interaction because my deadline is later than theirs yes right so the counterspell player if unless it's like a tails end tails end uh or a stifle or a trick bind or something like that if it's like spell counter magic uh their deadline is the zealous conscript is still on the stack that's when they have to interact when they get priority so i'm going to say if anybody's got a counter spell like i got nothing you know yeah force their hand on that one right i don't ever want to be in a situation where i've like passed so that actually makes you more likely to wait until because yeah it may as well make them use their yeah you definitely want to wait as long as possible in that situation i would probably be the bully okay let's do another scenario that was fun okay okay sanguine bond and exquisite blood um this is the combo where one of them says uh whenever you gain life opponents lose that much life and then that same would bond and the exquisite blood says whenever an opponent loses life you gain that life so with both of them out if you deal any damage to an opponent it'll start this loop where you they all die yeah um so let's say you have a chaos warp in your hands and let's say they put exquisite blood on the stack they've already got sanguine bond out okay yeah so in that situation again we we kind of look at this as a decision tree we say first opportunity to to act is with the spell on the stack yeah right this is like probably a pretty good situation to interact if we've got a chaos warp if we chaos warp the one that's in play the other one is going to come into into play and essentially do nothing right right i will say that sanguine bond is in effect there are a lot of standards for they could have a veto they could have a dina not veto v veto not like veto like the president does but vito you know right yeah yeah yeah there's uh there's a guild mage that i think does this the uh viscapa maybe yeah so exquisite blood is the effect that they don't reprint on any cards for this reason um they don't want any redundancy for it so like it is unique to its effect yeah and that's a fair point right like if you can say taking up this one piece at this opportunity by waiting for which i figured out which one we had on the battlefield uh yeah so if we can take out the the key piece that sort of layers with all of the other pieces that might be in the deck for as a redundancy then you want to take away the rarer one or the one that's harder to come by but having them letting them both land is dangerous it is dangerous yeah i mean you can still so it depends on what else they have in play if they're gonna rely on attacking then you gotta look at okay who's open how likely are we to actually lose life right maybe they've got a tim in play where they can just say okay well i'll deal damage to you right that's probably bad news right because then there's there's a lot less agency involved in um you can see it there i mean you could wait till you activate the tim then try and get rid of the x-rays of blood but if they have anything else yeah then they go oh ha ha lightning bolt and then yeah yeah so it depends on how they're going to trigger it initially and of course that might push your deadline back a little bit you might say i have a little bit more time until we find out how they're actually going to deal the damage but in general having all of the pieces to a combo in play is bad news this one's a little bit different because they're triggers yeah but uh i would say that you know in other combo examples if they're instant speed then you're you're in danger zone if everything's in play because you might go to interact you might chaos warp and then they can continue the combo and respond on top of it right so like you say yeah it's like oh great your character is going to resolve after everybody's dead so it won't matter yeah yeah i think in this case i would just get rid of the sanguine bond and just what with exquisite blood on the stack and just be like yep veto or this cobalt guild mage may come down but it's it's not going to be this turn because they would have to have like 20 mana to do that so i'll just live to fight another day and like if next turn they play veto then i'll deal with it then yeah exactly or start talking to your opponents too and say like i can deal with this now but if this happens again like there are other things that can do this if this happens again you know you guys got to have my back on this one too yeah when we're done here exquisite blood will still be on the battlefield so please don't just tap out on your turn save your interaction for if this person tries to comment yeah fight's not over yeah that's that's nice okay let's talk about um the flip side of all of this so now up till now we've mostly been talking about it as if we're not the combo player and we're playing against them but that's not always the case sometimes you are the cassius marsh sometimes you are the post malone sometimes you are kyle hill sometimes you have really cool hair i don't but he does executing your combo is the next category on the i i guess we're going to talk about here how you correctly play your combo so that it does not get stopped in the ways we just talked about so let's walk through some ways we can kind of sneak our combo and guarantee ourselves a victory or snatch victory from the jaws of defeat um the first one we have written down is pick your spot so are your opponents tapped out tapped out is a great place to be if you're with your opponents being tapped out great place to be for your combo player is there has their attention been elsewhere a lot of games end this way right where like somebody's the gets off to a fast start they're scary scary scary and then this player in the corner just kind of sneaks in there for the win at a point or you've got two players that are just wailing on each other all game they're you got a bit of a grudge match situation you're like well if i'm gonna fly under the radar this is the way to go yeah i'll just uh develop my board and then no they use all their stuff i i think also like decks only have so much interaction so i feel a lot safer after a few pieces of interaction have already been used yes uh there's just less likely that they've got it so sometimes even if they have some open mana you can feel safer like hey what did are they really going to draw path swords and this other thing all so far in the game when only 12 total cards have been drawn or if there's a counter spell war going on or you know counter counter counter if you've got an instant speed way to do something at that situation even with the counter spells on the stack you can do it in response and say hey this is something i've been looking to do for a while and i've just been waiting for a good opportunity to do it in cdh that's ad nauseam most of the time right counter war and then they're like sneaking out as you know yeah well you guys don't have any more counters left i know that oh sad for you that's cool proper sequencing is really important when trying to execute your combo um deploy your pieces carefully and then the proper order so as not to show your hand or spook your opponents i think also being aware of which pieces of the combo you have more redundancy for and which ones you don't so in the sanguine bond exquisite blood thing of course sanguine bond would be on the table before exquisite blood because sanguine bond by itself is actually not as scary right because again there's only one other card in the deck that really combos with that whereas if exquisite blood gets played first there might be four or five cards in their deck that combos with that yeah yeah so um if astronauts alter is a key piece ferexian ulcer probably also is maybe all three dimensional dimensions maybe goblin bombardment is so that's why i think astronauts is particularly difficult yeah uh because it is a piece that is fairly cheap and when they slide it out there in an early turn it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to combo yeah usually there are fair applications for astronauts alter sometimes uh but for the most part you're like okay well it's coming it's coming somewhere down the line i don't know when but it's hard because it's not going to come necessarily right away they feel way more safe casting it than just sort of using it as a value piece for a while before they combo out yeah it has utility outside of the combo yeah that's a real hallmark of good combos is when the pieces aren't dead by themselves yeah right yeah yeah cause if they're dead by themselves then you just don't play it until the moment you're gonna come off food chain right you just never see a food chain come down and they don't combo off because it's so important to whatever they're doing they're just going to hold it until that moment yeah it's like treasonous ogre nobody just plays trees in this ogre and then it's like go like hey i'll pay life for mana later like or you're gonna be like i'm gonna play treasonous ogre and then pay three life make one mana and faithless looting yeah that's not happening nobody ever does that it's just wait until it's going to do the full part of it so but so so don't be the person that's playing the treasures until you're thinking that you're going to get away with it because people know what those cards are and so you play the less threatening pieces first the the ones that have more utility that just could be knockers innocuously used yeah really just assume that anybody you're playing against was watching this episode of the command zone and saying i know how to how to spot this combo from a mile away yeah give them as few signals as possible uh i also put employee decoys so i think a good strategy can be to prevent uh or sorry to present a threat that's not part of your combo but is something that is scary enough that opponents will have to focus and deal with it and use their interaction on that thing especially if that thing is an enchantment a hard to remove type of card and they're not likely to have a lot of cards in their deck that can remove that type of card so a creature is less effective at this uh than an enchantment if you have an enchantment piece of your combo what that does is it screws up people's deadlines right one thing that you'll see sometimes people play is uh either ground abolisher or silence because that pushes people's deadlines up to this second right now yeah if this hits the battlefield or if this resolves you're done that's it yeah the game's over right so people have to use their counter metric on it it's like you say it's it's not even like it's a big threat by itself but if they don't use their their interaction right now they're not going to get an opportunity to yeah the implied is that whatever my follow-up would play is it's going to knock you out exactly yeah i like that a lot um i also think something people don't do enough and i just came up with this point it's not there's no fancy copy for it but is consider which deck at the table is the worst for your deck um the most likely to be able to stop your combo a lot of times you'll be out of deck and let's say i have an enchantment based uh combo piece or something that's going on well the green and the white players are way more likely to have interaction for what you're doing so if you are in a game and you can pressure that player specifically pressure their life total early you can cause them to have to make moves that they don't have to make and dwindle their resources yeah so that later in the game you can deploy your combo and you know like they had to they you know they had to kill a creature earlier than they wanted to they had to play out some blockers when maybe they would want to set up in a different way and you've and you've sort of nerfed them to the point where like okay and now they're not ready and i'm going to attack them from this new angle of a combo right yeah yeah and then assess the assessment so are they or have they been actively worried about you this can be overt or covert and i i think covert means they're eyeing your board yeah you can catch people eye on your board a lot and if they're ironing your board that person has threat assessed you as the problem yep 100 they're like can i see your graveyard over there or can i uh you know how much land you got untapped right these are the questions that people ask when they're assessing your board the real sly ones will try not to ask you any questions but then they will still have to know how much land you had so they have to count it so you could see them like looking at your board and sort of maybe lips are even moving and they keep glancing back because they're trying to be sly so if they go like look then look again then look a third time listen they've identified you as the threat and then what that means to you i think is like you can't go for your combo right now because they know they're waiting they're they're ready for it you sort of have to wait they are like all right you got eight mana i know the type of player you are that thing is scary yep and now they are definitely gonna try and hit you at the worst part to maximize the disadvantage when you try to go for the combo i uh did this once actually this is kind of like employing decoys but a combo of assessing the assessment and and employing decoys i saw somebody um an opponent of mine he was playing a nosorious deck and had an avacyn angel of hope in play and it was indestructible yeah it was it was causing us a lot of problems right and i've got a necromancy in my hand three-man enchantment reanimate something yep um i said to my other opponent the non-nozorious player graveyard player i said can i see your graveyard he says yeah he hands it over to me i sort of riffle through it a little bit pull out the avenger of zendikar that's in his graveyard i didn't really want to defend his center car i sort of pulled it out a little bit and handed it back to him right you like put it on top of the graveyard in fact yeah exactly i was like uh here you go and and uh the zorya's player says what do you got going on over there he says all i have in his avengers enter in my graveyard said okay so i said i'm gonna cast necromancy and he says what are you targeting i said i don't have to tell you yet because it's an enchantment it etbs then i choose a target so i need to know whether it resolves and he says yeah yeah it's fine it's it resolves what are you picking you take your avengers in the car i said i'm gonna take the gilded drake in your graveyard and take your ass and he said well i'm gonna force a will your necromancy i'm like oh we're following you hey i already asked you yeah yeah i can tell you yeah you can kind of throw people off with subtle clues like that right if you know that they're watching that's great um yeah so be it be attentive to the fact that like if they are aware of what you know you being the threat or what you might do you might be able to throw some false signals in there i like that a lot all right thanks jim thanks for joining us that was very fun uh that is the extent of our convo combo combos today combo combos combo combos we can say it to the listeners what are your favorite combos in commander what are your cool bluffing stories like the one that jim just told uh do you like combos in commander do you hate them uh you know i guess we can hear from those people too they'll tell us regardless but seriously if they're already like cool combo stories you've got i'd love to see it in the comments it's always fun to hear that stuff you go make sure that you go to channelfireball.com command to order all of your magic part cards products singles i said pards because that's products and cards uh you know we've got crimson val is out now kamigawa neon dynasty right on the horizon it is the holidays you are probably thinking of what you want to get your friends and family for the holidays magic cards are a great holiday gift channel firewall.com command is the place to go to get all that stuff especially if you want to make sure you're going to get it pretty quickly because all these vendors are sending stuff out super fast i've been impressed with all every time i've used the marketplace it's been really really good um and then once you get those cards ultra pro is the way to protect them or ultra products make great gifts as well you know if you know you have a friend that plays a certain deck and there is a play mat deck boxes sleeves even sometimes there are binders that have the image of that deck like they've built a new olivia deck there is a really cool like showcase art deck box for the olivia like giving them all the stuff to dress their deck up real nice like yeah i think that would be a sweet gift i wish somebody would do that for me i don't know if i have is there orvar sleeves and stuff because if there was i mean jimmy just a little hint okay um special thanks oh no now it's time for the end step oh gosh we have jim here now it's time for the end step where we talk about something cool outside the world of magic this is great because i don't have to come up with an n step jim all right you have something cool to talk about i got to do something first yeah yes well he'll get better with practice we'll practice that yeah so something cool outside the world of magic yeah um i i something that maybe some people know about me is that i'm a huge legend of zelda fan love it love it love it everything about it and it's zelda's uh 35th anniversary this year it makes the original of the original wow for nintendo i'm 35 years old as well uh one of the coolest things more than the same year that last zelda came out yeah it makes me feel old okay but one of the cool things that they're doing for the 35th anniversary is they've released a handheld game and watch game that has uh the original legend of zelda zelda two which not a lot of people have played because the game is not good um throw the sword a little ways like that far it's hard it's very it's very hard and uh link's awakening wow all out of watch now it's it's like a handheld game you know the things that you used to buy at like a grocery store oh yeah it's one of those oh that's cool but it's got all three games loaded on it um this is a holiday gift as well yeah it's really cool yeah if any of you out there are shopping for me for christmas this is what i want um it's yeah it's really really cool i i don't know it's just sort of a piece of zelda history i think it's a super appropriate thing for the 35th anniversary um you know along with maybe some ports for switch that actually work but no shade wow um does this device have all the bugs of the original caves i don't think so that's too bad are you talking about the like zelda two thing where you can kind of cheese the final battle against shadow link well there's all kinds of bugs but that's one of them that's one of them where you can just sort of you can like skip certain levels in the original by like going like oh yeah you know yeah yeah you can like go back and forth a couple times i forget all this but maybe i'll try it i'll do a playthrough i don't know if you can hook it up to twitch so that i can stream it but i'm sure you can do it on tv it's a game yeah there's oh that's interesting of any kind no just well maybe just you just lock it down somehow and then you get a camera and just pointed at it probably fine i could do that i'll talk to murph murphy if anybody knows it's probably jake that'll know to be honest he knows all technical things might know too he actually murph knows all console things so between the two of them i know yeah we have all the knowledge we need like 10 steps that way that's cool i remember when the gold um cartridge cartridge oh yeah like we were just like what yeah yeah it just it just felt expensive yeah like you you didn't know that that was an option yeah they all have to be great [Laughter] yeah so i'm having lots of fun playing zelda games this year uh because it's the 35th anniversary right right as opposed to all the other years you played them because they it's just zelda's cool yeah because i compulsively play one game forever all right big thanks to our amazing team here at the command zone that's arthur meadowcroft lady danger manson lung greg blanchett ashland rose josh murphy jake boss patrick nan jordan pridgeon sam waldo grav golotti truck tie jamie block damon lynn shawna gillis and evan limberger and special thanks to jeffrey palmer for the living card animations that begin our show and sometimes sit behind us yeah i think jeffrey did that one uh you can find him on twitter at living cards mtg and jim why don't you tell everybody we've said spike feeders over and over during uh this episode obviously if you just type the spike feeders into your youtube search bar they are going to pop up but do you have any other ways that people can find you online yeah you can reach me on twitter that's my primary social media i'm at jim tsf or at the spike feeders if you want to reach the whole group for whatever reason there is seven of us but if you want to reach me in particular either to talk about kag things or to talk about you know anything else if you want to just talk to me one-on-one you can message me on twitter uh or uh youtube twitch that's about it we will have all the links in the show notes and definitely definitely definitely if there is a rules committee announcement that you do not like then jim is the one you should talk to yep he's in charge of all that stuff and i have nothing to do with it so thank you jim yeah i hope you get some great messages from all that thanks everybody for watching we'll see you next time peace [Music] thank you for your attention for further inquiries send an email to commandcast rocketjump.com or ask us on twitter at jf1 and at josh lee kwai see you later alligator greetings humans you

Channel: The Command Zone

Views: 91,372

Keywords: video game high school, ted wong, vghs, wong, jfwong, jimmy, magic, the, gathering, mtg, magic the gathering, strategy, game, trading card game, deck, tactics, commander, general, elder, dragon, highlander, politics, josh, lee, kwai, cards, Card Game (Game Genre), negotiations, command, zone, podcast, the command zone, edh rules, mana, mana bases, Game Knights, GameKnights, gameplay, arena, brawl, historic, oathbreaker, spike, feaders, jim, lapage, combo, innistrad, crimson, vow, kamigawa, neon, dynasty, alchemy, new, capenna

Id: P5BCUH0GGmU

Length: 112min 5sec (6725 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021