Why We Like Combos (and Other Deck-Building Stories)

i've been thinking about combos a lot and i've been thinking about what makes them fun that's probably because i've sacrificed a lot of my free time to slay the spire a digital deck building game that does to deck builders what hearthstone did to collectible card games if you don't know what a deck builder is it's a genre of card games where rather than having a pre-built deck or a deck you build and bring to the game the act of building the deck itself is integrated into the gameplay and is arguably the core experience the very first deck builder was dominion but as you can see many have come afterwards either iterating on the original or taking the idea of deck building and smooshing it with other genres slay the spy takes the concept of deck building and puts it into a video game it encapsulates everything that this genre is and elevates it by unshackling it from the physical realm and you know what just the other day i played a game of slay the spire and i built the most satisfying combo of my life when you begin a game of slay the spire your deck is garbage it's not even hot garbage it's tepid at best you laboriously fight monsters with attack cards and defend against their attacks with block cards on and on it goes but after each combat you get to add a new card to your deck permanently changing its composition and these new cards are wild here's a problem even if i wanted to show you the combo i've built i couldn't because i didn't record the game but also the color pool is so varied that i couldn't stumble into the same combo again thing is i don't want to tell you about my combo because combos are solitary and shareable experiences okay i'm gonna ignore everything that i just said and tell you about my combo anyway i got a bunch of cards that increased my strength then i got four upgraded limit breaks that doubled any strength that i had i also got a bunch of cards that drew more cards meaning i could cycle through my deck until i found a triple or quadruple attack finisher and kill any boss in turn one that might mean something to you if you're very familiar with slay the spire and all of its cards but even if this didn't sound like a word vomit from a very nerdy man's cave i still can't relay the emotional resonance of everything that happened nothing illustrates my point better than the finals of the 2012 magic the gathering pro tour that saw stanislav sifka be yuya watanabe if you've never seen this whether you love or abort magic the gathering i promise you one of the most bizarre displays of sportsmanship in the history of the world also i should clear up that even though you build a deck to play magic the gathering technically it's not a deck builder as defined by the genre for magic you build a deck in advance and then play it deck builders you build the deck as part of the playing experience let's put things into context winning a magic pro tour is a nine impossible feat not only are you shopped in a room with nearly 400 of the world's best players you also have to play nearly undefeated for three consecutive days in a gruelling gauntlet of not just widths but also stamina and if this wasn't difficult enough don't forget that magic has a high skill and luck element meaning that even the best players in the world can boast a 60 win rate in professional games and magic players cheat and in fact they're so good at it that they've been doing it for years and nobody can tell for example the hero of our story yuya watanabe has been disqualified for cheating in 2019 seven years after the 2012 pro tour has he been fudging cards this entire time who knows point being that winning the pro tour wouldn't just be a mark of unparalleled powers and skill it would also be validation for anyone who's chosen to play collectible card games as their job and forty thousand dollars there's also that yuya was the fan favorite in this matchup even though neither of them had reached the spot of proto final before yuya had been taking stabs at it for years winning multiple grand prix and earning two player of the year titles stanislav was a relative newcomer with no titles but on top of that he was piloting a deck that everyone hated and that deck was called eggs okay sure officially it was called second breakfast but that's just because wizards of the coast needed a catchier name for the broadcast the premise was simple create an unbreakable cycle of gaining mana and drawing cards by sacrificing artifacts the community dubbed eggs to only return everything back and continue sacrificing in an endless loop the only interaction you had with your opponent was a single card called pyrite spell bomb that dealt two damage to your opponent every time you sacrificed it but there's only one in the deck meaning you had to continuously cycle through the deck and your graveyard until you could deal the requisite 20 damage to win the game failing that there was another card called grape shot in the sideboard if your opponents find a way to deal with pyrite spellbomb not only did wizards of the coast feel like they had to create a special segment explaining what the hell it was that this deck was doing for people watching at home but also after the pro tour it was quickly banned and swept under the rug because spectating a match with eggs was tedious consider that the game state gets so ridiculous that stanislav isn't even bothering to play with his hand hidden and just lays it out open on the table why try there's nothing yuya can do to stop him and most of his turn just looks like this cycle into a land cycle the next sphere into a car that's kind of already done its job and and another car that's already done its job syrian visions i don't know about you but if i were you yet teetering at the edge of what could potentially be the greatest achievement of my professional career i don't think i'd take this well because my role in that match would just be to sit and watch my opponent take one endless turn yuya doesn't just take it well but in a display of showmanship so rare amongst magic players he helps stanislav count his mana totals and the number of cards he's played by turning over dice for him he didn't have to help him might as well make him work for it and hope that stanislav makes a mistake somewhere in the chain but yuya does and if you ask me what i think was going on inside u.s head i'd say that he properly decided that this was the only way he could actively participate in what could be the most important game of magic in his life what this isn't an egg it's just orange juice what do you think i am a wizard if you ever wondered why slay the spire works only as a digital game this is precisely it combos are fun but mostly just to the person executing them they went on the journey of collecting those cards and playing them out they ached over probabilities of drawing the piece that will make it all glued together or flop and whilst i can certainly appreciate it from the viewpoint of a spectator who has no stake in the game i don't think i'd want to be an active participant where the other player just draws cards and shuffles the deck for 20 minutes i don't think i'd want to be yuya talking of journey let's talk about one of the more popular ones and no i don't mean the originators of the hit single don't stop believing i'm talking about the hero's journey if you're not familiar with this literary concept here's a brief explanation of one of the most common storytelling tropes the term hero's journey was coined by joseph campbell and he described it like this a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man in other words there's a transformation so for example lord of the rings star wars and tom cruise are all heroes journeys and so are deck builders forget for a second whatever theme the publishers put on these card games or in some cases whatever style of artwork they could afford to put on them and consider the narrative of what you do in the game mechanically what is the scope of gameplay and its emotional resonance you have your humble beginnings aka starting deck you have the supernatural wonder aka the cards you add to your deck which also represents the transformation the fabulous forces which are whatever challenges the game imposes and you have victory or at least you hope you do and that's why i don't really love deck builders don't get me wrong i enjoy playing them but only in the same way i enjoy watching edge of tomorrow i had a perfectly pleasant time but i can't help but feel afterwards like i've decanted an entire jar of nutella into my mouth there's no judgment here if you enjoy deck builders more power to you as much as some people including myself go on endlessly about finding higher meaning in board games at the end of the day we all do it because it's just a good time it makes us feel good and that's what drives us but i can't watch edge of tomorrow over and over again unless i'm part of some weird meta art installation for example i wanted to buy a copy of dominion for some b-roll for this video the progenitor of deck building but one look at the cover and i developed an involuntary gag reflex by the way if you've never played a deck builder do yourself a favor and get dominion you'll be a whole new world okay let's review what we've learned deck builders rely on combos to create memorable gameplay but unlike their digital counterparts they can't lean on combos too heavily because combos are solitary experiences now we're left with a question that most tabletop game designers have been trying to answer for years now how do we innovate on a genre if we can't forcibly push the thing that most people enjoy about it you can streamline down until you refine it to its score like the quest for aldorado a game i would jump at recommending if it didn't have tired colonial overtones in its art you can incorporate it into other design elements like spirit island which is also a game i would recommend but just describing its genre i end up with asymmetric cooperative hand builder with elements of area control you can use deck building as a design element to complement or inform an entirely different genre like what orleans did with back building or you can entirely miss the point and come up with translucent cards so cards become different cards when you put cards together my word it's totally different from replacing one card with a different card because it's the same card you see except it's now a different card i'm sorry john declare you're a wonderful designer i really like spacebase or you can do what almost no other deck builder has done before and instead asked the question what if we're trying to tell a very different type of story which is where this video pivots to thought why in the world would i spend one two three four five six one thousand nine hundred and ninety words talking about a genre conceptually and then pivot to a single game good question like most games mentioned in this video ford is a deck building game and it's kind of adorable in fort you are a kid building a fort and your deck is your friends who are helping you construct it this is captain and he is badass this is puddin and she's got style and style's gonna get you far in this game and this is golden boy and the less we talk about golden boy the better for everyone involved you'll draw cards from your deck and acquire new ones which will go into your discard pile once you've drawn all your cards from multiple turns you'll shuffle your discard pile back into a new deck and keep cycling and that's where the similarities end because fort is not interested in doing the hero's journey oh no the story it wants to tell is descent into madness each card in fault is your friend and your objective is to have the most points which you acquire by increasing your thought level to increase your thought level not only do you have to play a card that has an action that lets you do that but you also have to have the resources required for the next level which can be pizza or toys i'll be honest with you i recognize the whimsy in this theme but it does very little for me i grew up in the soviet union and back in the motherland we didn't really have forts or pizza or toys your experience might be different don't get me wrong despite ford being a second edition and an actual reskin the theme sticks better than anything i could have ever imagined and not just because of the copious references to glue here's some immediate differences from games in this genre in other deck builders on your turn you would be able to just dump your entire hand like some sort of a weird and confused masculine statement of prowess unleashing a cornucopia of abilities that chain and interact with each other in thought however you only get to play one card each of these cards has a suit such as skateboards super soakers or books if an action on the card that you played is boostable you can discard cards from your hand matching the suit on that action and increase its potential but inevitably at the end of your turn you will end up with cards in your hand and these cards aren't cards they're kids who didn't get to go out and play and so instead of hanging out in your lame fort they will go to the yard each turn you're also forced to recruit one new kid and that kid could be hanging out in the park ready to jump into action or and this is crucial you could recruit a kid from your opponent's yard confirming my long-held suspicion that kids are fickle non-committal and just like that your entire world is taken for a turbulent spin cards you thought you had would run away and other cards you thought were great are now rubbish because they combo into nothing let me show you what i mean you can hold resources in your stuff but you could also sneakily stash them in your pack which works as extra storage but also there's cards that will score you a point for each thing in your pack that's great if say i have four resources in my pack i play it i score four points and in a game where 40 is a winning score that feels pretty good but then let's say i spent these resources to upgrade my thought level someone took away the car that lets me put in more and now this does nothing better yet unlike in other deck builders where each player starts with a rubbish deck and slowly builds it into something cohesive here you start with a deck that's been randomly dealt from a communal pile only two of your 10 starting cards are preset meaning that every card you hold in your starting hand has the potential to be as good as the best card in the game except it isn't because what you're holding in your hand is jumbled nonsense slowly and surely you'll try to tame it into something that does make sense but much like a card pyramid no matter how long you try and concentrate someone will inevitably knock it over in an instantaneous and carefree childish whim you're never the hero of the story you're just some kid who thought it would be cool to build a fort but then realize that much like anything in life building the damn thing is just a small and insignificant part of it and mostly you're just managing complicated social groups whilst everyone gets angry with you and leaves i think it'll be obvious to some of you that this video clearly started as a review of ford but the more i thought about it the more i realized that this isn't the story that i want to tell thought is sublimely simple but it subverts so much of the genre that if i wanted to begin the conversation about it i realized just how much i'd have to front load and you might say to me efka with seasoned cardboard is we know what's up but you'd be surprised how many people in this shotgun riddled hobby don't know what a deck builder is i don't blame them every time i open up bgg there's like 500 new terms to learn and none of them are intuitive imagine my surprise years ago when i've learned that eurogames and ameritrash aren't just a new spin on eurotrash americans don't look up eurotrash it's not worth it that's not to say that if you've never played a deck builder you won't be able to appreciate thought it's clearly an experiment but very much a functioning experiment ensure it'll take you a game to familiarize yourself with all the strategies and abilities and honestly the rule book could be clearer but before you know it you'll be intimately familiar with skids and butch and ghost and kitty and just how valuable each of these silly kids can be which is where we finally come back to combos because fort does the unimaginable it makes me care about other people's combos if the captain was the ultimate move the kid the resistance in my grand cardboard scheme and someone takes him away from me that's a crap feeling but whereas other games might just leave it at that in a nelson kind of a haha moment fort takes it a step further and makes you watch other people play with your card which is excruciating and yet because there's a potential that they might neglect it there's always that faint glimmer of hope that you could get it back and since you only ever get to play one card a turn combos aren't these long-winded boasts but instead an incredible and unlikely turn in a cacophony of orchestra practice where a single note lands just right and sounds beautiful four is not gonna be for everyone if you're new to board games look i'm not going to be pretentious enough to tell you that you should first get a deck builder with training wheels do what you like if you think you'll enjoy ford there's a surprising amount of fun to be discovered in this box just be aware that that fun builds on a lot that's come before it and i hope that our video helped you put things into context this video was brought to you by the power of our patreon backers who enable some of the finest board game media in the world if you'd like to become one of them you'll get access to newsletters or maybe even audio logs or maybe even a personal shout out like darker odig garco thank you very much for supporting our channel we'll be back very soon

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 42,924

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2019, fort, card game, deck building, combo, combos, slay the spire, magic: the gathering, magic

Id: hVXiRSTR--M

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BionicBeans]

Actual Video Title: Why We Like Combos (and Other Deck-Building Stories)

It's about 60% history and discussion of deck-building games, the thrill of the combo, and how they have influenced general games since. After that is a review of Fort with the context of that discussion and how it subverts much of the genre to great effect. THAT is the "other stuff"

[u/mynameisdis]

The first 10 minutes was actually a solid standalone video essay about deck building games.

[u/cottage-in-the-city]

Misleading title a bit, I quite liked the "other stuff". Props to NPI for this video, it would have been easier to take out the deck-building preamble but that wasn't a corner they cut and the video waa better for it imo

[u/Codemancer]

It was sweet getting that extra context. That honestly was one of the biggest reasons I dislike dominion so much. I was definitely guilty of it. I loved anything that gave +card and +action. I am excited to give this one a try.

[u/Christian_Bennett]

I’d be curious to know more of Efka’s thoughts on the Quest for El Dorado, for me I’ve always seen it as quite an evocative game that pokes fun at the tropes of Victorian explorers. My favourite example of this is the native card, a person you hire and possibly the most powerful card in the game, which lets you move onto any hex on the route. I’ve always seen it as a twist on the theme because it implies that, because the person lives there, they knows where they’re going and what they’re doing way better than all these bumbling explorers, haha. It’s obviously not as blatant as something like Spirit Island, but I feel as though there is something there. I’ve thought about it a fair bit, as I love the gameplay but initially felt a bit iffy on the theme - if it’s problematic, it’s as problematic as films like Indiana Jones, The Mummy and National Treasure which all evoke the same themes even if not the same setting. I’m just wondering where that line is drawn? There can’t be an easy answer.

With Fort itself, from the way the gameplay is described, to be honest it sounds like a deckbuilder where all the fun parts of deckbuilding (ie. starting with the same cards and gradually crafting your own unique little engine and seeing how effective it is versus your friends) have been removed. I’d obviously need to play it before I judge it, but from here it looks more annoying than fun, if that makes sense.

[u/[deleted]]

I've found it hard to watch NPI a lot of the time but this was great.

And wow, I'd forgotten Eurotrash. Blast from the past.

[u/BeautifulPudding]

This video is a goddamn masterpiece.

[u/jimbobbqen]

Bloody Inn has a good take on the combo. You build your engine to a point where you genrally have to sacrafice a part of it to get points or improve it. This prevents you from executing your game breaking 10 mins per turn combo every turn as it takes time to rebuild.

Edit: forgot to mention, you also have to pay upkeep on your engine so a powerful engine is quiet expensive and in Bloody Inn, money = points.