Welcome back, combo aficionados! Last week, we talked about “dedicated” combo decks in Commander, a word which here means “those decks which are structured primarily around assembling a game-ending card combination quickly.” I was careful to stress, however, that these are not the only decks which use combos to end the game even if they’re the ones that most people think of when they imagine combo decks. Commander is nearly unique in that combo appears as a win condition in decks which are not nearly as all-in on it as, for instance, Standard Marvel or Legacy Sneak and Show.

Initially, this article was supposed to discuss two archetypes: Prison and UW Control. After further consideration, I’ve decided that I defined Tide-like decks a bit too broadly in the previous article added a third archetype to this article: Pod-like decks. So that’s a cool bonus if you were worried that I didn’t have enough stuff to ramble about. Let’s dig into that one first since it’s the simplest one to talk about.

3. Pod-Like Combo Decks

What They Are:

A mutant strain with similar plumage to the Tide-like deck but filling a different ecological niche. In a less flowery way, they are decks which can out-value their way to a win using “fair” methods of board and card advantage, but have a robust tutoring or card selection plan that allows them to pivot to a combo kill if the opportunity presents itself. The difference between this and Tide-like decks is that Tide-like decks are, at bottom, fast combo decks which have an ability to spend time productively value-racing the board. Pod-like decks are value-racing decks which can move to combo.

These should not be confused with decks that “have a combo in case the game goes long.” These are not decks which run a combo and pretend to arrive at it by accident. These are decks which were already running Sun Titan for value reasons but added in Saffi so that the value-threat into a combo piece.

The analogous deck from competitive Magic are the now-banned Modern Birthing Pod decks, which could absolutely run over decks just turning Kitchen Finks sideways or sacccing those Finks into Siege Rhinos to build an unanswerable board advantage. But, if the opportunity presented itself, they could pivot into a Melira combo to end the game on the spot. Fittingly, the Commander versions of that deck are often green-based creature decks that leverage green’s ability to toolbox creatures to accomplish the strategic flexibility that made the Modern deck a nightmare. Also, though ANT-like decks and Tide-like decks could frequently refer to decks that didn’t run those specific cards, I actually can’t think of any Pod-like decks that shouldn’t run Pod. Riku, Karador, Yisan and Meren are often built this way and all of those decks would need an excuse to not.

How to Build Them:

Keep an eye open for interlocking sets of combo pieces. The maxim is that you should avoid playing cards that are only good in the combo. Every combo-only card your deck runs weakens the value plan. The goal is to minimally distort the deckbuilding process while maximizing your ability to threaten an infinite game-ender. In one of the quintessential Pod-like decks, Boonweaver Karador, the namesake card is often the only card in the entire deck that doesn’t fit into the value plan. Be like Boonweaver Karador.

How to Play Them:

Develop a keen nose for who is and isn’t holding removal. Your combos are often fairly easy to disrupt and you’re rarely playing blue to answer removal. As such, the ability to predict what you’re up against on a given turn gives you the critical ability to decide whether to spend precious resources and tutors assembling the combo or hang back and value. Beyond that, it’s all about developing a truly comprehensive knowledge of the interactions between the cards in your deck. I’ve watched Ghave decks miss infinite combos that were on board, but when you’ve got a Pod on board and a Green Sun’s Zenith in hand, the combinatorial options get terrifyingly deep. Can you go off? If not, what’s the most value you can accrue? Your library might be out of sight, but you have to keep it all in mind.

How to Play Against Them:

Make sure the jack of all trades is a master of none. As much as they’re trying to avoid it, Pod-like decks do have to dilute their value plan a little to include combos. You can out-value them. Just make sure to hold removal for the engines of repetitive value. Don’t kill the Gilded Lotus, kill the Skullclamp. Let them develop resources that you care about the least, whether that’s mana, creatures on board, or cards in hand (though it usually won’t be cards in hand). Also, don’t play your last piece of creature removal. Nearly every combo they play can be killed by a single piece of well-timed piece of creature removal. If you don’t have a piece of creature removal, consider bluffing.

4. Prison Combo Decks

What They Are:

Almost a Commander exclusive. Whereas it’s easy to explain dedicated “fast” combo decks by referring back to decks like them in other formats, the prison-type decks in those same formats are not all that similar to their Commander kin. While people talk fairly frequently about “stax” in Commander, Commander-stax barely resembles its Vintage cousin. Both focus on proactive rather than reactive control through resource denial, but the Vintage version focuses on establishing an early resource advantage off lands like Mishra’s Workshop and Ancient Tomb and using that resource advantage to break the symmetry of lock pieces like Thorn of Amethyst and Sphere of Resistance. This keeps opposing decks off balance long enough to tip things in favor of their ground assault.

For the purposes of this series, a deck is a Prison deck if it aims to make the game unplayable for its opponents. How it wins after that varies pretty widely. Derevi decks beat down, Brago decks beat down or go infinite, Teferi decks start decking people.

How to Build Them:

Figure out what you can afford to give up that most decks can’t and make everyone give it. Oh, also: don’t try to build the “tax” deck. In Commander, Sphere effects won’t slow multiple opponents down for long enough to chew 40 life off them with Lodestone Golems. Plus, where a Sphere or Thorn will double the price of Brainstorms and Ponders, the difference between a 6-cost Consecrated Sphinx and a 7-cost one is comparatively minor. Rather than starting out ahead on resources and preserving the lead long enough to end the game, Commander prison decks start out behind but aim to “turn the corner” at some point. Generally that involves either a boardwipe which leaves them ahead on resources, cemented by a lock piece.

Give up lands if you can play off creatures or mana rocks. Play Null Rod if you want to punish the rock decks and Cursed Totem if you hate the creature mana decks. Play Static Orb if you use your untap step less than everyone else. The joy of building Prison decks is that you get to choose the rules and make a hapless cast of unprepared opponents play by them.

The comparative variety of prison decks makes it hard to be specific, so more than the previous archetypes, these are more like suggestions than rules. But here’s the first one: recognize that prison will, outside of particularly hot hands, often fall behind. Your lock pieces vary widely in value from game to game, and if you draw the wrong ones you may have a hand of cards that do surprisingly little in a given game situation. That Cursed Totem only stops decks whose mana is elf-powered, and Winter Orb gets worse if you’re not the only 20-mana-rock deck at the table. A prison deck’s non-prison cards should usually be cards that directly work to mitigate these sorts of failures.

Second, unlike most other combo decks which win when their combo comes together prison decks build towards progressively harder locks. Your combo is a progressive, rather than an acute, attack. The endpoint isn’t that the game is “won,” necessarily. At least not in the literal sense that no one else has a life total. Your combo doesn’t win the game, it stops it. Building a deck that can stop the game is, ultimately, about making sure you have the card selection tools necessary to reach the right tools at the right time. And yeah, “make your deck consistent” sounds kinda 101, but I want to be a little clearer: this is not merely about card selection. What it’s about is being able to find the right lock pieces. As an example: I am currently playing Tezzeret the Seeker in a Derevi deck with almost no mana rocks because his minus ability means he’s a split card that turns into any lock piece in the entire deck. Even in a deck with relatively few artifacts and commensurately little use for his plus or his ult, he’s basically a perfect card. In short: don’t underestimate narrow tutor effects if their list of targets includes your lock pieces.

How to Play Them:

Leverage those strong and narrow tools. Again, it’s hard to provide concrete advice because of the broad differences in plans between prison decks, but: more than most combo decks, prison decks are about predicting your opponents’ plans. (One of the most interesting things about playing prison decks is that you have to fake being a little bit psychic to do it well.) Remember, you’re trying to move into a position where you’re not answering threats but stopping opponents from playing them. Knowing what they want to do in each phase of the game ensures that you play the right cards at the right time. There are a lot of early turns where you’ll have two lock pieces in hand and only enough mana for one. Games are won and lost on making the right decisions on those turns.

How to Play Against Them:

Scale back your expectations. You will not get to do everything your deck usually wants to do, but you can often do enough. Prison decks tend to prolong the game, so advantages that usually mean little in Commander can turn out to be decisive. An unopposed 3/3 is not usually a big deal, but it can be enough to keep a Derevi deck from attacking you or to put a clock on a Teferi deck. Getting ahead and remaining ahead on board, even by narrow margins, can give the Prison deck fits if they’re building a soft lock. Against harder locks, the whole game hinges on your ability to destroy their lock pieces. But I don’t really needed to mention that, right?

5. UW Control-Like Decks

What They Are:

Standard Control decks with a combo finish. Whenever I’ve explained my classification, this is the one that throws them off. “Blue-White Control isn’t a combo deck, is it?” No, not in other formats (with an asterisk next to Miracles). UW Control is one of the most perennial decks in the game, and the plan is similar every time. Answer threats. Gradually accrue card advantage. Finally, once you’re far enough ahead, land a single threat and ride it to victory. The problem is, in Commander, the final stage of that plan is essentially impossible. With 120 life across from you, you’re never getting there with a Morphling, or even an Aetherling. That’s just too slow a plan.

As a response to this fact, the role traditionally filled by a singular, resilient threat has been taken over by singular, resilient combos. Some examples are so closely analogous to the perennial Standard deck that it’s easy to see: a Grand Arbiter Augustin IV which finishes the game by Rest–Helming everyone plays the same gameplan in the same colors. Oloro and Hanna decks are close neighbors too, and both coincidentally contain blue and white. But Tasigur, the Golden Fang is another prime example of this style of deck and looks massively different in terms of its card-list. In fact, many UGx goodstuff decks and some of the “Palinchron” decks that I initially mentioned under Tide-like decks can be built in ways that tilt them towards UW-Control-like.

How to Build Them:

Identify your win-con first. I’m not going to offer too many tips on how to build the “control” portion of the deck, because that’s an article in its own right. Instead, I’m going to focus on how to choose the right combo for your deck. UW-Control-like decks choose their intended combo (or combos) based on how difficult it is to disrupt. Whereas Pod-like decks want a combo made of pieces that fit as seamlessly as possible into their value plan, the entire point of a control deck’s combo is that it should be hard to answer. You can play combo pieces that don’t really interact with the rest of your deck’s plan as long as the win they threaten is hard to disrupt.

That’s why Rest in Peace + Helm of Obedience is a quintessential control deck combo: it kills a player instantly when the second piece resolves and only requires protecting an artifact and an enchantment (two relatively hard-to-remove permanent types). It doesn’t matter that it’s made out of a merely-OK graveyard hate card and a four mana artifact that does basically nothing on its own. What matters is that it’s hard to stop with anything except a counterspell (and as a UW-Control-like deck you can wait to run it out until you can interact with your own counters).

The gold standard for these combos is their ability to continue to go off in response to removal. Combos that pass this test are comparatively rare, but they’re among the best. Tasigur decks are arguably peerless here. First, they land an infinite mana combo. A lot of infinite mana combos like Palinchron + Mana Doubler/Cabal Coffers or Elf-Who-Taps-For-Three-or-More + Umbral Mantle/Staff of Domination can continue to fire as long as you have some extra mana to restart their loop in response to removal. Then, they cast their general and use him to draw their deck. Again, trying to remove Tasigur will do nothing, because you just activate him again with the removal on the stack. Then he kills the table by looping some spell, often an instant that can kill the table even someone casts something to make him draw from his empty library. In short, there is basically no point where all pieces of the combo are on-board and disruption will do anything.

How to Play Them:

Move when you have the advantage. You’re slow, and your deck will be deep enough on answers that you typically won’t be able to build a proactive resource-accumulation plan as well as the other decks at the table. So you’re playing to prolong the game. On a long enough timeline, you should be able to maneuver into a position where your opponents have to spend a turn rebuilding after a wipe or a Rift. That’s typically your moment. Spend the turn where everyone tapped out to go for your win.

How to Play Against Them:

Kill them first. I should clarify: don’t necessarily kill the control player first, but definitely make sure you’re angling to kill them before they can assemble their combo. In fact, having a dedicated control player at the table is generally in the interest of every other player: they’ll use their plentiful removal to answer threats, freeing you and your removal up to pursue your own plans. At a four-person table with three proactive decks and one reactive deck, each non-control player has a ⅓ chance that any given removal targets them, which means that ⅔ of the time the control player’s removal actually helps you. So don’t be squeamish about keeping the control player around for awhile.

While you’re keeping them alive, though, don’t lose sight of the fact that if they are trying to combo you’ve probably already lost. So kill them before that happens. In practice, this means that I tend to attack control players first but only until they’re in range of a creature damage kill, then I’ll move on to other targets. Keep ‘em scared.

Closing Notes

That oughta just about do it, huh? I covered every broad class of combo-using deck I could identify, and I’m reasonably confident it’s exhaustive*. I’ll close by reiterating a central point that I’ve found myself having to repeat a lot: remember that these categories are archetypes, and not defined by specific cards in the list. A lot of combo-using decks are hybrids, and can be Tide-like or ANT-like without playing either of those cards. Figuring out what archetype you’ve built is often a matter of experimentation. Don’t be afraid to get a few reps in with a new list before trying to apply any advice from these articles to it.

The important thing — if anything about an article on decklist categorization in a social format of a children’s card game can be said to be “important” — is to realize that not all combo decks are equal. Winning with a combo is a strategy employed by a variety of styles of deck with wildly different gameplans, and being able to spot which one you’re building or playing against will level up your abilities as a player and a brewer.

* There’s an argument that general-damage decks in Commander actually play a lot like Electrostatic Pummeler and Infect decks and deserve consideration as combo decks, but calling “a tendency to deal 21 damage” a combo feels like a stretch even for me.