RandomCasualty wrote:There is really very little to "play right" in a complex combo deck. MOstly you just need the basic formula, then you put those cards together, shuffle and the deck virtually plays itself.
Ok, I am sure now. You are ignorant and probably a crappy player too. That is on top of knowing absolutely nothing about building decks. I would say I am sorry for saying this except I am not. You are talking about something you quite clearly have not the faintest clue about.
Let me give you an example of how complex playing a combo deck is - I will use L5R as I am most familiar with it. It should be easy to grasp the concepts though.
You are playing Crane Honor Bomb - a deck that has often been labeled as non-interactive. Your goal is to either get Kakita Chiyeko out, slap a Blade of Penance on her, Ambush someone and then Brutal Confrontation them, using Chiyeko to reuse the confrontation and using Asahina Nizomi to make sure the duel is not lethal, all the while gaining honr from the Blade of Penance. Failing that you want to slap a Blade onto Kakita Tamura, use a variety of cards to straighten her and repetedly duel the living daylight out of whatever you can see, again gaining honor all the while.
Simple, huh? Get the combo cards, start your turn at starting honor, end it at 40 honor, done. We will assume the deck has been prebuilt by someone else so all the work should be done according to you.
Turn 1
You reveal your provinces and see a single holding (you need these to produce gold which you need in turn to pay for most of your other cards), a Chiyeko, a random personality and an event, which automatically resolves: A New Wall. The event means you get to grab a holding from your deck and put it where the event was. Now, before you grab that holding you need to analyze what you are going to do. You got a part of your combo lying around - grat, eh? Of course you won't be playing Chiyeko for at least two more turns and all the while she will be hogging a slot that could give you stuff to use right now. You have a holding and iwll be getting another, which is decent but not great. Ideally you want three holdings - on turn 1 your stronghold pays for one of them, on turn two the stronghold buys another and the first holding buys a second holding. Then on turn 3 you can start buying personalities. So you are one holding short of what you want. And then you have another personality - lets say a defensive one.
Now, what to do? That depends on your opponent. He might be playing Waterzerkers. In that case you can assume he will take at least as long as you to buy personalities, but then he may be able to kill you in a single turn. So you want those three holdings or you will be behind in production, but after that you want a defender, or more likely, multiuple ones. Additionally he uses force-based duels, which you will always lose so if you can grab a Nizomi his ability to turn duels non-lethal is great. So against Waterzerkers, discord both personalities and use your stronghold to grab Gifts and Favors from your deck (the only card you can fetch like this), allowing you to play two holdings on your second turn.
Against another Crane you can not immediately tell what he will be playing, so you may have to make a judgement call. If you think he is playing heavy personality kill you want to leave your Chiyeko in the provice - he
will kill the first couple of combo parts you see. Against a straight honor runner you want to again go for gold.
Against, say, Lion Swarm you want to use the event to grab the best gold producing holding you can afford and immediately play it. Discard Chiyeko, keep the defender and hope for another to turn up. Next turn buy the defender. The lion will attack for sure and you will need that defender unless you get very lucky with your fateside draw.
And of course you might be playing against a Faceless Kitsuki, who, now that he has seen your Chiyeko will never play a single personality for you to duel. So discard both personalities, grab a honor producing holding and hope you can gain enough honor from your personalities to match what he can gain from holdings.
As a side note - when you notice you will be playing against Ratling Attrition, Yumasu or other slowish decks - all of which play In Times of War, which simply kills your combos - you want to use the event to grab your anti holding so it is there when you need it.
That is a single turn of playing a combo deck. One turn, with a good draw, no hard decisions and it is the first turn, where you have virtually no decisions to make. For the next couple of turns the number of dcisions you make will
at least double each turn. And I have not even talked about your fate hand, where most of your decisions come from for this particular deck. And heavens forbid you are going up against a lockdown deck or a dishonor/honor deck - both of these will easily lead to turns where you think about 5 minutes on your turn before taking your first action (yes, 20 minute single turns are not unheard of - those time limits in tournaments exist partially for this reason).
RandomCasualty wrote:I mean I guess if the player is abysmal he could screw it up, but really, it'd be pretty hard.
Actually it would be pretty easy. I am absolutely certain I will get a 90+% win chance against a bad player, no matter what deck he plays. Heck, just playing an unfamiliar deck will turn a balanced encounter into at least a 70/30 advantage for the other person.
But that is L5R and it has a rather steep learning curve. So let's talk M:TG. I have won my fair share of games against tournament-level combo decks (copied right off the net from the last tourney victories) using preconstructed decks. I have done the same using an all-common slight deck and a nearly all-common (4 uncommons I believe) green swarm deck.
Quite simply, combo decks take skill to play, no matter what you may believe.
RandomCasualty wrote:I mean I've used the apprentice program to construct a bunch of famous combo killer decks, and I can say that it isn't very hard to play them, at all.
So, won a tournament yet? Heck, played against a serious opponent yet?
RandomCasualty wrote:The only reason that you can have suboptimal characters is because you allow choice.
Why? Why does picking fighter have to make you worse than picking cleric?
And now you are already claiming those you call "deckbuilders" want fighters to be worse than druids. If there is such a thing as a deckbuilder I am one and I want every single base class to be perfectly balanced.
But I also do not care at all if a wizard who takes power attack, two weapon fighting and iron will is flat out worse than a wizard who took improved initiative, extend spell and great fortitude. And I also don't care about the plight of those who complain about their monk/bard/cleric with a tiny bit of wizard and soulknife mixed in is next to useless.
To put it simply, I want the basic building blocks - classes, feats and so on - to be balanced. Next I want the most obvious of abuses removed. Note that plain overpowered abilities should already be gone now. But stuff like weird caster level stacking might not.
And then, with the basic building blocks being equal everyone can have fun building their characters. And yes, someone sitting down a couple of hours looking for synergy, making sure he has his weaknesses covered and he has useful stuff to do in any situation will have a more useful character than someone who picks overlapping but non-stacking abilities, who can do 500 different things in combat but nothing out of combat and who picks feats and classes that were designed for other character concepts.
RandomCasualty wrote:Having choice does not necessarily mean that you have to have big imbalance, not at all. SAME allows you choice as far as where you place your attributes, yet all your choices are balanced. An RPG can do that if it's well designed. We already know this, because Frank had a bunch of threads showing why it's balanced.
And yet even SAME features a part of the system where, as Frank puts it, "the DM can put all of the unbalanced stuff into".