Broken Combo (once again)

Janosik · 22 April 2025, 13:54

Woke up this morning, logged on and saw this in Facing the Dragonstorm:

wait

Attack more than 5 times

AND

Win in 5 or less rounds?!!

I guess broken combo really is a feature of design and not a bug, huh?

You'll be needing one of these:

The first version of this deck I posted here...
https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/1051232/#Comment_1051232
... needed a 5 color PW but since then I've seen people running 3 color versions with PWs like Tamiyo, Narset, Guff, Sarkhan Unbroken... There are different card choices you can make.

The deck might run out of steam on a turn, but it's not really a big problem, as it's usually left 3 large creatures on the table when it does, and you can start the loop again easily enough by casting whatever your cheapest card is (Aside: In Legacy your cheapest card costs 1 mana, it's Summoner's Pact ^_^)

One thing to notice about this version of the deck is that I was able to put it together without buying any cards from TDM at all. So I can save up all my resources for the one card they'll probably print in the next set that slots into the deck. They usually make just one or two such cards.... in DFT it was Brightglass Gearhulk, in FDN we got Mystical Teachings and Genesis Wave, in Duskmourn it was Phenomenon Investigators, in Bloomburrow it was Sylvan Tutor...

Imma go out on a limb here and suggest maybe this is not healthy for the game. People may say that since there are 5 Masterpieces in the deck, it's hard to put together, but I have to say with the slow speed that new cards for the deck get released I find it fairly easy to gather the resources to buy them within a month or two of release without spending cash money (I could have bought Brightglass Gearhulk for $80 so I could play it a couple of months ago, but I can wait for things like that). A brand new player won't be able to build this deck within a month or two of creating an account, but anyone who logs in every day should be able to manage it.

It should be noted that this particular version of the deck can't be piloted by Greg, since it relies on casting and copying Phenomenon Investogators, and Greg has been programmed always to choose option A with that card rather than option B which keeps the combo going. Does that make it ok? Some, of course, would (and have!) argued yes! I would argue no. Is the poor AI in the game really something we want to advertise as a feature? Is it ok that while nobody ever loses to the deck, as many players as want to can win with it with ease? Besides, maybe there's another version of the deck out there which replaces Investigators with, say, Capricious Hellraiser, or some other as yet unreleased card, that Greg can pilot.

Machine · 24 April 2025, 07:08

I see what you are hinting at, but I hope you also realize that if you keep telling yourself the same story over and over, you will start believing it more and more. All you need to get the second objective, without all those flashy cards you are showing here, is a PM2 rare: Titans' Vanguard. Put him in a Grist deck together with Gather the Pack and chances are high you will nail it the first time.

Janosik · 24 April 2025, 13:20

@Machine said:
I see what you are hinting at, but I hope you also realize that if you keep telling yourself the same story over and over, you will start believing it more and more. All you need to get the second objective, without all those flashy cards you are showing here, is a PM2 rare: Titans' Vanguard. Put him in a Grist deck together with Gather the Pack and chances are high you will nail it the first time.

Note that this is a post about broken combo in Standard, and not one about Facing the Dragonstorm, which is just a framing device here for what I wanted to talk about really.

People are using decks like this to win in coalition events now.

Tolkne · 24 April 2025, 16:09

I support Janosik ... Yes, I agree with the topic.

The problem is that newcomers who came from 2024-2025 will not be able to perform such tricks to pass in 5 rounds. This is an abnormal condition, this is not Legacy.

There is an old event, where you need to pass 5 rounds (see a link from Reddit, this is 7 years old https://www.reddit.com/r/MTGPuzzleQuest/comments/7jm7g0/how_to_win_in_5_rounds/ )
You can say, so to speak, this is not everyone just to go through. I talked with my friends and came to this conclusion that to go through the 5th round and with a successful layout of the deck, this must be had such a PW:

Grist
Guff

Grist knows how to resurrect any creature from the cemetery, but not a fact will simply stretch Ghalta the first time, otherwise you will stretch a completely different creature. For a beginner you need all this:
• Tempt with Discovery
• Mystic Teaching (is the card called correctly? Just MT)
• Ghalta Stampede
• Any creature
And it will go fast )

But with Guuff is another matter:
• MT
• Golden Wish
• Vanguard Koth (after 7 shields will inflict damage from red Gems)
• Summon Red Wizards (to activate gem for mass conversion)
And ... the end. The opponent is burned to the ground from the vanguard Koth for 4 rounds.

I believe that the condition of the 5th round should be changed to another, because not everyone is able to do this without the right cards, otherwise they will have to spend so much real money to pull out all that all players who played this game for more than 5-6 years and have so many cards that can be passed over 5 rounds.

TheDude1 · 24 April 2025, 20:35

Two separate thoughts since this framing is raising two separate issues:

The 5 rounds requirement is challenging, but it's far from impossible. I got both objectives in one play using a Pajani deck where the only mythic it relied on was Moonshaker Cavalry. Yes, it had some other very strong cards (Banner of Kinship, Assemble the Players), and there was some card draw luck, but it did the job without being a 5-masterpiece behemoth or requiring super-niche deck/PW builds.

It's not an easy objective for every player to solve, but isn't that part of the point? This concern comes down to what your expectation of event prizes is. Should they be acquired by all relatively easily, or should they be a reward for completing a (difficult) objective? Your view on that goes a long way toward answering whether the objective is unfair or not. Notably, this isn't a even rank-based reward, and as PvE you can replay it as many times as you need to complete (and not even in the same go-round as the other objective!). It's just offered as a come-and-get-it challenge.

On the power creep side, I agree that there are a lot of interactions out there that lead to OP decks, and that this has been growing in frequency. But I stand firm in believing this isn't a problem unless/until people are losing consistently, and that includes the discussion about Greg having poor play decisions. This game has been built over the years on the expectation of winning 80%+ of your matches, both visible to the player and unseen - think about how rank and progression reward thresholds have been set, but also churn rates when difficult events are run (ie, original runs of The Elderspark and why it was quickly retired).

There seem to be three ways out of it, each with its own downside:
1. Reset win expectations, including tougher matchmaking and allowing Greg to make better choices
2. Nerf and/or limit production of OP cards
3. Limit access to OP cards

Option 1 is hard, because people just hate losing, and (my non-data-driven intuition) as a mobile game, there's a much lower cost to dropping out if the game is too tough to win. This isn't Dark Souls or even paper Magic, with huge difficulty curves and lower win rates. There's a sense in this game that progression leads to mastery, that the game should get easier as you get more cards/better PW, instead of a constant look-over-your-shoulder feeling of imminent loss. I definitely think there could stand to be some more difficulty faced at the higher levels, but I'm also not naive to think it won't lead to more players leaving the game.

Option 2 is fine as far as it goes, but it will have effects of making longer matches using less-powerful cards. I don't presume to speak for everyone, as I know not everyone loves drawn-out, back-and-forth matches - given some of the discussion elsewhere on the forums around time commitment (especially in coalition events), my sense is that people would rather win games faster. To tie back to option 1, in an environment where Greg is dumb, you can more often dictate how (long) you want the game to proceed using the power of cards available; in an environment where Greg is good and reactive, that choice isn't always up to you.

Option 3 feels the least palatable. The more OP cards are locked away (either by rarity or as time-based exclusives), the more feel-bad it is when you can't get it because luck-of-the-draw pack openings aren't in your favor. Free-to-play players already can't craft masterpieces, and this game is fairly stingy on pinks: most consistent way is via TotP, and it still takes 4 weeks to get enough for one non-dupe Mythic+. So most people with these kinds of decks are VIPs paying for access, and let's not talk about the furor of "Pay to Win!" if they were paid exclusives. Broken combos using uncommons/rares have usually been dealt with, but it's much harder to justify when the decks are loaded with Mythic+ and take quite a bit of time/resources to compile - even with (back to 1!) winning coming so easily due to dumb Greg. (Put another way, I tip my cap to the free-to-play players who spend all of their time achieving every possible objective to get the resources needed to build those decks. But I also realize those are the extraordinarily rare exceptions.)

Each of these options comes with tradeoffs - it's why I argued in the last post about power creep that this is a huge question of "I don't like how I'm winning" vs "I am losing more". Appealing to a large base of players is bound to have structural implications for high-level players, and both Oktagon and Webcore have decided those tradeoffs are worth making.

Machine · 25 April 2025, 09:05

@Janosik said:

@Machine said:
I see what you are hinting at, but I hope you also realize that if you keep telling yourself the same story over and over, you will start believing it more and more. All you need to get the second objective, without all those flashy cards you are showing here, is a PM2 rare: Titans' Vanguard. Put him in a Grist deck together with Gather the Pack and chances are high you will nail it the first time.

Note that this is a post about broken combo in Standard, and not one about Facing the Dragonstorm, which is just a framing device here for what I wanted to talk about really.

People are using decks like this to win in coalition events now.

You are right. Your title is related to OP decks containing power creep cards. You threw me off guard with your link to the Dragonstorm event. I'm on your side if your statement is that power creep is real. I already posted about my concerns regarding power creep when they previewed Villanous Wealth. And that has been several sets ago already.

Apart from this, I like the "5 round challenge". Not all objectives have to be easy to achieve. It's a puzzle game after all and finding out how to solve this objective is part of the fun. My other thought was Moonshaker, but that card was already mentioned. And I'm sure there are many other strategies to reach this objective.

sarimace · 30 April 2025, 13:49

But I stand firm in believing this isn't a problem unless/until people are losing consistently, and that includes the discussion about Greg having poor play decisions.

I strongly disagree. Right now, I win most of my matches, but even a lot of the ones I win are frustrating and not fun. On the other hand, if I get outplayed, if I go against a deck with interesting and cool synergies, that is cool, and I would have had fun in the game, even if I ultimately lost.
The problem is not winning/losing. It is the insane card power levels. It is requisition raid, coalition victory, demolition field which destroys everything you played up until that point in the game. It is Rakdos, ambiguity and Aclazotz which prevent you from playing your cards at all. Its Ghalta, Golden Wish and Tempt which give Greg full mana while also having huge impact of their own. Its Titan's Vanguard, Okinec Ahau, Another Round and Tempt with bunnies, which kill in one or two turns.
The game is not fun when all your progress is wiped by a single card. It is not fun to be unable to play anything because it just dies, and it is not fun to die to a lucky cascade or a busted mana card backed up by multiplicative scaling.

TheDude1 · 1 May 2025, 16:47

Hi Sarmiace, completely understand where you're coming from. I don't completely agree, but I also know I'm likely in a small minority on this issue.

My context on many of these is that they're mostly variations on things seen before - before Rakdos and Requisition Raid, it was Consulate Crackdown and River's Rebuke and Ruinous Ultimatum. (I would not disagree with you if you said that instead of 16 mana, Rakdos and Raid should be around the 20-22 mana range as the legacy cards.) Before Ambiguity, it was Insidious Will - and a vocal group have wanted to bring that card effect back! On the other hand, to your point about synergies, Ghalta-Atraxa-Tortoise was a very syngerstic group, and people hated Greg's ability to pilot it so much that all three got nerfed.

I'm not disagreeing on the fact that losing sucks, and it especially sucks to feel like you can't even get a chance to play. You touch on it in your last point, that there are different cases of feel-bad: board wipes, lockdown/hand hate and random luck/cascades are all different causes, but the biggest common factor in feeling bad is that you lose. I'm wary of the slippery-slope argument that comes with declaring a specific play style in and of itself bad, since there's a lot of asymmetry that people like chasing/playing powerful card/archetypes but hate when those same cards are played against them. I don't know what Webcore uses as their standard for nerfing (if it's general sentiment or something data-driven). That's why I am venturing a standard that if it's not causing me to regularly lose, I'm going to take it as part of the puzzle in Puzzle Quest. For me, GAT fell into that category, since it was everywhere and enabled/dominated just about every other strategy. Most of the others you mention aren't so synergistic, and aren't even meta-warping (either due to rarity or impact) the way GAT and other nerfs have been.

EDIT: So no one misunderstands that I think "everything is fine" as-is, what I do think is nerf-worthy (or at least unnecessary):

No need to reinforce Rakdos when destroying something, destruction each turn is powerful enough. Or, nerf the P/T down to something like 3/3.
Ghalta conversion down to 10-12, or lower the P/T to 10/10 (15/15 is the fourth-highest on any creature in the game, and none of those higher come with the same conversion upside)
Tempt with Discovery doesn't really need the second Discover effect
Raise cost of Rakdos and Raid as mentioned above
Raise Grist's loyalty costs, and/or make effect #1 move to hand with half-mana at level 4, and/or make effect #2 only 2 supports at level 4

Broken Combo (once again)

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