Post

I adore playing combo decks in card games. I wish there were a way to design a card game around combo matchups that makes any sense at all. Combo being so linear and trending towards having 80/20 or 20/80 matchups tends to lead towards it being unhealthy and leading to generally bad gameplay.

I actually think that Magic is probably the best set up amongst card games to enable combo. There are just so many cards and design knobs to turn that come with age that there are stopgaps against almost anything. Instant speed counters, mana being a gate towards a lot of combo, and the plethora

of lockpieces and hate cards that exist make it so that combo can exist and be healthy in a lot of metagames. Yu-gi-Oh goes the other way where every deck is combo or prison (Yu-gi-Oh players please don't argue this you live in a different world than I). I think that kinda sucks personally.

Hearthstone had a surprising amount of combo when I played around 2018, but I suspect they got away from that in the modern era. It was pretty rough back then. Could be wrong though. Maybe 1p deckbuilders are the place to do this, like STS. I've played that game, it's called Vampire Crawlers.

And honestly it ruined the game completely how easy it was to infinite combo. STS2 started early access with a lot of combo ability, but they took most of that away, and now infinite comboing requires very specific setups or relics.

Almost any modern TCG tries to do away with combo completely, and that makes a lot of sense for reasons above. Most people prefer combat and creatures and playing to the board as more fun than playing solitaire. I do think you lose a lot with this though. The feeling that you can do *anything*

in Magic is really impactful I think. Maybe you can't get there without a sufficiently huge card pool, impossible for most new TCGs. But I do wonder how you would even go about trying to add hints of combo into modern TCGs. Or how you'd deal with organic combos that form as cardpools increase.