Dredge lists have moved towards twelve dredge cards in order to ensure one is in their opening seven. Recently, Hive Mind has played eleven Pacts, as it wants extra copies of them to fight Daze or Stifle. Historically, nine cards has been the number for having one of a card early game when you only care about the first copy. Through twelve copies, each additional one is about 5% added to both of those percentages. Six copies of a card in your deck means you are 55% to have one in your opener and 65% to have one by turn three on the play, the critical turns for most Legacy combo decks. The average hand just has and plays one of the spells that wins the game. One avenue of making your combo deck work is just playing a bunch of the cards you want to see. For example, Twin usually aims for a critical turn of five to combo off with Dispel backup or turn four without it depending on matchup. This is not to be confused with when it goes off given a perfect draw, though you can reasonably sculpt your deck to try and maximize this. I’ll go into this a bit more as we go, but the fundamental turn of any combo deck is just when it plans on going off. This is not intended as a straight walkthrough, but instead is a collection of things that might each make something click for a given person in a given scenario. In order to give a foundation to build off of in this subject, let’s start from the top here on what makes a strong combo deck and what each major element means for your deck. There are a lot of games lost with combo and a lot of people who dismiss the archetype simply because it is understandably foreign to what most people associate with “real Magic.” Instead of fighting over board position and interacting with your opponent’s attempts to win, you ignore what they are doing and fight the inherent randomness of shuffled libraries. The Dredge decks always need to dodge Leyline of the Void if your opponent has the Dismember when you go for Twin, sometimes you lose, etc. On the surface, this seems like an obvious statement. There are specific factors involved in different combo decks that are just accepted as part of playing them. After top 8ing the Open in Pittsburgh last weekend with the deck, my friend Alex John described it as “the stars are right,” which I personally felt was a rather fitting reference on multiple levels. So, when I dropped before the first draft, I knew exactly what the problem was. The deck was actually all about maximizing the number of cards seen with cantrips, something that lies smack in the middle of my comfort zone. Most importantly I was able to duplicate these results in my own testing. Testing against Todd Anderson had him crushing every deck I played bar Tempered Steel, which was close. This past weekend I chose to play U/R Twin in US Nationals.
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