🎯 Goal
Make the player feel clever for assembling an intricate combo and reward them with powerful payoffs.
In a perfect world this deck would not need to have one big, game-winning turn like traditional storm decks, but rather have 2 (or even 3) big engine turns an win off the generated advantage.

This is what RavebornMuse calls Combo-Control in this storm discussion on riptidelab.

To make this achievable we want to focus on payoffs that persist between turns.
Some approaches are described here and here.

Good:

• Putting +1/+1 counters on creatures
• Creating tokens (e.g. Shark Typhoon, Geralf, the Fleshwright)
• Killing/Reducing opponents threats (e.g. lifegain)

Bad:

• +1/+1 until EoT
• Direct damage that is less than ~10
• Preventing a second cycle of the combo (e.g. by consuming all resources like temporary mana, cards in hand, exiling the combo pieces, ...)

This style of decks is also called Cheerios but is usually focused on a combo turn win.

🗺️ Gameplan
Cast lots of (cost-reduced) eggs to generate storm count and turn that into profit.
Or have lots of artifacts in play and turn that into profit.

How many cast triggers of artifacts are assumable in a cycle? 5-6?

Hypergeometric Calculator says for an exemplatory turn 4 combo:

• Cards remaining in Deck (Population Size): 30
• number of 0-costed artifacts (# success): 15
  • This is quite a lot, not sure if it is possible to draft this
• Chance to hit 5 0-costed artifacts (# successes in sample) in a row (sample size==5) without bricking on a land or similiar is 2.1%

Ouch 😱

This means we need to draw more than one card or have some smoothing (e.g. rummage) available to us.

Engine

3 Core Components:

1. Reduce the cost of your artifacts to 0 to cast them for free, e.g.

• Semblance Anvil:
  • 0-2 cmc artifacts + talismans/signets
• Manadork (Chief Engineer / Grand Architect) + Untapper (Jeskai Ascendancy / Paradox Engine / Steelfin Whale)
  • 0-1 cmc artifacts + talismans/signets

1. Continous card draw, to keep the train going, e.g.

• Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain / Vedalken Archmage
• Future Sight/Mystic Forge

1. Some kind of payoff

2. Smoothing your draws to make hits more likely, or draw more than 1

• Jeskai Ascendancy
• Riddlesmith

1. (opt.) Return your 0 cost artifacts to your hand or from the grave instead of drawing (Retract/Yawgmoth's Will)

Meria has component 1 and 2 in a single card.
Song of Creation draws two cards so component 2 and 4.

The Song and Anvil might also enable a creature storm deck or madness deck.

The fact that Meria is and not is a bit off putting.
Meria is often combined with an untapper like Traxos, Scourge of Kroog to reactivate her draw ability on every artifact cast.

See example deck & primer here or here with some combos.

Has component 1 and 3 as it pings the opponent on every artifact cast.
The is prohibitive but the 10 landscapes should be able to support it.
Slots very nicely into / artifact sacrifice deck.

Beefy Boys

Tokens

Storm

Damage

Mill

Displacer Kitten + a talisman

Untapper

With Untappers

Smoothing

Normalo Draw
Wheel effects, but who can afford them? 🥲

See here

Talisman & Signets