"Setting up" means you're actually doing something.
Which is relevant how?
At this point you should just check a dictionary. You're being intentionally obtuse.
I was pointing out the irrelevance of you bringing up fighting games. In Dominion and Magic, "combo" refers to cards.
Great examples of which are the Golden Deck and Belcher.
Which are being discussed because they are relevant. Doesn't explain why you brought up fighting games.
My guess is that most people are thinking of Belcher in combination with other cards. They're not thinking "yeah, Belcher and 59 of whatever other cards, doesn't matter what they are".
Well, "Belcher and 59 of whatever other cards, doesn't matter what they are" isn't all that far from the truth, really. If you look at the primer for Belcher on The Source (which is to the Eternal formats pretty much what f.ds is to Dominion, except The Source is somewhat more competitive-oriented), it showcases three cards from the deck as images. Obviously Belcher is one of those cards. Another one is Empty the Warrens, which is an alternate win condition just in case you don't draw Belcher; it doesn't serve any other purpose in the deck, i.e. you actually don't want to draw both Empty the Warrens and Belcher during one game. The third one is Burning Wish, whose main purpose is to search for another Empty the Warrens in the situation where you didn't draw Belcher and you didn't even draw an Empty the Warrens. The three cards that the guy who wrote the article considers the main cards of the deck are cards that you don't ever want to draw together.
Naturally, it also matters what the rest of the cards do. Some of them always have to give you mana regardless of the deck you're playing, because otherwise you can't really do anything. In Belcher's case in particular, all of them have to give you lots of mana really fast because that's what allows you to generate enough mana to win on turn 1. There aren't really any of those cards that have any particular positive interaction with Belcher, Empty the Warrens or each other, so you just put in the best ones. The exception is Lion's Eye Diamond which is a strong card with a drawback that combo decks usually doesn't have to care about at all, so that's obviously automatically included in the deck, but it's still just a card that's really good at giving you lots of mana very fast, which means that you definitely don't need it in your hand in order to win, as long as you can get enough mana from other cards. Also they can't be lands, because Belcher antisynergizes with lands.
There exists also a related combo deck called the Spanish Inquisition. As you can see, the deck list is almost entirely different (and it's actually based on combinations of cards), but you can still just stick Goblin Charbelcher into the deck, and it still works, and it still kills your opponent on turn 1 way over 50% of the time. Or you can play almost the same deck without Goblin Charbelcher and it's very slightly slower and very slightly more resistant to counters. The only thing that these decks have in common with the more popular deck known as Belcher is that they run very few lands and a lot of ways to generate lots of mana very early, and well, the fact that they're extremely fast combo decks. Running very few lands and a lot of ways to generate lots of mana very early in general is a common characteristic of combo decks, because the extra mana is what makes them so fast, and because they're so fast, they don't need a lot of lands (you can play only one per turn, and if you're only ever going to have two turns, why have 20 lands?).
I defer to Donald X. on this:
Third, Belcher is 100% full-on flat-out a combo deck. The combo is Belcher and cards that produce mana without being lands. The deck isn't about getting two cards into play and then scoring off of their interaction; it doesn't have to be.
Moreover, this makes me realize that even if you are correct about the meaning of "combo deck" in MtG, it doesn't really apply to Dominion simply because of the sheer scope. The combo seems to be Belcher + X, where X is special but there are still many options to fill that role. Moreover, due to the nature of deck construction, you have access to most of those options when you don't in Dominion.
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/24745-Eternal-Europe-Fundamentals-What-Is-Combo.html
There. "A combo deck in Magic terms is a deck that is fully dedicated to setting up a line of plays that will if left undisrupted either end the game on the spot or move it into a position that all but guarantees a win in the next one to two turns." After that definition, he then goes on to categorize combos into one-card combos, traditional combos and engine-combos. Response to this article on The Source: http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/showthread.php?20560-SCG-Article-On-Combo — i.e. pretty positive. What is especially noteworthy about this is that it's a rather high-level strategy article talking about tournament decks.
Thank-you. Now we're getting somewhere.
The introduction implies that the definition that the author
proposes is not the traditional one. He makes that explicit later on:
Since almost none of the single-card combos are legal what is one to do? Well for one thing we can approach combo the way it has traditionally been conceived: setting up a combination of multiple pieces to win the game.
So the traditional definition is exactly the definition that everyone else here has been using. No doubt a large portion of the MtG community still uses the traditional definition as well (as evidenced by previously provided links). You can decry those other sources as non-competitive, newbies, whatever, but it doesn't change the fact that they are a significant portion of the MtG community. So your argument that we should use the same definition as used in MtG doesn't mean much, when that community has a few differing definitions themselves.
Mr. Kotter is proposing a
better definition, and he makes a compelling case as to
why it is better... for Magic. But that doesn't mean it carries over to Dominion.
...the reason this is a much better definition is that it describes the way a combo decks wants its games to play out instead of focusing purely on deck construction.
Generally speaking this is the correct approach to identifying strategies and deck types because what informs your decision making in a particular matchup and allows you to find cards and strategies that are effective against your opponent isn't which cards (or colors for that matter) are in their deck—it's what they're trying to do.
This is a key difference from Dominion. The Magic player is concerned with how the game plays out, not as much on deck construction. MtG has thousands upon thousands of cards, and since there isn't a kingdom of just 10 cards, you can't really predict the specific cards in their deck. So the approach to strategy is about learning high level approaches, "what they're trying to do", rather than how to respond to super-specific cards or card combos.
But Dominion is a deck-building game. You
need to focus on the deck construction here. There
is a small set of cards in each game. You
can improve your game by considering specific cards and card combos.
Kotter considers three categories of the Combo Deck archetype. First, the one-card combo.
One-card decks are in a way the holy grail of combo deckbuilding. They are decks that win as soon as they manage to resolve (or activate) their single key card.
All well and good for Magic, but is this applicable to Dominion? Not really, IMO. There is no single card in Dominion that just wins you the game when you play it. The closest thing you've brought up is Bishop in a golden deck, and you usually need trashing support for it to work so it doesn't
really function as a one-card combo. You've argued this lightly, but I'm sure you know deep down that trying to reach Golden Deck status with only Bishops is a painful path.
Well, I guess there's Rebuild. Do you consider Rebuild as a one-card combo deck?
Second, Kotter mentions the traditional definition with a combo of 2+ pieces. I've already addressed this above. It's a good definition, it's one that everybody uses.
Kotter's third category is the engine combo:
Engine Combo. These decks are what totally demolish the intuitive definition of a combo deck. Instead of trying to set up a particular combination of cards they try to achieve a "critical mass" of interchangeable pieces that all perform one or both of two critical functions: drawing cards or producing mana. What they aim to do is to accumulate the resources to fuel one big turn of constant resource exchange cards into mana into cards into mana and so on.
I'm not sure what the Dominion analogue for this would be, because games of Dominion don't end the same way as games of Magic. As far as "interchangeable pieces" go, the best I can come up with is how engines in Dominion seek trashing, +cards, +buy, etc. and can get them from a variety of sources. But are you proposing that we fold the Engine Deck archetype into the Combo Deck archetype?
Overall, the article you've linked has done a fantastic job at convincing me that it's far more intuitive and far more strategically useful to use the traditional definition of "combo deck" in Dominion.
A much better combo would be Watchtower/Goons.
Which is still not a combo, but engine payload.
)
I don't know if you're still standing by this position, but I'm convinced it's not the right position.
I most certainly stand by the position that on a kingdom with Watchtower and Goons, the the first thing you should notice is that the kingdom has great engine payload in Goons+Watchtower, not that the kingdom has a great "combo".
Sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call Watchtower+Goons a combo. Even Carsten Kotter makes a distinction between "combo" and "combo deck":
After all combo comes from "combination" so we expect a combo deck to be one that tries to set up a certain combination of cards that then has a powerful effect on the game.
The whole point of his article is to expand the understanding of "combo deck", not to usurp the de facto definition of "combo". They are two different terms that have different uses. For convenience you may say "combo" to refer to the deck archetype if you provide the proper context (as Kotter does later in his article), but that doesn't change that "combo" also legitimately refers to a small set of cards with strong synergy.
