A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 9: What if Nothing Matters?
Last time, we talked about the winning decks of the 1996 World Championship. This time, we'll talk about the first influential combo deck in Magic history: Prosperous Bloom.
The basic premise of the Prosperous Bloom deck is to get Cadaverous Bloom into play and use it to generate a lot of mana to cast a big Prosperity or some number of Infernal Contracts. With Cadaverous Bloom in play, those card drawing spells net a positive amount of mana, allowing the Prosperous Bloom player to draw more and more of their library, generating more and more mana, until they cast a lethal Drain Life.
Squandered Resources acts essentially as a mana accelerant that allows for starting the combo even without Cadaverous Bloom in play – play it, sacrifice your lands to it to cast draw spells and eventually Cadaverous Bloom, and then finish the combo as normal.
Natural Balance acts essentially as a big Dark Ritual in this deck, putting lands into play that can immediately be tapped for mana then sacrificed to Squandered Resources. With Squandered Resources in play, a Natural Balance nets six mana.
This deck also famously benefits from a quirk of Fifth Edition-era Magic rules. In Magic, there's a rules concept known as 'state-based actions.' State-based actions are things like "a creature with more damage on it than its toughness dies" and "a player at 0 or negative life loses the game"; ever-present effects that are just part of the game rules. Back then, state-based effects were only checked at the end of a phase, unlike now when they are checked basically whenever a player could take any action. This meant that the Prosperous Bloom player could go down to negative life off casting Infernal Contracts and not immediately lose the game, going back up above zero with their lethal Drain Life.
There are two main kinds of combo decks in magic: A/B combos and critical mass combos.
In an A/B combo, two cards combine to win the game on the spot. The classic Channel Fireball combo is an example of this. Probably the most influential A/B combo in Magic history is actually Splinter Twin, but that's around 15 years down the line from 1997.
A/B combos tend to get put into combo-control or aggro-combo decks, where they act as finishers rather than the entire strategy. Because the combo only occupies a handful of card slots, the overall deck can have a more conventional strategy, and the combo gives it an extra dimension. There are pure A/B combo decks, of course; in that case, the remaining card slots are filled with card draw, fast mana, and cards that search the library ("tutors"), which are used to speed up drawing into the combo and having the mana to cast it. Often, those decks have played a handful of counterspells or hand disruption (like Duress) to help protect the combo.
By contrast, in a critical mass combo, almost every spell in the deck is dedicated to the combo. Critical mass decks are trying to cast enough of their spells and accumulate enough resources to win. Often, a critical mass deck generates a very large amount of mana which is then dumped into an X spell like Drain Life. The ur-critical mass deck is Storm, which we'll meet a few years down the line. But the '12 Mountain, 28 Lightning Bolt' deck is also a critical mass deck – just an exceedingly simple one. Its only purpose in life is to cast 7 of its spells then win.
Indeed, 1996-97 is right around when 'burn' decks start showing up on the tournament scene with regularity; Wizards has printed enough distinct direct-damage spells now that the 40 Lightning Bolt deck is something of a reality, even if you can't literally put 40 Lightning Bolts in your deck.
ProsBloom is also the first 'pure' combo deck. It really has no interest in interacting with its opponent or doing much of anything at all. On the turn it 'goes off,' it'll cast a dozen spells, and that single turn will take several minutes to resolve. But for most of the game it'll just sit around, play lands, draw cards, and try to get either Squandered Resources or Cadaverous Bloom into play. The Memory Lapses and Power Sink in the deck are really there to protect the combo by countering opposing disruption; especially necessary as casting a big Prosperity all but ensures the opponent will draw an answer.
Nothing matters other than enacting the combo and winning. The ProsBloom player is essentially getting the effect of Necropotence the hard way – by not spending cards to interact with what the opponent is doing, it gets to have more cards for purposes of the combo. The cost, of course, is sitting there and taking damage while they do nothing but play their lands and draw cards.
But the only life point that matters is the last one, as we've already learned.
Few cards like Cadaverous Bloom have been printed; Bloom is a degenerate engine, a card that allows exchanging resources (cards for mana) in an unlimited way and at an extremely advantageous rate. Wizards would pretty quickly learn that cards like these are dangerous.
Though it is very influential in terms of deck construction, ProsBloom itself never really broke out of the playpen of Mirage Block Constructed; it had some tournament results, but was largely overshadowed by Necropotence for its entire existence in Standard.
You might wonder "oh but what about after Necropotence rotated out in fall of 1998 along with Ice Age block." That's the neat thing: It didn't. Wizards, possessed by who knows what malevolent spirit, reprinted Necropotence into Fifth Edition, thus stretching the Summer of Necro into damn near three years of Necro.
Elsewhere in Magic
Standard at this time is dominated by iterative variants of deck archetypes that we've already discussed – Necropotence, mono-red aggro, burn, and variants of blue control.
The popular blue control deck at this time is 'Counterpost', a pile of counterspells that uses Kjeldoran Outpost as a win condition that's very difficult to disrupt or kill. Lands that can be win conditions will go on to become a staple of the control-est of control decks throughout Magic's history, from Mishra's Factory to Hall of the Storm Giants nearly 30 years later. While Kjeldoran Outpost had to be played in addition to other lands because of its severe drawback, lands like these usually don't take up a spell slot – allowing control decks to never have an expensive finisher rotting in their hand when they're hoping to draw answers to opposing threats.
Next Time
We move right along to Tempest block, home of the slivers (a beloved mechanic that Wizards has brought back numerous times) and buyback (a not-so-beloved mechanic except by the most perverse players).