Fear combo decks. While you sit there trying to win through normal means - attacking with creatures, throwing Char at their head, etc. - combo just does it's own things, then kills you in one turn. You could be blissfully ignorant as to what your opponent's playing, then BAM!!! it hits you, and you look at your hand, unable to stop it.
For too long aggro decks have had free reign in Standard, pausing only to ponder whether or not their opponent has a Shining Shoal in hand. Even Heartbeat decks had trouble with random aggro decks. Now Time Spiral brings with it one of the most obtusely broken combo engines ever: Enduring Renewal. Prepared players are digging their counter spells, Disenchants, and Naturalizes out of their boxes of cards, fearing another combo winter.
Don't just fear the combo winter, embrace it! Or at least be prepared by knowing what you'll be facing.
To begin with, let's review the combo:Step 1: Play Enduring RenewalStep 2: Play Wild CantorStep 3: Sacrifice Wild Cantor for R, return to your hand with Enduring Renewal.Step 4: Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until you have a large storm count.Step 5: Grapeshot.
Thus, the deck needs 3WWR to go off, 2WW for Enduring Renewal, R to Wild Cantor, who in turn provides one red upon his final death to combine with the last colorless for Grapeshot.
Now, let's take a quick look at the combo variants that have been abandoned for this deck; that's right, rejected combos:
Pandemonium + Enduring Renewal + Wild CantorBenefits: Adds redundancy.Drawbacks: While costing more than our three part combo, Pandemonium doesn't really work well when you have few creatures and your opponent is playing an aggro deck.
Enduring Renewal + Soul Warden + Wild CantorBenefits: Gain infinite life while you wait for your Grapeshot. Also, simply win the game if your opponent has drawn more cards than you have. And it gains you life when you play Soul Warden early and your opponent doesn't kill it.Drawbacks: Infinite life is fun, but all you've done is make a few people sideboard in Biorhythm to beat you. Or they simply wait until you've decked yourself. While this is a nice combo, the sad thing is that if your opponent can't stop it, you should probably be winning anyway - gaining infinite life still sets you up for losing from decking. At least with the Pandemonium Combo, you had another win condition, instead of a stave off losing condition.
Enduring Renewal + Mindlash Sliver + Basal Sliver + Consume Spirit/Grapeshot/DemonfireBenefits: Infinitely large Consume Spirits are fun to play, and Consume Spirit doubles as removal if you need to buy some time. Demonfire is also great if you have no other cards in hand, as it's an uncounterable finisher.Drawbacks: While having double the finishers is cool, having double the creatures you need in play before you finish is not.
Enduring Renewal + Thermopod + Ornithopter + Grapeshot/Demonfire Benefits: Demonfire can be uncounterable, and you can certainly use all that many any number of ways to kill your opponent. Indeed, you could effectively run lots of X burn spells and mana acceleration, and use the combo as an extra win strategy but in such a deck, Thermopod and Ornithopter are only great if you have Enduring Renewal. Still, having an alternate path to victory would be nice. Ornithopter also blocks 1/1s all day longDrawbacks: Thermopod costs 5 and Ornithopter can be shattered (while Enduring Renewal can't, and creatures can't.)
