WRT the long-standing tactical appropriation of tempo/control elements by combo players (aka, wonderPreaux is back on caffeine and subtweeting everyone who ever said "ANT iS a CoNtRol dEck" without a trace of nuance or irony)
This is technically about Doomsday, which has its own discord for discussing the deck, but this is relevant to combo decks as a whole, including Storm, and also gives me a chance to answer the "why don't Storm players play cards to address the Doomsday matchup?" topic in one fell swoop.
Credit where it’s due, I was not the one to come up with the Stifle/Wasteland tech for Doomsday (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/3939893#paper), but, looking at MTGGoldfish listings, I am the guy continuing to take Stifle builds to events. Community appreciation aside, another reason to cite Wally’s original build is it pre-dates the release of Endurance. Much like how the 2nd copy of Thassa’s Oracle in Doomsday has a simplistic/meme rationale of “beating Extract”, despite being a standard fixture of Vintage lists for months prior, I can’t help but think Stifle has an obvious explanation for its use that doesn’t capture the theorycraft. There are easy, inadequate answers and rigorous, complete answers and I’m aiming to deliver the latter.
There’s a common idea of combo decks being like control decks, and that’s really the topic here: “to what degree do combo decks resemble control decks and why?” (I promise this eventually answers the Stifle question). There’s definitely a surface-level connection to make when you see combo decks play cards like Thoughtseize or Force of Will, which are control mainstays, and also hear about tactical concepts like “grinding players out” or “going over the top” of fair decks. In practice, though, the similarity only stretches so far, you wouldn’t want to one-for-one an opponent continuously if you’re trying to string together a ten-spell turn for Tendrils, for instance. There’s only so much “answering” a combo deck is interested in doing, and, with the power of Legacy combos, you’d think the combo player is the one with the real “threat”, right?
The best explanation for the resemblance of combo and control decks I’ve ever thought up requires a brief digression -- once upon a time I took an art class in college (the best piece I ever produced was a painting of my glasses on a desk, I’ll leave it to the reader to conclude on my skill level when being visually impaired improves the output). Among many concepts that didn’t really stick with me, one thing I learned about was negative space, the part of your medium that you didn’t directly “art” and what the unaffected area is showing as a result of what’s been done around it. The point being: combo decks are negative space control decks. Instead of the control player approach of acknowledging the meta and the opponent’s plays to manage and interface with them, the combo player is looking to push into the space the opponent won’t and can’t access, to create a win out of all the plays an opponent can’t make.
The reason combo decks seem like control decks is because they have a similar composition (discard / counters, a lot of mana – ours tends to be faster, though, and cantrips or redundancy), but the decks ultimately operate differently because similar tools are being used for different motives. Control decks aim to manage opposing threats so they don’t die to them, combo decks aim to manage opposing interactions so they can kill the opponent. Control decks generate card advantage through proactive deck-building choices, combo decks arrive with passive card advantage through construction of a deck that denies most angles of interaction. Much like how a control deck might have to carefully select which removal cards it plays to line up well with expected threats, Stifles and Wastelands are my pick to deal with opposing interaction, especially from Delver.
There is a largely accurate but somewhat reductive appraisal of Doomsday’s Delver matchup that goes along the lines of “all of Delver’s cards are good against Doomsday”, and the best method I could think of to stop an opponent who could play any card effectually against me was to attack their ability to play cards at all. This is the same thing Delver does to other players, but, again, the motives are inverted: you’re trapping the opponent with Wasteland / Stifle / Daze not so you can kill them with onboard cards, but so that you don’t get your combo bricked by all their cheap interaction. I think one of the better ways to defend against a wide range of interaction is to just screw the opponent out of playing Magic, which, honestly, isn’t too far out of my normal M.O. as a combo player anyway.
Now, to extend this a bit further, consider control decks in a given format, what would be the way control decks beat each other? The answer is probably “card advantage” and “inevitability”, as those are the key deck-building concepts for Control decks. If you’re “out-controlling” the other Control deck, it stands to reason that you’d do well in the matchup. So, for combo decks, consider the negative space equivalents to “card advantage” and “inevitability”: “card economy” (instead of accumulating a lot more cards than your control opponent, you do your combo with less resources than the other combo player) and “speed” (instead of having the “bigger” lategame than your control opponent, since Legacy comboes are all straight kills anyway, you have the more quickly dominant interaction than the other combo player). This is why, taking Storm pilots as an example, they will bemoan matchups like Oops (you get demolished on the speed axis) or Doomsday (a one-card combo is unbeatable card economy) because they get “out-combo’d” inherently.
What cards would a Storm player run against Doomsday, for instance? How about discard spells to dictate game flow? Well, even playing UB and foregoing Veil, my list can have 20 interactive cards postboard and, in a resource-light discard/counter fight, still come out ahead as soon as Doomsday is drawn. Going further, even trying to “cheese” with Extracts and Slaughter Games still plays the losing game of trading cards. If I had to money-match Doomsday players on any Storm variant, I’d probably do wild all-in builds or break parity with postboard creatures to strike at the speed axis – and even then, I’m not sure it would be enough. When you step back into the context of an event, though, much like Storm builds with 4 Leyline of the Voids for Reanimator, you’d have to consider if you’re even getting good value out of your sideboard slots, and devoting a quarter of your board to at most 5% of the meta probably isn’t the answer. Doomsday definitely has bad matchups, but Storm just isn’t going to be one of them on the mechanics alone, you just get “out-combo’d”.
tl;dr
- Stifle is good at beating diverse interaction because your wide range of spells doesn't matter if you can't cast them
- Doomsday probably just ranches Storm, I'm just as sad as all of you