Cards like Glorious Anthem and Honor of the Pure are not good on their own. Pros have referred to them time and again as "half a card", because they don't do anything on their own, and do very little with only a single creature being buffed. Global buffs are actually card disadvantage, and only pass mustard when you have a sizable army to boost.
To use another example, Lava Spike is not a good card. However, when combined with many similar cards, the result is a deck that can win its fair share of games. It doesn't use the combat zone. If minimal usage of the combat zone is your definition of combo, is Lava Spike then a combo card?
To follow that point, why, then, would Spider Spawning considered a combo deck? The deck makes ample use of the combat zone. Armored Skaab and Fortress Crab hold down the ground, and 1/2 tokens later take over the field. It has some non-combat spells, but then, what deck doesn't?
Yes, glorious anthem effects are useless without any creatures on the board. So are equipment. But they are both very powerful effects in most games of magic because they help you win combat so much. Anthem effects are high picks in regular draft because they're really strong.
As for lava spike, some of the red decks that are basically all burn spells are considered to be kind of combo decks.
And as for spider spawning, yes it wins through attacking with creatures, but a lot of its game plan involves filling up its graveyard and leveraging that zone to its advantage, which isn't something most decks do. How you actually win isn't relevant. Storming into Goblin Warrens actually kills you through turning men sideways, but it's still definitely a combo deck.
By that definition, Honor of the Pure, Glorious Anthem, and a bunch of small white creatures is a combo deck. None of these cards are very good on their own. But putting them together sure makes for a cohesive deck.
We're probably getting caught up in semantics here. It feels like people are using the word "combo" to be synonymous with "archetype" and "synergy". While I don't want to turn this into a nitpicky back and forth over definitions, you'll note that the original author of this thread was talking specifically about two and three card combos - your Pestermites and such, not your archetype-enabling Glorious Anthems. It's certainly more than possible to enable archetypes and syngeries in cube, but I don't think I could recommend seeding any actual combos in a cube, unless it was a rotisserie draft.
First off those cards are good on their own. And secondly those cards attack the game in the same way most decks do, combat. If your definition of combo is only something like Pestermite + Kiki-Jiki, is storm not a combo deck?
I'm not sure if I would define any of those as combo decks. Archetypes, definitely, and the cards invite people to build around their themes. But I haven't heard anyone refer to their U/G self-mill Spider Spawning deck as combo. They are really just control decks with lots of Horned Turtles to gum up the ground, and a powerful end game win condition. Burning Vengeance, maybe there could be a case made for that, but those decks still have to play a real game of Magic.
When I think combo, mostly I think of non-interactive decks that largely ignore the board state, focusing instead on a sculpting a combination of cards that will either win the game on the spot, or put the game largely out of reach. I would say that combo decks operate more like solitaire than normal back and forth games of Magic. The kind of raw power and consistency to execute that kind of combo is difficult to achieve in draft.
They're very much combo decks. They function by taking a whole bunch of cards that don't do that much individually and weaving them together to make a cohesive deck. They also focuse on areas of the game and play with a strategy different than most regular decks. Combo doesn't imply non-interactive, it just seems that way because most combo decks in constructed are so powerful they don't have to be interactive.
But the thing about combo in limited is that you really have to support it heavily for it to be supported. You could support storm in cube, but you'd have to devote more of the cube to that for it to be viable. Which is why most of the combos that end up in cube are things like reanimator or the artifact decks. The artifact deck needs like 5 cards to support: Academy, Academy Ruins, Tezzeret x 2 and Tinker. And not even necessarily all of those. And then you can just include a bunch of cards you'd have anyways like mana rocks, myr battlesphere, scroll rack, etc. Same with reanimator. Fatties and reanimation spells are just really good on their own. I built a really sweet reanimator deck tonight without really using any cards that are only good in reanimator.
Yes, glorious anthem effects are useless without any creatures on the board. So are equipment. But they are both very powerful effects in most games of magic because they help you win combat so much. Anthem effects are high picks in regular draft because they're really strong.
As for lava spike, some of the red decks that are basically all burn spells are considered to be kind of combo decks.
And as for spider spawning, yes it wins through attacking with creatures, but a lot of its game plan involves filling up its graveyard and leveraging that zone to its advantage, which isn't something most decks do. How you actually win isn't relevant. Storming into Goblin Warrens actually kills you through turning men sideways, but it's still definitely a combo deck.
First off those cards are good on their own. And secondly those cards attack the game in the same way most decks do, combat. If your definition of combo is only something like Pestermite + Kiki-Jiki, is storm not a combo deck?
They're very much combo decks. They function by taking a whole bunch of cards that don't do that much individually and weaving them together to make a cohesive deck. They also focuse on areas of the game and play with a strategy different than most regular decks. Combo doesn't imply non-interactive, it just seems that way because most combo decks in constructed are so powerful they don't have to be interactive.
But the thing about combo in limited is that you really have to support it heavily for it to be supported. You could support storm in cube, but you'd have to devote more of the cube to that for it to be viable. Which is why most of the combos that end up in cube are things like reanimator or the artifact decks. The artifact deck needs like 5 cards to support: Academy, Academy Ruins, Tezzeret x 2 and Tinker. And not even necessarily all of those. And then you can just include a bunch of cards you'd have anyways like mana rocks, myr battlesphere, scroll rack, etc. Same with reanimator. Fatties and reanimation spells are just really good on their own. I built a really sweet reanimator deck tonight without really using any cards that are only good in reanimator.