Deformers are great fun to play with but when you get some familiarity one of the best applications of deformers is imitating life.
Use deformers to create lifelike events, show the wind blowing, fireworks exploding, and objects melting in the sun.
A great deformer to depict a real life effect is the wind deformer and its pretty easy to apply.
Simply create a plane object.
Apply an attractive material to your plane.
Rotate it so that it faces you and add a wind deformer.
Of course you need to make your new deformer a child of the plane object.
This could be a flag, a sheet waving on the clothes line.
There are so many possibilities but having your object wave gives it life and real life animation.
Under the attributes for your wind deformer, choose object properties and here you can adjust and key it's amplitude, size, frequency, and turbulence.
All of these imitate behaviors of the wind or simply a large object passing by.
Is it in a factory? Is there a fixed frequency, a threshold in the process where the turbulence is a signature of the behavior.
It's easy to predict events or show effects using this one simple deformer.
The melt deformer is a lot of fun.
There are obvious application like something melting in the sun but think of our cartoon characters who melt with embarrassment, science fiction life forms and even emotional suggestion with a melting behavior.
This too is pretty easy.
Simply place your object, add a melt deformer, make it a child of your target object.
With a circular object, a face or building contour you can apply the 'spherify' deformer to add sphere like contour and shape to your object.
A cartoon object fills with gas, a bloated politician's head grows ever larger with his promises, there are many useful and humorous applications for a special deformers like this.
More? There's a category for explosions, shatter, and shear.
Forces that deface or modify but suggest immediacy like a bomb or storm or the powerful effect of a tornado settling on parts of the town.
There's a deformer for every occasion and some complex configuration such as formula which will allow you to apply a formula to your shape, perhaps apply a wave form to it's motion.
However like so much advanced effects in Cinema the group of deformers that I consider the base group such as twist, bulge, and taper might be the best place to practice and cultivate this kind of modeling technique to your creations.