Giving a boost to human tribal decks.

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CanadianBrad

Guest
Because I believe everyone who plays this game should make a tribal deck or two, I often find myself considering the uses of certain cards in that context. And, so far as the doctors tell me, I'm human, so I think we're entitled to give our own tribe a little love. So, in turn 1, we're going to play our Plains, tap it, and cast Champion of the Parish. Gives us a cheap little one-drop that's got the potential to turn into a monster. But on the bright sunny plains of a white deck, we need a dark shadow. And his is the Unruly Mob, which we're going to play on turn 2 using that second plains we threw down. Now our Champion has become a 2/2, and will get bigger as time goes on. And as we spew human soldier tokens like madmen for chump-blocking purposes, they're going to die. While they're around, they're giving our Champion his boost, and when they've served their purpose and cease to exist, they're adding more pitchforks and torches to our angry riot.

Just because while it's fun to have a horde of creatures backing up the Champion, it's even more fun to see the enemy kill off a bunch of the horde and thereby weaken the Champion, just to turn out a bigger, more unruly, mob.

And, for fun, because we're aggro people and we like red mixed into our white, and we're all about buffing up our humans, on turn 3 we're going to play a mountain and follow it up with Thatcher Revolt. Now, on turn 3, we can swing with a 5/5 and 3x 1/1s, and afterward, our mob grows to a 4/4.

I say, bring on the dragons and the demons and the purple people eaters. We're HUMANS, and we're at the top of the food chain, baby.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Maybe we should revive the Tribal games... they've been on hiatus for lack of interest, but with "fresh new blood" :), maybe it's time to play again...
 
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CanadianBrad

Guest
How do you run the Tribal games? I'd be interested in doing some digging, and perhaps playing a couple of games. Give me the details.
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Maybe we should revive the Tribal games... they've been on hiatus for lack of interest, but with "fresh new blood" :), maybe it's time to play again...
They've been on hiatus because someone in the last game took ELEVEN MONTHS to take their first turn. (Which makes you think... are they really on hiatus, or are we just waiting for Spiderman?) Seriously, Brad, check out the first two pages of this thread, paying close attention to the time stamp on each post. It really is quite hilarious in retrospect. And just goes to show you how lackadaisical we all are here. Every time you get involved in a multiplayer game, be sure to keep good records of your deck, because your children might end up finishing that game for you.

I should also mention that Oversoul is too good to play games against. Someone else should build his decks for him.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Hey, and after all of that waiting, it was done in a couple of days or a week afterwards... that jogged my memory, I think it's because Oversoul likes his combo decks that are pretending to be tribal decks ;)

CanadianBrad: We play Magic games on the forums via threads and on the honor system. The Games Run forum has tons of examples. We've played tribal, Two-Headed Giant, Chaos, Constructed, Draft, and Mindmaster (a casual variant using just a booster for your deck). We've pretty much done it all.
 
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CanadianBrad

Guest
Hey, and after all of that waiting, it was done in a couple of days or a week afterwards... that jogged my memory, I think it's because Oversoul likes his combo decks that are pretending to be tribal decks ;)

CanadianBrad: We play Magic games on the forums via threads and on the honor system. The Games Run forum has tons of examples. We've played tribal, Two-Headed Giant, Chaos, Constructed, Draft, and Mindmaster (a casual variant using just a booster for your deck). We've pretty much done it all.
Maybe I'll have to get myself involved in that. As to "impostor" tribal decks, couldn't some kind of ruling be made regarding what counts as a "tribal" deck(an idea from the top of my head: 50%, rounded up, of all non-land cards in the deck must be creature cards sharing a subtype in order for the deck to be considered a tribal deck)? Seems to me that in a situation like that, an officiating party and a small set of rules(something casual, because we aren't pros here) could be used.

Example: Turgy22 and I are going to play a game against one another. Prior to the match, both of us submit deck lists to Spiderman, who matches them against a set of rules that we've agreed on beforehand. Following the game, I take the same role for the game between Turgy and Spidey, and then Turgy fills the same role when Spidey and I play.

As to an 11-month hiatus, I think it's acceptable to say that if a player has not completed a turn within, say, seven days of their opponent's last turn, that player has forfeit the match.

Mayhaps this is something that I'll put a couple of deck lists together for. Is there a set of rules already in place for Tribal decks(restricted cards, what constitutes "tribal", etc)?
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Maybe I'll have to get myself involved in that. As to "impostor" tribal decks, couldn't some kind of ruling be made regarding what counts as a "tribal" deck(an idea from the top of my head: 50%, rounded up, of all non-land cards in the deck must be creature cards sharing a subtype in order for the deck to be considered a tribal deck)? Seems to me that in a situation like that, an officiating party and a small set of rules(something casual, because we aren't pros here) could be used.
I think you might have the wrong idea about what the complaint was with the imposter tribal decks. To be clear, I do feel guilty about at least one of these decks. But there were rules and we did follow them. At least one third of a deck had to be creatures of the same creature type, which would be that deck's "tribe." Some of us agreed not to use the power 9, but that wasn't really codified and no one ended up using power 9 cards anyway. There was also some confusion because Limited put together a rules post that Spiderman stickied and it had rules for Magic Online's "Tribal Wars Classic." But it was explicitly stated that we were not actually playing Tribal Wars Classic (Edit: actually, it's been long enough that Magic Online's Tribal Wars Classic format no longer even exists, as it was replaced by Tribal Wars Legacy). Because of text in Limited's post, some people may have thought we were banning Engineered Plague and other such cards, but that was never actually agreed to. We agreed to the Vintage banned and restricted lists.

When Spiderman makes the remark about my decks being combo decks masquerading as tribal decks, it's because I built a deck with 20 slots devoted to creatures of my tribe, constructs, and all of the other slots devoted to a combo engine that used the constructs to do massive damage before anyone else could get going. I had three opponents that game, and I killed all of them by my fifth turn. I do feel a bit guilty about that game. In my defense, I'll note that I'd been asking for a change to the Legacy banned list instead of the Vintage banned and restricted lists. I'd even kind of sort of warned everyone else that if they wanted cards not to be in the card pool, they should come to a consensus and definitively ban those cards, because otherwise I'd use them. I wasn't trying to make it an ultimatum and I didn't even follow through on it at first. I managed to win three games in a row, two of which were very close, without exploiting the really broken cards that are banned in Legacy and legal in Vintage (I did use Survival of the Fittest in my spirits deck, and that's now banned in Legacy, but I can't remember if it had been banned yet when we started that game). After that game, we discussed it again and did seem to come to a consensus that the Legacy banned list would be best for the tribal games, but it was a moot point because we didn't play anymore tribal games.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Mayhaps this is something that I'll put a couple of deck lists together for. Is there a set of rules already in place for Tribal decks(restricted cards, what constitutes "tribal", etc)?
There I go, responding to the other stuff and not this question. We have a stickied thread in the games run forum that was the hub for all of our tribal games. It can be found here. However, as I touched on already, there are some issues with the first post in that thread. Limited copied and pasted from the official rules for the Magic Online format "Tribal Wars Classic." The part about "all sets in Magic Online" was never applicable and the banned list he posted below that was never what we followed (we were using the plain old Vintage banned and restricted lists). Really, his post is a poor introduction to the format we had. It doesn't outright state in the list of rules that elves, goblins, and zombies are not valid tribe choices, but then in the list of tribes that have already been played, they are listed as being disallowed. Also, because Limited didn't know about the first tribal game, the numbering scheme is weird and the thread hasn't been updated. I mentioned at some point that I would make a new version of that post for Spiderman to paste in as an update to the Tribal Games Administration, but I still haven't done that...
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
I think we didn't know what kind of decks people were going to play for the first couple of games so pretty much everything went in those games. After one of Oversoul's combo kills, I think we agreed that a player kill had to be dealt by creatures, but I guess in the last game or so, Oversoul found a way around that :) Personally, since I don't have fun playing against those kinds of decks in the tribal format as I think it violates the spirit of the game, I chose to not follow up with any further games but nothing really prevented anyone else from playing. However, it seems no one else chose to take up the mantle of organizing the next tribal anyway.

CanadianBrad said:
As to an 11-month hiatus, I think it's acceptable to say that if a player has not completed a turn within, say, seven days of their opponent's last turn, that player has forfeit the match.
I believe that was also an option (which I think I was fine with), but most everyone just chose to wait for me anyway since there really wasn't any rush.

I think the Stickied thread is fine with the rules regarding tribal, it's really tweaking the banned/restricted list and what tribes are and are not allowed. I can't remember after all of this time why the elves, goblins, and zombies were banned but I believe (without looking at the tribes played list), they were played at one point. I also seem to remember a proposal to allow a tribe back in after x times (a year?) to allow any use of any new cards that have been released then, but not sure where that went.

Anyway, after all of this time, we probably could just "start from scratch" and allow all tribes again for now.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I think we didn't know what kind of decks people were going to play for the first couple of games so pretty much everything went in those games. After one of Oversoul's combo kills, I think we agreed that a player kill had to be dealt by creatures, but I guess in the last game or so, Oversoul found a way around that :) Personally, since I don't have fun playing against those kinds of decks in the tribal format as I think it violates the spirit of the game, I chose to not follow up with any further games but nothing really prevented anyone else from playing. However, it seems no one else chose to take up the mantle of organizing the next tribal anyway.
Actually, it was after Mooseman's combo using Palinchron and Mirari's Wake in Game 6 that we made a "gentleman's agreement" not to exploit infinite combos. I can see how one would think it was me, as I was the lone dissenter. If the highlander game is included, two games in a row had just been won by infinite combos, the first by DarthFerret and the second by Mooseman. I had won Game 2 thanks to an infinite combo, but my attempts at infinite combos had failed in two other games. It's probably for the best that we stopped using infinite combos. There was also someone suggesting that we implement some sort of "finishing blow must be dealt by creatures" rule, but no one really jumped on this, and it would be a problematic rule anyway. Under such a rule, I could use a combo engine to take everyone else down to 1 life, then finish people off with creatures, but I couldn't finish a brutal creature war with Lightning Bolt, a card that would have been fine if I'd used it on that opponent earlier, before my creatures dealt enough damage to reduce that opponent to 3 life.

There was some discussion about the types of games we wanted to play and I actually agreed with what most people were saying there, despite my broken construct deck. The whole point of a tribal format is to use tribes, not to throw 20 creatures into a combo deck. Maybe because of how brutal the last game was, this is getting remembered as "Oversoul builds a Raffinity engine around 20 slots of constructs and uses it to kill everyone in 5 turns." Maybe I should recap here, so in the fourteen tribal games (emphasizing a bunch of things with bold text)...

Game 1: I played a Smokestack lockdown combo with walls. You won with Skyhunter Prowler beats.
Game 2: I won with an infinite life combo using clerics.
Game 3: I played a Skullclamp/Earthcraft soldier deck with infinite token generation. You played a cool bringer deck and won.
Game 4: I used Al0ysiusHWWW's secret lifeline/chimera tech to make big chimeras. You won with Overrunning spiders.
Game 5: I played a wizard deck with a Mind over Matter infinite damage engine. I got taken out and Mythosx won a close game with wizard ping damage.
Highlander special: I played zombies and became a target because of Necropotence. DarthFerret won using an infinite combo.
Game 6: I played a merfolk deck with no infinite combos, but it did have a Rhystic Deluge/Cowardice combo that never emerged. Mooseman won using an infinite combo.
It was after this that we agreed on no more infinite combos.
Game 7: I played a Belbe's Portal dragon deck with Recurring Nightmare to bring back Ryusei and Kokusho. Mooseman won with gargoyle beatdown.
Game 8: I played a crappy skeleton deck that could use Panoptic Mirror to keep killing everyone's creatures so that my regenerating skeletons would be the only ones left standing. Mooseman won with faerie beatdown.
Game 9: I played a straight-up white beatdown griffin deck with combo engine whatsoever. You won with Kithkin.
Game 10: I played a creature-swapping and creature-stealing crab deck. BigBlue ran me right over with a Sneak Attack combo deck using avatars and went on to win the game.
Game 11: I played a wurm deck using Recurring Nightmare with wurms that had on-death effects. I recovered from Mooseman's use of Apocalypse before anyone else by virtue of slightly better topdecking, so I won with wurm and token beatdown.
At this point, I, along with Spiderman, had been in all of the tribal games. I'd won two. I advocated for a change to the Legacy banned list, but there wasn't any interest, so we continued using the Vintage banned/restricted lists. I said that if we didn't explicitly ban cards, I'd feel free to use them.
Game 12: I used a Land Tax engine to power out Angel beatdown. One player decked himself trying to get an answer to me and two players dropped from the game. I won with angel beatdown.
Game 13: I played a Tradewind Survival deck with spirits. With only 3 life left against Mooseman's ally deck, I won using Tradewind Rider lockdown.
Game 14: I followed up on my indication that I'd use cards if we didn't ban them. Mishra's Workshop, Skullclamp, Tinker, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, and Tolarian Academy are all legal in Vintage. I'd wanted them banned, but we didn't ban them, so I played them. I killed all three other players by my fifth turn. It was broken and stupid.

Now, I don't think this was just me being petty and building a broken deck to build a point after no one listened to me about banning cards, although maybe there was an element of that. After my crab deck was hopelessly overpowered, I tried to build stronger decks. I won three games in a row, but two of them were only barely. I figured I had a big target on my head for having won three in a row. I was trying to build a deck that could cope with that. I did write a post in the discussion about how sometimes players had gone into games with different expectations about the kinds of game that would be played. I said then, and I still maintain, that banning cards is the best way to address that, even if it isn't perfect. I even seemed to convince everyone still involved that we should switch to the Legacy banned list for following tribal games. But then after Turgy said he was done, you said you didn't want to play if it would only be three people.

I believe that was also an option (which I think I was fine with), but most everyone just chose to wait for me anyway since there really wasn't any rush.
Anyway, after all of this time, we probably could just "start from scratch" and allow all tribes again for now.
How about a tribe rotation system? Maybe for each new tribal game, we could rotate the oldest disallowed tribes back in, or something of that nature.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Nice recap! Wow, you actually spent time going through all of those threads? :eek:

With regards to Game 14 and playing cards *because* no one said they were banned, frankly, I think it was kind of petty. I'm pretty sure no one else was using those cards specifically to build a broken deck so while it wasn't said "officially", it seemed to be there unofficially. I mean, I can see using Sol Ring and Mana Vault because they're good cards by themselves, but you seemed to be the only one concerned about either banning them or using them because they weren't banned "to make a point".

A tribal rotation system is fine too, but since it's been what, at least a year since we last played and the participants have dwindled anyway, we might as well start over. But I don't have a preference either way.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
With regards to Game 14 and playing cards *because* no one said they were banned, frankly, I think it was kind of petty.
Yeah, I said wasn't "just" me being petty. It might have been a factor. I was also trying to think of ways to build a deck that could top what I'd played before, as I'd only barely won with my spirit deck in game 13. I tried to build a Kor deck using a bunch of artifacts and damage redirection, but when I tested it, I saw that it was kind of slow and, thinking I'd be the biggest target, I switched to constructs.

I'm pretty sure no one else was using those cards specifically to build a broken deck so while it wasn't said "officially", it seemed to be there unofficially. I mean, I can see using Sol Ring and Mana Vault because they're good cards by themselves, but you seemed to be the only one concerned about either banning them or using them because they weren't banned "to make a point".
It's a bit more complicated than that. I wasn't trying to bully everyone into acknowledging that certain cards were too powerful. It's a problem of expectations. I went into game 10 expecting to have enough time to pull off some creature-swapping tricks and establish a line of defense, but I got destroyed because of Sneak Attack. Sneak Attack is really powerful, but it isn't banned in any format as far as I know. I didn't want players not to use Sneak Attack, I just wasn't expecting it. I started packing more power because players seemed to expect that, but I should point out that this was somewhat inconsistent anyway. BigBlue won with his powerful Sneak Attack avatar deck and the very next game he had an intimidating shapeshifter deck that virtually dominated the board with gigantic creatures and he could have won the game if he'd played a bit differently. But then he followed it up with a bat deck that never gave any indication of being threatening. At some point after I built that silly crab deck, I decided to use more powerful cards, but at first it didn't seem like a problem (I won three games in a row, but I didn't exactly dominate). For some reason, with the construct deck, instead of just using one broken card, I used several. It wasn't a plan I had for making a point. It was partially just on a whim.

A tribal rotation system is fine too, but since it's been what, at least a year since we last played and the participants have dwindled anyway, we might as well start over. But I don't have a preference either way.
Yeah, I concur.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention, since it might not be obvious...

About the whole "see how long we had to wait for Spiderman" thing, Turgy and I were just giving Spiderman a hard time, as that is a favorite pastime on these boards. We didn't actually consider it a big problem.
 

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
Actually, it was after Mooseman's combo using Palinchron and Mirari's Wake in Game 6 that we made a "gentleman's agreement" not to exploit infinite combos.
Wait....... can you believe this
In your face KJ!!!!! I couldn't resist.
And I don't even remember this combo. I'll have to necro research this single moment that I took time to actually make a combo..... no way that actually happened.

I'm always up for a tribal multi-player game.
I care not for the rules you guys decide on, I'll try to stay within them.
Someday WotC may actually create moose creatures.... they just don't know it.
 
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CanadianBrad

Guest
This seems to have become a discussion regarding the Tribal tournaments(or whatever) you guys have played in the past. I never intended for this to take place. However, since I'm interested, and others obviously are as well, I've started a thread over in General. Let's have this discussion over there.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Yeah, that was one big tangent. I blame Spiderman.

As for humans as a tribe, DarthFerret played them in one of the tribal games, so maybe he'd have some insight for a human-based deck...
 
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