Tribal decks on CPA

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
Here is the winning Gargoyle deck..... I know it isn't very good, but it has no combo kills at all. I had too much land and too many non-basic for the Land Tax. Only 1 Darksteel??? What was I thinking?

1 Darksteel Gargoyle
1 Kjeldoran Gargoyle
1 Shrieking Grotesque
1 Disenchant
3 Stonecloaker
2 Brass Herald
1 Lightning Bolt
2 Browbeat
2 Land Tax
2 Blazing Salvo
3 Abbey Gargoyles
3 Basalt Gargoyle
3 Granite Gargoyle
2 Ivory Gargoyle
3 Wakestone Gargoyle
2 Opal Gargoyle
3 Glorious Anthem
4 Plateau
2 Boros Garrison
4 Mountains
7 Plains
4 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Sulfur Elemental
 
D

DarthFerret

Guest
Here is the Assassin deck, thought it would do a whole lot better than it did.

8 Swamp
4 Underground Sea
8 Island
1 Maze of Ith
2 Treachery
2 Cultural Exchange
4 War Barge
4 Control Magic
4 Counterspell
4 Terror
4 Zombie Assassin
4 Merfolk Assassin
4 Stalking Assassin
4 Kiku, Nights Flower
4 Royal Assassin

I think maybe i should have stuck with either all creature control, or all countermagic. The diversity of this deck may have been its downfall.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
This is my Thallid tribe:

2 Sylvan Library
2 Giant Growth
3 Terror
3 Pernicious Deed
2 Overrun
3 Gaea's Blessing
2 Night Soil
2 Fungal Bloom
2 Thorn Thallid
2 Thallid Shell-Dweller
2 Thallid Germinator
3 Thallid Devourer
3 Thallid
1 Sporesower Thallid
1 Savage Thallid
2 Psychotrope Thallid
1 Feral Thallid
3 Deathspore Thallid
9 Forest
5 Swamp
4 Bayou
1 Wasteland
1 Maze of Ith
1 Strip Mine

I just basically did a search on Apprentice/Gatherer for Thallid cards and put together what seemed good. Lack of flier defense was my downfall...
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Last year, or perhaps the year before it, I was writing some article because that was a thing I was trying to do at the time. Anyway, I wanted to remember the exact composition of my stupid Constructs deck from the infamous Tribal Game #14. And I didn't find a record of it. Most of the decks that I used in forum games were saved in some form on my computer. But some lists were lost or weren't properly saved, like the final version of the Zombies deck I brought to the Tribal Highlander Special game. I've long since forgotten why I was looking for my Constructs decklist in the first place, but I knew that I didn't have it on my desktop computer, nor on my laptop, nor on my new computer that couldn't possibly have it because its files were simply pulled from the two previous computers.

Anyway, I decided that it didn't actually matter. The deck was kind of an embarrassment anyway. I knew that it was beyond the power level of the format we'd been playing. It was a mistake for me to build and while I'm keen on learning from my mistakes, the lesson there was not something hidden in the exact details of the decklist. It's been a while and most people involved would (reasonably) only remember that my broken deck killed them all before they got a chance to use their cards. Well, that and Spiderman taking a year to play his first turn. So I'll reiterate, yeah, it was a mistake, but what happened was that I'd lost six(ish) of the tribal games in a row, trying to build tribal combo decks that ranged from relatively mundane and innocuous (like my Merfolk deck that was just a bunch of merfolk and traditional blue spells with Cowardice + Rhystic Deluge to attempt to take over the board) to aggressively seeking a combo finish (like my Wizards deck that mixed pinging wizards with Mind Over Matter + Curiosity for a big direct damage combo finish). In some of them my silly decks were ultimately outclassed. In some of them I only narrowly lost. In some of them I just happened to be sitting across the table from something that was a bad matchup (my Dragons deck could have had a good chance at winning if it hadn't found itself in a bad spot against a swarm of pro-red gargoyles). But overall, it was fun and I was having a good time.

And then I tried to play a Crabs deck. It was a bit, uh, goofier than some of my other attempts, but I really wanted to try it. Who'd have thought of tribal crabs? I'd already used the Horseshoe Crab + Hermetic Study machine gun combo in an older deck, and I'd seen at one point that it could become hilarious when paired with Charisma. Seeing that the same creature type had Chromeshell Crab, I settled on the theme of playing a tribe of largely ineffectual creatures (crabs) that would try to swap control of creatures around. I'd get other people's good stuff, and they'd get crustaceans. I figured it would either lead to me deftly disrupting the board state with my creature stealing/trading and becoming one of the last players standing, or I'd cause some chaos and get ganged up on when I stolen too many things from too many people. I anticipated that either outcome would be fun. What actually happened was that BigBlue build a monster of an Avatars deck. Seeing that I had the potential to take his creatures, he deemed me a threat and summarily executed me. That may have been the right move on his part, and he did go on to win the game. I also really liked his deck. But when I thought about what to play next, I was a bit stuck. "I did not like being immediately trounced by a superior deck," I said to myself. "How can I prevent that from happening in the future? I must build more powerful decks."

So I tried wurms. BigBlue's deck threatened to do me in. He had some big creatures and some deadly tricks up his sleeve. But it was a multiplayer game and there was some chaos. I came out winning, but it was very, very close. "Wow," I said to myself. "I only barely won, and I think I got lucky. His deck was still better than mine. I need to ramp it up. That was not enough power. What is a more powerful tribe?"

I toyed with some options and, because I had tasted victory and wanted more, I decided that angels were the best choice. Lots of very powerful angels and somehow no one had picked the tribe. I had also been working on a Vedalken combo deck, and I did this weird thing with Al0ysiusHWWW where we basically built each others' decks. I had my eye on BigBlue, but he turned out to be playing bats and didn't really do anything. I won again. "What's next?" I asked myself. "I am going to have a target on my head now. I've won two in a row. They're going to gang up on me." I don't know why I thought everyone would gang up on me, but I did. At the time. And so I looked for something powerful.

Spirits hadn't yet been played, and I saw the potential for a Tradewind Survival deck. My gameplan did work, but again, it was very close. Turgy's indestructible treefolk might have done me in if I hadn't gotten help taking him out, and Mooseman got me down to 3 life before I was able to take control of the board. "I've won three in a row," I exclaimed. "Now I have a huge target on my head. Where do I go from here?" I assumed that I'd probably lose the next game, but I still wanted to have fun with it. I went over some of my ideas. I was a fan of the Kor. Not the newfangled Zendikar Kor, but the old school Rath Kor with their damage-redirecting shenanigans. I put together a Kor tribal list that used Stuffy Doll and a bunch of white cards to manipulate damage, with the goal of being able to influence where damage would go in the game and punish opponents for attacking me by redirecting the damage from their attacks. I playtested my new creation. It sucked. The deck had a few good things going for it, but it was unreliable and very slow. I had already won three in a row. I didn't want to win every tribal game and make everyone else lose interest in playing the format. But I wanted to at least have a fighting chance! By this point, I'd already indicated that I'd have a deck ready (not knowing that a year delay was in my future). I wanted to build something more powerful and I thought that I had to do so quickly. I tried to think of better tribes than Kor, but nothing was appealing to me. Racking my brain for options, I noticed that Stuffy Doll was a construct. Maybe a Stuffy Doll deck with constructs as the tribe instead of Kor? I looked at the list of constructs. There were some very potent creatures on it. "What else is legal in this format?" I pondered. "What can I use with constructs?" What was legal turned out to be, well, almost everything. We were still using the Vintage B/R lists. If I'd been wiser, I'd have stopped and thought about the difference in power level between what I was looking at and what had been played so far. But really, at the time, I seriously thought that there was a good chance that I'd run into artifact hate or something that would help eliminate me. We all know how that turned out.

But I'm reviving this thread for a reason. I inherited my parents' old computer in 2002 or so, upgrading the operating system from Windows '98 to Windows 2000. That was the machine I used for everything up until I bought a laptop at the end of 2009. I transferred my files onto the laptop in a folder called "Old Computer Stuff." But, as I noted in some other threads, I had a lot of issues with that HP laptop. For the first several months of 2010, I had to fall back on the reliable, albeit ancient, Windows '98 class desktop. Later that year, I gave the old computer to my youngest brother, as he didn't have his own computer or any money at the time. He didn't use it very much and eventually purchased a more modern system. When he was moving in 2015, he didn't want to take up space with my old computer, so he gave it back to me. Since then, I'd had it stored in the garage. Recently, I poked around on it and happened across my Constructs decklist. We played the game in 2011, well after I'd given my brother this computer. But remember, the game was on a turn-one hiatus for a year. I'd actually been using the old computer when I made the deck in the first place. And it's still there. I haven't the foggiest recollection of how I made my plays in 2011. Presumably I had made a copy of the decklist somewhere else and that copy was since lost. But now I have been reunited with my terrible decklist.

This seems as good a place to archive it as any?

Let's see, where did I leave off? Dragons? On with more decklists, then...
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Skeletons deck from Tribal Game 8

Twenty freaking skeletons
4 Rimebound Dead
4 Unworthy Dead
4 Urborg Skeleton
4 Restless Dead
4 Drudge Skeletons

Combo cheesiness
1 Forbidden Ritual
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
4 Innocent Blood
3 Barter in Blood
4 Panoptic Mirror

Support
3 Dark Ritual
1 Entomb
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor

Lands
19 Snow-Covered Swamp
2 Peat Bog

My Griffins deck from Tribal Game 9

Griffin-buffing stuff
4 Griffin Canyon
4 Crusade
2 Zuberi, Golden Feather

Board control
4 Wrath of God
4 Disenchant
4 Swords to Plowshares

Fantastic beats
2 Razorfoot Griffin
2 Ekundu Griffin
2 Mistmoon Griffin
4 Wild Griffin
4 Diving Griffin
4 Armored Griffin

Mana
20 Plains

My Crabs deck from Tribal Game 10

Shenanigans
4 Chromeshell Crab
4 Horseshoe Crab
2 Treachery
4 Charisma
3 Psionic Gift
3 Hermetic Study

Blockers
4 King Crab
4 Giant Crab
4 Oraxid

Utility
1 Windfall
2 Nevinyrral's Disk
2 Evacuation

Mana
22 Island
1 Sol Ring

My Wurms deck from Tribal Game 11

Token generation engine
4 Recurring Nightmare
4 Symbiotic Wurm
4 Penumbra Wurm

Wurmfinders
4 Defense of the Heart
4 Pattern of Rebirth

Regular wurms
4 Harvest Wurm
3 Thundering Wurm
3 Fallow Wurm
2 Golgari Rotwurm

Win condition
1 Epic Struggle

Mana
7 Swamp
11 Forest
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Bayou
1 Sol Ring

My Angels deck from Tribal Game 12

Card advantage engine
3 Planar Birth
3 Scroll Rack
2 Zuran Orb
4 Land Tax
18 Plains

Board control
2 Seal of Cleansing
2 Swords to Plowshares
4 Path to Exile
2 Wrath of God

Angels, angels, and more angels
2 Serra Angel
2 Platinum Angel
2 Copper-Leaf Angel
4 Serra Avenger
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
1 Reya Dawnbringer
4 Blinding Angel
4 Exalted Angel

My Spirits deck from Tribal Game 13

Bounce
4 Tradewind Rider
2 Seedborn Muse

Defense
4 Windborn Muse
4 Phantom Nantuko
2 Phantom Nishoba

Survival engine
4 Survival of the Fittest
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob

Acceleration
1 Sol Ring
4 Fertile Ground
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Mirari's Wake
4 Petalmane Baku

Utility
2 Karmic Guide
3 Kami of Ancient Law

Lands
1 Plains
2 Island
2 Forest
4 Tundra
4 Savannah
4 Tropical Island

My Constructs deck from Tribal Game 14

Acceleration
4 Metalworker
1 Mana Crypt
4 Mishra's Workshop
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Grim Monolith
1 Mana Vault
1 Sol Ring
1 Tinker

Equipment
2 Pariah's Shield
4 Skullclamp
1 Cranial Plating

Stuff for killing people
4 Triskelion
4 Arcbound Ravager
4 Disciple of the Vault

Ravager fodder
4 Su-Chi
4 Cathodion
4 Arcbound Worker

Other utility
2 Stuffy Doll
2 Silent Arbiter

Artifact lands
4 Seat of the Synod
4 Vault of Whispers
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Sure, this is a fine place to archive the decklists.

Since it's been a long time I can't be sure, but I *think* I approached every game as a new slate and just tried to evaluate decks as they came out as to who might be a bigger threat. I didn't take past games and wins into account.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Since it's been a long time I can't be sure, but I *think* I approached every game as a new slate and just tried to evaluate decks as they came out as to who might be a bigger threat. I didn't take past games and wins into account.
I think almost everyone did.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Thread necromancy time! While writing my Tribal report for the fast-approaching release of Modern Horizons 2, I was trying to jog my memory about some deck that someone else had played in a CPA game, and I happened across this thread. I was immediately distracted by the fact that the decklists I presented here stopped at Tribal Game 14. So, here's my Goblins deck from Tribal Game 15. There must have been some reason that I failed to post it here back in 2017 when I posted my other lists, but I cannot think of what that reason would have been. I wondered if maybe I hadn't been able to find the list at the time, but then I found that I had already posted it in an unrelated thread just over a month later...

4x Goblin Lackey
2x Goblin King
4x Goblin Piledriver
4x Goblin Chieftain
4x Goblin Sharpshooter
4x Goblin Warchief
2x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror-Breaker
2x Siege-Gang Commander
1x Skirk Prospector
4x Goblin Matron
2x Krenko, Mob Boss
2x Lightning Crafter
1x Æther Vial
1x Patriarch's Bidding
1x Oversold Cemetery
1x Mana Echoes
1x Goblin Warrens
1x Braid of Fire
1x Bloodstained Mire
1x Wooded Foothills
1x Cavern of Souls
1x Badlands
1x Dragonskull Summit
1x Blood Crypt
4x Snow-Covered Mountain
6x Mountain
3x Swamp
 
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Ferret

Moderator
Staff member
If any of the Goblins have Mountainwalk, I would recommend a Blood Moon. Very handy - especially these days when so many lands are non-basic...
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
If any of the Goblins have Mountainwalk, I would recommend a Blood Moon. Very handy - especially these days when so many lands are non-basic...
Definitely a valid approach. Tribal Game 15 was played all the way back in 2013, so I forget if Blood Moon was in my maybe pile for this one, but it might have been. I could easily build a stronger Goblins deck these days, and could probably have done so even back then. It came up in discussion here before, but there was a kind of awkward and unfortunate set of circumstances involved. We had a new member show up named "CanadianBrad" and the motivation to try a revival of the Tribal games with the new "Lowlander" deckbuilding restriction was partially motivated by conversations with CanadianBrad, who seemed interested in building and playing decks in these games at the time. He opined that our old "banned" trio of tribes (goblins, elves, and zombies) wouldn't be so overpowered with the new deckbuilding restriction and no one here really seemed to critically examine that. Based on what CanadianBrad had said, I got the impression that he was building a Goblins deck, so I used a Goblins list that I'd been testing for Legacy as the starting point for my own deck. I figured it was a big step down from the broken mess I'd piloted in Tribal Game 14, and that I'd probably kill a player or do a bunch of damage before forcing a board wipe and getting taken down in epic fashion. Instead, CanadianBrad took a single turn and then wordlessly disappeared from the CPA forever, and my goblins killed Spiderman, Turgy, Rokapoke, and Killer Joe on my fourth turn, leaving only Mooseman alive to take the full force of their assault on my fifth turn.

In hindsight, I it strikes me as silly and naive for someone to seriously think that my Goblins deck would have been less of an issue in a casual pod with an untested ruleset. It was possibly even more broken than my Constructs deck from Tribal Game 14. But at the time, I seriously didn't think it would be an issue. The excuse I'll go with is that I was mainly interested in Legacy tournament play at the time and wasn't thinking properly about what sorts of decks would be more fun and appropriate for this new experiment.

Still, I feel pretty dumb about that. I basically had to learn the same lesson twice, once in Tribal Game 14 and once in Tribal Game 15.
 
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