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By: AJ_Impy, AJ Richardson
Oct 13 2007 4:57pm
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A Few New Blue Crews: The Art of Tribal Wars

Welcome, honourable readers, as we reach into the well of tribal possibilities and find some interesting blue things swimming around in the depths. When the Human tribe was introduced with Mirrodin, it marked a move by Wizards to move away from giving Blue races that had no right setting foot on land. Merfolk, last seen in Odyssey with Ambassador Laquatus, were ostracised until Time Spiral. Cephalids had their last hurrah with Callous Oppressor in Onslaught and have yet to re-emerge. Less advanced than these sentient races, we have crustaceans and piscines of various kinds, usually labelled as beasts, showing up here and there, most recently the reprint of Dandan.

Now you sea them, now you don't.
Merfolk of the Pearl Trident
Cephalid Inkshrouder
Dandan

With Merfolk restored to prominence and never really lacking in members, we turn to the lesser creatures and more obscure options. One tribe in particular was created in Urza's block to join the fight in Invasion, but was only granted its own type in Xth edition. Most of its representatives were parts of larger cycles or Ships, and as such had little hope of appearing in Tribal form when Ghost Ship and Pirate Ship showed up in Time Spiral as a Spirit and Human Pirate respectively. Now, however, they've retroactively been granted a race of their own, and will be all set when the Update hits.

This is the Voice of the Metathran

Metathran Aerostat
Metathran Transport
Living Airship
Metathran Zombie
Stormscape Battlemage
Thrantastic

About the Thran

4 Living Airship
4 Metathran Aerostat
4 Metathran Transport
4 Metathran Zombie
4 Sky Weaver
4 Stormscape Battlemage

Feeling blue?

4 Pyroblast
4 Jaya Ballard, Task Mage

Metamana

4 Darksteel Ingot
8 Island
4 Watery Grave
4 Blood Crypt
4 Steam Vents
4 Mirrodin's Core

Here we have an interesting little deck with decent game both offensively and defensively. On defence, it can use the Zombie and Living Airship to hold the opposing forces at bay, with Metathran Aerostat able to do a decent impression of Fleeting Image as long as you have a creature in hand. Stormscape Battlemage does double duty as a Venerable Monk or Dakmor Lancer as the situation warrants, leading into our removal suite, the star of which is Metathran Transport. Being blue is not a nice thing to be with Pyroblast and Jaya Ballard, Task Mage around to act as Izzet-flavored Terminates, especially as Jaya can be cheated into play by the Aerostat at end of turn. The Transport, although low powered, provides us with a nice source of unblockability to round out our suite of flyers, working alongside Jaya to give us late-game reach options. Sky Weaver is in as a useful early drop and to get the most out of stacking on the Aerostat: One useful little trick is to stack the Aerostat's ability with itself using the control key, and thus drop as many creatures from your hand as you have the mana to do.

The strength of the deck is versatility: You can hold back the horde or remove the big targets, counter counters and have a solid amount of evasion. Weaknesses include a relatively low power to cost and toughness, vulnerability to Pyroclasm and needing to get your splash colors to fully exploit your abilities.

We're going to need a bigger boat

Now we turn our attention beneath the waves. Eels and Mantas have been consolidated into Fish, alongside Dandan. Leaving aside Skyreach Manta for the monoblue seas, we find ourselves with a bit of a quandry. Our selection of creatures has two glaring weaknesses: Low toughness and Islandhome. Counterbalancing this, we generally have a very strong power to cost ratio, a tribe of glass cannons and walls. Now, is there any card we can think of to overcome these problems?

Surestrike Trident
Something Fishy

Catch of the day

4 Coral Eel
4 Dandan
4 Slipstream Eel
4 Wormfang Behemoth
4 Wormfang Manta

Fishing Gear

2 Stifle
4 Vedalken Plotter
4 Surestrike Trident
4 Piracy Charm
2 Spin into Myth
24 Island

First strike helps with our toughness issue, and being able to deal damage without attacking is perfect for a 6/6 or 4/1 wall. That said, turn two Dandan turn three Vedalken Plotter can be tricky to deal with, especially if you can support it with Piracy Charm and Spin into Myth to keep the clock ticking. Without much in the way of evasion your tridents are all-important: If you can jam up the board and start pinging away, there's little they can do. The Stifles are in there for the Wormfang fish: Getting a Wormfang Manta into play and stopping its mini-Eater of Days impression is expensive, but potentially profitable as that is your only built-in evasion, so an extra turn kicker comes in handy.

Don't forget to use every option of your charms as the situation dictates: With your plotters ensuring Islandhome isn't a problem, islandwalk gives you more of that all-important reach. If they're in topdeck mode, the discard option during their draw step after fatesealing away their biggest threat is an excellent way to slow them down. Your path to victory lies with your 5/5s and 6/6s, else with the trident. The main weaknesses have been discussed at length: Brace yourself for Tremor and Nausea effects, and pray your opponent isn't running either Crovax.

Insert promiscuous dirty joke here

Staying submerged, we turn from the Piscines to the Crustaceans. Where fish had a high power but low toughness, here we have the opposite problem, with nearly every crab at higher toughness to power. Also, we need to rely on Mistform Ultimus: One last hurrah for the granddaddy of all changelings before the other nineteen hit the online world. One of our most effective tools, Wormfang Crab, is also the riskiest, giving our opponent the ability to Oblivion Ring anything else he or she sees fit, which means we need to be cautious in playing it. On the advantage side, in Riptide Crab and Horseshoe Crab we have a pair with vigilance or the ability to untap, which we can make good use of. Finally, Chromeshell Crab is a useful swap effect, which makes running Bronze Bombshell an alluring possibility.

Riptide Crab
Wormfang Crab
Chromeshell Crab
Horseshoe Crab

Craaab People!

Taste like Crab

4 Wormfang Crab
4 Chromeshell Crab
4 Horseshoe Crab
4 Riptide Crab

Rock Pool

4 Adarkar Wastes
16 Island
4 Plains

Shell Crackers

4 Mistform Ultimus
4 Viridian Longbow
4 Loxodon Warhammer
4 Bronze Bombshell
4 Erratic Mutation

The support cards play to our strengths and shore up our weaknesses: Loxodon Warhammer keeps our power up in a useful range, especially on our unblockable wormfangs, whereas Viridian Longbow is good on a Riptide and lethal on a Horseshoe. Erratic Mutation does double duty as removal and pump spell: With our curve topping at five, it goes very nicely on the Wormfang as a finisher. The deck is weak against flyers and can take a while to get going against rush decks, but the 1/3s can hold the line relatively well. The tribe is fairly robust against pyroclasm-level removal and the Wormfang lends a degree of wrath insurance.

The surface world contains nothing I cannot take.

Merfolk. An old-school iconic brought back to a new prominence, with a fairly well defined generic build centred around Lord of Atlantis and aggro, killing you quickly and effectively with islandwalking swimmers. With the creature type update, in conjunction with recent additions in Masters Edition and Xth, another merfolk path opens up: Take all your stuff and beat you up with it. No longer just the domain of Wizards, humans and the occasional crab, we have in relatively quick succession Rootwater Matriarch, Seasinger and, with the creature type update, Empress Galina, all ready to take your carefully-crafted deck and beat you over the head with it. Now, each thief has a prerequisite: one only takes creatures in the water, one only takes unique creatures, and one only takes creatures already enchanted. Fortunately, blue has in its arsenal a number of fun little cards to let us do that to our heart's content, and some of them are already Merfolk.

Reef Shaman
Leyline of Singularity
Fool
What's yours is mine

Filching Fishfolk

4 Empress Galina
4 Merfolk Looter
4 Reef Shaman
4 Rootwater Matriarch
4 Seasinger
4 Tidal Courier

Pelagic Trickey

24 Island
4 Leyline of Singularity
4 Shimmering Wings
4 Fool's Demise

In testing this deck, it was irksome to frequently flip up the Empress with Tidal Courier: When the update takes place, she goes to hand, prior, however, she's still typeless and goes to the bottom of the library. The main strategy of the deck involves three seperate combos, Leyline of Singularity with Galina, Shimmering Wings and Fool's Demise with Rootwater Matriarch and Reef Shaman with Seasinger. Tidal Courier and Merfolk Looter are there to dig for combo merfolk. The ideal situation is a game state where you can control just about any creature your opponent attempts to play and smash their face with them. This is somewhat vulnerable to disruption, although your auras are removal resistant, and Fool's Demise gives you mileage against wrath effects. The weakness of the deck is the extremely low power and toughness of your creatures: Your opponent had better have something worth nicking, because your power goes from 0-2 and your toughness from 1-3. The deck is fairly resilient: Demise on a Courier chump blocker will be digging through your deck like there's no tomorrow or holding off much better creatures until they can be stolen. Get control and you win, lose it and you've got problems.

That about wraps it up for this article. I have noticed on various message boards that some people fear the changes with Lorwyn, specifically the creature type update and the changelings, will take some of the fun out of the format. My personal opinion is that the fun of Tribal comes from moulding your deck around your chosen tribe, to make a fun and innovative whole which is capable of winning, out of such disparate parts. Having a greater toolbox enables greater innovation and flexibility: Being able to use the changelings as tribal filler means that every single tribe online is doable where they weren't before.

There are a lot more humans with the update, and given how many there were initially we do have quite a gorilla in the playground. However, Humans will never get the love garnished upon elves, goblins, merfolk or even dragons. There is only one card in the whole of Magic with 'Human' not as part of a typeline, namely Homura, Human Ascendant. Humans have the advantage of numbers,  but the synergies we can get with them are ones of our own devising, modular rather than linear. They draw their strength from a vast array of options, but at the end of the day there are only sixty cards in a tuned deck, and of all the potential humans, you will face few enough to count on the fingers of your hands. Balancing this out, we no longer have swathes of creatures with no Tribal identity unusable in the format, and to me, that is a fair trade. The proof wil come a few months down the road: Will we still have people willing to try to build interesting and innovative tribal decks? I strongly believe that we will. The format has been shaken up, but if anything, it is fresher than ever. 

5 Comments

Comment by mtgotraders at Wed, 10/17/2007 - 22:21
mtgotraders's picture

I personally highly enjoyed this article and hope I can play a few tribal matches myself while the account limits are down.

by AJ_Impy at Tue, 10/16/2007 - 07:30
AJ_Impy's picture

Remarkably few comments this time. Anyone?

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