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.
