Tribal Tournament Discussion

[CanadianBrad]

I posted a three-card combo over in Card Strategies a little while ago. Since then, it has really become a discussion about the series of Tribal games that have been played here previously, some of the great things about it, and some of the problems that arose from it. Generally, though, there seems to be interest in the idea. So I propose that we as a group gather round and hammer out some framework of rules to reboot this idea.

This is a link to the Tribal Games administration(assumably the last attempt at this).

Questions:

1) Are there any new rules that should be added, or existing rules that should be amended/eliminated? I propose that Tribal decks should be limited to 60 cards, no more than 4 copies of any single card, and at least 50% of non-land cards within the deck must be creature cards matching your tribal subtype.

2) Should there be any amendments to the banned/restricted list? Keeping in mind, of course, that it would be completely and utterly ridiculous to suggest a card be banned, only to have it voted down by the group, and then turn around and play it.

3) Can anyone see a downside to a time restraint placed on a player's turn(required action within 14 days, or something to that effect)? I don't mean to single out and/or exclude Spiderman, or anyone else. I just figure that if you're too busy to play, you're too busy to play, and you should invite another game when your schedule opens up a little more.

4) Are there any tribes that should be eliminated, and why? It was mentioned earlier(I have not verified accuracy, and to my knowledge neither has the original poster) that goblins, zombies, and elves weren't permitted in the first go-round. Does anyone know why? These are fairly significant tribes to eliminate.

5) Are there any other issues that should be discussed?

 

[turgy22]

1) Don't care.
2) Don't care.
3) Don't care.
4) Don't care.
5) Thanks for asking. Okay, here's my deal: I don't like spending time building a deck for one game only to find that I'm drastically overpowered by someone else's deck. In general, I've found that tribal games tend to not be so competitive and multiplayer games tend to give everyone a good chance regardless of how weak their decks might be. Things didn't work out as such last game. Not that I'm bitter or anything; I just felt it was a big waste of my time. Ironically enough, I actually got a lot of enjoyment from the long delay caused by Spiderman. I'd definitely do that again.

Anyway, if you want another player, I'll play, but someone else needs to build the deck for me.

 

[CanadianBrad]

That's a pretty valid point. How much time/effort should someone put into building a deck?

I'm of the opinion that when you're playing Tribal, flavour is everything. Pick your tribe and your creatures, assign spells based on abilities that make sense with your tribe(why would merfolk be making use of Lava Axe?). Now, it's a bit of a mind-bender for me, simply because I've not played with you guys before and don't know what kind of a level you play at(reading about it, or being told "oh, we're casual", and playing games are different things). So I'll throw up a deck list in the near future that gives you guys an idea of what my tribal decks look like(and would encourage others to do the same). The other thing is that I like building decks, and they all hover around the same kind of mark competitively(pretty low, I'm in it for fun and really nothing else, I can win 1 game in 20 and be content). So I'll throw together a couple decks for a few different tribes, and maybe you'll like the look of them.

That's a solid point, though.

Another thing I'd like to ask: What about tribes from years past? Anyone have any interest in playing Kobolds, for example, or maybe Viashino? Do some of these older/oddball tribes hold any interest to anyone?

 

[Spiderman]

1) I think the "original" rules (from the link) are fine, with maybe taking out the Magic Online line, because i don't think anyone who's here plays Magic Online to care. I don't think there needs to be a deck size restriction, 4 copies of a card I think is understood as part of the Constructed rules but if it needs to be explicitly said that's fine.

2) I think the banned/list from the link is fine, I guess it's a matter of determining the general banned/restricted rules for the type of Constructed decks, whether it be Vintage or Legacy.

3) Don't care about this one as I was the main offender in the last game, but in general and in the past, if the person has been totally inactive and not on the forums at all, we've dropped them after a week? or so. If they've been here but have been posting about being busy, then it's been up to the players to decide what to do because it's been understood that forum games play at a "slower" pace in general.

4) I honestly can't remember why those tribes were excluded in the first place; maybe if I have time I'll go back and try to find the discussion. But right now, I think all tribes are fair game since it's been a while and then "retired" until maybe either a year later or five games (depending on how fast and often we play tribal again).

5) Infinite non-creature combos have been a problem in the past and I don't like playing against them as I think it violates the spirit of the format. I think player deaths should come from creature combat damage; if someone has an "infinite combo" with that (I guess always continually taking turns and attacking?), at least the creatures are dealing the damage. So I propose to make that a CPA House Rule.

I kinda agree with turgy22 that the last tribal was a waste of time after all of that time waiting , but I don't spend a lot of time on deckbuilding (which is why it took so long to get a deck together in the first place, I dreaded looking at all of the cards and making a deck), so I'll probably start by re-using some past decks with maybe some updates. So I don't care about the "oddball" tribes as long as they can meet the general Tribal rules of 1/3 creature cards, etc.

 

[Oversoul]

1. 50% is too high. The 1/3 used in the official versions of Tribal seems fine to me. I don't know all of the reasons that WotC chose 1/3 as the ratio, but it seems like the right neighborhood to force players to build decks around creature types without basically crippling deckbuilding altogether. Another factor is that several cool potential tribes don't have the minimum of eight (or seven with Mistform Ultimus) different creatures necesssary to serve as 50% of a 60-card deck. Case in point: there are five creatures (six with Mistform Ultimus) with the type "bringer." This was used by Spiderman for a tribal deck. And there are only four creatures (five with Mistform Ultimus) with the type "chimera." I used that for a tribal deck. There may have been other examples.

2. I have three proposals. The first is to use the Legacy banned list, which can be found here. It's not designed with multiplayer in mind, nor for a tribal format, but it does ban the most egregious cards for our purposes. As a point of reference, this would do essentially nothing to stop the wurm deck that I used to win Game 11 (I used Sol Ring as a one-of, but it wasn't important to the deck), but would invalidate the construct deck I used to win Game 14 (from memory, I think in that deck I had Tolarian Academy, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Sol Ring, Tinker, Skullclamp, and Mishra's Workshop). This proposal is very straightforward and I think it would probably be good enough.

Tribal Wars Legacy is now an officially sanctioned format in Magic Online, so the DCI has a banned list that is tribal-relevant. The banned list for Tribal Wars Legacy can be found here. Note that this banned list is for the Magic Online card pool. We could address that pretty easily by using the union of this list and the regular Legacy banned list. I'm not aware of any site that I can link to for such a list, but I can copy and past both lists into the same Notepad document and delete the duplicate entries in under a minute...

Amulet of Quoz
Arboria
Ancestral Recall
Balance
Bazaar of Baghdad
Black Lotus
Black Vise
Bronze Tablet
Channel
Chaos Orb
Circle of Solace
Contract from Below
Darkpact
Demonic Attorney
Demonic Consultation
Demonic Tutor
Earthcraft
Engineered Plague
Extinction
Falling Star
Fastbond
Flash
Frantic Search
Goblin Recruiter
Gush
Hermit Druid
Imperial Seal
Jeweled Bird
Library of Alexandria
Mana Crypt
Mana Drain
Mana Vault
Memory Jar
Mental Misstep
Mind Twist
Mind's Desire
Mishra's Workshop
Moat
Mox Emerald
Mox Jet
Mox Pearl
Mox Ruby
Mox Sapphire
Mystical Tutor
Necropotence
Oath of Druids
Peer Pressure
Rebirth
Shahrazad
Skullclamp
Sol Ring
Stasis
Strip Mine
Survival of the Fittest
Tempest Efreet
The Abyss
Time Vault
Time Walk
Timetwister
Timmerian Fiends
Tinker
Tolarian Academy
Tsabo's Decree
Umezawa's Jitte
Vampiric Tutor
Wheel of Fortune
Windfall
Worldgorger Dragon
Yawgmoth's Bargain
Yawgmoth's Will

My third proposal is the most comprehensive, but given the seeming lack of interest, it may be best just to go with one of the simpler ones. I'd be up for having us generate our own banned list, possibly with the Legacy and the Magic Online lists as a starting template. We could nominate cards we think are broke and that we'd rather not have in these tribal games, and then vote on them. But if only one or two people care much what cards are banned and most of us just want to play, that's probably a silly idea. I'll throw it out there anyway, in case I'm wrong about the lack of interest.

3. When Turgy linked to the huge delay in Game 14, with its subsequent cheesiness caused by my exploitative deckbuilding (exploitative because I used Mishra's Workshop and such, which had been legal under our rules, but had lain dormant up to that point), he apparently opened up a can of worms. But I interpreted it as intended to serve two purposes: to give the most extreme example of how long our forum games can take so that CanadianBrad would have a heads-up on that, and to tease Spiderman because letting him ever live down that delay just isn't fun. In my view, we all have lives and things that can get in the way of participating here, and delays are just a matter of course. In the past, almost every large delay included a note by the player responsible, either before or during the downtime, and often either saying something like "Sorry, but I'll definitely be able to get to this by next week" or "I don't know when I'll be able to come back and it could be several weeks, so drop me if you guys want." Spiderman's epic first turn in Game 14 was a bit of an exception, but there were mitigating circumstances: Spiderman is the most prolific member here and practically the only active administrator, so when he kept stating an intention to get a deck ready for our game, but couldn't actually get around to it, we turned it into a source of amusement. I doubt that it'll happen again (and if it does, I'll relish Turgy's commentary on it).

4. Goblins, elves, and zombies were banned for being too strong. They're way more powerful than other tribal decks. To even come close to leveling the playing field, we'd need a whole new banned list just for those three tribes. Goblins are so strong that they even have one of their creatures banned in Legacy tournaments. If you have doubts here or you're curious about what kind of thing I'm talking about, I'd suggest Googling for some old tournament reports with the "Food Chain Goblins" deck. My construct deck was obnoxious. Goblins, elves, and zombies can do that same sort of thing, but without Mishra's Workshop.

5. I wasn't the biggest fan of our agreement to exclude exploitation of infinite combos, but I can understand the reasoning behind it and I'm fine playing that way. Infinite combos are pretty cheesy after all, and it seems like there's a consensus that the games shouldn't be too cheesy. Mandating combat damage as the only source of damage is probably a deal-breaker for me, as that is way more limiting. I didn't particularly mind playing decks like my griffin deck, which had no damage source other than creatures of my tribe attacking, but I wouldn't want to be held to only doing that.

The comments about deckbuilding are interesting. Maybe I should build multiple decks, get some deckbuilding practice that's long overdue, and let Turgy choose one and then I'll choose another and that way I'd have two chances to use cheesy combos see my decks in action.

 

[Spiderman]

More comments:

2. Frankly, trying to come up with banned card is way too much thinking for me since my only exposure to tribal are these games. Since it seems "someone else" has come up with a banned list, that's fine for me (and us) to use. The only cards coming to my head are the ones that explicitly hose tribes, like Engineered Plague, and they already seem to be covered.

Other than that, my personal philosophy is allowing cards to be played but for the obvious "broken" ones, just "one-of", hence a Restricted list. Again, no one seems to come up with broken combo decks aside from Oversoul (jab!) and it looks like DF (who isn't around anymore) and Mooseman (who doesn't seem to be regular at it, so maybe he was just trying one out that time). If some type of restrictions are placed on player deaths, that might negate the need to police cards and or combos.

3.

to tease Spiderman because letting him ever live down that delay just isn't fun

Um, thanks?

4. I'm willing to have those tribes open but yeah, it does seem a specific banned/restricted list needs to be made for them and that might be too much effort than for what it's worth.

5.

Mandating combat damage as the only source of damage is probably a deal-breaker for me, as that is way more limiting

I'm curious as to what you view the spirit of "Tribal" is. Aside from putting x amt of cards of your "tribe" in a deck, what is your view on the whole point of the format?

To me, it's basically "tribes going to war" which means combat damage should be the primary source of damage. I think having one regular combat phase also helps to limit any "broken" combos aside from somehow being able to take turn after turn (which can be addressed also). Otherwise, you have have death by pinging, milling, or any of the alternate win conditions that seem to get around what tribal is all about. Except for poison, forgot about that one... that may be okay.

 

[Oversoul]

Other than that, my personal philosophy is allowing cards to be played but for the obvious "broken" ones, just "one-of", hence a Restricted list.

Keep in mind that the only sanctioned formats with restricted lists are Vintage and two of the Magic Online formats, one of which is a Vintage analog and one of which is played using a very specific cardpool. The only one of those applicable to the full cardpool of Magic is the Vintage list, and that one is meant for the most powerful tournament decks that exist. Mishra's Workshop is one card that I used that's not even restricted there and that is broken as hell. There are others. It's why I pushed for the Legacy banned list in the first place. If you're not using the broken cards available in Vintage anyway, you don't even notice the change.

Again, no one seems to come up with broken combo decks aside from Oversoul (jab!) and it looks like DF (who isn't around anymore) and Mooseman (who doesn't seem to be regular at it, so maybe he was just trying one out that time). If some type of restrictions are placed on player deaths, that might negate the need to police cards and or combos.

As a couple of examples, I used Epic Struggle in my wurm deck. I didn't actually win with it, but it was one of my possible win conditions. I don't know if you think that violates the spirit of tribal games, but I sure don't. As another example, Mythosx won with his wizard deck using ping damage, and no one thought anything of it at the time. There are other cases of players having ways to kill people that weren't creature attacks. I don't see this as a problem.

Oh, and you just reminded me of an anecdote. I used to play infrequently at this card shop in Renton called Shane's. I think the place is still around, but I make a point of not going to Renton, so I'm not sure. They occasionally did "Type Fun" tournaments that were sort of no-holds-barred (no cards banned or restricted). So of course, some players did use combo decks. I wasn't around for it, but for whatever reason, instead of just banning cards, they instituted a rule that players couldn't kill other players before Turn 5, or something to that effect. A friend of mine (he was here under the handle "unsanitarypigs" for a brief time) had been building a deck based around broken Crucible of Worlds interactions, and was annoyed at the stupid new rule they'd put in place, so he was going to design a new deck with more of a focus on control and less of a focus on combo. So I went through his cards and built him a new Crucible of Worlds deck. I don't remember all the details, but it had multiple copies of Fastbond, Yawgmoth's Bargain, Wheel of Fortune, Windfall, and other broken cards. It could, on Turn 1 or 2, hit an opponent for 19 life and lock the opponent out from being able to play anything. So that's what he did. He reduced his opponents to 1 life, drew most of his deck into his hand, gained a ton of life, locked opponents down until Turn 5, then finished them off. I don't remember if they changed that rule afterward, but I hope so.

I'm not saying that I'll find some loophole in a restriction like "player deaths must be due to damage from attacks by creatures." I'm saying that I think the problem in past games was probably mostly broken cards. I think alternatives like Epic Struggle and wizard ping damage are aspects of the game I'd want to keep around.

Oh, and in the case of my broken construct deck, were my non-combat damage sources really the problem? If I'd killed everyone with creature attacks (instead of killing two people with creature attacks and one person with Triskelion's ability) would it not have been broken anymore?

4. I'm willing to have those tribes open but yeah, it does seem a specific banned/restricted list needs to be made for them and that might be too much effort than for what it's worth.

I just think the differential overall power level between those three tribes and all other tribes is so vast that other tribes couldn't possibly compete with them. Sets printed since we decided on that rule have strengthened some tribes considerably and there might be a handful of other tribes for which it's no longer true. Faeries and angels come to mind. If we allow goblins, elves, and zombies, everyone's going to play one of those three, and the sillier tribes we used, like orcs and skeletons, wouldn't be viable. I think that banning those three tribes is good for diversity.

I'm curious as to what you view the spirit of "Tribal" is. Aside from putting x amt of cards of your "tribe" in a deck, what is your view on the whole point of the format?

I'd say it's playing cohesive decks centered around creatures of a certain type. I get the flavor idea that it's about tribes going to war, but there are lots of ways to win wars. Why not milling? Why not pinging? Wizards are crafty. If wizards go up against beasts in war, they're going to try to avoid meeting them head-on. They might try to organize some trickery that can attack their enemies' vulnerabilities instead.

But really, the point of these games for me was to have fun. If we allow broken cards and I'm the only one that plays them, that's not fun. Now it's true that, without any banned list, I could simply tone things down and play decks that aren't so degenerate. But then while I'm goofing off trying to play a crab deck, I get obliterated by Sneak Attacked avatars. If we have a banned list, at least everyone will know what's up.

 

[Mooseman]

Ok, I found the game with my one time at a combo: Mirari's wake for mana exceleration, Palinchron for repeated spell casting and brain freeze for the win.
Yes, it was a combo but a fragile one. I didn't have any other combos in decks, since I don't really like combos like that.
But I do like playing and seeing cleaver card combos (mine are usually by happenstance), 5, 6 or more card combos are great to see go off, but they don't have to be game ending, just game changing.
KJ plays a lot of control and getting him out of a multi-player game is always a challange.
I do think that the decks should be tribal flavored, not just a vehicle for an infinate loop combo win. But it doesn't have to be just combat.
Not sure how good an explination that is, but it how I believe it should happen.
Others oon this board are way better at explinations then me.

 

[CanadianBrad]

Some good information here. To add some of my thoughts:

1) Damage ONLY by creatures. I don't know that I agree with that. My proposal would be that a killing stroke has to be dealt by creature damage. For example, Player X has 3 life remaining, and Player Y casts Lightning Helix. Rather than killing Player X, that player is reduced to 1 life, which can only be dealt by a creature-type card. In this example, Player Y would still gain all 3 life that Lightning Helix would typically grant them(so spells have full effects, essentially, aside from not being able to kill players, although they can still deal damage). Alternately, a rule preventing players from killing an opponent prior to Turn X is a reasonable idea.

2) Infinite combos should be eliminated(although I don't feel I can speak to making them part of CPA House Rules, being so new to the community). There is an element of cheese to them that may(or may not) have a home in serious competitive play, but I don't think they belong in casual, fun-geared type matches.

3) The "flavour" of Tribal decks. I think this means different things to different people, and I think one would just be trying to incite an argument by trying to hold everyone to a heavily-structured set of rules. For example, my personal beliefs tell me that a Tribal deck should not only be made up of creatures of the same tribe(I'm going to use vampires as an example), but related spells and, potentially, related creatures of a different tribe. So my black/red vampire tribal deck may contain Grandmother Sengir, despite the fact that she falls outside the vampire tribe, because the association is there. On the same wavelength, I'm inclined to include enchantments like Exquisite Blood or equipment like Blade of the Bloodchief, because I think it can generally be agreed that these have a "vampire-esque" vibe and effect. By the same token, I wouldn't include cards like Dwarven Landslide or Wooden Stake, because they are either anti-vampire cards, or it would be a stretch to associate it with vampiric culture. Basically, I ask myself "How would a (insert tribe here) be associated with, and make use of, a (card type) like (specific card)?", and feel that I should be able to justify each card in my deck as relating to my tribe. However, I realize 1) others have different opinions, and 2) it would be a huge amount of work to come up with a system to institute a rule like that. Therefore, I think that just going with X% of tribal creatures per deck is the best way to go(and I'm not opposed to 1/3 of deck total. To be clear, I meant 50% of cards remaining after land cards, but I was making that assumption off of a 60-card deck).

4) There's a solid point regarding different play-styles and win-conditions. I feel that in a tournament-type environment, a scoring system should be used. 0 points for a loss, obviously. 1 point each for a draw, 1 point for a win using a win condition other than tribal creature damage to finish an opponent(decking an opponent, life-gain win-cons like Test of Endurance/Felidar Sovereign, etc.), and 2 points for a win resulting from opponent killed by tribal creature damage. While I feel that Tribal type play should restrict deck building(and subsequently strategy, to a degree) I don't feel that it should force everyone to play by the same strategy. If you're a control player or a mill-type player, perhaps the challenge now becomes building a deck allowing you to do that within the Tribal restrictions.

Some thoughts. I'll slap some more up later. Keep in mind that I'm not trying to bind anyone to any of these, this is just the way I see things, and I'd be interested to hear some feedback.

 

[Killer Joe]

It's rare that I build a tribal deck because, well, ya know, you usually need CREATURES and that's not my thing, usually.

How about none of the rules above and replace them with this concept: Tribal-Commander

 

[CanadianBrad]

Care to elaborate, Joe? I'm not really familiar with Commander rules, and how you might tweak them.

 

[Killer Joe]

Oh, sure, only copy of any one card with a minimum deck size of 100 cards. The detailed rules are here:
Commander Rules

 

[CanadianBrad]

Oh, sure, only copy of any one card with a minimum deck size of 100 cards. The detailed rules are here:
Commander Rules

Just with a further restriction of 1/3 of a tribe? The only problem that I potentially see there is that there's probably a lesser number of tribes that can field 33 different creatures. Vampires, zombies, elves, soldiers, they can all hack it, but there's likely several other lesser tribes that probably can't manage that. It's a cool idea, though. Maybe if we pared down the deck size.

 

[Oversoul]

1/3 of a 60-card deck is 20 cards, not 33. I explained this in one of my posts, but it was a long post. With the 1/3 rule, 20 slots in a 60-card deck have to go to creatures of the chosen tribe. One of my tribes, chimeras, only has four different cards: Iron-Heart Chimera, Brass-Talon Chimera, Tin-Wing Chimera, and Lead-Belly Chimera. So even with four each of those creatures, that's only 16 slots. But there's actually another chimera: Mistform Ultimus. It has a ruling that states that the printed "illusion" on the card is just for flavor and that, even though there wouldn't be room to print all of them, the cards actually is every creature type. Because of that, I was able to fill 20 slots, which is 1/3 of 60, and play a chimera deck. The vast majority of creature types have had more cards printed than chimeras, and can fulfill the requirement for tribal games.

 

[CanadianBrad]

1/3 of a 60-card deck is 20 cards, not 33. I explained this in one of my posts, but it was a long post. With the 1/3 rule, 20 slots in a 60-card deck have to go to creatures of the chosen tribe. One of my tribes, chimeras, only has four different cards: Iron-Heart Chimera, Brass-Talon Chimera, Tin-Wing Chimera, and Lead-Belly Chimera. So even with four each of those creatures, that's only 16 slots. But there's actually another chimera: Mistform Ultimus. It has a ruling that states that the printed "illusion" on the card is just for flavor and that, even though there wouldn't be room to print all of them, the cards actually is every creature type. Because of that, I was able to fill 20 slots, which is 1/3 of 60, and play a chimera deck. The vast majority of creature types have had more cards printed than chimeras, and can fulfill the requirement for tribal games.

We appear to be on different wave-lengths. Originally, I suggested that decks should be limited to 60 cards, and 50% of non-land cards should be tribal creatures. I think you missed the "of non-land cards" and suggested 1/3 of deck total(and the 2 would likely be around the same number.

In that last post, I was commenting on Joe's idea of Tribal-Commander, and how it might be difficult with a lot of tribes if we made it 1/3 tribal creature cards in a 100-card deck(hence 33), especially as I'm interpreting the rules to say that you cannot have multiples in a Commander-legal deck, except for basic lands. By the way, thanks for that link, Joe.

What I originally suggested(50% of non-land cards in a 60-card deck) works out closely to your original suggestion(1/3 of a deck). In a 60-card deck, that works out to 20 cards in your concept, and, given an average of 18-24 lands, 18-21 creatures in my concept. Joe's idea is really interesting because it deletes the repetition, but I think that Tribal suffers from that as so many of the tribes are smaller.

 

[turgy22]

Some thoughts:

1. I am personally opposed to restrictions on damage sources, time to kill, etc. Card and deckbuilding restrictions, I'm cool with, but I don't the game rules should be any different than any other game. It doesn't make any sense for a Wizard or a Wall deck to be forced to win through combat damage. Also, if you say that you can't kill anyone before a certain turn, some overs-hole is going to make a deck to either lock everyone down just before that limit or create a combo deck timed to go off right on that turn.

2. CanadianBrad: Just so you know, KillerJoe's name isn't actually Joe. It's Mark. From now on, you should only refer to him as YellowJacket so as to avoid any confusion.

3. Here's an idea. What if we combined the ideas behind Tribal and Commander? I think we should stick with 60 card decks (1/3 of which would be tribal creatures), but make a rule that the rest of the non-land cards in the deck can only be one-offs. That way, we don't squeeze out any barely-qualifying tribes and also help prevent decks from getting too far away from their tribes.

 

[CanadianBrad]

Some thoughts:

1. I am personally opposed to restrictions on damage sources, time to kill, etc. Card and deckbuilding restrictions, I'm cool with, but I don't the game rules should be any different than any other game. It doesn't make any sense for a Wizard or a Wall deck to be forced to win through combat damage. Also, if you say that you can't kill anyone before a certain turn, some overs-hole is going to make a deck to either lock everyone down just before that limit or create a combo deck timed to go off right on that turn.

2. CanadianBrad: Just so you know, KillerJoe's name isn't actually Joe. It's Mark. From now on, you should only refer to him as YellowJacket so as to avoid any confusion.

3. Here's an idea. What if we combined the ideas behind Tribal and Commander? I think we should stick with 60 card decks (1/3 of which would be tribal creatures), but make a rule that the rest of the non-land cards in the deck can only be one-offs. That way, we don't squeeze out any barely-qualifying tribes and also help prevent decks from getting too far away from their tribes.

Turgy:

1) There's some merit to that(I always forget about those who play Wall decks for some reason - I've never built one). I'm basically trying to come up with something to keep the focus on Tribal, and not building a combo deck with some pesky creatures serving as deck-filler. Some more discussion should be had.

2) That's important information. An Aspirin, please?

3) This is making a lot of sense to me. Anyone else want to chime in on that?

 

[Oversoul]

Since Mistform Ultimus, Lorwyn came out with the "changeling" mechanic, which seems very similar. Mistform Ultimus has never been retroactively given "changeling" even though the wording in his text box is very similar to the wording for the changeling mechanic. Rule 702.70 indicates that even outside the game, these cards are considered to be every creature type, which would seem to indicate that they could be used to fill tribal requirements, just as was done in our games with Mistform Ultimus. Perhaps someone with Magic Online experience can verify that this is true in Magic Online's tribal formats...

I did a quick perusal using a Mistform Ultimus Watch article from last year. Without using "changeling" creatures, but still using Mistform Ultimus, tribes that have fewer than four normal members would be ineligible for tribal games, as they'd be unable to fill 16 non-Ultimus slots. Of course, if changelings are employed, all tribes are legal, as there are more than five creatures with "changeling." I found these creature types with three or fewer (non-Ultimus, non-changeling) members:

Anteaters, Assembly-Workers, Badgers, Beebles, Brushwaggs, Camels, Dreadnoughts, Eyes, Ferrets, Flagbearers, Gremlins, Harpies, Hippogriffs, Hippos, Hyenas, Lammasu, Masticores, Mongooses, Nautiluses, Octopuses, Orggs, Ouphes, Oysters, Phelddagrifs, Riggers, Satyrs, Sheep, Sirens, Spawn, Sponges, Squid, Starfish, Weirds, Whales, Wombats.

Some of those consist of only one creature. How lonely. In addition, some tribes have zero members (again, ignoring Mistform Ultimus and changeling cards). These creature types are not on any creatures, but are used by cards for other purposes. In almost all cases (for an exception, see Boldwyr Intimidator), these creature types are assigned to tokens generated by cards. Saprolings are the most prolific example of this. Zero-member tribes are:

Blinkmoths, Camarids, Caribou, Citizens, Cowards, Deserters, Germs, Graveborn, Orbs, Pentavites, Pests, Pinchers, Prisms, Reflections, Sands, Saprolings, Serfs, Splinters, Survivors, Tetravites, Triskelavites.

I didn't bother to hunt down the most recent list of creature types and I wasn't necessarily thorough. But that should be mostly accurate.

We appear to be on different wave-lengths. Originally, I suggested that decks should be limited to 60 cards, and 50% of non-land cards should be tribal creatures. I think you missed the "of non-land cards" and suggested 1/3 of deck total(and the 2 would likely be around the same number.

The 1/3 rule came from Magic Online's official tribal formats, currently Tribal Wars Standard and Tribal Wars Legacy (there used to be a Tribal Wars Classic, but I guess it was replaced by Tribal Wars Legacy). Of course, we don't have to abide by any of that if we don't want to, but I think it was a good benchmark. Some people did occasionally build decks with more than 1/3 of the cards being creatures of the tribe (I think I did this once, but I'm not going to check at the moment), but usually that wasn't the case. There's no need to base it on non-land cards, which would be less consistent. I don't know how it would play out for casual games, but I can think of some tournament decks that were pretty extreme about land count. In the past "43-Land," "9-Land Stompy," "2-Land Belcher," and "1-Land Belcher" were all archetypes. And there are probably others that I'm not remembering right now.

some overs-hole is going to make a deck

I see what you did there.

CanadianBrad: Just so you know, KillerJoe's name isn't actually Joe. It's Mark. From now on, you should only refer to him as YellowJacket so as to avoid any confusion.

But does he still remember the password for his YellowJacket account?

Here's an idea. What if we combined the ideas behind Tribal and Commander? I think we should stick with 60 card decks (1/3 of which would be tribal creatures), but make a rule that the rest of the non-land cards in the deck can only be one-offs. That way, we don't squeeze out any barely-qualifying tribes and also help prevent decks from getting too far away from their tribes.

I actually like this, at least as my first reaction. The number of viable tribes would go way down, but that's not a dealbreaker, right?

 

[CanadianBrad]

Brad's Seven Tribal-Commander Commandments

1) Thou shalt build a deck of a fixed 60 cards.
2) Thou shalt not have any duplicates aside from basic land cards.
3) Thou shalt have a Legendary Commander, of the chosen Tribal subtype.
4) Thou shalt have a minimum of 20 creature cards of a matching "Tribal" subtype.
5) Thou shalt not play infinite combos.
6) Thou shalt follow the Vintage banned and restricted list.
7) Thou shalt follow the mana colour identity requirement laid out in the Commander rules.

Feel free to amend. I'm not God, after all.

Questions:
Are we requiring the Commander to be of the "Tribe?" This makes sense to me, but perhaps others have different opinions? Are we allowing additional creature cards outside of the tribal subtype, once the tribe requirement is fulfilled, or are we stipulating that all creatures within the deck must come from the tribal subtype?

And we'll leave restrictions on damage-dealing/killing blows/alternate win-cons alone, and not modify them at all?

I feel that we may be close to a consensus.

 

[Oversoul]

6) Thou shalt follow the Vintage banned and restricted list.

Not really applicable to Highlander formats. The "restricted" part of the Vintage restricted list refers to only allowing one copy of a card. In Highlander (Commander is a variant of Highlander), all cards other than basic lands are already "restricted." The Vintage banned list consists entirely of ante cards (banned because they say to remove them before playing if not playing for ante, which would allow for cheesy shenanigans), cards that are tossed onto the field of play (banned because they're impractical for gameplay on multiple levels), and sorceries from Arabian Nights illustrated by Kaja Foglio (banned because of an urban legend). These cards are banned in all sanctioned Magic formats, not just Vintage. I'd suggest that we also have a banned list that includes power-level bans and not just bans that raise mechanical issues. Legacy would work. Or perhaps the "official" banned list for Commander?

And yeah, I think that if we do mix tribal and commander, the commander should have to be a member of the tribe. As with our previous foray into tribal highlander, I think elves, goblins, and zombies are fine there.

60 cards should be the minimum, but if people want to build bigger decks while maintaining, as a minimum, the 1/3 ratio, then I say let them. Mythosx did that in the early tribal games with a gigantic sliver deck and it was amusing.