Feedback Thread: Crafting a Tribal Lowlander Format

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
My latest Comboist Manifesto endeavor is probably going to show up on the front page at some point. But I've also written another new article, my first non-Comboist article in a long time. I wanted to keep it separate from those articles because they're about my ideas on Magic theory, combo decks, my gameplay experience with combos, etc. But this article is about a format.

I'm not earnestly trying to resurrect Tribal games here at the CPA. We're probably on the cusp of having enough people actively playing forum games to make it work, but actually assembling Constructed decks for a unique format can be a bit of a chore. So the article is really more my analysis of how the format could/should be implemented somewhere, at some point. Anyway, these are my thoughts on the matter. Also, I know it's too long again. Really got to cut myself off at some point...
 

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
Yes, it takes me a while to respond to articles, but...…. I like the idea....
Banning tribes seems a bit drastic, but making tribe tiers could alleviate mismatches.
Say top tier is goblins, elves, slivers, etc
next is Eldrazi, Merfolk, Vampires, etc…..
Bottom tier is all the rest, like treefolk, druids, tec.....
Thus we could play games here defined by their tier.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Yes, it takes me a while to respond to articles, but...…. I like the idea....
Banning tribes seems a bit drastic, but making tribe tiers could alleviate mismatches.
Say top tier is goblins, elves, slivers, etc
next is Eldrazi, Merfolk, Vampires, etc…..
Bottom tier is all the rest, like treefolk, druids, tec.....
Thus we could play games here defined by their tier.
I actually really like this conceptually. I'm tentatively for it, but I do expect that it wouldn't work as smoothly as if we had a bit of a larger crowd that was like a weekly playgroup or something. There aren't very many of us active here and our forum games take a long time, so improvements based on the results of games would be slow. If some jerk kills everyone at the table with an overpowered Constructs deck in a setting where people are playing all the time, then it's probably an unimportant one-off thing and maybe the group changes the rules based on it or maybe they just move on. But if it's the game everyone was waiting a year to finish and it ends that way, it's a much bigger disappointment. Hypothetically, of course. It's just an example I thought of... :oops:

But as I described in the article, we could be more proactive about this. People with an interest in the format could do their own testing and present their findings to "the council" or whatever we'd call it. Having to arrange tribes into tiers would be another layer, but not an overly burdensome one, I think. I'd be up for this. How many tiers would be wise? I think there's enough unexplored territory that trying to be too granular would be premature, but I also think we've seen enough to start sorting tribes into a few tiers, probably four. Maybe five. I'll try to come up with a fleshed-out tier list (which will be wrong of course without testing, but it could serve as a start). I'm thinking of trying to go for five tiers to start with. First one would be small and exclusive, just the best of the best. Second one would be powerful with lots of options and lots of synergies, including some borderline-broken individual cards. Third one would be tribes with considerable depth spanning many years of set releases, but without the easily accessible power of the higher tiers. Fourth one would have tribes that display some synergies but are currently deficient in some way. Fifth one would be the leftovers, the tribes that are either too small or too unsupported to be effective competition for the others. Or maybe I'm getting ahead of myself and five is too many tiers to start with?

What do you think of my proposed individual card bannings? It's been a while since I wrote the article and I'd probably make some revisions, but giving it a quick look now, I think it's a reasonable start.

No Fish! I am sick and tired of playing Fish!
 

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
Sounds like a start. At least Spidey and I will just find some decks off the interweb and modify them to fit the format, there should be some interesting tribal decks.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Mooseman said:
Yes, it takes me a while to respond to articles...
Like 6 months? :eek: :p Oh wait, it's getting to be that long for me to post Oversoul's next article... :rolleyes:

Oversoul said:
People with an interest in the format could do their own testing...
That would have to be fleshed out further...

Mooseman said:
At least Spidey and I will just find some decks off the interweb...
True dat.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
So this topic has been quiet, but I wanted to offer a little update. I've been chipping away at a kind of primer based on the commentary provided by Mooseman in this thread. It's nearly finished. This thing is huge. I've organized every single creature type into eight tentative Tribal tiers and written a blurb for almost all of them (still need to cover the highest tier, the one with the tribes we banned in our old Tribal games here at the CPA). My goal was to form a robust starting point so that anyone at the CPA who is interested in Tribal can have a reference to discuss in formulating a casual Tribal format. I don't really want to maintain a format by myself, but I have the notion that getting started is the part that takes a lot of work. So if I provide a starting point, other people can comb through it and turn it into something better. My qualm with all of this is that the document is so monstrous. Too big for a frontpage article even if I wanted to do another one on the subject. Anyway, I'll post it in the Casual Decks forum soonish. If you're interested in the topic at all, feel free to skip to whichever aspects you're interested in and to comment on those aspects. I imagine reading through the whole thing at once would be too much to ask of people. But it's all just fodder for discussion...
 
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