Yes, thanks for the game! I know that the Strip Mine/Crucible combo is an issue, but I think that there are times where it can come in handy. There are lot's of cards like Gaea's Cradle, Serra Sanctum, etc. that can really cause problems, and being able to have answers to them just sort of fell into place after trying to think of ways to continue making Ob Nixilis large. I'm not a proponent of crushing people's mana bases, and this deck can't completely abuse it like an Azusa deck can.
The funny part was that Crucible was dealt with pretty quickly in this game, so it didn't end up mattering anyways!
Thank you for publishing our game sir. that was quite the interesting read. even if i was there for the entire thing. Grimgrin FTW >.> That was quite fun, and of course, the strip mine Crucible is a hated combo piece. We play mainly for casual games, and thus combos like that are frowned upon (no offense to you sir). again i'd like to thank you for the game and the free publicity. even tho i'm aware mine and trey's decks aren't eh most amazing things in the world.
perhaps I don't, but tribal is tied for my fav format with Prism.. what I like is creativity, which i dont see by playing the typical elf/gobos or fitting 20 creatures into a tournament/lock-down combo
I am a big fan of tribal, used to be there every week during the days shard ran it still, if my schedule matched up i'd consider showing though my collection is pauper so that puts a slight power disadvantage lol
The SFM/blade package is a necessary counterweight to the other more abusive engines in the format, like 12-post, Seismic Assault / Loam, and Punishing Grove. Those can just as easily be tacked on to a variety of tribes and certainly appear to be having more success in getting Top 4's than creature aggro is lately. Punishing Grove is particularly offensive, as creature decks need graveyard hate to really fight it effectively.
The SFM package is the creature deck's way of having some game against those decks. It puts a quick clock on 12-post player without overextending into sweepers or mindlessly ramming into walls every turn. It gives the relevant protection to a key creature against the board control engines. The only other way aggro decks in a legacy format typically fight those strategies is with Wasteland/Port, and that's largely neutered as a strategy because of the (very reasonable) banning of Vial in these events.
I've played legacy zoo in SCG Opens, it is a "fair" deck that has to be constructed to attack a million different decks doing a million different "unfair" things, many of which are completely legal and popular in tribal wars. I even have the benefit of a SB there, and it's still frustrating sometimes. In legacy tribal wars, creature aggro is "fair". Everyone's deck has 20 creatures, everyone should be equipped to fight off that angle of attack, unlike some others. Let's not strip the fair decks of the one really good thing they have going against all the busted ones.
I think bans are in general band-aids. On a lethal incurable wound. This is the essential problem. Will spikes ruin the game every chance they get? yes. Can we stop them? no. If you enjoy the format, play it. Either use crutches and be part of the problem or don't and don't be. Very simple. Not a solution of course because there is none. But not something to lose sleep over either.
This isn't about judging people for whatever values they may or may not hold. This is about accepting that the format, like commander is as good or as bad as its community wants it to be.
Mainly have fun. And win tix if available. Of course.
I agree about SFM not being banned. I am not advocating for bans because I find that most ban gripes are because of bad tastes left in mouths and banning "problems" instead of trying to make your deck not lose to them is easy...All I am saying is that I am admitting that it is kind of a deck building crutch for me to actually win (I am a Spike), but I like being in the spirit and want to discover more (Bacause I am kind of a Johnny too).
I think SFM provides an interesting card in the format...Batterskull and the Swords are just SOOOOOOo good that people don't want to look to anything else. I could also see banning them...make people get Tatsumasa or something...
Indeed. My own morphological signature used to be a) include at least two Reveillarks in every deck, and or b) use a lot of singletons and try to work a tool box into the deck even if it is awkward and unruly at best. Now I am not so sure what it is. Once my play test partners (mainly AJ) made me aware of this I tried to break that pattern.
Now, for the rest of your post: I like that you found Ayanam1 (the "1" is supposed to be a "i" btw)'s dredge deck awesome. That's the spirit. You meet a Tribal dredge deck once, and that's awesome. The problem would arise if we started to see a dredge deck every single week (especialy from the same player). That would become annoying at some point. Same for Aluren: it was just a one-time wonder, therefore it's cool. (Ok, we have broad enough shoulders to see Aluren even a few times more than once per year, actually).
What might be annoying to some players about the Stoneforge package is that 1. it's not about building a Stoneforge deck, it's something you cram into every deck; and 2. it's being done every week, often more that once per week.
Hey, you're currently among the Top 16. You just have to keep it like that for 46 more weeks. :)
I wouldn't demonize the Stoneforge in Tribal. They banned her in Standard because they aimed to shut down the original Caw-Blade quickly for the last few weeks of legality. And they couldn't just kill all the blades. But in Tribal, the power of the Stoneforge is different. You can deal with her as you deal with all the utility creatures that impact the board. A Royal Assassin, if left unattended, may win the games on his own. Nobody ever cared for that.
Stoneforge fetching everything but the blades, even Batterskull, just acts as a tutor and an accelerator mainly. Batterskull is strong but doesn't destabilize the board. The blades do. What Stoneforge does is giving you a way to put 2-3 blades in the deck and always choose the most relevant one depending on the opponent colors. And the right blade can turn a creature into an unstoppable, unremovable clock with free disruption or removal effects.
After the tutoring is done, the presence of the Stoneforge on the board is just useful against permission decks, otherwise is just a 1 mana discount on the blades.
In Standard the blades still win games: the decks just pack 4-6 of them. Of course, tribal decks don't have room for that. Modern decks use Steelshaper's Gift for the tutoring. Tribal decks could do that too, if Stoneforge was banned. Or even better, Enlightened Tutor. What I'm saying is that banning Stoneforge wouldn't prevent Tribal player to use blades, and to pick the right one when needed. Banning the blades (and Batterskull if you want), would allow the Stoneforge to fetch creative stuff for creative equipment interactions, which right now aren't even considered. Not that I would advocate this banning, but if I had to choose, I would keep the Stoneforge over the blades any day.
I have been wanting to test this format. Plus, I like playing with you experienced guys because you actually have insight as to what tribes can do!!
I am still a relative MTGO noob. I did not start taking it seriously until last year when I started school in tandem with working full time (wife and kids too!! Busy, busy, busy...). That said, to build my collection, I started with a TON of NMS drafts (best draft format ever? Maybe DKA-ISD is better...). So, of course I got a Batterskull (a play set of Tezzeret and Consecrated Sphinx too!). SFM was a 2 tix card when I got them for trade of other draft droppings (My Gut Shot for your SFM? Sure!)...combo!
I can see the other side of the coin though. There was a reason they had to ban it in Standard. The synergy is really good, and can be overwhelming if left unchecked. I think the stigma with it lies in the fact that I basically drop it on t3 and win. It is like the Aluren deck or Hypergenesis, the combo can be disrupted but it can be warping and no one likes to lose on t2-3, which is essentially what happens if I "Vial" in a Batterskull... I don't want this format to be "zomg ewe hafta turn doodz sidewayz, cuz it aren't fun if I duzn't and I will quit. (;_;) I also don't want to push people away from this tourney because I am uncreative and win with obvobvobv awesome cards.
RE: Ayanam- I beat his Leviathan deck with my Rebels in this week. This past Saturday, however,, we had a close one: My "Dirty Kitty" Goblin deck vs. his Horror Dredge deck. That Dredge deck is awesome (and Goblin Sharshooter owns it, lol) and I really hope to start brewing with that guy. I also have failed to mention that the interview itself was well written too :).
RE:Score- whatev. We are human (2nd most popular tribe) and it doesn't really matter. I just want the "official" to be calculated correctly, cause I am gunnin' for the hall of fame this year.
Your FB comment is appeared now. :)
I'll definitely keep showing up on Wednesdays, starting from 9 PM GMT.
Thanks for acknowledging Ayanam1's interview. I sometimes feel like he's kind of an obscure player, doing a lot of important stuff without clamor, while nobody is noticing. And it's kind of an Asian-American stereotype, so that pisses me off a little.
Sorry for getting your score wrong! I sometimes lose myself in all the data.
Cool stuff about Training Grounds and Mirror Entity, and Changeling Hero is a really good idea. These are cards that you don't see often, so you get points for bringing variety to the event. But hey, nobody judges you for playing Batterskull. :) It's more of a, "this is new, this is just classic" thing. I know I hated when I finally bought my first Primeval Titan when the price went down and out of some major sacrifices, and I would show up in Commander tables where I would be addressed as a "money player". People that struggled to get a money card earned the right to play it as much and as often as they like (people that didn't struggled have the same right, of course. But there's a case where complaining is outright undeserved).
I know that winning is fun (for ALL psychographics) and the budgets aren't the same for everyone. Yet at some point, trying to win while doing the same exact thing again and again and again should lose some of its appeal. There are decks that you can play one hundred times and always find a way to surprise you or to generate interesting game states when facing different opponents. Combo Elves and burn Goblins aren't among those.
Actually, I believe the answer to my question is simply this: yes, players grow tired of playing those decks (I know this is true, I saw successful Elf and Goblin players either changing decks or disappear entirely from the tournament). But those two tribes are so popular and easy to build than they found new players every time.
Yet we experienced a drop in Goblin appearances during the second half of 2011. Human has become the other most popular tribe (the first one, actually), but Human decks can be everything and its opposite, so that's not really an issue, nor something you actually get to perceive on a weekly basis.
And then there's the Zombie case, that's weird, as I will note in the next article. Zombie is the third most featured tribe in TribAp, yet they scored a Top 4 placement only twice over 58 events, the second of which was actually with a Living End deck that just used Zombies as cycling creatures. It appears TribAp players like to play with Zombies. But they aren't playing them right.
You don't like a lot of stuff! :P
And why are you always just commenting here, like a sitcom character? Come play! :)
(Seriously, even just on Wednesdays - which is now officially a thing again, thanks to apaulogy)
I sometimes feel like pure aggro players just conceive this format as it was a tabletop wargame a la Warhammer Fantasy Battle (which actually has some ways to sweep & trick, but very limited of course). Like the players/planeswalkers should field their armies and just let them clash while drinking coffee to the side.
And it worries me that someone at WotC might embrace this view (thank God they don't mess too frequently with the format, then), because banning Moat is just a way to keep goblinoids from having to worry about enchantment hate.
WotC's behaviour regarding Tribal Wars is especially baffling, because they keep doing blocks with tribal themes and mechanics (as recently as right now!), then rarely care if at all about the format that would exploit them the most, giving some love to a lot of cards that otherwise would never see constructed play (not to mention in an eternal format). But if "caring for Tribal" means "caring for goblinoid welfare", I'm more than happy with WotC not being involved at all in the format.
As for AJ's style, when I wrote that I was thinking more of a morphological aspect (that I'm sure nobody without OCD really ever notices) than a general strategy direction. I build every deck I feature in the editor. And the ones from the most experienced and influential players often have distinctive morphological signatures. It's like for painters, in a way (and I surely consider deckbuilding an art). I'm referring to the way the deck looks when you group all the cards and display them by casting cost. I can look at the lists without knowing what the cards do and I can say, "This looks like an AJ deck", or "This resembles a Nemesis deck" (just to name-drop the two Grudge Challengers). AJ's decklists (in his current phase. The Blue Period?) are often shorts, often with a majority of full playsets, which represent the core of what the deck strategy will be (regardless of what that will be).
My Spike list reminded me of those lists, as I usually include some apparently-random card (or absolutely-random, in a "I want to play this too!" kind of way).
Actually, my real Spike list is more uneven than that, but I try to build those inspirational lists as rough frameworks in order to push people to better them ("Oh, cool, Spikes! But hey, I can build them better than that. Let me try"). I find that nobody, at least within this environmnet, would really duplicate a list found in an article. But doing something better than someone else? They can do that. :)
I think at the time I didn't want him to double block, make me save him by sacrificing one of my guys and then top deck something to screw me over. Looking back it was probably correct to attack with him, but I think the way I was playing it was just safe is all.
Not sure why u werent attacking with gooling droodion in the fist match game 2, he cant profitbly block it whatsoever and itsnot preventing him from attacking you really at all by staying back, 4 damage a turn or edict every turn is pretty important not to pass up when its free. only have to spend mana if he blocks with lethal and then you blow him out anyway.
Be that as it may, it was AJ who initially proposed the Spike idea back when he and Lord Erman were discussing sideboards (and why the format does not have them) in their dual article crossover. So he did bring up the spikes tribe then. :) Some of us have worked to make it a more proactive deck since then but no luck yet.
Totally unrelated to the above post but in reference to the living death decks vs Living end decks. These are two entirely different style decks. One is combo (living end + cascade hopefully for the win at the end of your ops turn) vs Mid Ranged/control.
Living Death acts as a sweeper, and a win con both. Though played with Buried Alive does make it more combo-centric and Patriarch's Bidding is a complimentary card in such decks. Other versions utilize Necrotic Ooze as a primary win con with Living Death as back up.
Mainly to my mind it is a necessity to run sweepers in this format since everyone insists on over-committing the board. So if not Living Death then pyroclasm, Damnation, Wrath of God, etc.
I do believe that is AJ's general thought behind his sweepers too (though you could just ask him). Also AJ's style is more than merely indestructibles and sweepers. He looks for odd tribes with powerful niche effects and tries to magnify them (Praetors or Masticore for example or his initial Sphinges Bidding deck that I stole and modified for my own use.) His more winning decks tend to sweep as the format requires an answer to super aggro and sweeping is basically the only answer to that now that WOTC saw fit to (inexplicably to this date) take out Moat which STILL baffles me. (Not just why they did it but why they never explain bizarre bannings.)
Dryads look like fun. Not sure how competitive such a deck would be but I imagine it would be a blast to play. (And aren't there some new dryads coming out?) 5xFireballs as usual.
Goblins and elves will continue to exist in bulk until they are hated out of the format.
Some of us crazy deck-builders forget that "winning is fun" and "winning with a budget deck I can afford" is also fun.
Now, druids are the closest I'll ever get to elves and goblins, but I do love playing decks that feast upon those aggro strategies. The problem is that some of those counter-strategies can also get old fast.
What would Tribal Apocalypse be unless half the players were complaining about something?
Anyway, one other interaction of note in my Rebel deck with Training Grounds is that when the Mirror Entity is on the battlefield, I can make all of my creatures 2/2s (4/4s with 2, 6/6s with 3) for free as many times as I want. This is highly relevant against burn spells...
I am going to cut the SFM package next time to challenge myself to just win with just the tribal synergy. One thing I have discovered is that Changeling Hero can be tutored for with Lin Sivvi to save rebels from sweep spells (which is why I have SFM + Batterskull...good alt. plan).
Yes, thanks for the game! I know that the Strip Mine/Crucible combo is an issue, but I think that there are times where it can come in handy. There are lot's of cards like Gaea's Cradle, Serra Sanctum, etc. that can really cause problems, and being able to have answers to them just sort of fell into place after trying to think of ways to continue making Ob Nixilis large. I'm not a proponent of crushing people's mana bases, and this deck can't completely abuse it like an Azusa deck can.
The funny part was that Crucible was dealt with pretty quickly in this game, so it didn't end up mattering anyways!
Thank you for publishing our game sir. that was quite the interesting read. even if i was there for the entire thing. Grimgrin FTW >.> That was quite fun, and of course, the strip mine Crucible is a hated combo piece. We play mainly for casual games, and thus combos like that are frowned upon (no offense to you sir). again i'd like to thank you for the game and the free publicity. even tho i'm aware mine and trey's decks aren't eh most amazing things in the world.
Tribal is quickly becoming my favourite format. Too bad I could not be there last Saturday. :-(
perhaps I don't, but tribal is tied for my fav format with Prism.. what I like is creativity, which i dont see by playing the typical elf/gobos or fitting 20 creatures into a tournament/lock-down combo
I am a big fan of tribal, used to be there every week during the days shard ran it still, if my schedule matched up i'd consider showing though my collection is pauper so that puts a slight power disadvantage lol
The SFM/blade package is a necessary counterweight to the other more abusive engines in the format, like 12-post, Seismic Assault / Loam, and Punishing Grove. Those can just as easily be tacked on to a variety of tribes and certainly appear to be having more success in getting Top 4's than creature aggro is lately. Punishing Grove is particularly offensive, as creature decks need graveyard hate to really fight it effectively.
The SFM package is the creature deck's way of having some game against those decks. It puts a quick clock on 12-post player without overextending into sweepers or mindlessly ramming into walls every turn. It gives the relevant protection to a key creature against the board control engines. The only other way aggro decks in a legacy format typically fight those strategies is with Wasteland/Port, and that's largely neutered as a strategy because of the (very reasonable) banning of Vial in these events.
I've played legacy zoo in SCG Opens, it is a "fair" deck that has to be constructed to attack a million different decks doing a million different "unfair" things, many of which are completely legal and popular in tribal wars. I even have the benefit of a SB there, and it's still frustrating sometimes. In legacy tribal wars, creature aggro is "fair". Everyone's deck has 20 creatures, everyone should be equipped to fight off that angle of attack, unlike some others. Let's not strip the fair decks of the one really good thing they have going against all the busted ones.
I think bans are in general band-aids. On a lethal incurable wound. This is the essential problem. Will spikes ruin the game every chance they get? yes. Can we stop them? no. If you enjoy the format, play it. Either use crutches and be part of the problem or don't and don't be. Very simple. Not a solution of course because there is none. But not something to lose sleep over either.
This isn't about judging people for whatever values they may or may not hold. This is about accepting that the format, like commander is as good or as bad as its community wants it to be.
Mainly have fun. And win tix if available. Of course.
I agree about SFM not being banned. I am not advocating for bans because I find that most ban gripes are because of bad tastes left in mouths and banning "problems" instead of trying to make your deck not lose to them is easy...All I am saying is that I am admitting that it is kind of a deck building crutch for me to actually win (I am a Spike), but I like being in the spirit and want to discover more (Bacause I am kind of a Johnny too).
I think SFM provides an interesting card in the format...Batterskull and the Swords are just SOOOOOOo good that people don't want to look to anything else. I could also see banning them...make people get Tatsumasa or something...
Indeed. My own morphological signature used to be a) include at least two Reveillarks in every deck, and or b) use a lot of singletons and try to work a tool box into the deck even if it is awkward and unruly at best. Now I am not so sure what it is. Once my play test partners (mainly AJ) made me aware of this I tried to break that pattern.
Now, for the rest of your post: I like that you found Ayanam1 (the "1" is supposed to be a "i" btw)'s dredge deck awesome. That's the spirit. You meet a Tribal dredge deck once, and that's awesome. The problem would arise if we started to see a dredge deck every single week (especialy from the same player). That would become annoying at some point. Same for Aluren: it was just a one-time wonder, therefore it's cool. (Ok, we have broad enough shoulders to see Aluren even a few times more than once per year, actually).
What might be annoying to some players about the Stoneforge package is that 1. it's not about building a Stoneforge deck, it's something you cram into every deck; and 2. it's being done every week, often more that once per week.
Hey, you're currently among the Top 16. You just have to keep it like that for 46 more weeks. :)
I wouldn't demonize the Stoneforge in Tribal. They banned her in Standard because they aimed to shut down the original Caw-Blade quickly for the last few weeks of legality. And they couldn't just kill all the blades. But in Tribal, the power of the Stoneforge is different. You can deal with her as you deal with all the utility creatures that impact the board. A Royal Assassin, if left unattended, may win the games on his own. Nobody ever cared for that.
Stoneforge fetching everything but the blades, even Batterskull, just acts as a tutor and an accelerator mainly. Batterskull is strong but doesn't destabilize the board. The blades do. What Stoneforge does is giving you a way to put 2-3 blades in the deck and always choose the most relevant one depending on the opponent colors. And the right blade can turn a creature into an unstoppable, unremovable clock with free disruption or removal effects.
After the tutoring is done, the presence of the Stoneforge on the board is just useful against permission decks, otherwise is just a 1 mana discount on the blades.
In Standard the blades still win games: the decks just pack 4-6 of them. Of course, tribal decks don't have room for that. Modern decks use Steelshaper's Gift for the tutoring. Tribal decks could do that too, if Stoneforge was banned. Or even better, Enlightened Tutor. What I'm saying is that banning Stoneforge wouldn't prevent Tribal player to use blades, and to pick the right one when needed. Banning the blades (and Batterskull if you want), would allow the Stoneforge to fetch creative stuff for creative equipment interactions, which right now aren't even considered. Not that I would advocate this banning, but if I had to choose, I would keep the Stoneforge over the blades any day.
I have been wanting to test this format. Plus, I like playing with you experienced guys because you actually have insight as to what tribes can do!!
I am still a relative MTGO noob. I did not start taking it seriously until last year when I started school in tandem with working full time (wife and kids too!! Busy, busy, busy...). That said, to build my collection, I started with a TON of NMS drafts (best draft format ever? Maybe DKA-ISD is better...). So, of course I got a Batterskull (a play set of Tezzeret and Consecrated Sphinx too!). SFM was a 2 tix card when I got them for trade of other draft droppings (My Gut Shot for your SFM? Sure!)...combo!
I can see the other side of the coin though. There was a reason they had to ban it in Standard. The synergy is really good, and can be overwhelming if left unchecked. I think the stigma with it lies in the fact that I basically drop it on t3 and win. It is like the Aluren deck or Hypergenesis, the combo can be disrupted but it can be warping and no one likes to lose on t2-3, which is essentially what happens if I "Vial" in a Batterskull... I don't want this format to be "zomg ewe hafta turn doodz sidewayz, cuz it aren't fun if I duzn't and I will quit. (;_;) I also don't want to push people away from this tourney because I am uncreative and win with obvobvobv awesome cards.
RE: Ayanam- I beat his Leviathan deck with my Rebels in this week. This past Saturday, however,, we had a close one: My "Dirty Kitty" Goblin deck vs. his Horror Dredge deck. That Dredge deck is awesome (and Goblin Sharshooter owns it, lol) and I really hope to start brewing with that guy. I also have failed to mention that the interview itself was well written too :).
RE:Score- whatev. We are human (2nd most popular tribe) and it doesn't really matter. I just want the "official" to be calculated correctly, cause I am gunnin' for the hall of fame this year.
Thanks, Paul!
Dryads are there for you to be lured into their soft, mossy embrace.
Your FB comment is appeared now. :)
I'll definitely keep showing up on Wednesdays, starting from 9 PM GMT.
Thanks for acknowledging Ayanam1's interview. I sometimes feel like he's kind of an obscure player, doing a lot of important stuff without clamor, while nobody is noticing. And it's kind of an Asian-American stereotype, so that pisses me off a little.
Sorry for getting your score wrong! I sometimes lose myself in all the data.
Cool stuff about Training Grounds and Mirror Entity, and Changeling Hero is a really good idea. These are cards that you don't see often, so you get points for bringing variety to the event. But hey, nobody judges you for playing Batterskull. :) It's more of a, "this is new, this is just classic" thing. I know I hated when I finally bought my first Primeval Titan when the price went down and out of some major sacrifices, and I would show up in Commander tables where I would be addressed as a "money player". People that struggled to get a money card earned the right to play it as much and as often as they like (people that didn't struggled have the same right, of course. But there's a case where complaining is outright undeserved).
I know that winning is fun (for ALL psychographics) and the budgets aren't the same for everyone. Yet at some point, trying to win while doing the same exact thing again and again and again should lose some of its appeal. There are decks that you can play one hundred times and always find a way to surprise you or to generate interesting game states when facing different opponents. Combo Elves and burn Goblins aren't among those.
Actually, I believe the answer to my question is simply this: yes, players grow tired of playing those decks (I know this is true, I saw successful Elf and Goblin players either changing decks or disappear entirely from the tournament). But those two tribes are so popular and easy to build than they found new players every time.
Yet we experienced a drop in Goblin appearances during the second half of 2011. Human has become the other most popular tribe (the first one, actually), but Human decks can be everything and its opposite, so that's not really an issue, nor something you actually get to perceive on a weekly basis.
And then there's the Zombie case, that's weird, as I will note in the next article. Zombie is the third most featured tribe in TribAp, yet they scored a Top 4 placement only twice over 58 events, the second of which was actually with a Living End deck that just used Zombies as cycling creatures. It appears TribAp players like to play with Zombies. But they aren't playing them right.
You don't like a lot of stuff! :P
And why are you always just commenting here, like a sitcom character? Come play! :)
(Seriously, even just on Wednesdays - which is now officially a thing again, thanks to apaulogy)
I subscribe to every single word you said here!
I sometimes feel like pure aggro players just conceive this format as it was a tabletop wargame a la Warhammer Fantasy Battle (which actually has some ways to sweep & trick, but very limited of course). Like the players/planeswalkers should field their armies and just let them clash while drinking coffee to the side.
And it worries me that someone at WotC might embrace this view (thank God they don't mess too frequently with the format, then), because banning Moat is just a way to keep goblinoids from having to worry about enchantment hate.
WotC's behaviour regarding Tribal Wars is especially baffling, because they keep doing blocks with tribal themes and mechanics (as recently as right now!), then rarely care if at all about the format that would exploit them the most, giving some love to a lot of cards that otherwise would never see constructed play (not to mention in an eternal format). But if "caring for Tribal" means "caring for goblinoid welfare", I'm more than happy with WotC not being involved at all in the format.
As for AJ's style, when I wrote that I was thinking more of a morphological aspect (that I'm sure nobody without OCD really ever notices) than a general strategy direction. I build every deck I feature in the editor. And the ones from the most experienced and influential players often have distinctive morphological signatures. It's like for painters, in a way (and I surely consider deckbuilding an art). I'm referring to the way the deck looks when you group all the cards and display them by casting cost. I can look at the lists without knowing what the cards do and I can say, "This looks like an AJ deck", or "This resembles a Nemesis deck" (just to name-drop the two Grudge Challengers). AJ's decklists (in his current phase. The Blue Period?) are often shorts, often with a majority of full playsets, which represent the core of what the deck strategy will be (regardless of what that will be).
My Spike list reminded me of those lists, as I usually include some apparently-random card (or absolutely-random, in a "I want to play this too!" kind of way).
Actually, my real Spike list is more uneven than that, but I try to build those inspirational lists as rough frameworks in order to push people to better them ("Oh, cool, Spikes! But hey, I can build them better than that. Let me try"). I find that nobody, at least within this environmnet, would really duplicate a list found in an article. But doing something better than someone else? They can do that. :)
I think at the time I didn't want him to double block, make me save him by sacrificing one of my guys and then top deck something to screw me over. Looking back it was probably correct to attack with him, but I think the way I was playing it was just safe is all.
Not sure why u werent attacking with gooling droodion in the fist match game 2, he cant profitbly block it whatsoever and itsnot preventing him from attacking you really at all by staying back, 4 damage a turn or edict every turn is pretty important not to pass up when its free. only have to spend mana if he blocks with lethal and then you blow him out anyway.
Be that as it may, it was AJ who initially proposed the Spike idea back when he and Lord Erman were discussing sideboards (and why the format does not have them) in their dual article crossover. So he did bring up the spikes tribe then. :) Some of us have worked to make it a more proactive deck since then but no luck yet.
Totally unrelated to the above post but in reference to the living death decks vs Living end decks. These are two entirely different style decks. One is combo (living end + cascade hopefully for the win at the end of your ops turn) vs Mid Ranged/control.
Living Death acts as a sweeper, and a win con both. Though played with Buried Alive does make it more combo-centric and Patriarch's Bidding is a complimentary card in such decks. Other versions utilize Necrotic Ooze as a primary win con with Living Death as back up.
Mainly to my mind it is a necessity to run sweepers in this format since everyone insists on over-committing the board. So if not Living Death then pyroclasm, Damnation, Wrath of God, etc.
I do believe that is AJ's general thought behind his sweepers too (though you could just ask him). Also AJ's style is more than merely indestructibles and sweepers. He looks for odd tribes with powerful niche effects and tries to magnify them (Praetors or Masticore for example or his initial Sphinges Bidding deck that I stole and modified for my own use.) His more winning decks tend to sweep as the format requires an answer to super aggro and sweeping is basically the only answer to that now that WOTC saw fit to (inexplicably to this date) take out Moat which STILL baffles me. (Not just why they did it but why they never explain bizarre bannings.)
Dryads look like fun. Not sure how competitive such a deck would be but I imagine it would be a blast to play. (And aren't there some new dryads coming out?) 5xFireballs as usual.
I don't like those either :P
Goblins and elves will continue to exist in bulk until they are hated out of the format.
Some of us crazy deck-builders forget that "winning is fun" and "winning with a budget deck I can afford" is also fun.
Now, druids are the closest I'll ever get to elves and goblins, but I do love playing decks that feast upon those aggro strategies. The problem is that some of those counter-strategies can also get old fast.
What would Tribal Apocalypse be unless half the players were complaining about something?
I certainly believe that you have a style. However the spike deck described in this article doesn't fit your style.
Where are the sweepers combined with expensive and indestructible creatures?
Also, I think any Spike Feeder deck should have Gavony Township for a creature combo lock-out possibility.
Where did my FB comment go?
Anyway, one other interaction of note in my Rebel deck with Training Grounds is that when the Mirror Entity is on the battlefield, I can make all of my creatures 2/2s (4/4s with 2, 6/6s with 3) for free as many times as I want. This is highly relevant against burn spells...
I am going to cut the SFM package next time to challenge myself to just win with just the tribal synergy. One thing I have discovered is that Changeling Hero can be tutored for with Lin Sivvi to save rebels from sweep spells (which is why I have SFM + Batterskull...good alt. plan).
Somewhat. The format can survive without me, but it probably won't have to just yet.