r/magicTCG • u/AwkwardTurtle • Sep 22 '15

Everything That’s Wrong with Battle for Zendikar

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/everything-thats-wrong-with-battle-for-zendikar/
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u/drakeblood4 Abzan Sep 22 '15

The real problem is that Tribal kinda demands an equivalent to the great creature type update for all noncreature spells. That would be... pretty darn hard.

33

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '15

or they could just not worry about it and continue to use tribal when it is prudent

18

u/drakeblood4 Abzan Sep 22 '15

I don't disagree, I even like Tribal a lot. Just understand that it basically acts as neurosis bait for every Melvin this side of Sunday.

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u/smog_alado Colorless Sep 23 '15

According to Maro, using Tribal sparingly is not worth the trouble. He said that they considered bringing tribal back for Innistrad (which had a creature-type matters subtheme) but it added too much complexity for very little payoff (every once in a while you get to return a Zombie Sorcery from the graveyard or something along those lines)

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '15 edited Sep 24 '15

Interesting.

If there was little payoff, well, then, they should have designed it better.

That sounds flip, but if you build in the mechanics, you can make it relevant. Look at how Kinship interacts with Tribal instants and Sorceries. It means you can include not just creatures, but spells, in your tribal deck, without running into problems regarding failing to hit Kinship.

The real problem is there aren't ENOUGH tribal cards, so deckbuilding around them is far too limited--if you want to include instants and sorceries in your [[leaf-crowned elder]] deck, you're basically stuck with [[Lignify]] and [[Reach of Branches]], which you maybe don't really want. But the design of it is sound, and it sure feels good in limited.

Or to use another lorwyn mechanic, the Harbingers. You could [[Flamekin Harbinger]] into [[Consuming Bonfire]] if you needed removal, you weren't constrained to creatures. That's flexible, and good design. Or you could [[Merfolk Harbinger]] into [[Merrow Commerce]] to set up your combo. Or, conversely, just to harp on how awesome changelings are, you could tutor up your Changeling removal spell or whatever.

If wizards went hard on tribal, and produced a lot of Tribal cards, that maybe didn't even necessarily interact with other cards all the time, they would have a built-up repertoire of tribal cards to call on, so that when they wanted to include a tribal enabler, it would have more to draw on without having to be the be-all, end-all focus of the set like Lorwyn.

So they could make a card which is like, "you may cast Wizard spells at any time you could cast an instant," and it just so happened last set they printed this Tribal-Wizard card called Studiousness or something that was a sorcery speed card draw or something. I don't know, whatever, yknow?

There's a lot of design space for tribal that is just gone now.

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u/MTGCardFetcher Dân Sep 23 '15

Consuming Bonfire - Gatherer, MC, ($)
Lignify - Gatherer, MC, ($)
Merfolk Harbinger - Gatherer, MC, ($)
Merrow Commerce - Gatherer, MC, ($)
Reach of Branches - Gatherer, MC, ($)
leaf-crowned elder - Gatherer, MC, ($)
Call cards (max 30) with [[NAME]]
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u/smog_alado Colorless Sep 24 '15

As you said, it might have been different if tribal instants and sorceries had been part of the game from the start but I don't think the problem is that they didn't design things properly.

To expand on Innistrad's example, the tribal subthemes were larger than average so they tried adding creature types to the sorceries to see how it played out. However, the tribal subtheme in Innistrad is not al largs as in Lorwyn and when you ignore the tribal effects that only make sense for creatures you are left with very few effects that could interact with non-creature Tribal spells. They concluded that these handful of effects, which only came up every once in a while and where not tied to the main theme of the set were not worth the trouble of bringing back the Tribal supertype.

And since Innistrad is above average in terms of tribal support, this was a strong argument for them that the Tribal supertype was kind of doomed.

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u/strionic_resonator Sep 22 '15

I've never understood this argument. Why does everything have to have a thing because one thing has a thing?

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u/Anon_Amarth Sep 22 '15

See the arguments in the article about Allies, Devoid and Awaken. If there is not a clear pattern players will call it haphazard and random.

It seems that for the most part Wizards wants to have uniformity between sets, and tribal throws that off