Magic Online has done many things for the game of Magic. Many of these things have been good, while other have been, well, debatable at best. But if MTGO has done only one thing, it has shed light on a few very fun formats that many people had seemingly forgotten about.

One of them is Tribal Wars.

That's right... Tribal Wars!

Tribal Wars is an interesting format that seems to have really caught on in the online community.

OK.  So you want rules. 

The rules are simple. 1/3 of your deck must be creatures that share a type. You cannot have creatures that don’t share a type. So in a 60 card deck, that’s 20 critters. When you figure in lands, that is most of your library. There are also some “honorary” tribal creatures, the Lords. So Lord of Atlantis is an “honorary” merfolk. Most of the other lords have been errated to include their creature type (which they are a lord of).

There are no sideboards allowed in this format. Your tribe is supposed to see you through with no fancy trickery.

Token generators must match the creature type. So Call of the Herd goes in an elephant deck, and nothing else. The same is true for artifact creatures. Sorry Brass Herald fans, only Golem decks for you. [This is where I cry... WAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  ~Streetz~]

There are a few cards that are banned in this format, just because of the sheer ridiculousness of their effect on the game. They are:

Unnatural Selection
Tsabo’s Decree
Engineered Plague
Circle of Solace
Endemic Plague
Peer Pressure
Skullclamp
Extinction
Coat of Arms
Toshi’s Gun (Umezawa’s Jitte) ...as of March 1st

If you are playing with older cards, stuff like Tivadar’s Crusade is probably also going to be banned in your group. I’ve seen Patron Wizards also get blacklisted, because of the potential lock it can cause in a wizard tribal deck. Basically, anything that can target one specific creature type is off-limits.

Sorry guys... people don't like you in Tribal Wars!

Druid Tribal Wars Decks!

For druid week, the most obvious form of this deck will be druid tribal. I had intended on making up my own deck, but Tekk’s creature feature had some druid tribal decks in his, and the decks in his article actually mirrored the decks I had come up with pretty closely. However, I found one deck that was designed specifically for tribal wars. Note: All the decks in this column come from pre-Mirrodin articles.

Thanks to Nate Heiss from MTG.com :

The main idea with this deck is to get threshold as fast as possible. The card that instantly caught my eye was the 4 Animal Magnetism. In draft, if you opened Magnetism, it was almost guaranteed to be heading left. You’d probably even see it twice. But in this deck, it usually nets you a creature and adds 4, sometimes 5 cards to your graveyard, which fuels the threshold engine. A fun little trick with this deck is to use Kamahl to turn a bunch of your lands into creatures, then cast Collective Unconscious for a grip-full. Another fun combo is Rites of Spring with Nantuko Cultivator in your hand.

This deck was from one of Nate’s Building on a Budget column, so he gives tips for adding money to the deck. He suggests adding the fetch-lands, because they get cards into your graveyard. He also mentioned Thriss, Nantuko Primus, which I think is a good addition to this deck.

The next druid tribal deck comes from the brain of MaGo (Mark Gottlieb). This deck focuses on what Druids do best: Get as much mana as possible, then go nuts.

Seton is a big mana engine in this deck. There are a lot of 1 mana spells, so with Seton out you can go off for a bunch of creatures in one turn. Just watch out for Brain Freeze. The main weakness in this deck is that it doesn’t run nearly as effective without Seton as it does with him, so Weird Harvest is your main opportunity to go get your Seton and Kamahl.

You’ll notice that this has Coat of Arms in it. This deck was originally posted when MTGO was in its infancy, so the tribal war variant was also less defined. Coat of Arms wasn’t illegal back then. Also, because this wasn’t specifically intended to be used in the Tribal Wars format, Biorhythm was included. Biorhythm is terrible in this format. Dropping the coat and Biorhythm leaves three open spots, where I’d add Krosan Restorer. Because this deck is so mana greedy, extra lands never hurt.

If you use gatherer to look up stuff for Tribal Wars, many of the newer cards (Mirrodin onward) won’t be listed as banned for the format. Coat of Arms doesn’t say it, and Umezawa’s Jitte isn’t listed either. For the paper version that you play with your friends, you can make up your own banned/restricted list.

That’s it for today’s variant: Tribal Wars

Well that's all I have for you today considering there aren't many other Magic Variants which I could squeeze Druids into I guess I'll move onto the Pros and Cons of Tribal Wars. 

Pros: Rewards creativity. Fun possibilities with obscure races. Tons of different strategies viable.

Cons: A lot of banned/restricted cards. Some tribes are more dominant than others (slivers are really, really good). Collecting a deck full of one type of creature can be difficult (non Onslaught tribes at least).

Have fun with your tribe. ~lionden_56~

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.

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