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Tribal Coffee won't be closing any stores around the United States any time soon, so you can look forward to more tantalizing articles in this series. In fact, you'll find some new energy flowing into the series. Could it be a shot of espresso with a nut flavor? You'll have to keep reading to find out and to see the winner from a contest I held earlier this year. As a general note, I should be banned from hosting a contest within one of my articles ever again. It took me this long to respond. However, I have to admit the showing for the contest wasn't spectacular. Did I make the restrictions too difficult? Enough of my babbling; here is the winner from the Construct Deck Building Contest:
Of the decks that were submitted, I found this one to be the most creative. The other deck was a little contrived and almost too predictable. Not that the other deck was bad. It was not. I just liked the feel of this deck better. To quote the author, Cashew:
I really like how the spells of the deck are very independent from the Construct tribe. Terminate and Void both provide some removal that the other submitted deck didn't have. That and the tribe shines by itself with some Humans, in the form of operators, there to keep things running smoothly. You can thank Shadowmage Infiltrator and Mishra for that. Congratulations, Cashew, on winning. I just might hand over this series to you for the rest of today if you are willing. But first, let's show the runner-up deck.
While he didn't win this contest, Ryuzaki at least deserves a “best description” award. I think this deck will play well, and it doesn't need a $5000 mana base like the winning deck. It was, however, missing something creative that said, "This is a Ryuzaki Deck!" Thank you Cashew and Ryuzaki for your submissions to this Construct Tribal Coffee contest. And with that, I will turn you over to your nut-flavored espresso shot also known as Cashew. ~Streetz~ Just a brief quiz before we start off today. On September 26, 2007, the Grand Creature Type Update occurred, coinciding with the release of Lorwyn. The major purpose of the update was to consolidate and standardize the tribes of Magic. Many smaller tribes disappeared and were merged into others. Since the update there has only been one new tribe introduced. Can you name it?
If you chose b. Noggles you are correct. While there were very few of the other four tribes, Noggles were completely non-existent. Some people get confused looking at them and link them to the Un-sets’ Donkey tribe. Regardless, Noggles are a brand new creation in the Magic universe and it'll be interesting to see if and when there are more. Archons were introduced in Ravnica, Hags in Legends, Scarecrows in The Dark, and Ouphes in Antiquities. Scarecrows are an article for another day perhaps, but we'll visit the other four tribes in some form or another. Archon, Archoff To most people if you say the word Archon, they probably think of a giant blue pulsing ball of psionic energy that's created when two Protoss Templars fuse together. Luckily, that's not the Magic version and merely the Starcraft version. Like many of the Shadowmoor creatures, understanding where they come from is as simple as understanding their real world mythology. Archon is a Greek word meaning quite simply “ruler.” This is not what we're looking for though. The best representative of Archons comes from Gnosticism. Gnosticism for those not familiar is a vastly complex religious movement that I'll simply explain as equal parts Christianity and Mysticism. To Gnostics, Archons are the servants of the Demiurge ("The Creator God") and are celestial beings most easily explained to be demons and angels. Not necessarily evil, they are known for their wrathful nature and definitely aren't huggable. These are your Old Testament-style beings that rain down sulfur and smite their foes. Many descriptions are a combination of Greek and Hebrew mythology.
Archons in Magic are a small tribe consisting of two powerful White fliers. The Archon of Justice atop his flying stag and the Blazing Archon, a Boros Guild standby who rides a fiery lion. The mechanic similarities start and end with flying and White, while the artwork on both contains subtle references to an underlying tribal theme of absolute good. Both arts seem to reference figures of power whose morale compass is unwaveringly on the side of truth and justice. The kind of creatures that would show no compassion for a starving street rat stealing bread, sorry Alladin. Unfortunately, Tribal with Archons is impossible with a mere tribe size of two. Without Changelings there's not really much we can do to fix that, but luckily both Archons are fairly straight forward and highly usable in about any White deck. Blazing Archon is a powerhouse card for recursion decks, stopping almost any Aggro-based deck in their tracks. So for now Archons are on watch; hopefully Shards of Alara brings us at least one or two more so we can actually make something with them. Mind Nogglin' Noggles, huh? I've seen a couple conversations about why they aren't called Goblins or Dwarves or even Donkeys to keep this small, probably annoying tribe out. In reality, though, the most accurate tribe for a Noggle standby would be Shapeshifter. In real world mythology, Noggles are British creatures that share vast similarities with the Pucas/Phooka's of Gaelic lore. Small shape shifters similar to the Teutonic Kobolds, they appear as small saddled horses, and if someone gets on they dash straight for water. Now if you're wondering why they're Blue and Red, here's your answer. When a Noggle hits the water they turn into a burning, blue cloud... aha! Much like Pucas and Kobolds they aren't evil, just mischievous and they roam the countryside causing shenanigans. Their appearance is Magic is very akin to the horse look; they are short squatty creatures with donkey heads. Not much is known of the Noggles as a whole yet, but thus far they only appear in the Shadowmoor plane as a mischievous scavenger race.
When you only have four in a tribe it's a no-brainer how the tribe makes up in a deck. The real challenge comes into the fact that all four cards are vastly different and don't support each other at all. All have relatively small power levels as well and act primarily as support cards. Noggle Bandit fits nicely into Rogue decks, while the Ransacker works well in any Control deck to provide card draw, minor disruption, and a little aggro. Noggle Bridgebreaker and Hedge-Mage have some uses, but nothing to the power of their kin. As such if you want to play Noggles try out the following deck, but it's mainly for fun, and heck let’s go rare-free since there are no rare Noggles yet.
The deck plays simple and there is plenty of swap ability. Basically it uses mild recursion and simple shenanigans to blast your opponent. The deck suffers some against fast flood tribes like Goblins, but should hold it's own through mid and end game if it can take control. There's plenty of draw and destruction, as long as you can handle the randomness that the Noggles bring. Hopefully, we'll see more Noggles one day so we can do something truly sinister with them. 'Hagadelic Baby There are two Hag types in Eventide: The generic marsh-dwelling Green/Black hags and the Gwyllion trickster Hags in Black/White. As far as real world references, the Gwyllion are derived from Welsh creatures often described to be elves or ugly female spirits. The Gwyllion like to hang out in mountains and delight in causing travelers to become lost. Not necessarily evil, they do enjoy a good scare, and can apparently be repelled with a knife. As far as the generic hags go, the best reference I can think of is your mother. (Author's note: If your mother is a MILF, I sincerely apologize and would gladly apologize to her in person.)
Eventide's six Hags bring the total Hag count to eight, the last one being the Scarwood Hag from The Dark. Somewhere, I think WotC has been very discriminatory towards ugly women as there are 56 Angels in comparison. Regardless, Hags in general seem to be very disjointed beyond a love of eating babies. There's some similarity between the Stalker Hag and the Scarwood Hag, but beyond that the themes run rampant. And oh my! Guess what? Yet again there's not a single rare card in our tribe. That means yet another budget deck is possible. As such, prepare to enjoy the cheap wonky fun of Hags.
Ouphe There It Is And now to one of the wonkiest of Magic tribes resurrected by Shadowmoor, the Ouphes. Ouphes—or Aufs as they are called in the real world—are described as changelings (or goblins or elves) left by fairies in homes. A cruel prank, the real human child is kidnapped leaving the family with a dim-witted deformed replacement. It's no wonder the name is shortened to the slang term "Oaf." In Magic, they are known as the artifact manglers, which fits in with their real world persona of dimwittedness. Not knowing how to operate or steal the artifacts, they tend to disrupt or outright destroy them. With thematic creature merges the Ouphes would also inherit Gremlins which also share a fondness for technological mayhem. Most recently though, Ouphes were given a little power kick. No longer are Ouphes the things of jokes. Dusk Urchins left unchecked help provide card advantage while doing some good old-fashioned beating. Kitchen Finks, though seemingly minor in power, are used in numerous powerhouse decks for their minor life gain and early game creature destruction. Joining this dynamic duo are the Aerie Ouphes and Gilder Bairns. Aerie doesn't look to be making any kind of impact, but Gilder Bairn should be an instant Johnny classic.
Chris Millar recently covered Gilder Bairn in extreme depth that I could never truly touch further on in an article called Oupherkill. I also don't find Kitchen Finks or Aerie Ouphes that interesting to talk about as one is used by all and the other by very few. Rather, I'd like to talk about my favorite Standard card, Dusk Urchins, and break away from tribal for a bit. I'm not ashamed to admit, I have a little crush on the Duskies. Every time I sit down to make a Standard deck, somehow four of these snake their way in, even if it didn't originally include Black as a color. The thing I really like about them is Dusk Urchins provide natural card advantage and tend to eat any control in a player’s hand immediately, letting nastier fellas pass through unharmed. One deck I'm playing him in relies entirely on card advantage to win, using less aggro power and less control than most other decks. The concept is vastly simple and as it's turned out completely potent, and since we just had two rare-free decks I'm going big bucks here. Break out your money shades!
The basic premise behind the deck is simple: Cards, cards, and more cards. Almost all your creatures create a natural card advantage while the Inkfathom Infiltrator provides unstoppable damage and the Liege boosts all your creatures. The damage is a trickle at first, but most decks can't keep up if even a single creature is allowed to cause extra draw. I play-tested this deck entirely in Two-Headed Giant and every single time, regardless of my partner quitting or not, the card advantage was overwhelming for even two players to handle. If you wanted to you could even add some of the Selkies in Standard, or take it out of Standard adding cards like Dimir Cutpurse. Regardless, when your draw engine and your aggro are the same things, toppling over decks can often be a breeze. Now I know you're crying foul here. This is Tribal Coffee and I throw you some powerhouse non-Tribal deck with one Ouphe trying to sell you it as an Ouphe deck. In my defense, I told you off the bat that it wasn't Ouphes, it just featured Dusk Urchins. You want an Ouphe deck? Show me an Ouphe deck. After all, Tribal Coffee is about an open forum, and I'm interested to see what you can do with the Ouphes. ~Cashew~
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Mishra-Truck
Madness. 
Construct
of Nature. 
Hags
Gone Wild. 
