Well they'll obviously have to have legs somehow, because otherwise it wouldn't make sense for them to attack and block
I strongly disagree. If we start applying all manner of real-world logic to our favorite game, we're in big trouble as we wonder about Walls Of Brambles being equipped with speedy boots and whatnot.
The game's wonderful flavor is just that: something to make all the tactical choices and game interplay more fun and interesting. Not some "realistic" litmus test. People have wailed for years about Merfolks' "inablity to fight on land."
I say pishfoo.
It doesn't matter to me if they've Found A Way to explain merfolkian battle techniques. I'm glad they're back cuz they're cool.
That's really all that matters.
Not me. The coolness.
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Speaking of creature type changes—here’s one that’s quite relevant. Once we changed Goblin King, Elvish Champion, and Lord of the Undead in Ninth Edition, I kept hoping we’d have an opportunity to make the same change to Lord of Atlantis. The Timeshifted set gave us such an opportunity, even though there are only a small handful of Merfolk available in Standard (a number that will grow as the year goes on).
[quote=Penguinguru917;/comments/6242269]People forget the flavor of Futureshifted cards so quickly.....
If you even try to play along, you'll realize that Tribal never existed in TS block. A couple cards that related to it decided to phase in from the future. They're from a different set--from the future!
Doesn't work like that. That's just fluff, not something that bears on the game. They aren't really cards from the future any more than the Planar Chaos ones are cards from an alternate reality, they're cards from that expansion just as much as any of the nontimeshifts. Ergo they have been introduced.
In this case, Tribal is from Lorwyn. That is undoubtedly the card type and I can't understand any arguement that would suggest otherwise.....as it's been accepted to be Onslaught redux.
You're mixing two different things. Will Tribal be in Lorwyn? Of course it will. Tribal cards might actually get rules associated with the type too rather than just acting as a way to give non-creature cards creature types. But it is not the new, "never before seen" card type because Tribal already exists. Saying "Tribal will be in the set, therefore it's the new card type" makes about as much sense as saying "artifacts will be in the set, therefore they're the new card type". It can't be the new card type if it isn't new.
We have to remember...retreading old themes is not exactly WoTC's cup of tea for blocks these days.
Really? So we didn't just have a multicoloured block with an explicit promise from Wizards that they'd be doing a multicolour block every few years? And we didn't recently have a block with a banner headline screaming "more Legends than Legends!" and a moderately heavy graveyard theme, Odessy-style (soulshift, return target Spirit or Arcane from your graveyard to your hand, when this Dragon goes into the graveyard it wins the game etc etc...), or one with a lot of artifacts in the spirit of what was once called the Artifact Cycle? It looks to me very much as though every 'block theme' Wizards has tried once (artifact = Urza's, multicolour = invasion, graveyard = Odyssey, tribal = Onslaught) is being revisited in a new cycle (artifact = Mirrodin, multicolour = Ravnica, graveyard = Kamigawa), leaving tribal as the only one left to revisit, even if we didn't have the rumoured Elf-heaviness (and now the noted return of Merfolk), the recent introduction of Tribal as a supertype and a batch of Celtic giants in Future Sight as a clue.
I highly doubt that Tribal is the thing being hyped. It is too utterly plain and downright boring to be an exciting new card type.
So was Equipment, and wasn't even a new card type in the end, but was still hyped as such in the promo material.
The return of Merfolk is a semi-welcome surprise, to be certain. Unlike other people, I don't mind the existence of other tribes for the colors, such as Vedalken, but Merfolk were the iconic race back in the day. It may be a sign that Lorwyn is a tribal block, considering that they were one of the original Alpha tribes (like Goblins and Zombies, but unlike Elves and much less Kithkin, who didn't even exist until Legends),
Which was always perverse, because Alpha contained 1 Merfolk and 1 Zombie, but 2 Elves (who waited until Invasion for their Lord), 2 Orcs (The Dark) and 2 Dwarves (still waiting). Moreover it was a while before any new zombies or merfolk showed up. Elven Riders might not have been Elves at the time, but at least they fit the theme. Elves ought to have had a lord from the start (if they had he'd probably have cost GG rather than 1GG).
As for removal of the Merfolk, I don't think it ever had anything to do with being tied to water - look at all the Benthic cards around, and the fact that they're still printing serpents. It's hard to imagine dryads swimming across the ocean, for that matter. Merfolk were cheap blue weenies that mostly lacked evasion, and it's not really blue's portion of the colour pie to do groundbound aggro horde decks. I've always imagined their removal was to get away from the 'everyone has the same sort of weenies' approach and make the colour more distinctive, making blue weenies either fliers or utility creatures.
I was wondering about their rise again since I saw they reprinted two in time spiral, that leaves tons of room inside of 10th without need to reprint their lord.
I think it makes sense now that Wizard is not a creature type per se, but a job type or something like that. But following that logic, Soldier wouldn't be a real creature type, nor Rebel and we already have a Rebel enchantment, so who knows.
@Phil: I didn't think equipment was very boring, and tribal doesn't have to be boring, either. It just is now because there is only one tribal card. If they actually expand on it, I'm sure they could come up with new, interesting stuff. Emphasis on could.
With confirmation from Wizards of the coast that Hurkyl's Recall is card #88, and an actual scan of Mahamoti Djinn confirming that it is card #90 and the Mexicans telling us that Lumengrid Warden is in the set, there is NO room for Lord of Atlantis in 10th Edition.
@Phil: I didn't think equipment was very boring, and tribal doesn't have to be boring, either. It just is now because there is only one tribal card. If they actually expand on it, I'm sure they could come up with new, interesting stuff. Emphasis on could.
I see a lot of potential in Tribal. Take the following enchantment for example:
Squee's Crusade 2RR
Tribal Enchantment - Goblin
Goblins creatures you control gain +2/+2
With Goblin Warchief, it costs 1 less because it's a Goblin.
You can sac it to Skirk Prospector for R because it's a Goblin.
You can fetch it instantly with Moggcatcher because it's a Goblin.
You can tap it for Skirk Fire Marshall because it's a Goblin.
You can tutor it with Goblin Matron because it's a Goblin.
You can put it into play with Goblin Lackey because it's a Goblin.
When you cycle Gempalm Incinerator, you deal an extra 1 because it's a Goblin.
...
See where I'm headed? Tribal cards would have synergy with plenty of existing cards. Add even more tricks to the list and Tribal have the potential to be one of the deepest mechanics conceived so far, because it goes so well with some already existing stuff... unless they decide to do gargantuan amounts of errata. And unlike Snow (where there was precedent but most of it sucked) we have some things to work here. Let's hope they do it right this time.
[quote]
Really? So we didn't just have a multicoloured block with an explicit promise from Wizards that they'd be doing a multicolour block every few years? And we didn't recently have a block with a banner headline screaming "more Legends than Legends!" and a moderately heavy graveyard theme, Odessy-style (soulshift, return target Spirit or Arcane from your graveyard to your hand, when this Dragon goes into the graveyard it wins the game etc etc...), or one with a lot of artifacts in the spirit of what was once called the Artifact Cycle? It looks to me very much as though every 'block theme' Wizards has tried once (artifact = Urza's, multicolour = invasion, graveyard = Odyssey, tribal = Onslaught) is being revisited in a new cycle (artifact = Mirrodin, multicolour = Ravnica, graveyard = Kamigawa), leaving tribal as the only one left to revisit, even if we didn't have the rumoured Elf-heaviness (and now the noted return of Merfolk), the recent introduction of Tribal as a supertype and a batch of Celtic giants in Future Sight as a clue.
The idea about retreading blocks has more to do with people seeing a cycle of blocks (If Invasion = Ravnica, and Odyssey = Time Spiral, then Onslaught = Lorwyn goes the logic). There is no basis for thinking that blocks work in a giant cycle. As you said, there were graveyard elements in Kamigawa (which would point to Odyssey), but there was also a massive Legendary theme, which hasn't been the theme of a set since Legends itself. Nor does a set like Coldsnap fit anywhere in the table. So yes, if you carefully pick and choose your evidence, it does look like there is a giant cycle of blocks which makes Lorwyn tribal. We have zero evidence pointing to that at this time though as far as I know.
As far as the new card type issue, the type is touted as "The first new card type since Alpha". Obviously they aren't counting Mirrodin's equipment, which would cause them to alter the claim to "The first new card type since Mirrodin". And obviously they aren't counting Fortifications, Tribal, Planeswalker or Contraptions (btw Planeswalker and Contraptions have exactly the same amount of rules support and, imo, plausibility), because that would cause them to alter the claim to "The first new card type since Future Sight".
So, either they're being deceptive, which is likely, or they're very plainly telling you they're introducing something you've never seen before. I'm inclined, at the moment, to go with the latter.
I like a lot the merfolks but it doesnt seem enough to say that the upcoming block will be a tribal block, for me it look more like a card type block,because the contraptions planeswalker and all that weirds things that are coming up.
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I hope this rumored tribal theme does not happen. When they do tribal stuff, it always seems so forced and decks turn all alike. They print 5-6 amazing goblins and every goblin deck ends up having the exact same core with just a couple cards variating from the norm. Not to mention the fact that just 2-3 tribes ever become competitive while the others, no matter how fun they are, end up as filler.
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If Lorwyn is tribal themed like Onslaught, it will be one of the worst blocks in a while.
Onslaught sucked. The only cards that were any good out of Onslaught had nothing to do with tribal at all, save the overpowered goblins that it brought to an already powerful tribal deck.
That´s exactly the reason I believe that Lorwyn won´t be a tribal block. Tribal is - what Wizards call it - a priori a linear theme. One mechanic ( or creature type ) forces you to use more cards of the same kind. They did this with spirits in Kamigawa, and Rosewater said several times, that they don´t want to do stuff like that anymore, cause it leads to a boring meta. Another great example for this would be affinity.
He says that, but they did it in Planar Chaos with green haste guys.
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And please people, stop saying that it's "widely accepted" that Lorwyn is a tribal block. Accepted by who? In fact, we don't have a single clue about this at all, except that "there's a bunch of elves in the storyline". As far as I remember, there wasn't a particular bunch of Elves, or Goblins, or Zombies in Onslaught block storyline.
Really? So we didn't just have a multicoloured block with an explicit promise from Wizards that they'd be doing a multicolour block every few years?
Can you point to this explicit promise? Even if so: multicolor is kind of an unusual case, being far and away the most popular theme Wizards has ever cooked up. I'd expect variants of the multicolor block to continue to appear in the future even if nothing else ever repeated.
and a moderately heavy graveyard theme, Odessy-style (soulshift, return target Spirit or Arcane from your graveyard to your hand, when this Dragon goes into the graveyard it wins the game etc etc...),
Kamigawa in no way has a graveyard theme. It has one graveyard mechanic and then an otherwise entirely normal number of graveyard-related effects. And that one graveyard effect is just a narrow Raise Dead, not a use of the graveyard as a resource like the Odyssey mechanics and the two graveyard mechanics in Future Sight do.
or one with a lot of artifacts in the spirit of what was once called the Artifact Cycle?
Urza's Block was called the "Artifacts Cycle" on the box, but it wasn't actually artifact themed in any way -- it had neither an unusual number of artifacts nor of cards and mechanics that interacted with them. The true antecedent to Mirrodin on this matter was Antiquities.
What Urza's Block did have was a very strong enchantment subtheme, with three block mechanics (sleepers, growing enchantments, and Rancor-style auras) that involved them.
Most of my point here is that Wizards does reuse themes, but that thus far the length of time over which they do so, and the predictability with which they do so, is very different than you suggest. Mirrodin, Kamigawa, Onslaught, and Odyssey all took themes of early sets and expanded on them, while Time Spiral had a brand new theme; only Ravnica reused a theme within a short time of its introduction, and that was the unambiguously most popular theme.
I do think there will be another tribal set at some point, but I don't think it's Lorwyn -- it's too predictable, and too uncreative, to reuse another theme right after the "all reused themes" block and the first block to reuse a theme in its entirety. Actually, the very fact that Lorwyn is adopting such a "traditional" high fantasy setting makes me believe that it'll explore a very new theme.
As for removal of the Merfolk, I don't think it ever had anything to do with being tied to water - look at all the Benthic cards around, and the fact that they're still printing serpents.
Wrong. Check out this article: Rosewater specifically notes that at the time, Creative had a (monumentally stupid) idea to pull out any creature that couldn't "be used in a duel." You may notice that 8th Edition (and, I'm pretty sure, all the expansions in the new face before Time Spiral block) have no creatures that are purely aquatic -- no merfolk, no fish, etc.
That´s exactly the reason I believe that Lorwyn won´t be a tribal block. Tribal is - what Wizards call it - a priori a linear theme. One mechanic ( or creature type ) forces you to use more cards of the same kind. They did this with spirits in Kamigawa, and Rosewater said several times, that they don´t want to do stuff like that anymore, cause it leads to a boring meta.
That too. I think Wizards has actually had a lot of success with their minor-key tribal efforts in sets since Onslaught -- there have been a lot of sets with minor tribal sub-themes (like Kamigawa's snakes or, more visibly, its spirits) that probably work better than trying to work out a non-linear way to theme an entire block around tribalism.
The new card type is definitely tribal.
If Bound in Silence counted, it would have been "the first new card type introduced since Alpha" the fact the article says Lorwyn will introduce the first new card type since Alpha implies that bound in Silence from Future Sight does not count.
As Lorwyn is turning out to be the new tribal set, the new card type should definitely be tribal.
That does make me wonder what tribe white is getting though. Soldiers or Rebels?
The new card type is definitely tribal.
If Bound in Silence counted, it would have been "the first new card type introduced since Alpha" the fact the article says Lorwyn will introduce the first new card type since Alpha implies that bound in Silence from Future Sight does not count.
As Lorwyn is turning out to be the new tribal set, the new card type should definitely be tribal.
That does make me wonder what tribe white is getting though. Soldiers or Rebels?
Eurmm Kithkin.
This really excites me you know. I want to know what info will be in the mag, prob not much buttah you never know. Tribal would be fun, but not only tribal, tribal must be the subtheme of the set. Like some tribal myr cards of Mirrodin, but the big theme is actually artifacts. Like tribal elves and merfolk, but the big theme is actually, well we don't know yet.
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hey i have managed to evolve my axolotls by feeding them thyroid glands the thyroxine contained in these gland is enough to change these water dwelling creatures into land based creatures
Posted by: Tay Collins | January 20, 2010 6:45 AM
Tay, that's not evolution. It's metamorphosis. Evolution means descent with heritable modification – individuals cannot evolve, unless they're Pokemon.
Posted by: David Marjanović | January 20, 2010 8:55 AM
Can you point to this explicit promise? Even if so: multicolor is kind of an unusual case, being far and away the most popular theme Wizards has ever cooked up. I'd expect variants of the multicolor block to continue to appear in the future even if nothing else ever repeated.
Moreover, I think Wizards realized if they were going to approach a multicolored block, the explicit idea was to NOT do Invasion II (as good as Invasion was). So why would they do Onslaught II?
As linear as Tribal is as a concept, it gets even worse when you factor in Extended and Casual where they can pick and choose the most broken elements from Onslaught and the next Tribal block, if the tribes are the same.
The new card type is definitely tribal.
If Bound in Silence counted, it would have been "the first new card type introduced since Alpha" the fact the article says Lorwyn will introduce the first new card type since Alpha implies that bound in Silence from Future Sight does not count.
As Lorwyn is turning out to be the new tribal set, the new card type should definitely be tribal.
I don't really think we can conclude anything. Remember this?
Mirrodin offers you an artifact rich environment never seen before in the game of Magic. With 306 black bordered cards featuring the new card design, the set challenges you to arm yourself with the first new card type since Legends - equipment cards.
Yeah the only issue i have with merfolk is the fact that they are (for the most part) water bound
Oh who cares, really? If you want to apply logic like that, then we would have to say that cards like Swamp Mosquito shouldn't be allowed to block Shivan Dragon because it quite frankly is nonsensical for a gigantic, marauding, fire-breathing dragon to be stopped cold by a mosquito. Yes, of course, the dragon kills the mosquito, but the dragon wouldn't be slowed any - it logically ought to still deal damage to the planeswalker, even though it doesn't have trample.
It can't be said to make significantly more or less sense than a merfolk blocking a wildebeest.
Anyway, I'm glad Merfolk are back. I mean, it makes the most sense for the elemental flavor of blue - air and water - for their iconic creature type to be Merfolk. They've been on hiatus, but I still associate the fish with blue more than I do wizards or vedalken. Wizards fit the philosophical flavor of blue, but they aren't exclusive to blue in the way that elves, goblins and zombies are (nearly) exclusive to green, red and black, and they aren't flavorful enough... And they seem more limited than merfolk in some ways. They work better as utility creatures, and not so well as vanilla (since you wonder what's so wizardly about a creature that can't do anything but attack and block), whereas merfolk can be evasive weenies or vanilla, and do many of the same things as wizards as well, or even BE wizards.
He says that, but they did it in Planar Chaos with green haste guys.
Uh... Was there a lord for green creatures with haste? I don't follow.
I would hate to see Onslaught 2, so at this point, with what little evidence we have, I'm perfectly willing to just ignore the claims of Lorwyn being a tribal block and focus on the actually new things that'll be going on, like the element of design that won't be included for the first time, or whatever MaRo said.
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I strongly disagree. If we start applying all manner of real-world logic to our favorite game, we're in big trouble as we wonder about Walls Of Brambles being equipped with speedy boots and whatnot.
The game's wonderful flavor is just that: something to make all the tactical choices and game interplay more fun and interesting. Not some "realistic" litmus test. People have wailed for years about Merfolks' "inablity to fight on land."
I say pishfoo.
It doesn't matter to me if they've Found A Way to explain merfolkian battle techniques. I'm glad they're back cuz they're cool.
That's really all that matters.
Not me. The coolness.
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That said, I think that the Merfolk thing is great. I enjoy more creature types and the art looks awesome.
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Doesn't work like that. That's just fluff, not something that bears on the game. They aren't really cards from the future any more than the Planar Chaos ones are cards from an alternate reality, they're cards from that expansion just as much as any of the nontimeshifts. Ergo they have been introduced.
You're mixing two different things. Will Tribal be in Lorwyn? Of course it will. Tribal cards might actually get rules associated with the type too rather than just acting as a way to give non-creature cards creature types. But it is not the new, "never before seen" card type because Tribal already exists. Saying "Tribal will be in the set, therefore it's the new card type" makes about as much sense as saying "artifacts will be in the set, therefore they're the new card type". It can't be the new card type if it isn't new.
Really? So we didn't just have a multicoloured block with an explicit promise from Wizards that they'd be doing a multicolour block every few years? And we didn't recently have a block with a banner headline screaming "more Legends than Legends!" and a moderately heavy graveyard theme, Odessy-style (soulshift, return target Spirit or Arcane from your graveyard to your hand, when this Dragon goes into the graveyard it wins the game etc etc...), or one with a lot of artifacts in the spirit of what was once called the Artifact Cycle? It looks to me very much as though every 'block theme' Wizards has tried once (artifact = Urza's, multicolour = invasion, graveyard = Odyssey, tribal = Onslaught) is being revisited in a new cycle (artifact = Mirrodin, multicolour = Ravnica, graveyard = Kamigawa), leaving tribal as the only one left to revisit, even if we didn't have the rumoured Elf-heaviness (and now the noted return of Merfolk), the recent introduction of Tribal as a supertype and a batch of Celtic giants in Future Sight as a clue.
So was Equipment, and wasn't even a new card type in the end, but was still hyped as such in the promo material.
Which was always perverse, because Alpha contained 1 Merfolk and 1 Zombie, but 2 Elves (who waited until Invasion for their Lord), 2 Orcs (The Dark) and 2 Dwarves (still waiting). Moreover it was a while before any new zombies or merfolk showed up. Elven Riders might not have been Elves at the time, but at least they fit the theme. Elves ought to have had a lord from the start (if they had he'd probably have cost GG rather than 1GG).
As for removal of the Merfolk, I don't think it ever had anything to do with being tied to water - look at all the Benthic cards around, and the fact that they're still printing serpents. It's hard to imagine dryads swimming across the ocean, for that matter. Merfolk were cheap blue weenies that mostly lacked evasion, and it's not really blue's portion of the colour pie to do groundbound aggro horde decks. I've always imagined their removal was to get away from the 'everyone has the same sort of weenies' approach and make the colour more distinctive, making blue weenies either fliers or utility creatures.
Phil
Lord of Atlantis is in 10th
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With confirmation from Wizards of the coast that Hurkyl's Recall is card #88, and an actual scan of Mahamoti Djinn confirming that it is card #90 and the Mexicans telling us that Lumengrid Warden is in the set, there is NO room for Lord of Atlantis in 10th Edition.
I see a lot of potential in Tribal. Take the following enchantment for example:
Squee's Crusade
2RR
Tribal Enchantment - Goblin
Goblins creatures you control gain +2/+2
With Goblin Warchief, it costs 1 less because it's a Goblin.
You can sac it to Skirk Prospector for R because it's a Goblin.
You can fetch it instantly with Moggcatcher because it's a Goblin.
You can tap it for Skirk Fire Marshall because it's a Goblin.
You can tutor it with Goblin Matron because it's a Goblin.
You can put it into play with Goblin Lackey because it's a Goblin.
When you cycle Gempalm Incinerator, you deal an extra 1 because it's a Goblin.
...
See where I'm headed? Tribal cards would have synergy with plenty of existing cards. Add even more tricks to the list and Tribal have the potential to be one of the deepest mechanics conceived so far, because it goes so well with some already existing stuff... unless they decide to do gargantuan amounts of errata. And unlike Snow (where there was precedent but most of it sucked) we have some things to work here. Let's hope they do it right this time.
As far as the new card type issue, the type is touted as "The first new card type since Alpha". Obviously they aren't counting Mirrodin's equipment, which would cause them to alter the claim to "The first new card type since Mirrodin". And obviously they aren't counting Fortifications, Tribal, Planeswalker or Contraptions (btw Planeswalker and Contraptions have exactly the same amount of rules support and, imo, plausibility), because that would cause them to alter the claim to "The first new card type since Future Sight".
So, either they're being deceptive, which is likely, or they're very plainly telling you they're introducing something you've never seen before. I'm inclined, at the moment, to go with the latter.
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Onslaught sucked. The only cards that were any good out of Onslaught had nothing to do with tribal at all, save the overpowered goblins that it brought to an already powerful tribal deck.
He says that, but they did it in Planar Chaos with green haste guys.
Not really. We had plenty of Rootwater Matriarchs and Rootwater Shamans. Merfolk were rarely ever aggressively-costed enough to be considered efficient weenies. It's not like Merfolk of the Pearl Trident are out of blue's share of the pie.
No, it's in Time Spiral.
And please people, stop saying that it's "widely accepted" that Lorwyn is a tribal block. Accepted by who? In fact, we don't have a single clue about this at all, except that "there's a bunch of elves in the storyline". As far as I remember, there wasn't a particular bunch of Elves, or Goblins, or Zombies in Onslaught block storyline.
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Can you point to this explicit promise? Even if so: multicolor is kind of an unusual case, being far and away the most popular theme Wizards has ever cooked up. I'd expect variants of the multicolor block to continue to appear in the future even if nothing else ever repeated.
Kamigawa in no way has a graveyard theme. It has one graveyard mechanic and then an otherwise entirely normal number of graveyard-related effects. And that one graveyard effect is just a narrow Raise Dead, not a use of the graveyard as a resource like the Odyssey mechanics and the two graveyard mechanics in Future Sight do.
Urza's Block was called the "Artifacts Cycle" on the box, but it wasn't actually artifact themed in any way -- it had neither an unusual number of artifacts nor of cards and mechanics that interacted with them. The true antecedent to Mirrodin on this matter was Antiquities.
What Urza's Block did have was a very strong enchantment subtheme, with three block mechanics (sleepers, growing enchantments, and Rancor-style auras) that involved them.
Most of my point here is that Wizards does reuse themes, but that thus far the length of time over which they do so, and the predictability with which they do so, is very different than you suggest. Mirrodin, Kamigawa, Onslaught, and Odyssey all took themes of early sets and expanded on them, while Time Spiral had a brand new theme; only Ravnica reused a theme within a short time of its introduction, and that was the unambiguously most popular theme.
I do think there will be another tribal set at some point, but I don't think it's Lorwyn -- it's too predictable, and too uncreative, to reuse another theme right after the "all reused themes" block and the first block to reuse a theme in its entirety. Actually, the very fact that Lorwyn is adopting such a "traditional" high fantasy setting makes me believe that it'll explore a very new theme.
Wrong. Check out this article: Rosewater specifically notes that at the time, Creative had a (monumentally stupid) idea to pull out any creature that couldn't "be used in a duel." You may notice that 8th Edition (and, I'm pretty sure, all the expansions in the new face before Time Spiral block) have no creatures that are purely aquatic -- no merfolk, no fish, etc.
That too. I think Wizards has actually had a lot of success with their minor-key tribal efforts in sets since Onslaught -- there have been a lot of sets with minor tribal sub-themes (like Kamigawa's snakes or, more visibly, its spirits) that probably work better than trying to work out a non-linear way to theme an entire block around tribalism.
If Bound in Silence counted, it would have been "the first new card type introduced since Alpha" the fact the article says Lorwyn will introduce the first new card type since Alpha implies that bound in Silence from Future Sight does not count.
As Lorwyn is turning out to be the new tribal set, the new card type should definitely be tribal.
That does make me wonder what tribe white is getting though. Soldiers or Rebels?
Eurmm Kithkin.
This really excites me you know. I want to know what info will be in the mag, prob not much buttah you never know. Tribal would be fun, but not only tribal, tribal must be the subtheme of the set. Like some tribal myr cards of Mirrodin, but the big theme is actually artifacts. Like tribal elves and merfolk, but the big theme is actually, well we don't know yet.
Posted by: Tay Collins | January 20, 2010 6:45 AM
Tay, that's not evolution. It's metamorphosis. Evolution means descent with heritable modification – individuals cannot evolve, unless they're Pokemon.
Posted by: David Marjanović | January 20, 2010 8:55 AM
Moreover, I think Wizards realized if they were going to approach a multicolored block, the explicit idea was to NOT do Invasion II (as good as Invasion was). So why would they do Onslaught II?
As linear as Tribal is as a concept, it gets even worse when you factor in Extended and Casual where they can pick and choose the most broken elements from Onslaught and the next Tribal block, if the tribes are the same.
-E
I don't really think we can conclude anything. Remember this?
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
It can't be said to make significantly more or less sense than a merfolk blocking a wildebeest.
Anyway, I'm glad Merfolk are back. I mean, it makes the most sense for the elemental flavor of blue - air and water - for their iconic creature type to be Merfolk. They've been on hiatus, but I still associate the fish with blue more than I do wizards or vedalken. Wizards fit the philosophical flavor of blue, but they aren't exclusive to blue in the way that elves, goblins and zombies are (nearly) exclusive to green, red and black, and they aren't flavorful enough... And they seem more limited than merfolk in some ways. They work better as utility creatures, and not so well as vanilla (since you wonder what's so wizardly about a creature that can't do anything but attack and block), whereas merfolk can be evasive weenies or vanilla, and do many of the same things as wizards as well, or even BE wizards.
Uh... Was there a lord for green creatures with haste? I don't follow.
I would hate to see Onslaught 2, so at this point, with what little evidence we have, I'm perfectly willing to just ignore the claims of Lorwyn being a tribal block and focus on the actually new things that'll be going on, like the element of design that won't be included for the first time, or whatever MaRo said.