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Getting To Work On Pioneer Tribal Brews

While combo decks have seized the early Pioneer spotlight, Ari Lax is hard at work building tribal creature brews! Can he make the discovery that will short-circuit the emerging metagame?

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My goal is to lay ground work for future Pioneer deck development. Tribal decks have been a consistent contender in Modern and Legacy, and I see no reason the same won’t be true in Pioneer.

Some of the decks I’ll talk about can compete with Felidar Guardian or Treasure Cruise, and some probably can’t, but that’s not a huge concern to me. Those cards are so borderline on power level that I can let the Banned and Restricted list decide their relevance for me. Either they won’t exist, or they are acceptable enough I expect these decks will be fine against them.

This article was heavily supported by the great work Gerry Thompson and Brian Gottlieb are doing on Twitter as @PioneerDLs. If you’re at all interested in Pioneer and aren’t following them, do so. I’m not normally one to love a deluge of out-of-context decklists, but in a new format the stream of raw ideas is crucial.

All-Purpose Tribal

The initial reason I wanted to focus on tribal in general instead of specific tribes was the subset of overlapping payoffs. There are relatively few actual tribal sets in Pioneer, and you only hit things like Modern Spirits or Humans with the redundancy that comes with multiple sets of payoffs. You must look to these generic stand-ins for some of these decks.

Unclaimed Territory is probably the best tribal card in all of Pioneer. Normally it ties four- or five-color decks together, but there are constraints on Pioneer we haven’t had to live with for a long time. The tribal combination of stretching for pieces and wanting low curves comes at a mana cost that Unclaimed Territory helps pay. You can make a Bant tribal deck work without Unclaimed Territory, but the mana is way more painful than an Abzan one because you don’t have multiple Kaladesh fastlands.

In order for a mass pump effect to be interesting, it has to provide more than just one power or cost two or less. Obelisk of Urd passes the more than one power test, while Metallic Mimic passes the converted mana cost test.

Obelisk of Urd does ask for you to go significantly wide at a low rate. It’s generic, but it isn’t truly “generic” in the sense that every tribal deck is going to want it. Keep an eye out for where that one shows up.

Not Quite There

I went through a lot of tribes on the way to this article. Here’s a quick list of the ones that aren’t quite there yet.

There might be just enough Dragons to make a control deck, but I’m not here for that today.

Wolves and Werewolves both don’t have good payoffs and don’t have good rate enablers. Nightpack Ambusher is in the range of playable, but the rest isn’t.

Angels are another set of midrange cards without a good payoff.

Sliver Hive layered on Unclaimed Territory is an absurd draw to that archetype. Leeching Sliver plus Predatory Sliver is a start towards the number of pump effects needed to make a good deck. But you are stuck working with a fractional set-and-a-half worth of content. Add another block of Slivers or changelings and this turns around immediately.

Reflector Mage being a Wizard pointed me towards that tribe, but the payoffs aren’t there. Naban, Dean of Iteration does look like it might enable a minor synergy package in Humans, and also pointed me in some other important directions.

The two fresher Ixalan tribes are right out, as there just isn’t the accumulated support for them. Dinosaurs has some of the clunk issues of something like Angels, but as we saw in Core Set 2020 Standard the deck can slant aggressive enough to matter. Allies has the same issue, but possibly only for one year until Zendikar Rising.

My comment stands after a search. You are a bit short on devotion to blue enablers since Frostburn Weird has a Weird creature type.

Copy someone else’s Bant Spirits list, copy my skepticism of Empyrean Eagle. I’m here today to try new things.

Zombies is similarly defined and uninteresting. Thoughtseize plus attackers is good. If you find some awesome deathtouch combo with Death Baron I missed in this format, let me know.

Constructs is just cheating on the tribal definition. Your real tribe is +1/+1 counters; it just happens that there are twelve zero-mana 0/0 Constructs to Metallic Mimic spam.

Elves is really good, but Elves is also cheating on the definition of Tribal. It’s just another name for a Leyline of Abundance Mono-Green Devotion, where Elvish Clancaller is both the actual Elves payoff and a solid Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx enabler.

On to the actual decks.

Humans With Jobs

When looking at white’s creature types, it was really clear Humans was the best-supported. Thalia’s Lieutenant is another contender for best tribal card in Pioneer. Soldiers was a clear worst, without a real reason to play the type outside of the generic payoffs.

But Knights has clean overlap with Humans in Worthy Knight. Obviously the card is better if your deck is entirely Knights, but just mostly Knights still gives you a powerful card to work with. Worthy Knight spamming multiple bodies per card is also exactly what you want for Obelisk of Urd.

Boros Humans-Knights
Ari Lax
Test deck on 10-28-2019
Pioneer
Magic Arena

Creatures (35)

Lands (20)

Spells (5)

Sideboard

Magic Card Back


There are basically limitless two-power one-drops in Pioneer. The ones with the right creature types have priority, and I think it’s hard to argue against Kytheon, Hero of Akros; Boros Elite; or Thraben Inspector as uniquely powerful within the one-drop Human category to fill in the blanks where you run out of two-power Knights.

We aren’t quite at the 100% Knights point where I want to play Tournament Grounds. That’s more of a “Pioneer in 2023” play.

Brave the Elements might be the biggest single draw to any mono-white strategy in Pioneer. You don’t really want to draw multiples, but some mode of the card always ends up game-breaking. Shirking off removal or a red sweeper, or breaking through a midrange deck’s stall, or winning a multi-creature combat in the mirror for one mana is something you can plan for and leverage for easy wins.

While it might make sense to play Knight of the White Orchid in your low-land-count Humans and Knights deck, it isn’t worth a card. Two power for two mana just isn’t it, and the Turn 3 ramp also isn’t it.

The two cards I’m likely missing the most on are Mutavault and Venerated Loxodon. Mutavault is the best value land in the format, with Castle Ardenvale being too expensive to matter, but it seems odd in the super-one-drop-heavy list that wants double or triple white. Venerated Loxodon over Benalish Marshal might be a part of that integration, but I’m starting from the assumption that I should be aiming to attack on Turn 3 and kill on Turn 4 and not simply pump on Turn 3 and kill on Turn 5 with overwhelming power.

I’m also willing to admit Venerated Loxodon might be a better Obelisk of Urd. Four power on the Elephant means you need how many creatures to get +2/+2 instead of just a single counter to break even? And at that point, is the difference between nine or ten power from your pump effect that big a deal?

The other big draw to going “mono-white” might just be doing that and then bridging to Azorius for good interaction. Have you cast a Reflector Mage? It is that good. That also starts bringing us to the heavy-white Bant shell that was so successful in Standard with Collected Company, and at that point I think you are just Humans without the job specifications.

There’s a shortage of good universal interactive creatures in Pioneer the way Modern has Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Meddling Mage, but there isn’t a shortage of specific hate “bears” to load up the sideboard.

Orzhov Humans-Warriors
Ari Lax
Test deck on 10-28-2019
Pioneer
Magic Arena

Creatures (37)

Lands (20)

Spells (3)

Sideboard

Magic Card Back


The main reasons to reach to full Mardu or Abzan Warriors just don’t align with the Humans payoffs, so two-color it is.

The two-drop reasons to splash also don’t really work out. Worthy Knight going wide kinda negates the drawback of overloading on two-drops, but the big lesson of Azorius Aggro in Ravnica Allegiance Standard was that playing a two-drop instead of multiple one-drops in this style of deck is usually a waste. I’m just playing the twos that provide wider pump effects the turn they enter the battlefield.

If you want to branch out to more colors, here are a couple of lists to use as starting points.

Goblins

Embercleave Goblins
Rizer
Test deck on 10-28-2019
Pioneer
Magic Arena

Creatures (26)

Lands (22)

Spells (12)

Sideboard

Magic Card Back


Rizer is a Magic Online legend who notably won a Magic Online PTQ last year with this archetype in Modern. That deck utilized Goblin Bushwhacker and Reckless Bushwhacker with Devastating Summons as its combo kill, but the same premise stands here with Goblins.

Goblin Ringleader is legal in Pioneer, but similar to Modern I don’t know if it’s playable here. Maybe the format cools off to the point you want a four-mana draw-two Goblin, but I’m mostly interested in just killing them and not playing four-mana creatures in my deck until then.

Giving haste to a Goblin Rabblemaster or Goblin Piledriver is a big deal. Goblin Warchief costs a lot of mana for that, so why not start early? Goblin Motivator is more exciting than Torch Courier since having a bonus attacker on follow up turns matters a lot for these payoffs, but I could see math pointing towards the true Raging Goblin.

I think this initial list is a little heavy on pump spells and lands for a deck with so many low-impact cards. You have a reasonable number of things to give double strike thanks to explosive Foundry Street Denizen turns, but multiple double strike spells don’t stack well. Similarly drawing four lands is an absolute disaster. You have a lot of three-drops, but Legion Warboss and Goblin Warchief aren’t so good you have to kill them.

If there’s room to improve on Rizer’s base, it’s in fixing these curve and impact issues. That or playing actual high-impact cards like Electrickery in the sideboard instead of Wild Slash.

Vampires

I saved the best for last. The headliner in Vampires is the same thing that made Zombies attractive, but for some reason I haven’t seen this deck posted everywhere. I’m also much more excited about the second-best card in the deck, since Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord is yet another comically powerful 2019 planeswalker.

Orzhov Vampires
Ari Lax
Test deck on 10-28-2019
Pioneer
Magic Arena

Creatures (24)

Planeswalkers (4)

Lands (24)

Spells (8)

Sideboard

Magic Card Back


There’s half a great Sam Black deck buried in this creature type. I’m sure I’m missing something that puts it all together as an engine, but for now I’m satisfied binning my extra Champion of Dusk cards or Adanto, the First Fort tokens to close out a game.

I’m almost 100% sure not playing a removal spell or two in the maindeck is wrong. You’re positioning yourself as one of the more interactive decks with an incremental payoff, not raw incremental stuff like Warriors. I’m just not sure which is the right one to play. The cut is almost surely some of the previously mentioned Sam Black resource conversion stuff, and the empty sideboard slots are likely best as Collective Brutality.

Vampires is already really well positioned in creature mirrors, but there’s no reason to not just slam the door with Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet and Languish. Just looking at those two cards makes me rethink playing Selfless Spirit in my earlier lists.

I didn’t mention Stain the Mind when I had it in Warriors because I didn’t realize the implications of the card until I got to Vampires. Stain the Mind is the only mono-black, non-restricted Cranial Extraction effect in Pioneer, a format where combo seems to be fairly single-card-centric and not super-redundant. The rest are all Dispossess or Lost Legacy with a card type restriction.

Playing a black creature deck is an undeniable interactive edge.

When I talk about the goal of progressing Pioneer deckbuilding, that kind of realization is exactly what I’m talking about.