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AuthorRivien Swanson

Rivien Swanson is a casual player and writer who specializes in the more arcane formats available on Magic Online. Whether talking about Tribal Standard, Prismatic, or good old casual constructed in general, Rivien's areticles are guaranteed to be written with a healthy dose of style and humor.

Tribal Bible #6 – I Am Unholier Than Thou, oh Tap Dancing Pants!

Welcome back! I have returned to thee, oh most faithful followers of the Standard Tribal format, and I have finally begun to wash the stench of those awful, awful decks from last week off of me.

Tribal Bible #5 – Party of Five

Party of Five, as you may or may not recall, was a notoriously horrible American television show which aired long ago and was cancelled with extreme prejudice due to its utter inability to do just about anything right, insofar as actually being entertaining was concerned. Today, we are going to look over some things which have been similarly cancelled, or well should be. I refer to these as “Parties of Five.”

Tribal Bible #4 – Bird Is The Word at Boot Camp? Elementaly, My Dear Watson!

Rivien continues his excellent Tribal Bible series, presenting decks for the popular Tribal Standard format. Today’s offering? Elementals, Soldiers, and Birds.

Tribal Bible #3 – Your Halo Slipping Down to Your Clown Shoes? Then You’re Not Quite Yeti Yet

Welcome to Tribal Bible #3 of the Impossibly Long Title. I’m going to hope the trend of these article names doesn’t continue, or by the time we get to #7 or so, the title will be longer than the actual article itself. That aside, we’ve got three Coldsnap-enabled tribes to do this week, so let’s get busy.

Chickenscratch – What You Should Know About Phyrexian Etchings

Phyrexian Etchings: it’s good. Really good. Quite frighteningly good. In fact, let’s make this interesting:

Phyrexian Etchings is — situationally – more broken than Necropotence.

Have I got your attention now? Good.

Tribal Bible #2 – Something Fishy about Horsing Around with Shamen

And we’re back with the second instalment of Tribal Bible, the most cleverly named series in the history of Magic, as written by the world’s most devastatingly bald… er… handsome writer. Or perhaps a child left to be raised by monkeys in a meth lab. You never can tell.

Tribal Bible #1 – Advice on Planting Demons

Welcome to my new series, Tribal Bible, dedicated to exploring the murky depths of our new format, Standard Tribal. My goal is to provide insights on three decks per week, hopefully each with a different tribe. A slant towards quirky, small tribes should be expected – partly because smaller tribes are more interesting to me, and also because the more members a tribe has, the more paths there are to take.

Justify My Love – Or At Least My Color: Rearranging The Pie So That White Can Act Like Soldiers

White doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Here’s this group of people (and currently birds), right? Knights, paladins, monks, clerics, and soldiers – all of these pretty much military positions – but none of them make any attempt to plan ahead or foil the opposition. It has no proactive cards; all it can do is react. Is that right?

From Left Field – The Unseen Angle

Okay, it’s been two weeks and we’re already all sick of AstroGlide decks. R/W, G/W, G/R/W, B/W – we’ve seen it all. Or have we? What if we told you that someone was trying to make a U/R cycling land destruction deck that Slid Aven Fogbringers for bounce and denial? THOUGHT so.