Shenanigans in all the Colours of the Wind

Every so often, Wizards prints a card that is all five colours, usually striving to make the card powerful or striking because of this. Some of these cards are kind of okay. Some of these cards are substantially less okay.

The first 5-colour card ever printed was Sliver Queen, back in Tempest. When I started playing, it was still the only card of this sort in existence, so it was kind of a big deal. Like any other human being for a stretch of time directly following the Rath block, I wanted to be the "Slivers" guy, which means that I wanted to run a deck with every single Sliver in it, and I would have given at least one of my friends' eyeball for a Sliver Queen. I looked at pictures of Sliver Queen on the internet, because back then we didn't have all those fancy Magic sites with actual articles or anything, by which I mean that I didn't know they existed.

The next quintuple chromatic card to stumble along was Coalition Victory, which was kind of cool because it made you win the game, plain and simple. Granted, by the time Invasion block rolled around, the concept of playing removal in response really hadn't clicked in with me or my friends... so we had yet to realize it would never work in the real world. The mana cost is also probably the worst in the game. But you could put it in your slivers deck, which was naturally five colors with no mana fixing, since, hey; you were already playing permanents of five colors, and you still didn't have a Sliver Queen.

Two sets later came along the lovable Cromat, whom one can't help but love for having a dozen-odd activated abilities. Interestingly enough, Wizards had a Popularity Poll for all the Legends a while back, and Cromat managed to win for no conceivable reason. Seriously, he looks to possess animal intelligence, at best... and he managed to even beat out the heavily-favored Squee. Cromat has literally no place in the story. It just goes to show, Wizards really needs to wise up to the idea that most people like the flavour of the game but don't give two dangs about no Gerrard.

Last Stand is a sad waste of a good card name. Seriously, if I'm going to lay down a five-colour sorcery, I might as well just use Coalition Victory and win the game.

Atogatog must die. Let me say I'm a big fan of tribes that are only going to be supported heavily for one set getting a lord, preferably a lord that really plays up their abilities rather than one that just gives them +1/+1 or whatever. This card, however, is not a good lord. He is possibly the worst lord card ever printed. If you're playing an atog deck, you sort of feel like you should be playing their lord, which is one of the worst creatures ever, so he leads to moral dilemmas as well as lost games. An experiment: build a deck that includes Atogatog, but not Dragon Gate. I guarantee you that the deck will be better if you replace the Atogatog with a Sliver Queen, even if the deck contains zero other Slivers and many Atogs. Even if the deck contains Plague Sliver. Atogatog is just so bad, and he's not even cool. He's lame. In fact, I've said this all before. Like, four days ago.

Karona, False God and Sliver Overlord were probably designed by different people on the opposite sides of a cubicle wall. The Overlord isn't nearly as awesome as the Queen, but he's still a 7/7 beatstick and his first ability is pretty good. Karona, meanwhile, is a mess. An important story character (or so I'm told,) and yet she has 2 less power and toughness than the Overlord, and costs one mana more. Oh, and she swaps over to your opponent each turn. Why the creature-type pumping, meanwhile? Tribal decks typically stick to one, maybe two colours. So you add three or four colours more to support Karona. Your opponent essentially gets a Karona too, meanwhile, without having to play it or even deviate from his mana base. I weep. A 5/5 creature that gave all of your creatures +3/+3 all of the time that cost WUBRG would still probably not be competitive. At least she doesn't have stupid art, which gives her an advantage over Atogatog, and if you can actually play her in Limited, you'd probably win or at least draw a removal spell.

After that pair of winners, Wizards put off any more five-colour madness until Kamigawa, in which we were graced with Genju of the Realm. He's actually pretty neat... he has a goofy card type (enchant land,) and is pretty hard to stop if you do manage to get it into play. Most decks can't handle a sorcery-proof black 8/12 trampler more than once. I sort of wish they had loaded him with more random abilities, but what can you do.

Transguild Courier is all five colours without being WUBRG. I actually like him because he could probably be any rarity and not seem out of place. It's really simple and pleasant to have around in limited, so it could be common. It has a striking and unique ability, so it could be rare. I use him in my Scarecrow deck to fulfill colour requirements without being a bitch to get in play.

Scion of the Ur-Dragon is the smallest of the five-colour creatures. I realize that Sneak Attack is too good, but making it all five colours and more vulnerable to destruction is not the answer. I would really rather have Sneak Attack. Like, really really.

I don't particularly like Sliver Legion. I understand the sentiment - it's the next logical step in crazy Sliver synergies - but it doesn't feel like another Sliver boss. It feels like a bunch of pastel slivers. Seriously, guys - my whole deck is a Sliver Legion.

Horde of Notions and The Reaper King are what one-set-tribe lords should be (if they're going to be stupid 5-colour things just because their tribes are 5-colour.) Horde of Notions is a terror in combat, and his ability plays extremely well with the fact that in Lorwyn, basically every greater elemental had a CIP ability and an easy way to get into the graveyard. It's cool, and it synergizes with what the tribe is doing without being a form-letter lord.
Same with the Reaper King. In fact, the Reaper King is also one of the coolest creatures around. He looks like one seriously badass dude, and there is no ability more intimidating than "Destroy target permanent" without an activation cost of any sort in front of it. Tribal Scarecrows is probably going to be pretty bad, but tribal Scarecrows with the King in tow is a lot cooler, even if it's still bad. I love the Scarecrows conceptually as well as visually, and I know they're not going to get any more support after this block, so might as well stock them up with a seriously cool lord.

Nevertheless, I still like Sliver Queen more.

A Scribe About Tribes

Tribes? Ho boy, Slivers are gonna pop up in here.

Basically, there are a crapload of tribes - especially with Wizards' recent fanatical need to convert more and more of the ubiquitous one-ofs (Gone is the possibility to make an Uncle Istvan deck. No longer may you craft a Niall-Silvain tribal deck. People-of-the-woods deck? Forget it.) Some tribes have a lot of cohesion; some have a little. For instance, most spiders can block flyers, and most imps can fly... or at least jump well. (To be printed, an imp at least has to be able to touch the rim, not just the net.) That is pretty much not the tribes in question today. I mean tribes with something more coherent in common - typically a block thing - that is just theirs. Furthermore, I'm talking about the ones that I remember as I write this post, not all of them.

Basically, mechanically-connected tribes lie somewhere along a three-sided continuum. A contrinuum. One point is made of ones that, because of the nature of their mechanical connection, work really well together. Example: Slivers. The other point is made of ones that don't have tons of natural synergy, but at least got a few lord cards. Example: samurai. The last point is made of ones that don't work well together, or even actively work against each other. Example: licids. Naturally I made a licids deck anyhow.

Okay, so first up in order of recall is Chimeras. There were like, four of these guys, but when I actually played with whatever set these losers were in I didn't know about one of them, so I thought there were three. Anyway, these guys - Lead-Belly Chimera, Tin-Wing Chimera, Iron-Heart Chimera, and Some Other Chimera are all 2/2 for 4 with some keyword ability, and you can sacrifice them to permanently give another chimera +2/+2 and the keyword ability. It doesn't transfer on, though, so if you sacrifice the 4/4 chimera with two keyword abilities, it only passes on the one it naturally has.
Anyways, I have a brain dysfunction that makes me need to craft synergistic decks, sometimes possessing me to run a deck loaded up with these colorless rejects. Among the most obvious problem with such a deck is that all 16 (of course you're playing 4 of each of them) of your creatures cost 4 mana, and all are only 2/2. On their own, each chimera is worse than an existing creature that costs two mana. For Chimeras done right, see Modular.

Now, the one we all saw coming - Slivers. It seems every time they print a new batch of Slivers, I like them a bit less. When I started playing, only one set of slivers had been released, and I was so crazy for them. Like every other player on the planet, I totally wanted to be the sliver guy. Everyone wanted Sliver Queen, but of course the real prize was Crystalline Sliver. I'll admit I didn't make my Sliver deck until the second batch came out, but they're still better than any Time Spiral nonsense. Now there's so many slivers that you can totally play a one-colour Sliver deck, which seems weird to me, since that means it will be hard to play that Sliver Queen which you are bound by law to include. It also bugs the heck outta me that the only Vigilance sliver is blue. What the heck, people.

I am basically the only guy with fond memories of licids. Licids are fellows that start out as creatures, but each has a tap ability that turns them into rules problems. When Ravnica hit, I joked that they should bring back licids for the Orzhov, because they're a rules nightmare, which combines a white thing - rules - with a black thing - nightmares. Licids are probably the only tribe where the creature depicted on the card is not the most prominent thing in the art. Also, despite being the size of my hand, half of the licids can kill a bear... so you know they're badasses.
What they're not badass at is working together, as my former licid deck totally proved. A very unexciting thing to enchant with say, Quickening Licid is another licid, because making a french vanilla creature out of two of your creatures is not the most exciting thing to do. Also, if you use the enchanted licid's ability, the one riding on it just dies. My favorite use for licids has very little to do with actually enchanting anything. See, when a licid becomes an enchantment, it stops being a creature. So you can block with a licid, then, with damage on the stack, tap him to turn him into a creature enchantment. Then the guy you were targeting gets bolted and your licid dies anyway, because the ability is worded in a way that it isn't countered if the target dies. Yeah, licids rule.

Spikes, like Spike Soldier were okay, I suppose. While there are 21 cards with "spike" in the name, there were only ten of these guys until they printed another one in Time Spiral. Spikes work together sorta well, in the sense that some of them have other uses for the +1/+1 counters that can be moved between them, and if you move a counter to a spike, you can move it off later. A spike deck (of course I have a spike deck) has basically the same problem as a licid deck - there's no discernible way to win. None of your spikes have evasion. I guess you could use your spikes to pile counters onto another, better creature, but there are a plethora of better ways to pump up a creature than to pay 2 mana to move counters one at a time to it.
There's also Spike Cannibal, which is either some sort of +1/+1 counter hoser or something you put in a apike deck despite the fact that it's a different color so that you can lose all of your more-or-less efficiently costed guys and get one big guy. With no evasion or anything. Who is instantly destroyed by a crappy removal card.
I believe if the spikes were printed today, most of them would be just a little stronger or a little more interesting; they had the misfortune to be born during a period when green really sucked and nobody cared. (That is, most of the history of the game.) For spikes done right, see Graft.

Atogs are all about "Sacrifice whatever: this guy gets +2/+2 until end of turn." You can't build an atog deck for three reasons. Firstly, none of the atogs want to be in a deck with other atogs. They want to be in a deck with whatever the heck random thing or concept they feed on. Secondly, you have the choice between either not playing the strongest atog or being a jerk by playing one of the best creatures in the history of ever in casual. Finally, if you're playing an atog deck, you sort of feel like you should be playing their lord, which is one of the worst creatures ever. Don't play Atogatog. Don't you do it.

Rebels search up. Mercenaries search down. In a rebel deck, you can use your weak creature to find a bigger one. In a mercenary deck, you can tap your big guy to find... something smaller. You mostly have to hardcast everything. In a rebel deck, you need hardcast only your first guy. This is why rebel decks are badass and mercenary decks suck. It's a pity, because the mercenaries themselves are much cooler. The mercenaries also had better toolbox cards in general. Nonetheless, Lin-Sivvi is one of the very few creatures to ever have been banned in any format. I don't know that mercenaries were even constructed playable. Two other notes: one of the strongest white tribes of all time is called "rebels"; I don't think of rebellion as a particularly white thing. Secondly, the card Mercenaries itself is white, and set a precedent for mercenaries by sucking.

Zuberas were a cheap tribe to build around, because none are rare and all of the normal ones are common. Furthermore, I swear that something was up with the print run, because every pack of Champions I've ever opened with had like, nine of them in there. Basically, the goal of the Zubera deck was to get all of your creatures killed at once. But first you wanted to get as many of the suckers out there at once as possible. The right way to do this was to play a lot of card drawing and stuff and to not be afraid to take some hits while you waited to Wrath everything away. The wrong way is Followed Footsteps, but I don't care.

You know what? I'm not going to write about Samurai.

Ninjas were cool, because you got to feel all sneaky, even though it was really always like "well, Betrayers came out two months ago, and he's got four blue and black lands untapped, and he's attacking with an Ornithoptor or Sage Owl, two cards that people never play with for no reason. I wonder what's going to happen?" Higure, the Still Wind was an extremely cool first for a lord: rather than just giving his tribe +1/+1, he had two abilities that synergize extremely well with two things that all ninjas have in common: they want to be in your hand, and they want to not be blocked when they attack. Many later lords do this as well, and it's really cool.