by Charlie Schmidt
Every now and then, a new creature type will emerge, such as Aetherborn from Kaladesh or pirates and dinosaurs from Ixalan. These new creature types will typically have cards that make playing that creature type strong and efficient, like the infamous Krenko, Mob Boss and Ezuri, Renegade Leader. What these decks may sometimes lack in diversity, they make up for it with hard and fast synergy and power. That is, most of the time. There have been several creature types in the past that got very little of the tribal support their goblin and elf brethren currently enjoy. I would argue that every creature type deserves some love, not just the ones currently favored by the design team.
One such creature type that could use some more synergy is Elephants. This may seem like a pointless or comedic argument I’m making, but I am completely serious on this one. So far, there have been 55 creatures printed with the subtype “elephant,” and not a single one has tribal synergy with the others. Being completely fair, several of them are from Un-sets, and most are not modern legal, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get their time in the spotlight. I envision them being on a plane similar to Saharan Africa, with a key feature of their tribal synergy being that they get higher power and trample if the player controls other elephants. Just a thought.
Another creature type I’d like to see get more tribal synergy is Dwarves. Kaladesh offered up a bit of dwarf synergy, so it isn’t as though there isn’t any in the game at all. However, one or two cards with dwarf synergy on them feels more like an insult to the creature type than actual support for it as a deck. What’s the point of playing the dwarf tribal card in a deck if the rest of the deck is just random dwarves I could find, instead of ones that actually contribute to the game plan? Not to mention that dwarves are such a mainstay in fantasy as a genre, appearing in Lord of the Rings, The Elder Scrolls series, and World of Warcraft, as well as many other well-known works. Dwarves deserve much more synergy than just one card dropped randomly into a set.
And finally, the creature type that most deserves synergy (and has yet to receive any) is Constructs. There have been 138 constructs printed in Magic thus far, not even taking into account cards that make construct tokens. Similar to Dwarves, Constructs are incredibly prominent in fantasy, from automatons like those in Dark Tower and Hellboy: The Golden Army (I know, bad example) to the mechanical sentries protecting the Dwemer fortresses in the Elder Scrolls (sorry to mention it twice, I’ve just been playing far too much Skyrim lately). It is astounding that a creature type with so many printings over Magic’s history has gotten absolutely zero tribal synergy on any card at all.
Tribal synergy is a very important part of Magic as a game. Without it, it’d be almost all spells and whatever creature is good enough to kill your opponent. This isn’t to say that all creature types deserve to get tribal synergy (looking at you, scarecrows), but it means that we can’t play favorites with what creatures get to fight together. Maybe that sounds crazy, or pedantic, but I believe there could be far more tribal decks out there, if only Magic would share the love just a bit more.