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See Vote 2 - Results!.
Tribal was one of the more popular options from voting, and we can't make a block purely out of Quests and Morph. There are two options for tribal:
Personally I'm a fan of keyword tribal. We've seen a bit of it, mostly on defenders like Overgrown Battlement, though we have seen some flying "tribal," too. Keyword tribal for several of the evergreen mechanics could be quite fun.
I think that's a fine variation on tribal - and very naturally gives you "This colour favours it, but there's some overlap" without being "Yeah, but blue goblins? really?"
Also much easier to slip into a set without having to make huge numbers of vanilla-ish creatures to support it, or risk being overly parasitic.
Still, we'd want to give some kind of strong identities to the flying, the hasty, the striking, the vigilant, um... ok, I just hit another problem. How many keywords are actually common enough to warrant a tribe? how many can we fit in a set?
There are easily enough evergreen keywords. I recently put a list over on Tel Eria Guardian:
White: Double strike, First Strike, Flash, Flying, Protection, Vigilance, Lifelink
Blue: Flash, Flying, Islandwalk, Protection, Hexproof
Black: Deathtouch, Intimidate, Flying, Haste, Lifelink, Swampwalk, Regeneration
Red: Double strike, First Strike, Intimidate, Haste, Mountainwalk, Trample
Green: Deathtouch, Flash, Forestwalk, Regeneration, Trample, Hexproof, Vigilance, Reach
What I liked about Lorwyn was how they tried to make it more modular: it wasn't just "pick a tribe, play as many as possible", there were lots of cards that encouraged combinations (eg. shapeshifters, elves that cared about giants, etc).
But I'm not sure it turned out that well in practice, I'm worried all that just made you feel like you were supposed to play "all one tribe", but failed.
Is there any way of doing the same sort of thing?
Eg. Cards rewarding you for playing 2-tribe tribal? Eg. mix-and-match tribal decks with one characteristic race and one iconic race? Eg. cards which work with multiple tribes but only one at once?
I thought Lorwyn worked pretty well at tying the different tribes together. A Giant player would pick up Stinkdrinker Daredevil, and Lowland Oaf, and now they want to pick up some Goblins too. A Merfolk player would pick up a Stonybrook Banneret and a Sigil Tracer, and now they want Wizards too.
To me, Flying, Defender, Vigilance, Intimidate, Landwalk, and Deathtouch all seem like they could make interesting "tribes."
I will admit that using creature types as tribes is a lot easier and probably more grokkable, though.
Let's see if this plan for 5 race and 6 class works. Remember this is based on popular MMO race and class. (Although Vampires are not as popular in MMOs, in our Magic style MMO, they are a major race because I needed a black race.)
Primary color in uppercase, secondary in lowercase, tertiary after dash.
RACES
CLASSES (3 fighter class, 3 mage class)
Analysis:
Note: Dual-classes are for flavor only, such as card names, major ruling body, or possible legendary figures.
Humans are white, then blue. Their classes are Soldier, Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue. Dual-class is the Paladin, which is a Cleric Soldier.
Gnomes are blue, then green. Their classes are Wizard, Rogue, Druid, and Warrior. Dual-class is the Illusionist, which is Wizard Rogue.
Vampires are black, then red. Their classes are Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, and Warrior. Dual-class is the Bloodmage, which is Rogue Cleric.
Dwarves are red, then white. Their classes are Warrior, Wizard, Cleric, and Soldier. Dual-class is the Battlemage, which is Warrior Wizard.
Elves are green, then black. Their classes are Druid, Warrior, Rogue, and Cleric. Dual class is the Ranger, which is Druid Warrior.
I'm not yet sold on the MMO flavor. I'd rather see a "game world" flavor, where citizens compete for glory and affluence in hopes of ascending farther in society. Nobles view the competition of their lessers as entertainment and sponsor the games as a way to give false hope to the oppressed. I see that you've mixed and matched enemy and ally colors among the races and classes, which is interesting. I would be inclined to have all the races be ally colors and the classes be enemy, or vice versa. I like that.
Here's an alternate take on races and classes: Races
Classes
"Keyword Tribal" Possibilities
(This looks silly now that I write it out, actually.)
I don't know if I like this, but it's another possibility.
FWIW, I generally like both sets of race/class suggestions, but I don't like the MMO parody flavour. If we want to do a "generic fantasy adventure world" a bit like zendikar but more so, I think that could work, but I think we want a flavour which is strong in its own right, not just against something else.
Do we want some kind of mechanics for tribal beyond "cards that care about tribe"? I can't think of an example though - soulshift almost? "Name a creature type" cards give a nice way to save number of cards while staying tribal.
I don't see how far you can go with keyword tribal. Will you really have 20 hexproof creatures, 20 haste, 20 landwalkers, etc.?
i thought about race/classes as one group ally and other group enemy. but it seemed a bit too neat and possibly forcing the tribes to colors that don't happen enough. i mean, there's a measly 16 green rogues ever, 6 of which are multicolor. but i'm okay with that since rogues are underrepresented as a whole and green tracker/hunter type makes sense. also i'd prefer goblins/orcs be RB and dwarves RG. nevertheless, i can accept this way of dividing the tribes if people like everything all neat and tidy.
But beyond just assigning colors, as vitenka asked, what else do we want with tribal mechanically? as i suggested during the vote, give each tribe their own keyword or ability, which will appear on many (not all) creatures of that tribe. they can be new or active keywords. maybe races get totally new keywords and classes use old keywords and mechanics. e.g.
if that's too much, then evergreen or coreset keywords (e.g. exalted, scry, bloodthirst) are fine for classes. then push new keywords to the races.
i also want to mention that there's a secret class and secret race you can unlock after you passed certain achievements.
If each class belongs to two or more colors, let's distinguish them even further as such. e.g.
Now how about racial qualities?
One may divide the classes even further, since each class for each of its two colors also belongs to two races. This means there are four flavors of rogues, wizards, warriors, and clerics, and two flavors of druids and soldiers. As such the descriptions for each race should be expanded upon at this time.
So by their racial differences, we can split the classes accordingly. For example
Clerics
Wizards
Rogues
Warriors
Soldiers
Druids
Based on the above descriptions, we can assign the abilities respective to each race and class. e.g. Human Rogue (pirate) can steal things when they hit an opponent. Human Wizard (water mage) may cause floods and turn lands into islands. and so on.
I don't want to be a downer but that sounds reasonably complex to get across clearly.
Aye, that sounds like we'd need more than one set to get across.
I probably should avoid the pun - but can 'quest' be a tribe? (Questing Elf, Questing Dwarf etc.)
how is that complex? everything is laid out in nice lists. you just have to make the cards/cycles according to the skeleton.
of course you can't fit it in one set. that's why wizards makes three sets per block. even in the first set, there should be around 120-150 creatures. i don't know how you can fill them haphazardly; you have to have a plan or blueprint. divided by 5 thats 24-30 cards per race. then divided by 4 classes per race, that's 6-8 cards per class per race. when you sort by race and/or class, the differences should be clear when you make tribal decks. so that a human cleric deck is not the same as a dwarf cleric deck, or vampire cleric deck, or elf cleric deck, or a mixed cleric deck.
what do you mean quest as a tribe? you mean creatures that feel like quests? Jack V proposed that in Community Questant. but that's more related to questing than tribes. certainly there can be a cycle or 3 of these.
Each of those examples needs at least 3 cards to be a thing that players can see, rather than just appearing to be a coincidence.
That's 20 types of card, eight of which have two things to demonstrate - that's 84 creatures right there. Just how big a set are we creating?
Oh, and then you want these to be tribal? So we'd want at a couple of lord for each type - 112.
Primarily; I meant the bad pun. But yes, I'm suggesting "Questor" as a class. (Or, well blegh, probably that is the best word.) and tribal stuff for it.
Yep, so half the set is practically done. It's just pretty much fill in the blanks by the numbers. Now we can spend more time and attention on the other themes of the set. Which by the way I've already taken all of them into account when thinking up the tribal plan. That is, of the 112 creatures you estimated, there is plenty of room for morph creatures, questing creatures, and control-themed creatures.
To elaborate. We have 20 race x class combinations. We can reserve 2 commons, 2 uncommons, and 1 rare for each of those combinations, for a total of about 100 tribal cards. (Actually rares and mythics can be dual class; maybe even uncommons, too. But can dismiss that for now.)
We need about 50-70 creatures at common. We can assign 2 creatures for each of the 20 combinations. So 40 spaces taken up. So we still have room for 10-30 non-tribal creatures, such as beasts, spiders, rats, goblins, etc. at common.
Same for uncommon, where we reserve 2 each for the major race x class combinations. So between commons and uncommons, each RxC combination can have 4 cards: 3 for the other 3 themes and 1 left for anything, including lords. BTW we don't need a lord for every combination. We just need a lord for each race and a lord for each class--so 11 lords max. Some cards can be lords for two tribes at once, thus taking up even fewer cards.
Compare the latest large sets and number of creatures in them:
The blocks with the most creatures were both tribal. Lorwyn had to support 8 races, but this is more like Innistrad's 5 races. So if we aim for 100 cards for the major races, there's still room for about 46 other creatures in the set. If we have to, we could trim down the quota of creatures to Alara's amount. Remember a big set has about 250 cards. That still leaves 100-120 non creature cards. That should be plenty of room for quests and spellmorphs etc. Also remember that these tribal cards can embody quests, morphs and control themes, so they're not stealing slots away from these themes.
Oh, ok; you're suggesting making a set about twice the size I was expecting. That explains that, then.
Still seems pretty complex, but possible.
Gold cycles of class-class pairs
Kind of complicated because there are 15 class-class pairs, but only 10 color-color pairs. That means some color pairs are repeated. So I decided to make 5 gold uncommons and 10 gold rares. The uncommon color pairs belong to the races' main colors (each race has a minor tertiary color for the purpose of this cycle.)
Uncommon golds:
Rare golds: