The Pirate Problem: Flavor Doesn't Make a Tribe

By Larcent

I've been playing in the beta for Magic: The Gathering Arena since February. My experience in this very limited game environment has helped me think a lot about tribal design, particularly where Ixalan block succeeded and failed. Let's talk about Pirates and figure out what the heck happened with them, design-wise.



Before the NDA was lifted a few weeks ago, Arena allowed access only to the Ixalan block for constructed play. I was able to build a couple of decks I was happy with without too much trouble (including the White/Blue flyers/ascend deck).

I played against many different decks, but I faced only one Pirate deck. It lost. I tried making a Blue-Black Revel in Riches Pirate control deck. It mostly lost. Pirates would show up in other decks -- the Blue ones were great for my early creature curve in White-Blue -- but there were no Pirate tribal decks to speak of. And that's because ultimately, Pirates weren't really much of a tribe.

Let's look at the two mechanics associated with the pirates: Raid and Treasure tokens. Raid rewards you for attacking with your pirates... kind of. In reality, most of the time Raid rewarded you for having attacked. This is an important distinction. Whatever Raid rewards you earned (mostly ETB effects on creatures) happened after combat. Raid rewarded you or your Pirate for showing up late.

Raid didn't really synergize with Pirates in any particular "tribal" way. Raid triggers typically did the standard suite of in-color rewards. They were not particularly special things, and not related to other Pirates. There was a Blue Pirate that looted, a Blue Pirate that drew a card, and a Blue-Red Pirate that… also looted. Some Raid triggers were mechanically bizarre. Why would you attach library milling to Raid? The strategy and rewards were not coherent or connected to a tribal identity other than sharing an ability word. More importantly, Raid wasn't really connected to anything recognizable as a win condition. In the end, it felt like Raid was focused on for the flavor, not for any sort of design philosophy connected to a tribe's actual play style.

Let's move on to Treasure. Pirates made lots of Treasures in Ixalan, but weirdly, they didn't seem to need it very much. They were a midrange crew of rapscallions, and they didn't seem to have a terribly needy mana curve. There were only a couple of Pirates that cared about or interacted with Treasures. Deadeye Plunderers suggested they were a signpost uncommon for play style that didn't really exist. Blue/Black was well positioned to produce lots of Treasures, but only a couple of quirky cards really cared about them. Treasures allowed you to splash things into your deck, like Vraska, Relic Seeker and other off-color surprises, but you had to be careful. This also didn’t really create a tribal identity. The Treasures did allow you to play a creature and still have mana up for a spell during your opponent's turn, something Grixis colors like, but that's a color identity, not a tribe.

Even the Pirate leaders were a mystifying bunch. Fathom Fleet Captain and Admiral Beckett Brass had a baffling number of hoops to jump through. I only once managed to get more than one Pirate token creature out of a single Fathom Fleet Captain. I've never seen Brass in play, ever, and her ability is the ultimate expression of a "win more" mechanic. Dire Fleet Captain only buffed himself, which, to be fair is very B/R, but he was extremely vulnerable outside of combat and often didn't last. Dire Fleet Neckbreaker was much more effective, but she came too late. As for the Pirate Planeswalkers, Vraska made both Pirates and Treasures, but didn't actually interact with them (and she was partly off-color). Angrath, the Flame-Chained, despite his Pirate ties, was purposefully designed to fit into any Black-Red deck to fill a Planeswalker color pie gap, without any mechanical ties to Ixalan Pirates.

Now there are plenty of perfectly fine, usable, and even excellent Pirate cards, but once you’re forced to analyze Pirates on a card-by-card basis, that's a big red flag that this is not a tribe.

Arena recently moved to the next stage of Beta, adding Amonkhet block, and giving you a starting collection of ten two-color preconstructed decks. The Black/Red precon is the “Pirate” tribal deck of the bunch. In that deck, only three Pirates in the deck use Raid, and only one creates Treasures. There are spells that reward you for having Pirates, but it pales when compared to synergy shown by Vampires and Merfolk. Only one Blue Pirate appears in any of the other preconstructed decks, so you can't even make a Blue-Red or Blue-Black Pirate deck without cracking some packs.

I played with the Black-Red Pirates deck a little bit (adding some cards from my initial packs, including Hazoret the Fervent). It felt like playing any Black-Red deck. You used damage spells to remove blockers and attacked with your creatures. There were only three cards that actually made me "feel" like I was playing a tribe when playing the Pirates. I’m going to go through them and extrapolate the important design lessons from each.

Dire Fleet Neckbreaker: There's nothing innovative about this, but she brought the win condition. When I got her onto the battlefield, she was impactful right away. The design lesson here: If you want your tribe to focus on domination in combat, they need to be rewarded at the time they are attacking, not afterward.

Fiery Cannonade: There were plenty of non-creature spells that rewarded you for having a Pirate in play, but this one rewarded you for playing them like a tribe. It was very effective against Vampires and Merfolk. The design lesson: Even tribes that revolve around aggressive, disposable creatures need to reward player commitment. Otherwise, why play them over other aggressive, disposable non-tribe creatures?

Dire Fleet Poisoner: Embedded in this Pirate is a story of what the tribe could/should have been. This catches opponents by surprise and changes the outcome of combats entirely. She allows your Pirates to attack into boards you normally wouldn’t. She rewards risky moves and mechanically plays like you'd imagine a Pirate should. Imagine if the Pirates were designed this way with embedded combat tricks instead of post-combat triggers. The design lesson: Synergy in tactics creates a tribe, not just a bunch of shared mechanics.

Dire Fleet Poisoner inspired me to think about a different kind of pirate lord. Captain Brandis Thorn apparently led the Dire Fleet crew, but existed only in flavor text. What about a tribal lord that actually did make a tribe's mechanics cohere together?

Consider how Raid changes significantly as a mechanic if you're able to cast a creature with an ETB trigger in the middle of combat, which is what the Dire Fleet Poisoner does. It can actually change the outcome of combats, which seems like an identity the Pirates are supposed to have. And Thorn lets you be greedy with your pirates and rewards you for bribing them.

Ultimately it feels like the pirate tribe was designed entirely around flavor. And while flavor can be fun, it can quickly lose its appeal when the undergirding mechanics don't support playing them together, and they can't win games.

(This Community Spotlight article comes courtesy of Larcent. If you would like to contribute a Community Spotlight article, check out Write for Goblin Artisans, then send a brief pitch of your idea to zefferal on gmail.)