Eternal Analysis 005—Tribute

Tribute is one of Eternal's poorer keywords, which is a shame because it's so close to being morbid.

Tribute kicks in when you play the card if one of your units went to your void this turn. Most tribute effects are stat bonuses, but there are a bunch of various effects and they usually define the card they're on. All the common tribute cards suck except Guard Dog (because it's on-rate without tribute) and Scavenging Spikeback (because a 5/5 for 4 is a real threat in Draft). (Pensive Lumen and Silverwing Purgeleader are on the cusp.) The reason they suck is how hard it is to actually trigger tribute.

Tribute has a strength over morbid that you can also trigger it by discarding units from your hand or milling units from your deck. But it has a huge weakness too: It doesn't trigger from sending your opponent's units to the void. That means the normal play pattern for this mechanic is to have a unit in play, attack with it, and lose it in combat to your opponent's unit(s). Even throwing away little units is hard to do because your opponent knows you're only doing that to trigger tribute, and they've got a ton of life to just take the 1 or 2 damage. There's only one card you can tribute during your opponent's turn and it's legendary.

Why is Ironfist Faithful
uncommon?
It's unplayable!

At uncommon, the trap grows stronger. Knight of Sorrow looks like a 6/6 lifesteal for 5; Warrant Officer looks like a 4+/3 that stuns an enemy unit for 3; Fierce Mosaraptor looks like a 3/4 Killer for 4; and Wurmic Chanter looks like mad value. But they're not. Not unless you can reliably engineer a board state where your opponent wants to or has to block your units. Or you can find unusual ways to trigger tribute. There are 5½ commons in the entire game that help you do that. There are 15 uncommons here, but 4 of them cost 4+ and don't leave enough power to actually follow up with a tribute card. The best tribute enablers are the wisp cycle, Combust, and Devour—Ironic that the three best enablers are in the faction with the least tribute.

As usual it's at rare and legendary where the cards start to be worth the difficulty, either by being worth the power without tribute or being completely absurd with it. Consider Kenna, Breaker of Games or Jekk, The Only Gun You Need. Even here there are cards that you regret playing when you can't trigger tribute. It just feels bad a lot of the time.

Like warp, tribute is a keyword you can absolutely make work for you if you dedicate your deck to that aim. That's not a great place for a keyword mechanic. It's awesome that it inspires new and unique decks that wouldn't exist otherwise, but it's simply a miss for one of your major mechanics to be a trap in Limited and in decks not built explicitly to overcome its weaknesses.

How would I tweak tribute? We need to make it easier to trigger in normal gameplay.

The most obvious answer is to make it as good as morbid by letting it trigger off your opponent's units going to the void. This makes chump-blocking dangerous for them. This makes the removal spells you were going to be playing anyhow trigger tribute. This lets your offensive discard and mill spells able to trigger it too. We've just opened up a whole range of new decks and made a keyword more relevant to Limited.

That's clearly the best solution. Downsides? Tribute becomes much stronger, and so some (but definitely not all) of the tribute cards will need to be nerfed a little to compensate. And that's it. I'd make that trade in a heartbeat.

If I had to find a solution with less impact on existing cards, I'd make more cheap common enablers.