The more choke cards you stack, the more effective they become, so he's often played with those two cards, as well as Aragorn, Heir to the White City (3R38) , Consorting With Wizards (2R97) , Sting (1R313) , and occasionally Galadriel, Lady of Light (1R45) and Gimli, Dwarf of the Mountain-race (2P121)
Lets deal with the second point first, because I dont think its especially relevant to the rest of Brennans argument
From that, you can pretty plainly see the strategy of this deck: swarm the battlefield with lots of creatures, and augment them with +1/+1 counters
When this card was teased by Mark Rosewater we wrongly predicted it would be a dragon-doubler like Necroduality
And in a post from 2025 on his personal blog, he confirms that tribute has an uphill climb in order to be seen again
The prevailing theory is that the Hasbro legal department was worried about lawsuits from collectors over falling secondary market prices, but thats just conjecture