For those hoping a natural David vs. Goliath storyline would play out naturally in Survivor, a leak from the CBS store page may have dashed those hopes.
It’s hard to know exactly what twists and turns are coming in a Survivor season ahead of time. There are constants such as “a lot of advantages” and “changing tribes in wacky new ways,” but players don’t know exactly what they will be or when they will happen. The hope that these David and Goliath tribes would stay separated until the merge seems to be a false one.
As discovered by someone on the show’s subreddit a week ago, the CBS store currently offers the David and Goliath Survivor buffs. Both the purple Goliath buff and the orange David buff are available now for $22.99, but the image url ending with “843” and “844” in a row led them to add “845” and “846” afterward.
The “845” product leads to a Survivor: David vs. Goliath green buff, while the “846” product leads to a bright cyan-aqua blue buff. Changing the end of the url to “847” leads to an image of Big Brother 20 coffee mugs. By the process of elimination, it would lead us to believe that there will be a tribe swap sometime before the merge into yet another green tribe, while the merge is a bright blue color. The only thing we know for sure is that these two buffs will show up this season.
There have only been three merge tribes with blue buffs in Survivor history prior to David vs. Goliath. The first was the Chaboga Mogo tribe in All-Stars, the second was Nobag in Gabon and the third was Aiga in Samoa. None of them were nearly as bright or vibrant as this unnamed blue buff.
Again, we’re only going by proceeding numbers, but modern seasons have used a “green third tribe buff” pattern a lot lately. It’s also a sign of good luck, as each expansion green tribe (one that didn’t exist before a swap) has had a stellar win/loss record so far.