Last time, I talked about the effect of Wizards’ new multiplayer rules on Two-Headed Giant. Wizards’ new multiplayer rules also define the Emperor format – and the new rules will also change that format, which is a good thing. As it is currently played, the format is about as enjoyable as battling a blazing manure pile on a hot summer day.
Been there, done that – don’t ever want to do it again. But the memory, like the stench, lingers on.
Actually, not all Emperor games or formats are broken. Emperor games use a lot of house rules and are played differently in many areas. Some of these house rules work well, and some groups play enjoyable Emperor games. Others play bizarre rules, and Emperor in ways that is less about enjoyment than winning – for example, my attempt to break the format at GenCon a couple years ago. Good Emperor is a casual place, with games being played according to the spirit of the rules. Bad Emperor games use decks built specifically to abuse the special rules of the Emperor format. That’s what our primary decks at GenCon did, and that’s what makes for boring games.
Speaking of which, the place where the most Emperor games are played – and the place where the format is totally inbred and screwed-up – is…
…wait for it….
Magic Online.
To the forums! Flame on!
Welcome back.
Seriously, Emperor has a small but strong following on MTGO, where a group of players have tuned their decks to completely break that format. The decks are – at once – totally amazing and completely repulsive.
In multiplayer games, people should not concede when their opponents play Hunted Wumpus. That should not happen. When it does – and it often does in Online Emperor – something is seriously wrong.
Here’s what’s going on. Online Emperor games use the Limited Range of Influence option – typically the 1/1/1 option. Range of Influence means that a player can only “reach” players in their range of influence, can only target that player and that player’s spells and permanents, and global effects only have an affect within that range of influence.
For example, in a multiplayer game with a range of influence of one, I can only reach and affect the players on either side of me. I can only attack those players, I can only target those players, and if I play Armageddon, it will destroy all lands controlled by me and by those two players. Lands controlled by other players – those outside my reach – are unaffected.
The MTGO Emperor decks abuse this rule to the max. All the decks do – in my experience, that’s all the online format is.
Here’s an example from the very first emperor game I watched, the day after I got my account up and running. The names have been changed to protect the idiots that play the format: call them Player A, Player B (the Emperor) and Player C.
Player A: Island, go
Player B: Forest, Wild Growth.
Player A: Twiddle, targeting Forest
Player B: Tap enchanted Forest for GG, Fertile Ground, go.
Player C: Island, go.
Opponents do something completely irrelevant.
Player A: Forest, Wild Growth targeting the emperor’s Forest
Player B: Island, tap Forest for GGGG.
Player C: Cast Dream’s Grip, targeting Forest.
Player B: Tap Forest again, play New Frontiers for 7.
The Emperor, and each of his pawns, put seven lands into play tapped. Player C began his second turn with eight land in play, facing an opponent with one land and a Raging Goblin.
The opponents typed “That’s not very fun. Starting that way.”
Player A responded “No, that’s what makes the format fun.”
The opposing team conceded. They had each had had one turn. Then the game became completely hopeless.
Fun, fun!
I watched another game yesterday, just to see if anything had changed. In this case, the players were – heck, no need to protect the guilty – marqueswebster, BudaZoa and SteveBehr against ViperACK, ElmsterWinterSky and someone whose name I cannot read on the screenshot.
The game was very similar to the one discussed above, but the players used Early Harvest as well as Twiddle effects. Every single player was running a base U/G deck, and both teams were taking exactly the same path. The emperors were also playing Heartbeat of Spring to double the mana produced by their lands and those of their pawns.
On turn 3, BudaZoa (the Emperor) cast New Frontiers. Once it resolved, at least one of the pawns used Early Harvest to untap the Emperor’s lands. BudaZoa then cast Weird Harvest, allowing himself and each of his pawns to search for three creatures. BudaZoa searched out and cast three Hunted Wumpuses, allowing each pawn to put three creatures into play.
The opponents conceded. It was turn 3. Here’s the board (at least the parts I can see on the screen shot. For the winning team, you had to scroll back and forth to see everything, something you can’t do with a screenshot.)
(unknown name): Island, 2 Forests
Viper ACK: Forest with Wild Growth, foil Chrome Mox
Elmster WinterSky: Island, 2 Forests
marqueswebster: Phyrexian Colossus, Hoverguard Sweeper, Lifespark Spellbomb, 6 Islands, 7 Forests
BudaZoa: Chrome Mox, 7 Forests, Swamp, Island, Wild Growth, Heartbeat of Spring, 3 Hunted Wumpuses, more stuff out of the shot.
SteveBehr: 7 Forests, Mountain, 2 Islands, Uktabi Wildcats, Bringer of the Black Dawn, Arashi, the Sky Asunder, Ancient Ooze, Kamahl, Fist of Krosa and more.
SteveBehr would have been attacking with at least sixty points of trampling damage.
On turn 3.
The New Frontiers decks just dominate this format. Nothing else can even remotely come close. Even decks with nothing but cheap counters cannot do anything, because no one can target the Emperor’s spells. What good would it do to waste counters on the pawn’s Twiddles, or even Early Harvests? The spells that need to be countered are the New Frontiers, Weird Harvest, and Hunted Wumpus.
Online, people pay $50.00 for a foil New Frontiers. That’s insane.
Online, New Frontiers is the third most expensive card in Odyssey. It is right behind Haunting Echoes and Call of the Herd, and is tied with Shadowmage Infiltrator. It is a trash rare in real life, and StarCityGames sells them for the same price as the Shrines and Obstinate Familiar.
No, I’m not playing Emperor online. Even if I could magically find the cards, the format is so incredibly narrow it isn’t worth it.
The new Emperor rules specify that the range of influence – the “reach” – is two for all players. One special rule applies – Emperors cannot attack or be attacked directly while the pawn on that side lives. A range of two solves some of these issues. New Frontiers and Hunted Wumpus are still good when the effects do not apply to the enemy emperor, but not as good as when they don’t apply to the enemy pawns, either.
However, the new rules won’t solve the online issue anytime soon. First, the new rules probably won’t be implemented until the new version of the software, which is due Real Soon Now.™ Until that time, Emperor will likely stay as it is.
Secondly, Wizards might continue to give players a choice of the range of influence for their games. That exists now. Most players chose the one-player range of influence option. One reason for that is that online games require each player to click okay to pass priority for each spell and activated ability. You can set the program to automatically okay some routine things, like triggered abilities that fire every turn (for example, the upkeep ability of Sun Droplet), but not for spells and initial events. The higher the range of influence, the more players that have to react and respond. That takes time, so it is a long, slow wait to get through multiplayer games if the range of influence is greater than one.
So, online, Emperor is going to continue to be kinda stupid, at least in my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
This is like the “casual vs. competitive” debate. Some people play only to see strange interactions and try new, albeit bad, decks. Some only play to win. It’s a continuum, and everyone falls somewhere between those ends. Some people are so far to one end or the other that they have trouble empathizing with people on the other end, but that’s life.
Personally, I’m closer to the casual end of the spectrum, but I certainly don’t enjoy losing. However, I don’t want to win enough to find the best deck in each format, then concentrate exclusively on that deck. For me, the best deck in any format is the deck I haven’t finished building, or haven’t played yet.
Back to Emperor. I like the variety of pick-up Emperor games at the store on casual nights. I like the mix of deck interactions, and of trying to make the game work with a widely disparate mix of player skills and card collections.
I also have a rule for pick-up Emperor games – I will play with anyone, against anything, provided the Emperor is not playing a combo deck.
The best strategy for winning an Emperor match is to have the Emperor play a fast, tightly-built combo deck, and the pawns to play decks packing counters and just enough defenses to stay alive until the Emperor goes off. Star Wars Kid wrote about the effectiveness of this plan in Two-Headed Dragon recently, and I wrote about it in Emperor a long time ago. The combo just works. It works too well. Games devolve into solitaire Magic. If two Emperors really want to play those games, I suggest that they just sit across from each other and play a duel, while the rest of us play something more interactive. Something more “fun.”
Sure, flame away in the forums. Debates about casual verses competitive always bring out the flamers, but you can’t win them. It’s like debating whether Coke, 7-Up, or Mountain Dew is the better soft drink. I have an opinion – heck, I’m drinking one of those now – but I won’t convince people with different tastes. (Especially when it’s Diet Pepsi – The Ferrett, who drinks gallons of the stuff)
Assuming you want to play Emperor and not play combo decks and counterspells, here are some general recommendations. These all assume that the games are using the new rules: namely, that you can’t attack the emperor while pawns live, you can pass creatures, range of influence of two, etc. That means that pawns can sling spells at the Emperor’s head, and hit the Emperor’s permanents.
The Emperor has three main functions in these games.
The first is to stay alive. I’m not just being cute – when the emperor dies, the game ends. For these reasons, the Emperor might even consider running life gain. Pulse of the Fields is often particularly nice – odds are that some opponent will have a decent life total. Cards that make the Emperor untargetable (Ivory Mask) can also be useful. Be warned, however, that if you are untargetable, then pawns cannot transfer creatures to you (see below).
The Emperor’s second function is to ship creatures to pawns. The Emperor rules give all creatures the following ability: “Tap: Target teammate gains control of this creature. Play this ability only any time you could play a sorcery.” This is a creature ability, meaning that it is affected by summoning sickness. The Emperor could ship creatures faster if he or she had something to give all the creatures haste, but not if the target player is untargetable.
The Emperor also needs to set up his or her mana quickly – but the Emperor can usually do this without worrying about defense in the early turns. Sakura-Tribe Elders, Kodama’s Reaches, Journeyer’s Kites, and Tithe all usually work reasonably well. Card drawing is another advantage for the Emperor – cards like Mind’s Eye can really shine, and even cards like Howling Mine or Mikokoro, Center of the Sea are worth considering – each of the three players on the Emperor’s team draws a card, while only the two opposing pawns do so.
The final function of the Emperor is to handle problems for the pawns. Since the pawns are generally focused on their specialties, they will want to avoid dead cards like Disenchant or Pacifism. The Emperor can run those types of cards – cards that can deal with indestructible creatures, or enchantments, or other problems. The emperor can target both enemy pawns, so such cards are much less likely to be dead.
The two pawns have different roles. I generally refer to them as upstream and downstream pawns, because of how creatures are passed and turns progress. The turn sequence is clockwise – meaning that the player to the active player’s left will have the next turn. When creatures are passed to the player on the Emperor’s left (downstream), those creatures will untap immediately. When the Emperor passes them to the player on his or her right (upstream), the creatures will not untap until the opponents’ have all had their turns. This can be quite important when passing blockers, but less important when passing attackers.
In general, I think one pawn should concentrate on attacking with creatures, while the other throws damage (or other destructive effects) at the Emperor’s head. The theory is to kill the pawn opposite the creature pawn, then use them to kill the weakened emperor.
I like having the downstream pawn doing the attacking. The main reason is that the Emperor has more problems shipping blockers to the enemy pawn on that side, making it easier to overwhelm their defenses. However, this can be a double-edged sword – if the opponent is also attacking on the downstream side, it can be useful to have the pawn on that side be creature heavy.
I’m not going to give exact, tuned decklists, since these decks should be tuned to individual preferences. Instead, I’ll just lay out the shells of out some of mine.
I have three decks that I like to play when I am in the Emperor’s seat.
The first is a toolbox Survival of the Fittest deck, complete with dual lands, Living Wish, and a lot of utility creatures. It isn’t tuned for Emperor – just multiplayer in general – but it has mana acceleration, reusable creature removal in Visara the Dreadful, answers to other permanents with recursive Viridian Zealot and Tradewind Rider, and even silliness like Peacekeeper (which I can bounce with the Rider to allow my pawns to attack) in the sideboard.
The second is an Enchantress deck that runs Moat. That is not partner friendly if the partners don’t have fliers, but it does have a lot of protection and answers. It can eventually supply the pawns with a ton of fliers when Serra’s Sanctum produces tons of mana, and Sacred Mesa turns that mana into a horde of Pegasus tokens.
The third is the most “tuned” for Emperor, although it is a highlander deck. It is G/W with mana acceleration like Sakura-Tribe Elder, Birds of Paradise, and Eternal Dragon. It has Enlightened Tutor and Golden Wish to find hosers like Ivory Mask, Titania’s Song, Null Rod, and Cursed Totem. It has card drawing in Mind’s Eye, Howling Mine, and Moonring Mirror. It can deal with problems via cards like Naturalize, Nantuko Vigilante, and Aura of Silence, and with creatures using Duplicant, Exile, Swords to Plowshares, and Chastise. It can also ship creatures, like Akroma, Angel of Wrath, Kodama of the North Tree, Plated Slagwurm, Serra Angel, Phantom Nantuko, Witch Hunter, and so forth. Finally, it has a couple of Regrowth effects, like Restock and Eternal Witness, and the Visions card Miraculous Recovery.
Note: Witch Hunter is great. First, it is white bounce, meaning that it can get rid of an attacker – especially one shipped by the opposing general. Second, it does direct damage – it is a white Tim. Witch Hunter is so massively out of flavor for white it’s funny.
I also like Lightning Greaves as a way to ship creatures. Equipment, if it equips a creature that moves out of your control, falls off. This means that the Emperor can cast a creature, equip it with Lightning Greaves, then ship it to the downside pawn for immediate (okay – next turn) use. The Greaves stays around for later use – or to protect an important creature, like Witch Hunter.
The pawn decks are not as tuned.
The direct damage deck is U/R, and runs a mixture of burn and bounce spells, plus some card drawing. Favorite spells include Prophetic Bolt, Jilt, and so forth – spells which do double duty. The deck also has a few walls – Wall of Stone, Glacial Wall, and Wall of Air – to stop attackers, and pingers like Tahngarth, Talruum Hero and Stinging Barrier. It has a very few counters. It isn’t tuned, but it seems to work.
When I am sitting in the creature beat seat, I usually run my favorite green multiplayer deck, Maze Launcher. It has Wall of Roots, Wall of Blossoms, Argothian Elders for mana acceleration, beaters like Silvos, Kodama of the North Tree, Gargantuan Gorilla (I play all snow-covered forests, natch) and Silklash Spider, and Maze of Ith for protection. That deck also has a surprise kill: Argothian Elder, Maze of Ith, and another land produce infinite mana during the attack phase, and Rocket Launcher can kill anyone I can target, or Whetstone can mill away their libraries. It’s not outstanding, but it is an old favorite.
Non-combo emperor can be a lot of fun. Try it sometime. Combo Emperor?
Well, if that’s what you like playing, wallow in it.