Imperator!

Maybe first I should say that I’m still a little bit ahead on my blogs. You see, when Dave said I was actually for real getting to write, I was pretty excited and wrote three blogs over the next three days. Then it took another week or two to actually get set up, so right now I’m still working with some blog glut so to speak. What this means is that when I say, “Last Saturday I played some Emperor format with some friends from Sheffield Lake,” I actually mean “Two Saturdays ago I killed three people with three separate Tendrils of Agony on one turn for more than 100 total life lost by them and more than 100 total life gained by me, because I’m just that schw33t.”

Okay, well, that was my big play of the day, and most of the time I wasn’t really doing too much, but it was still tons of fun.

For any of you who don’t know, Emperor is a great format, probably my favorite multiplayer format since even with 6 people the games don’t take as long as a Chaos game with more than 3 people. It works like this;

1. Six people divide into two teams of three.
2. Each team selects one emperor and two lieutenants and sit in this order: Lieutenant 1 – Emperor – Lieutenant 2, so that the two emperors face off against each other.
3. The object is to kill the opposing team’s Emperor.
4. All players have a “spell range” of two, which means Lieutenants can cast spells directly affecting their opposite Lieutenant or the opposing team’s Emperor.
5. All players have an “attack range” of one, which means Lieutenants can attack only their opposite Lieutenant, and Emperors can only attack the opposing team when one of their own Lieutenants is dead.
6. To make up for this, Emperors can pass creatures to their Lieutenants during their attack phase. The creatures are only able to untap after the Emperor’s next untap phase.

That’s pretty much the basics of how we played, anyway. For more comprehensive rules and strategy, visit this site.

The first time I played Emperor I was on a team with my friends Jerrod and Justin and we all just happened to pick our Black control decks with Megrim. It was a bloodbath even before one of us forced through a Memory Jar with four Megrims between us. It turns out people don’t like losing 56 life at a time. One kid threw his cards. It was great.

Lt. 1: “Hymn to Tourach.”
Lt. 2: “Okay.”
Lt. 1: [Picking cards] “You lose 4 life too.”
Lt. 2: “What? From what?!”
Lt. 1: “That Megrim at the other end of the table.”
Lt. 3: [Waves.]

So Saturday night we had six people—John, Anthony and Mike on one team, Justin, Jeff and me on t’other—and a whole mix of decks from fully powered Vintage Stax to Extended and Standard versions of decks I’m not really familiar with to type casual Sacred Mesa Elves.

We actually had to cut the first game short (I count it as a win for our side) because Anthony played his T1 Stax and managed to completely wipe out his own team’s chances for survival on his first turn. Some decks just weren’t meant for a team setting, like ones with global effects that make each player sacrifice his permanents and tap his stuff.

Well, maybe not; in one game Jeff, as our Emperor, played Wildfire from his UR Landsteal deck, and that seemed to work out fairly well for us. It killed all of my opposing Lieutenant’s creatures and lands along with all of mine, but gave me time to find another creature (Wild Mongrel, I believe, which I could only cast by tapping my one land, having Jeff Boomerang it to my hand, and playing it again) and going in for he win over a long period of time.

That was probably the best deck I played that night. By which I mean I felt the most effective when I was playing that since it had a good creature base to protect my emperor and some good disruption to protect my creatures. It was based on Miracle-Gro or Gro-A-Tog, but without the Tog and the really expensive counterspells. Here it is, as best I can recall:

4x Quirion Dryad
4x Cloud of Faeries
4x Wild Mongrel
3x Ninja of the Deep Hours

4x Daze
3x Swords to Plowshares
3x Counterspell
4x Mana Leak
2x Suppression Field (Yes, I will use it with Mongrel, thank you. Mongrel’s still good even when his brokenness is made just normal.)
2x Disenchant
3x Cunning Wish
1x Balance
1x Gush
1x Frantic Search
1x Fact or Fiction

4x Windswept Heath
4x Flooded Strand
4x Island
2x Plains
2x Forest
2x Tropical Island
2x Tundra

I think it’s pretty solid as a disruptive deck. Obviously the idea is to counter your opponent’s spells while making the Dryad bigger. Daze, Frantic Search, and Cloud of Faeries are all-stars since they can refresh your mana and allow you to cast more spells. Plus, having Cloud of Faeries with Ninja of the Deep Hours is sweet synergy.

With a little different card drawing engine, like maybe using black instead of white for support, you could probably use this pretty well as a threshold deck with Werebears in place of the Ninja. Plus, except for the lands and Cunning Wish (which are easily replaced by more basic lands and card drawing) it’s cheap too. A lot of those cards I’ve seen in the 5centbin at one time or another.

I know the deck isn’t terribly original, but any of you who started playing in Mirrodin block when Affinity made everybody a sellout…er, winner may not have seen it before. Give it a try or build something else new. Try something featuring a color you wouldn’t normally play.

And try Emperor format because it’s so much fun.

The hardest part is finding six people. You don’t need to make special decks, and all of you players can play pretty much any deck they want since one deck’s strengths will make up for another deck’s weaknesses on a team. I don’t think I’d recommend putting the insta-kill combo deck in at Emperor because somebody will end up going Helm-Sol Ring-Chromatic Sphere-Egg-Egg-Cabal Ritual with threshold-Helm-Yawgmoth’s Bargain-draw 12-Many Eggs-Cabal Ritual with threshold-Tendrils-Tendrils-Tendrils for the win. (Take a look at my last post to see sort of what I was playing.)

Of course, it was a bit more complex than that, but you get the picture. Combo r00lz, sometimes.

Anyway, keep it up, and when you find out what "it" is, drop us a line.

Take it easy.