I've started this thread because I'm interested in people's experiances of the Emperor format, and what they think the best rules to use for it are. The reason I'm interested is that I've recently started running Emporer games at my University Games society, which has a range of players between borderline PTQ players like myself and a few others, and new people who turn up every week with a modified precon.
The problem we've encountered is nothing to do with collection disparity - those of us who have larger collections know roughly the sort of decks which are sensible, and multiplayer is a great leveller anyhow. The problem is the raw power of the Emporer seat, and the tendancy of games to be decided by whoever had the more broken Emporer deck.
Our current house rules are:
Permenant and Stack targeting range 1 for Lieutenants, 2 for Emporers.
Global effects remain global.
Roll to start, team which wins the roll has their Emporer go first. First player to get a turn doesn't miss the draw.
Deckbuilding restrictions are based on the principle of 'nothing too stupid' - noone has a problem with a 4*Gush control deck, UG Madness or Goblins, but 4*Sol Ring will get you told off, ditto anything which will blatantly stop everybody else from having fun. Combo in the Emporer seat also is heavily frowned upon, as you have the time to do almost ANYTHING given decent Lieutenants.
The problem we've been having is that these rules are not enforcable, and the format isn't working. Winning appears to come down to whichever Emporer comes closest to the line of unacceptable boredom, and if an Emporer does drop something unpleasant then only mass removal can get rid of the thing. It doesn't even have to be a big threat like T&N for Mephidross Vampire & Triskelion - a simple Royal Assassin demands a mass removal spell from the opposition, and given Lieutenants are usually playing duelling decks, they don't often have many answers.
A recent anicdote to emphasise what I mean: Yesterday I managed to organise a 9 player 3v3v3 Emporer game with players arranged in a circle, so each Lieutenant was facing off against one opposing Lieutenant. We had a wide range of (mostly aggro) decks around, from Madness to budgetised Rock to Ravager to a random heap of white creatures. I'd organised the teams to give reasonable matchups (1 experianced Lieutenant and 1 newbie per team), and I'd had a word with the Emporers about playing nothing too boring. The first turn went fine, but then on turn 2 one player used his singleton Sol Ring to drop...
Portcullis. Only about 3 people had player 1-drops, and noone could target the Portcullis, and the Chalice for 3 that hit soon after stopped most of the answers we had. That was it for that game - we played about 4 turns of 1/1 beats before one team stood up and announced that they didn't particularly want to play this one out.
That's how our Emporer games seem to go - whichever Emporer steps closests to the combo/prison line wins, and noone has much fun. I'm tempted to stop trying with them, but I feel there's a really good format hiding in there somewhere. We've had some excellent games when people have played positive decks, usually when the whole thing turns into a massive race with burn going everywhere. The problem is that the positive Emporer decks which are trying to blaze a path often come unstuck against the prevailing tactics of lifegain, stall, and recurring removal.
Now obviously in a competative environment, the answer would be to play the decks which win - given the time availible it would be easy to combo/lock out the rest of the table with a dedicated deck. The thing is, our games society is NOT a competative environment - people are trying to have fun, and when we try the format, noone has fun. My last attempt to fix the format will probably be to take the Emporers beside beforehand to have a word about what is acceptable, and to institute a targeting range of 2 for all players and targets, with the exception that the Emporer's face cannot be targetted until he/she has lost a Lieutenant. That means that the Emporer's permenants can be targetted by the opposing generals, just not his royal personage
.
So, I'd like to hear others' experiances with Emporer - what rules do you play, do you design decks specifically for the format, and how do the games play out?
[Edit: Peter Jahn makes many of the same points in
this article, although his playgroup seems to ber more balanced in terms of experience and collection size]
