Empire: With "Pillage"

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Cyberium
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Post by Cyberium » 4 years ago

I'm thinking about trying an Empire variant and would love to hear suggestions on this.

For those who don't know, Empire is:

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Emperor
Six or ten players • Two teams
An Emperor game is a contest between two teams. Each team has one emperor (seated in the middle) and two generals (seated one on each side of the emperor). The left-hand general of one team takes the first turn, and then play passes to the left, balancing the advantage of going first with having all the opposing team members take their turns next. The spell range is limited to one—that is, your spells and abilities can affect only you and the players sitting one seat to your left or right (the two players right next to you). You can attack only players on your immediate left or right. Because of this, until a general is knocked out, neither emperor can be attacked. Moving creatures is allowed. Each player starts with 20 life; life totals aren’t shared. If a general is eliminated, the remaining players on that team continue to play normally. When an emperor is eliminated, that team loses.

You can also play Emperor with four generals per team, sitting two on each side of the emperor. Spell range is still limited to one.

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One thing about moving creature is that it would take up its combat, so in most cases the Emperor would be using his combat phase to move creatures to his subordinates, like mobilizing troops.

That said, the "Pillage" mode I want to add consist of several new rules. In terms of passing:

1) Artifacts and PWs could also be passed to different players, but the passing range of any permanent is 1, so General A passing a creature to General B would have to go through the Emperor first, then the Emperor passes it to General B.

2) You can pass artifact, creatures, and PWs only if they haven't taken action this turn, such as combat or activating abilities.

3) You may cast non-aura enchantment (i.e. one without target) under another player at the range of 1. This is another way for Emperor to help his subordinate, and vice versa.

4) Spell range for Emperor is 2.

In terms of losing:

1) When a player loses, his nearest opponent takes control of all the artifacts and lands of the losing player.

2) Creatures and PWs of the losing player will be executed upon losing unless ransomed with its CMC by his living teammates "at the beginning of the next upkeep". While ransoming would cost you a turn of resources, some creature/PW are worth saving.

3) Curses stay on the player even after the owner loses.

This new variation is to simulate an actual battlefield where one takes over a territory. A General who's about to lose could either use his final combat for a last ditch effort, or he could "retreat" to preserve resources for his surviving teammates, and nations buying hostages back after battles. And taking control of lands may suffer backlash if the losing team also have spells like Acidic Soil.

What do you think?

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Hawk
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Post by Hawk » 4 years ago

Things I like: More marching options; makes equipment, anthems, and 'walkers much more useful and allows any old deck to be an okay Emperor. Extended range for Emperors is powerful if built for abuse, but worthwhile and feels like how the format SHOULD work; emperors still can't target each other but it means someone playing Baral isn't just useless as an emperor - in fact, Baral is a GREAT emperor. In general all the new passing rules seem great.

I'm less sold on the rules about losing - I worry it'd be too snowbally if killing a general gives the opponent a huge influx of lands, mana rocks, equipment, and possibly other powerful artifacts. The "trade-off" of teammates being able to "rescue" creatures and planeswalkers (at full price!) isn't worth it and I suspect games would often be decided based on which team lost a general first. It'd be better if it wasn't everything - what if you gained 4/6-X lands or artifacts of your choice, where "X" is the number of living teammates? Now it's a catch-up mechanism - if in a 5v5 game one team has lost three generals, now they're stealing 3 cards when they drop someone. You could tweak the numbers, but I do think that a general killing an opponent and immediately doubling (or more) their mana nevermind any other permanents they inherit is just way too big a swing, and I'm not sure that players would want to build for Price of Progress and Acidic Soil to trap folks as a punishment (nor am I convinced that is good, healthy, or fun).

For the rest really what you need is a rule of "When a player loses, their permanents are not removed from the game as per normal; instead the following happens". That's really what 2 and 3 are trying to accomplish. That worries me too though, because as identified if a general is about to go down they can just march every non-land, non-enchantment permanent to their ally and now the opposing team gains next to nothing (and may even be worse off!) by killing them. That's...interesting and can make for interesting tension of trying to keep someone alive until you can OTK them, but is going to make the games even slower and more grindy than Emperor tends towards anyways and again, I'm not sure it's healthy or fun gameplay.

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Treamayne
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Post by Treamayne » 4 years ago

Seems interesting. I would be more directive in how you want the "pillage" to work. Example:

When a "General" loses do the following (in order)
- Exile all creatures and Planeswalkers that general controls to his Emporer's exile zone
- Remove all remaining non-aura enchantments that general controls from the game if they are not also another permanent type (e.g. Enchantment Artifact)
- The closest opponent gains control of all remaining artifacts and lands that General controlled
-- Suggest this be limited to the number of surviving teammates on that player's side - so if the pillaging player has both teammates, he gets three of the lands and three of the non-land permanents - the rest fell in battle
- At the beginning of his upkeep, that General's Emporer may cast one or more creature(s) or planeswalker(s) his general controlled from Exile (that permanent may then move during the combat phase, as normal)
-- Why would everything have to be ransomed back at once?


This is only an example, and does not exactly follow what you described (I think) but I believe that a more detailed flow of the pillage effect would be helpful.

In your versions of Emporer, do you use (or have you considered) cascading CI?

E.g. if the Emperor is playing UBR, then his generals may only be U, B, R, UB, UR or BR (some subset of the colors used by the Emperor). Even without your "Pillage" portion, I've found that using the cascading CI (for established groups of course, hard to do in pick-up games) tends to make the team more cohesive and adds flavor to the variant.
V/R

Treamayne

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