My friends and I have been playing Magic for about a year now, and early into the game, we were convinced to pick up a full set of Planechase, a multi player magic variant. Since we were doing a lot of multi-player games at the time, we were looking for something to bring us together and set some ground rules, and just have a new way to play. We loved it. We thought that Wizards did a great job in creating an environment of chaos and fun, our only complaint would be that the games take a great deal of time to get through. So when Wizards announced another multi-player variant called Archenemy, in which one player would "be ready to face off against as many of your friends as your kitchen table can hold. Two? Three? Twenty? Bring 'em on!", our interests were peaked.
So we went to our local store and ordered a full set of Archenemy. I picked them up this past Friday, and we got together Saturday night to play. I opened up the first deck, Bring About the Undead Apocolypse, and we set out to play with a mixture of casual decks. A few turns later, I scooped up my cards after giving all of my opponents double mana for a turn, allowing them to completely massacre me.
After a few more games of this (even swapping out the precon deck for a good white control deck), we came up with two inherent problems with the concept of Archenemy. One is one of the oldest concepts in Magic, in that card advantage wins games, and the second is that many of the Archenemy scheme cards are pretty worthless, and in some cases (as I discovered in my first game) help your opponents more than they would ever help you.
Card advantage in Magic is how people win games. The base concept is that if you use one card to stop two cards of your opponents, you have a one card advantage. We had 5 on 1 matches, a far cry from the quoted "twenty" opponents pitched to us. In a turn, the Archenemy would play a scheme, draw a card, and potentially play a land and cast a spell. The players would all draw a card, and all potentially play a land and cast a spell. The scheme card played would have to have the power to make up a 4 card advantage (in our case) and they just don't have that power. My first card, for example, allowed me to search through my opponents graveyards and pull a creature. That might be fine in late game, but for your first turn, that's a 4 card advantage in your opponents favor. A couple of turns like this, and there's no way that one player can make up such a huge disadvantage.
That's a small example of the worthlessness of the scheme cards. Often we'd find ourselves hoping for some major boon to let us just live for another turn, and instead we would draw something that lets us discard a card from their hand. That doesn't do anything about the horde swarming down on me. That doesn't do enough by itself to hurt my opponents. It's the right kind of idea, trying to fight card advantage, but its not enough of an impact, and its too random to be reliable.
So with these very glaring problems, and two of our top decks unable to even come close to winning, we started working on house rules to make these things work. Here's what we've come up with so far, stuff that worked, and didn't work, so hopefully we can make this as great of a format as Planechase is.
1. The Archenemy gets 20 life per opponent. With 5 opponents, that would give the Archenemy 100 life. We quickly proved this to merely extend the game by about 1 turn. By itself, it's not enough.
2. The Archenemy draws a hand of scheme cards. We tried to figure out hand size on this, starting with one card for each opponent, but that was way too strong, limiting it down to three cards was better, but it was still pretty powerful. We're trying to help the Archenemy have a chance, not handing him the keys to a steamroller.
3. The Archenemy draws two cards and chooses one to play. We didn't get to spend a whole lot of time testing this one out, but it seemed to be much better. Most of the time one of the cards would be useful at least.
4. Combine the best cards into a real scheme deck. Many of the cards are useless, but there's some real gems in each of the sets. If we could pick the best of them, then the random nature of the cards might be easier to deal with.
So, should you run out to the store and pick your play group up a full set? Welll... probably not. Some of the underlying concepts that the game tries to make are on the right track, but there's too much wrong with the schemes and the precon decks to make it worthwhile. Hopefully somebody comes up with a way to play these decks that keeps game balance and promotes fun, because Wizards dropped the ball on this one.
