Emergence Zone Sucks In cEDH

It's been a while, but I think it's time we talked more about cards that suck in cEDH; specifically, it's time we talked about the worst land people commonly include in their cEDH decks: Emergence Zone.

The Allure of Emergence Zone

Emergence Zone suffers a lot from how easy it is to trick yourself into it. Being a utility land, or a land that can serve another purpose than simply making mana, leads deckbuilders to believe the cost of including it is low. Especially since the land always comes in untapped, it's easy to believe it operates just like any of your other lands most of the time, and if the effect happens to come up during the course of a game you get to feel really smart for having that over the next best land in the considering section.

This appeal becomes stronger the less colorful your deck is, since the cost of only producing colorless goes down tremendously. Additionally, the ability to surprise the table with a well-timed sorcery that they wouldn't think to play around or even just straight-up winning on top of another player's win attempt is a unique effect that isn't available on many other cards and has real, tangible value in a multiplayer game that is dense with interaction.

All of this sounds great! What's not to love? A great deal of cEDh deckbuilder's certainly agree with that! Emergence Zone shows up as the 161st most played card and 45th most played land on cEDH.guide's stats section. While not present in absolutely every deck, that's still quite a high representation given the truth about the card...

Emergence Zone Sucks

With all of these great upsides I just outlined above, how can this unique utility land possibly suck? The truth is the effect on the card is flashier than it is relevant, and in the vast majority of cEDH pods you play, Emergence Zone is just nonbasic Wastes. For specifically mono-colored decks, there is a chance that that is just fine, especially if playing a color that has less powerful options for utility lands to include. For decks that are 2+ colors, playing with a nonbasic Wastes will frequently have catastrophic consequences on your mana development for that game. The reason for this is twofold:

1. The most powerful cards in cEDH are cards that exclusively produce large amounts of colorless mana. Of course I'm referring to Mana Crypt, Sol Ring, and Mana Vault. This suite of fast mana defines much of the speed of cEDH and puts a lot of additional pressure on your other mana sources to allow you to cast your colored spells.

2. The singleton nature of cEDH takes a heavy toll on the rest of your colored sources in your deck as it is. Being a singleton format and therefore unable to load up on all of your on color fetchlands and on color dual lands means you have to supplement those slots with less consistent lands often featuring a drawback. Contrast this with a format like Legacy where lands like Wasteland are easier to make work as utility lands, but even there most four-color decks struggle to make room!

As a result, only making colorless is a much larger drawback on Emergence Zone than it seems at first glance, and the only way for the land to be worth it would be if the effect were extremely potent and relevant in a great deal of games. There are plenty of examples of lands that do fit that bill in various decks. Lands like Ancient Tomb, Gemstone Caverns, Urza's Saga, Cavern of Souls, and Phyrexian Tower are all lands that simply produce colorless much of the time, but either provide a powerful effect that makes colored mana when it matters or can produce more than just one mana some amount of the time. These are effects that are relevant to almost every game you play or are powerful enough when they do come up to warrant inclusion. Being able to play spells as though they had flash not only requires you to have drawn and played this land, have something relevant to the context of the game, have the mana to pay to make your effect work at instant speed, and actually be worth paying a premium to do at instant speed. When broken down like this, there is a lot more setup to make this effect relevant that it seems at first read, and certainly is less enticing given the drawback compared to other options available in the format that are going to be relevant more often.

How to Win as an Instant

It can be easy to misconstrue my argument against Emergence Zone in cEDH as a statement that the ability to win at instant speed is weak or irrelevant. This is not actually my stance at all. I firmly believe the flexibility of a deck to present a win at instant speed is a unique angle of various decks that exist today and have existed in cEDH's past that tangibly add power to what those decks can do. In fact, much of the reason that Emergence Zone is heavily overplayed is due to the known power in being able to present a win at instant speed and the dream of being able to have that ability in any cEDH deck you play. If Emergence Zone was a one-shot effect, like Quicken or Alchemist's Refuge, this article would have no need to be written because no one would play it. The fantasy of timing your instant-speed win out of your deck that normally can't when you opponents least expect it is the entire draw to Emergence Zone, and suffers two pitfalls that other ways of winning at instant speed do not:

1. Winning as an instant with Emergence Zone requires a sorcery-speed action to get started. You must first play Emergence Zone as your land for turn and before you can even threaten the ability to win out of nowhere. This action does a lot to not only telegraph what could happen, since it is quite literally on-board, but also limits when you can even threaten and instant-speed win given a sudden burst of resources.
2. If your deck is not specifically designed to win at instant speed, you can end up telegraphing when you have it too hard and pulling yourself in too many directions when deckbuilding. This hearkens back to the concept of cohesion in deckbuilding. If you're building a deck that wants to be able to threaten the ability to win at instant speed anytime, it's best to design your deck to have things to do with your mana if the perfect moment never comes. You don't want to waste your mana or feel pressured into attempting a win too quickly because you have no way to use your mana and bide additional time for a better spot. This concept can be best understood by referencing the times Flash was legal in Commander alongside Protean Hulk. The threat to die at any point in the game was so high that it was common for players to hold a great deal of mana up for interaction or wins of their own going into other players' turns at the risk of dying should they choose to just tap out.

The nostalgia that some cEDH players have for the Flash Hulk dominance does some amount to drive the popularity of Emergence Zone, but the reality is that decks designed to win as an instant need to be designed from the start to consider that. Take for example Shimmer Zur, a deck that played a relatively weak card in the form of Shimmer Myr to enable an instant-speed win but did so to allow players to attempt a win after tutoring up Necropotence into play. This usage of the massive influx of resources from Necropotence made the inclusion of a weaker card like Shimmer Myr make more sense for the deck. Additionally, it allowed for crazy instant-win turns off of Ad Nauseam should you have enough mana to get it started. The primary focus, however, was utilizing large life payments into Necropotence and leveraging that in a way that would not work otherwise. The deck was designed to make the payoff of playing Shimmer Myr worth it by enabling all the additional cards you would have to discard on the end step to instead potentially just win the game. Today, that strategy has fallen off largely from being too slow and mana-intensive, but still you see instant-speed win attempts from decks like Sisay, Weatherlight Captain, and the rise of Final Fortune as a widespread inclusion functionally allows for a similar effect, attempting a win outside the normal turn order cadence, that could punish players for tapping too low thinking they will get to untap before they need to worry about you.

Play Better Cards

By and large, the appeal of winning as an instant is so great that cEDH deckbuilders often go to great lengths to make it possible; but it is rarely worth the lower card quality necessary to make it work. This is the big reason we've seen more people putting away Shimmer Myr and picking up stronger cards, like Underworld Breach. One of the newest spoilers, Borne Upon a Wind, offers a similar appeal and has already drummed up some hype among the cEDH players who were around during the Flash Hulk era, but heed the advice from this article: including this card is not free just because it is blue and cantrips. If you want your deck to be about winning the game with this, you need to build your deck planning to tutor for it and cast it more games than not, because it is not a free inclusion, just like Emergence Zone. Play better cards, make those cards more castable, and cut Emergence Zone from your deck. It may be cool to win at instant speed, but winning more often because you have better cards is way cooler. Thanks for reading!