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Fire Emblem: An Ever-Burning Craze!
By: Ignatz Victor
Let me paint you a picture. You’re walking through Cichol Hall, on the way to one of Professor Hanneman’s lectures, when you see something rather strange. Two of your fellow students are sitting at a table, hunched over an array of cardboard cards. They’re moving them around, chatting to each other, and you look over to see who’s got the better hand. To your shock, you don’t see Clubs, Hearts, or Diamonds, but Swords, Dragons, and Heroes! What in the world might be going on?
I’m sure this isn’t new for most of you. The scenario I just described has become a pretty regular occurrence at Garreg Mach University! The addictive trading card game “Fire Emblem” is a fast growing hobby. A recent survey of two-hundred students indicated that 154 of them had already heard of the game, and 80 were either interested in playing or were already veterans!
This very week, many students will flock to the Nabatea card shop to participate in a release event for the game’s newest expansion set, “Crossroads”, due to come out on Thursday.
For this weeks “Dragon’s Deep Dive”, I’ll be exploring the history of this popular game, and examining just how it got to this point.
Fire Emblem’s first set, titled simply “Fire Emblem” was released to the public by Emblem Games in April of 1990. Newcomers were encouraged to purchase a starter deck, centered around use of the “Marth, Prince of Altea” card, to begin their collections. They could expand their decks through the purchase of booster packs, each containing ten randomized cards and a “How To Play” insert. Gameplay in this era of the game was extremely rudimentary, with many popular mechanics and card types utterly absent from its first set of 100 cards. Additionally, the game was not balanced properly, and it only took a few years for players to workout and spread (over rudimentary e-mail!) an “optimal” deck. Some cards from this era, such as a foil-treated “Camus, Black Knight”, sell for amounts in the hundreds at auctions.
Beginning in 1992, the game’s first expansion set, “Gaiden”, was released. This expansion started a trend that would become the norm for Fire Emblem expansions in the future, releasing in multiple pieces over the next year! However, of these two expansions under the Gaiden umbrella, “Zofian Faithful” and “Rigel’s Warriors”, that may be the only trend that stuck. The Gaiden cards are widely lampooned by fans as being bizarre and mostly unplayable in the game’s current state. Most of them contain almost no synergies with the original set’s cards, and “Gaiden Jank” is a popular term for new cards that are considered underpowered or poorly designed by fans. Still, Gaiden accumulated a cult fanbase, who spent many years organizing events dedicated to the strange set and even making petitions for Emblem Games to make a new set in the world established by Gaiden.
The game’s second major expansion, “Mystery Of The Emblem”, is lauded by many players as the best of its early years. “Mystery” reissued many cards based on characters from the original, but used the knowledge of four years of play to refine and rebalance these cards into a much more playable state. Notably, this set saw the first ever banning of a card from tournament play, due to its dominance. That card was “Sirius, Mysterious Knight”, and while the gradual increase in power of released cards over time has resulted in an unbanning, it is still often viewed as a symbol of power in the game.
The next two released expansions, “Geneology Of The Holy War” and “Thracia 776”, were the first to tell an overarching story, with a companion novel given out to each attendant of Thracia’s first release event. These sets, often referred to as the “Jugdral Duology”, also introduced a brand new ability that could be added to cards. “Inheritance” allowed some cards to confer bonuses upon other cards as they were defeated on the field. The mechanic proved somewhat unpopular, and has only seen a resurgence in very recent years, to much more acclaim.
Continuing with the format established by the Jugdral Duo, the next expansion set was meant to be part of a larger story. “Binding Blade” introduced “Equipment” cards, which could be attached to your Hero cards to create more powerful units. To hype up the set, Emblem Games hid several specially marked rare equipment cards around their home city and encouraged fans to go on “treasure hunts” to “uncover the lost weapons of the past!” This marketing event was a disaster, resulting in over twenty reported break-ins and at least one fistfight. Urban legend claims that one card, supposedly hidden under the CEO’s desk, resulted in a robbery of Emblem Games itself, but they have never acknowledged the rumor publicly.
For the follow-up set, “Blazing Blade”, Emblem Games had a much safer, but no less risky, idea. They changed the layout of booster packs entirely, now offering twelve cards instead of their previous ten, and changing their distribution so that each pack would now contain one rare card, guaranteed, with a chance for a second. They also pushed for much heavier marketing and wider distribution, pushing the game on television, radio, and even billboards in major cities. Some fans were rankled by the changes, preferring the rush of opening a pack with less predictable results and the relative niche status of their hobby, but in the end the set was a massive success, and is often said to be the reason that Fire Emblem survived into the 2000’s. The most memorable card from the set may be “Mine”, an innocuous Event card that allowed the player to lay a trap on the battlefield. While initially considered laughably week, a loophole in the wording of the card allowed for clever players to exploit it in a way that eventually, through a bizarre chain of effects buried deep in the game’s rules, allowed them to take control of their opponent’s heroes and swiftly win the game! The card was banned and the rules were changed, but the comedy of the situation was not lost on players. To this day, one of the most popular comments on any social media post from Emblem Games is almost guaranteed to be “FREE MINE”.
In 2004’s “Sacred Stones”, more radical changes were made, this time to the gameplay itself! New “Monster” units were released, and the familiar Hero cards were given an aesthetic makeover to match a new set of rules and mechanics. The fan backlash was immediate, and the set is often viewed poorly today. One card, “Seth, Silver Knight” is widely considered the most powerful Fire Emblem card ever printed, and is currently banned from any and all tournament play.
Returning to the duology structure, “Path of Radiance” and “Radiant Dawn” introduced cards with the popular “Transformation” ability, allowing them to be flipped over to reveal a second form for the depicted character. Justified in the setting as “a land of shapechangers”, the mechanic produced raucous debate and lead to the requirement of using opaque card sleeves in tournament play. The fans are still often split on whether Transformation was a needless gimmick or a great source of strategic gameplay, but it has returned many a time in newer sets.
To celebrate the game’s upcoming twentieth anniversary, the 2000’s ended for Fire Emblem with a pair of releases, “Shadow Dragon” and “New Mystery Of The Emblem”, revamped versions of some of the game’s earliest sets. Fans were ultimately disappointed that “Shadow Dragon” brought few brand new cards, creating a rather stale environment, and Emblem’s attempt to fix the problem with more content in “New Mystery” was stymied by a poor fiscal year and printer malfunctions leading to a very limited release. At this point, many established fans expressed their opinions that the game was dying, leading to a small exodus of players.
Operating on this feedback, teetering on the edge of disaster, the team at Emblem Games knew they needed a strong expansion to win back the crowd. Another sweep of changes to the game’s rules and booster pack structure accompanied their last ditch effort, “Fire Emblem: Awakening”. “Awakening” was touted as a reinvention of the game, and released with a plethora of content specifically designed to teach newcomers how to play. To interest old fans, every pack of Awakening contained a special curated slot that was guaranteed to contain a fan-favorite card from the game’s history. The expansion was a smash hit, and sold better than any expansion before it ever had.
In 2015, Emblem Games released cryptic advertisements, telling players that they would soon have to “Pick A Side”. These alluded to the release of the game’s thirteenth expansion set, “Fates”. At the release event, players had to choose a faction from the game’s fiction to support, the peaceful land of Hoshido or the militaristic kingdom of Nohr. They would receive packs loaded with cards that corresponded to that faction, and fans widely loved the aspect of choice this system added to the gameplay.
In a release that baffled players and left many wondering if April Fool’s had arrived, the game’s next set was entitled “Shadows Of Valentia”, and was a remake of the infamous “Gaiden” set. The combination of a remake set, which had proved unpopular just years earlier, and a return to the butt of every joke, Gaiden, left fans scratching their heads. However, when the set was released, it did fairly well in sales, but was wildly popular among established fans, who loved the new versions of classic cards and added aspects that made the set much more fun to play.
The newest release, Crossroads, is said to be a celebration of the franchise as a whole, and contains characters from every previous set. It may be easy to call such a move a tad self-indulgent, but with the way Fire Emblem has established itself as a staple of game stores and kitchen tables everywhere, I find it hard to deny them this opportunity to revel.
I would encourage any readers who have interest to come to Nabatea on a Thursday night, when the store holds its Fire Emblem tournaments. Talk to the players, see if you can try a game, and if you’re interested, pick up a Starter Deck from Seteth. Sooner or later, you might find yourself hooked, slinging cards with the rest of us and cheering on your favorite store league team.
Go Golden Deer!