- 08 Nov, 2025 *
Meeting an Eldrazi– a skyscraper-sized haze of tentacles, surrounded by the pitchy thrum of the universe unfurling– is rarely a personable experience. And yet when I walked into Rocco’s in south-side Capenna, “Em”, as she now calls herself, was exhibiting an earnest clumsiness, shakily attempting to set down a latte with her newfound tentacles. “I’m still used to thumbs,” she joked. “Small thumbs.”
Em, a former 1/1 token, recently entered the spotlight through her memoir Poly Target, a raw and emotional look into her experience being turned into an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn by an Indomitable Creativity. We sat down to discuss life as an Eldrazi, “po…
- 08 Nov, 2025 *
Meeting an Eldrazi– a skyscraper-sized haze of tentacles, surrounded by the pitchy thrum of the universe unfurling– is rarely a personable experience. And yet when I walked into Rocco’s in south-side Capenna, “Em”, as she now calls herself, was exhibiting an earnest clumsiness, shakily attempting to set down a latte with her newfound tentacles. “I’m still used to thumbs,” she joked. “Small thumbs.”
Em, a former 1/1 token, recently entered the spotlight through her memoir Poly Target, a raw and emotional look into her experience being turned into an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn by an Indomitable Creativity. We sat down to discuss life as an Eldrazi, “poly target pride”, and the highs and lows of having tentacles.
Thanks for meeting me here.
My pleasure.
First of all, can you tell us a little about yourself, for our readers who don’t know your story?
Sure. My name is Em. Until about a year ago, I was a 1/1 white Human Soldier creature token. My brother was a chump blocker, and I figured that’s what I would be too. But then my controller cast Indomitable Creativity, and just like that, I got polymorphed into a new life. Obviously I’m an Emrakul now, which I didn’t choose to be, but it has its ups and downs. People joke that I’m the first Emrakul that they can picture dying to fifteen Squirrels, which I think is hilarious.
What do you remember most about the actual polymorphing?
Oh, while the Polymorph on the stack where I was just terrified. I felt like I had a gun to my head. And then the opponent cracked a fetch in response, got out a Hedge Maze, and for maybe fifteen seconds just sat there, deciding how to surveil. Now I understand that she was playing around Pithing Needle, which was a card some Creativity decks played, at least for a while, but at the time I thought it was just cruel. Here I was, about to change forever, and it was on hold because someone had to figure out whether to bin a Fatal Push! (*laughs*) Those were the longest fifteen seconds of my life.
That sounds terrifying.
It was! Especially because I hadn’t met a lot of other poly targets yet, so I had some myths and biases in my head. I remember thinking, “Oh God, I don’t want to become a Portal to Phyrexia”. That was my own prejudice– at the time that was the worst thing I could imagine. Part of why I wrote a book is the hope that I can clear up some of those myths for the next generation. It’s always going to be scary, I think, but it doesn’t have to be confusing and shameful.
Yeah, you talk a lot about the changes, and your journey to accepting that some of those changes were actually really good.
Absolutely. I remember actually feeling very happy about the gender change. Obviously I was male as a 1/1 Human, but tokens don’t really have a fixed gender in the same way as, say, legendary creatures. It’s kind of “Oh, Forbidden Friendship has a man in the art, guess I’m a man, even though I’m also, like, a penny or a piece of scrap paper.” And now as a legendary I’m, like, wow, this makes more sense, I feel like I’m not just wearing gender as a coat. Making that realization was the first time I felt like, actually, maybe the sudden change wasn’t all so bad.
But obviously you talk about how it isn’t a bed of roses, either.
Absolutely. Having protection from spells that are one of more colors is a little rough sometimes. Sometimes you play against infect, and their Elf gets Mutagenic Growthed, and you think “Wow, I wish I could try that.” Obviously we have Dress Down nowadays, so people like us can experience things like we could as tokens again, but it’s not quite the same.
And of course, it’s not fun being a bit of a culture war issue. There was a while when I just wasn’t accepting my identity, refusing to interact with other poly targets, and that wasn’t good for me. I already thought I was a freak, and there I was struggling with people who thought I wanted to take all their turns and annihilate all their children, or people yelling that I should get bounced to hand.
And how’d you come to accept it?
Honestly? I just got a sense of perspective. At some point I was just like, “Okay, I wouldn’t say these things about a Natural Order target, or a hardcast Eldrazi, or an evoke-ephemerated Elemental. Why am I saying them about myself?” Nowadays there’s a bit of a “garnet pride” movement, too, for cards that are good to have in your deck but bad to draw, and I wish I’d had that, had somebody to tell me it’s okay that my player curses when she draws me. Also, my brother was a 1/1 red Dinosaur, and I think having a red permanent to talk to helped me come to grips with the chaos part of it.
What do you mean?
Like, I had trouble accepting that life is kind of arbitrary, that we’re at the whims of players we can’t know or understand, that even if I have a purpose as an attacker, it ends when the playmats get rolled back up and I have to go home. I thought there was an order to the universe, and nowadays I can see that was my bias from where I was in the color pie, but at the time I thought it was just a fact. I tried for a long time to view my polymorphing in that light, that there was a reason behind it, and failed.
But at the end of the day, I have to be a spaghetti monster, on the battlefield and in my day-to-day life, and there’s something sort of silly about that. It wears you down, in a good way, into accepting the absurdity.
But also sometimes not accepting it. I understand you intend to surgically remove some tentacles?
Yeah, that’s the thing... I think because I grew up a chump blocker, I was taught that if things were unsustainable, it would be okay, and the thing to do is to make sacrifices until things get better. Because of that, for the longest time, I thought if I just waited long enough it would become okay. After all, I did learn to accept a lot of things about my new self with time. And especially as a role model, I was worried that people might think “oh, wait, she’s not really that happy, I bet poly targets are all just constantly miserable”.
But now as an adult, I’m like... I’m having a bad time with these. Why am I not making a change to my life that will improve it? It’s like Legacy. Just because you’ve been dealt a hand doesn’t mean you can’t sculpt it a bit.
Well, thank you for your time, Em. Any parting advice for young poly targets reading this?
You were going to change anyway. Even if you didn’t get poly’d, your body and feelings and identity were going to change in ten, twenty years, even if you’d stayed a token. Whenever you find yourself asking “why me?” or “how do I do this?”, just remember that: you were never not going to change.
Cover image by Mark Tedin, courtesy of Scryfall.