Yo dude,
I am going to be doing two things in particular at GP Columbus in May.
First of all, I am going to be giving myself a bit of repetitive stress disorder as I scribble my name a zillion times on people’s cards. Then – and this is where you may come in – I plan on trying out my newly re-acquired gaming freedom and playing in the 2-headed giant PTQ that Sunday.
If you’re going to be down there and don’t have a second head, or if you were not planning on going down there, but are intrigued by the prospect of being joined at the neck and shoulders, let me know.
– Matt
Well. That was interesting. Because that offer was not just from anyone, but from artist and fellow Magicthegathering.com writer Matt Cavotta. And the idea that we could be not just partners in a Two-Headed Giant game, but as dual-wielding representatives of Magicthegathering.com, intrigued me.
But first, I should probably mention how I know Matt — for although people tend to think that I’ve met everyone at Wizards of the Coast, given that I’ve been an editor and ne’er-do-well of StarCityGames.com for almost seven years now, the truth is that there are a lot of people in Magic I’ve never met.
I’ve never met Chris Millar. Mike Flores is a stranger to me (though he calls me often whenever I’m editing one of his articles — Mike likes making sure everything gets up right). Despite many efforts to do so, I’ve never met Jamie Wakefield or John Friggin’ Rizzo, and I spent the day at Grand Prix: Columbus frantically trying to get the attention of both Stephen Menendian and Bill Stark, but they were both in matches whenever I tracked them down.
Don’t even talk to me about Tim Aten. I think he despises me. (Then again, who doesn’t Tim Aten despise?)
So there are a lot of gaps in my Magic people-knowing… But Matt Cavotta is not one of them. We met a long time ago, and as a fellow Ohio resident, he came to my house once or twice to sling some cards. I even commissioned a piece of custom artwork from him (a sketch of my wife’s roleplaying character Ardenal).
We had talked about getting together on multiple occasions since then, but two things happened:
1) Matt moved away to Seattle to become an official Wizards of the Coast employee, and:
2) He moved back, then got hooked on American Idol.
By the time he’d gotten back, I’d already established that Tuesdays were the night that my multiplayer group got together, and Matt wanted to play, but dammit Sanjaya must be voted off that very evening. He couldn’t record it; man, he had to watch it all unspool live, so he only made it over to play with us once.
For those of you who haven’t met Matt, well…. He’s pretty much what you’d think he is from his writings on Magicthegathering.com. He’s tall and lanky, towering over me by a good couple of inches, so that I had to spend my day looking up at him. (This is oddly unsettling for a guy who’s almost six feet tall.) He has an eager, expressive face, and doesn’t talk so much with his hands as he does his entire body. He’s got a way of roping you in without being uncomfortably enthusiastic.
He also has provided me with one of the best casual game stories we’ve ever had.
See, Matt did come over one night to play, and he faced four of us down. We were anxious to see what sort of deck Matt would bust out — none of us knew how good a player he was, and he was the only new fishie at our dining room table that night, so we stared at each card that he laid down with interest.
What kinds of crazy strategies would Matt bust out with? The man was an artist, and sometimes even a writer. He’d just helped design a set, for God’s sake. We were expecting that crazy, Johnny-style deckbuilding that Mark Rosewater champions.
His first play was a third-turn Skywing Aven. I remembered it thanks to my Odyssey Limited days, but other people stared; okay, a 2/1 flier that you can return to your hand by discarding a card. Cool. Must be some crazy recursion engine. He was playing swamps and forests and islands, so G/B/U.
His next play? Ebony Treefolk. Okay, an Invasion Limited staple, but I’m not seeing the synergy. Was there some kind of crazy pumping infinite loop here? Then he played an Anavolver and cycled an Elvish Aberration, and we were totally confused.
Finally, he dropped a Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, showing off a fourth color in his deck, and I couldn’t take it any more. “Matt,” I cried. “What the hell does your deck do?”
He grinned sheepishly.
“About that,” he said. “I don’t have any cards of my own, since I never buy sets…”
You guessed it, folks; every card in his deck was an artist’s proof. It was, barring lands, the all-Cavotta deck. And he kept picking up his cards with distaste and going, “Man, my cards suck!”
We could not stop laughing.
(We laughed a little less hard when Jaya started to rule the table — a walking Inferno was a bit of trouble for us, since some of us were at ten life — but a little teamwork soon took care of that, and Matt himself.)
So the idea of playing with Matt was a lot of fun because a) he was a fun guy, b) I’d never played Two-Headed Giant before, and c) we could team up to embarrass Wizards wholeheartedly.
Because let’s get this straight: I didn’t know how good a player Matt was. I knew he didn’t suck, because the few times we’d played Sealed together showed that he at least knew how to put together a deck with seventeen lands and a decent mixture of removal and critters. But was he better than I was? Worse?
(How could he be worse? Oh, ha ha. It is to laugh.)
Given that neither of us had ever played a game of Two-Headed Giant before, we were reasonably sure that our lack of familiarity with the format would return to bite us in the ass. (And lo, we were prophets.) Plus, we’d be hanging it at a Grand Prix, where the remnants of the previous day’s play go to console themselves with a PTQ, meaning that we’d be slogging our way through the low-level pro wanna-bes who’d scrubbed out the day before. Our odds were not good.
But hey. Fun. You know how it is. So I agreed to meet him in Columbus early Sunday morn, and we’d get together to put our heads together. We called ourselves “Team Chumps,” since we figured we’d go out in an amusing blaze of glory — and besides, when I was a member of “Team Prize Support” in Alaska, I actually won the whole tournament, so perhaps bad names led to good results.
I did, we got our cards, and we got an hour to build them.
“Who needs an hour to build a pair of decks?” Matt asked.
An hour later, we were scrambling for land before the final call came down. “Wow,” Matt said, knowing that each of us had learned our first lesson in Two-Headed Giant. “That hour went by quick.”
Lo, he was correct; even though we had doped out that the Red in our packs was so weak that neither of us felt bad about leaving it out entirely (Shivan Wumpus and Detritivore were our rares, with no Red burn to be found anywhere), the question was which colors supported each other the best? We had good Green and solid White; was it better to have one uber-strong deck that could fall to a bad draw, or two solid decks, neither lacking overwhelming power?
In an ideal world, I’d give you our card pool, but Matt gave me his deck after the tournament and I apparently ate it on the way home. I can tell you that I packed a reasonably strong G/U deck:
1 Citanul Woodreaders
1 Crookclaw Transmuter
1 Dreamscape Artist
1 Essence Warden
1 Havenwood Wurm
1 Infiltrator en-Kor
1 Ixidron
1 Logic Knot
2 Mire Boa
1 Reality Acid
1 Riftsweeper
1 Tolarian Sentinel
1 Shaper Parasite
1 Uktabi Drake
1 Primal Forcemage
1 Edge of Autumn
1 Healing Leaves
1 Ovinize
1 Prismatic Lens
1 Temporal Eddy
1 Tromp the Domains
1 Verdant Embrace
1 Saltcrusted Steppe
1 Pendelhaven
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Zoetic Cavern
Matt’s deck was the support deck, featuring a lot of W/B creature destruction and neutralization at a low mana curve — I don’t think his deck had more than one five-mana spell, and most of his stuff could be cast off of three lands. The goal was that Matt would cast early defense while I used all of the land tricks to ramp up to six mana, where the good stuff was, at which point I’d muscle my way out of town with my beef.
But we did misbuild our decks to some extent:
- Because we weren’t entirely sure on the definition of “You,” we overvalued White’s tricks a lot more than we should have. In particular, we had Intervention Pact — a solid, solid trick in a duel, but given that this was Two-Headed Giant (and I was the alpha player), this “trick” depended on someone assigning damage to Matt, not me. They hardly ever did that; the inexperienced players just pointed at me by default, and the smart players anticipated Dawn Charm. In fact, it worked only once, when I used all of my multiplayer sneaky-wiles to suggest to a team that they should assign their dragon’s damage to Matt, and they did, and it worked. Okay, that was nice.
- Likewise, Matt had looked over some tournament-finishing 2HG decks, and he noted that some of them could get away with creature counts as low as ten, if they had solid tricks. And that was awesome, for a support deck. But because we were still thinking in duel terms, we overvalued Fortify because it saves our creatures… Except it doesn’t. It saves Matt’s creatures, and remember that Matt was piloting the creature-light deck. In the best case, it allows the two or three guys he has out to alpha strike. Not nearly as good.
- We thought that the “Do not regenerate” clause on Knight of the Holy Nimbus would make it twice as bad thanks to the dual opponents, so we left it out — forgetting, of course, that a 2/2 attacker with flanking on turn 2 is still not bad, particularly in a deck that’s supposed to be playing the stall game while I ramp up. So you waste two mana to kill it? Great. That’s two mana you’re not playing anything.
- Afraid of Slivers, I convinced myself (and, sadly, Matt), that a lone Necrotic Sliver wasn’t good enough to play because it could be used against us, even though it was in his colors. True enough, but I should have been looking at it as a 4BW Desert Twister, which is still a solid Limited card and would have given us a bit more of a late game.
Then we had some tricky judgment calls that I’m not sure whether we got right or not:
- Do you maindeck enchantment and artifact hate? Matt and I waffled on this one, and we weren’t sure — we had a Patrician’s Scorn and an Ancient Grudge we could have put in, but was it worth it? Jeez, we still don’t know.
- We had to cut three cards from the B/W deck in the end, and we had an ugly choice between four decent filler cards: Augur il-Vec, Deadly Grub, Trespasser il-Vec, and Revered Dead. We went with Trespasser in the end because it was a 3/1 that could get some shadow damage in, but we’re still not sure whether it would have been better to have the potential 4 life and a blocker (and a better ass to throw a Verdant Embrace on), or the regenerating Revered Dead. Matt really, really liked Deadly Grub, but me? I was not impressed.
- Smallpox? Yixlid Jailer? Petrified Plating? Cutthroat il-Dal? Wistful Thinking? (After all, there is twice the chance one of them will tap out when low on cards.) Are they worth it? We didn’t think so, but should we have thought so?
Alas, we set in to play.
The first game might as well have had its own headline: “Never listen to fellow players.” See, unfamiliar with the format, I asked the folks to my left a question: “Say, do you attack each head separately, or can either head throw its creature in front of its partner to block?”
These fine folk told me that you attacked separately — if I had no creatures out and Matt did, they could choose to attack me and I’d have to take the damage. This didn’t seem right, so I asked the players to my left.
They too confirmed this.
So we went into our first round believing something to be totally false. And our opponents, who were even less-skilled than we were, also believed this. This was much to our detriment, since my deck had no early blockers, and before we could stabilize we were down to four.
The grating thing is that that by the time we were down to fourteen, we called a judge over to ask a question and discovered, hey, both of those guys were wrong! So we were down sixteen points thanks to a disinformation campaign started by others, and we were about to lose. Gah.
Then our Phthisis resolved, doing fourteen points to the guy’s Dust Corona-clad Dragon, and my Tromp the Domains fired off, and we took them from thirty to precisely zero in a single turn. From the ashes…
…the funny thing is that — ironic, given the amazing clashing lack of skill here — we won based on skill. The beta player had a Molten Slagheap out and kept forgetting to tap at the end of the turn to add a counter on it… And when he died, he had a Strangling Soot in hand and no Swamp to use. If he’d remembered just one extra time, they would have won.
There is a line of thought that goes, “I shouldn’t tell you how dumb we are.” But I tend to think that everyone has spectacularly stupid plays; I’m just neurotic enough to relate them to you. This places me in the Erwin Zone but without the cred that I used to have…. But remind me to tell you about that theory on Magic writers on some other time.
The second game started with a team we already bore a mild grudge against; they were the jerks who’d given us our decks and hadn’t bothered to alphabetize the cards at all. I’m a big fan of being neat when you send someone else’s cards over, so Matt and I came that close to laughing, “Hey, we’re gonna tromp you because you’re rude!”
Then we realized we might as well just tell them the full contents of our decks anyway, and shut our mouth just in time. There’s a time for fun, and then there’s a time to shut your yap.
As it turns out, it didn’t matter because it was a massacre; it was one of those games where you go over it afterwards, and realize that you have practically no chance. They had a two-headed Sliver deck, and started with first-turn Shadow Sliver, second-turn other Sliver, third-turn poison Sliver, fourth-turn Telekinetic Sliver, fifth-turn Vigilance Sliver and two Cautery Slivers. We killed the poison sliver just as we got our ninth counter and I Temporal Eddied the Telekinetic Sliver to buy us a turn, but we just got swamped.
I looked at everything we had in our decks. Admittedly, Matt kept a reasonably slow had with four lands, but it was the Shadow that killed us; I had an early blocker or two, but we just got swarmed. And they were kind of apologetic.
Third game was the kind of game that Matt and I felt good about; we were up against a team that knew what they were doing, and we just pulled it out of nowhere. We had an Essence Warden, which got us up to 43 life relatively quickly as we built up competing armies, which was a buffer against the suspend-o-Rama overwhelming army they pulled out when Keldon Halberdier and Durkwood Baloth came online on the same turn.
We took fifteen damage because we had nothing big enough to block, and they looked all happy because their guys trumped ours…. And then I cast Ixidron.
That was pretty nice, and then Tromp the Domains showed up after a war of attrition, and we just had the right answers at the right time. They weren’t happy that they lost, but it was the kind of tough counter-and-response that at least makes you feel like you were thoroughly in the game.
The fourth game was a pain-in-the-butt game against pain-in-the-butt people. They were decent players, and let me qualify by saying they weren’t jerks — they were courteous, and didn’t trash talk. But they were all game and no smiles, to the point where they would spend several minutes at the beginning of each whispering to each other, to the point where Matt started whispering to me just because they were doing it.
It’s probably the way it should be done, I admit, so I can’t fault them for thoroughly masticating every move. That’s not the problem, even if it’s slightly alienating… But then again, the goal at a tournament isn’t to make friends, but to win. I dig that.
However, when they’ve spent three minutes on every upkeep involved deep in a whispering campaign, and the game enters the critical and most likely pivotal turn for us — the one where we either stabilize their onslaught or we lose in their next attack phase – leaning over to go, “By the way, would you mind speeding it up?” is not cool.
And then trying to explain after I snapped, “You’ve taken far more time than we have every turn, barring an extended judge ruling, so we’re going to take our time to decide,” by saying, “Well, the clock’s running out, so it’s in our best interests to play quickly” is a flat-out lie. We’re currently in a losing position where going x-2 puts us out of contention; it’s in “our” best interests to run out the clock legitimately and force a tie when there would otherwise be a loss.
As it turns out, we couldn’t stall even in final turns, and lost; they had a heavy B/R destruction deck, and while I found my Tromp the Domains, it was always substandard because I had a maximum of three creatures out at any given time (as opposed to the army I really needed). But I also made two glaring play errors that cost us the game, one obvious and the other not so obvious:
1) I accidentally nodded my way past their first-turn end step, leaving my Terramorphic Expanse uncracked, which screwed us up because my second-turn Dreamscape Artist became a third-turn Dreamscape Artist Apprentice, which got one activation in instead of two it should have had before they killed it, which probably would have changed the outlook of the game considerably. D’oh.
2) The second one was more troublesome; they were attacking with a shadow-granted Stonebrow, Krosan Hero, and I Ovinized it… And then let Matt block it with a sole Whitemane Lion. Realistically, there were enough pump effects and damage effects in their deck — and the Stonebrow was killing us quickly — that I should have committed to a double-block just to make sure the 0/1 met its ugly demise. I should have put both the Seht’s Tiger and the Lion in front of it to make sure that it was going to die to anything but a Stonewood Invocation; as it was, they Temporal Isolationed the Lion, allowing Stonebrow to survive, and that six points of damage killed us in three more turns.
(The judge ruling, incidentally, is whether the Ovinize would remove both Stonebrow’s +2/+2 effect and his shadow. It would.)
At 2-2, we were out. But that was fine with us. We’d learned and had fun. That was cool.
I drove home. And the next day, I got this email:
Hey Dude,
I had a good time playing last weekend. Though our deckbuilding was a bit shaky, I do think we did as well as we could have with the decks we built.
I don’t recall any serious game-changing goofs on our part. We scrubbed out at 2-2, but the whole scene got my competitive Magic juices flowing again.
There was a time when I was hitting every limited PTQ within 4 hours drive. I almost qualified at an Urza’s Saga sealed PTQ in Cleveland, getting beaten in the finals by PT regular John Marks. There’s a TSP Block Constructed PTQ in Cleveland coming up in about a month. Perhaps there’s some hometown magic waiting to be worked!
Yeah, baby. That’s what I wanna hear. More Magic.
I can almost taste it.
The Weekly Plug Bug
It’s been a while since I’ve shilled for my comic appropriately, but of course every last one of you should be reading Ungrateful Dead —
– what? I’ve done that joke before? Ah, well, Craig can use the traffic.
No, no, my strip is called Home on the Strange, and it’s about the adventures of many nerdy friends. In this week’s storyline, we have the impetuous Karla, who has been trying to take over the Internet for a very long time. But today, from a very unexpected place, she gets a new ally….
Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Here Site Here Guy