Last week I talked (or rather rambled over far too many words) about my thoughts on the Two-Headed Giant format after playing in a number of small tournaments. This week I was going to talk about how Grand Prix: Amsterdam updated my knowledge, but as you can see from here, the tournament didn’t exactly go to plan. So I’m just going to talk about beer, drugs, and prostitutes instead.
Yes, it’s time for one of those good old-fashioned tournament reports.
I don’t often get a chance to write them anymore. Nowadays I write the (alleged) Pro Player blog as part of the main coverage, and simply rehashing that material here isn’t particularly exciting. Sometimes the opportunity presents itself to go over something in greater detail than the time constraints of blogging while playing allow, which I’m going to do a little of, but mainly I want to talk about what I got up to over the weekend (You might want to get the black tape ready Craig). Forget the money and everything else, you’ll pick up more in a regular 9-to-5 anyway. If you’re a young person looking to play Magic at a competitive level, you should be looking at it as the best excuse to get out and see the world.
So come with me, and I’ll be your less-than-honorable guide as we take a walk on the wild side through Amsterdam.
I was actually stopping in a holiday apartment sorted out by Tina Kinnar. Stopping at the same place was my 2HG team mate Keith Spragg and another team, Nick Sephton and Faieza Saleem. Nick is a level three judge, and his girlfriend Fizz also does scorekeeping at a lot of the big events. This weekend they were taking a break to play the GP. Tina was a friend of theirs. She doesn’t play Magic (and had handily brought a book for those occasions when the conversation inevitably turned to our mutual obsession) and was here just to see the city. In fact all of them came out a few days earlier to make it more of a holiday. I had demonstrating duties at university and couldn’t make it out until Thursday evening. I also needed to catch a shockingly early nine o’clock flight on the Monday morning.
So, Thursday evening… I was on a cheap flight from Manchester out to Schipol airport. Not many people know this but Schipol is actually so large that planes actually cross time zones just taxiing from the runway to the terminal.
Our editor Craig Stevenson had also arranged to pick up some floor space at the apartment for the first couple of nights. His flight was scheduled to land just after mine, so it made sense for me to wait for him (and also get some of the first year lab I was supposed to be marking on Monday done).
This was definitely a missed opportunity for me. What I should have done was go straight into town and hit the red light district. I could have been done in time to meet Craig at Central Station, especially as his flight was delayed, and no one would have been any the wiser.
Well, I suppose it was my birthday, and at the ripe old age of 32 the brain is just too slow at picking up on these opportunities.
Anyway, off to Central Station we headed. I had been given directions on which tram to catch and where to find the apartment but, pshaw, who needs all that when you have a map.
While this would normally be a cue to begin some implausibly long story about getting lost and ending up in an area of ladies of negotiable virtue, the truth is I possess a frighteningly well-developed sense of direction. Lost is a word that holds no meaning for me (isn’t it a very bad TV show where the writers don’t have the faintest clue where the story is going and yet have still been given the opportunity to crap all over the Star Trek universe as well?).
I think I missed another opportunity here. Craig had never been to Amsterdam, he wouldn’t know any better if we took a “detour.”
The sleaze-centre of my brain was clearly malfunctioning.
We reached the apartment without any incident, and the first thing I noticed was the stairs. One of the quirks about Amsterdam is that I think at some point there was tax levied on buildings based upon their width. Human nature being human nature meant that virtually all the buildings in Amsterdam are very tall and narrow.
But these stairs… I mean come on guys, making buildings where you need pitons and mountaineering ropes just to get to the first floor is taking tax avoidance to new levels. My knees were not happy.
The apartment was pretty good, with a nice view of the canal. I didn’t really care about that. It was currently my birthday, and the tournament wasn’t starting for another day, so it was time for drink!
The Netherlands close proximity to Belgium means you get spoilt for good beer. Keith was tucking into Duvel, while I’m fairly partial to a Leffe Bruin. You need to be careful though, those beers take no prisoners. Duvel is 6.5%.
We were later joined by Jason Howlett and Nick Lovett, as well as judge extraordinaire Gis Hoogendijk. Jason can always be relied upon to find somewhere interesting, and so after the first bar shut he managed to find a chilled out Absinthe bar to keep the alcohol flowing.
Beer count = 7.
Lights out = 4am.
While walking back from Central station the night before I’d bumped into Wizards staff Matthew Poujade and Helene Bergeot. Helene had said they wanted me at the venue for noon the next day. On Friday morning she sent me a text that I wouldn’t actually be needed until registration officially opened at four in the afternoon. Considering I didn’t actually get out of bed until one in the afternoon, this was rather fortuitous.
Friday was fairly chilled. We tried building a sealed pool for practise, but as this turned out to be the sealed pool from hell we gave up. Craig was supposed to be meeting up with his team-mate Joules at three in the Hill Street Blues. I knew where that was and led the party directly there.
Well, not quite. You can’t actually pass that close to the red light district without taking a small detour.
I have a small confession. I actually really love the red light district in Amsterdam. Yeah it’s nasty, smelly (I’m not even going to talk about the urinals standing on the streets), and an area of extremely dubious morality (to some people anyway). But there’s a sense of life about it, like you’ve walked into a Mos Eisley where you don’t have to worry about someone shooting you in the kneecaps. Some of the girls behind the windows are really stunning, but part of the attraction is actually watching the other people walking around the area. I think one of the triumphs of liberal Amsterdam is to take somewhere that would be a complete no-go area in any other city and turn it into a tourist attraction. There are a lot of people there purely for the “business,” but you also get tourists just curious to see the area. Unfortunately it never reflects well on my country, as most of the Brits you see there behave like complete knobheads, although it is amusing to spot the stag parties where the hapless soon-to-be-groom is coerced through one of the doors and into the clutches of some monstrous two-headed giant of a woman.
Hill Street Blues is a favored haunt of British and Irish Magic players. The interior looks like the accumulated works of several generations of New York graffiti artists, and there’s an ever-present miasma of dangerously strong dope smoke. This was where we met the Scots and dropped Craig off before carrying onto the venue.
The venue was on the far side of Central Station and unfortunately had absolutely nothing else in the vicinity. When we got there the queue was already quite long, but as a former Grand Prix winner I got to skip the entire thing… and I didn’t have to pay an entrance fee either, which was nice.
Unfortunately, as Birmingham was so long ago it doesn’t even crop up in the list of past tournaments on MagictheGathering.com, Danny Brosens initially thought I was joking when I mentioned it to him in Geneva. This might explain why every other winner got a gold star with their name on it stuck to the floor, while I missed out. *sob*
For the next three hours I got to gunsling, as mentioned in my other blog. What I didn’t mention is how random Sealed Deck seemed. I thought my deck was pretty good and yet I don’t think I managed much better than winning 50% of my matches because of rotten draws / jammy Welshmen who happen to have Sudden Death when I don’t think there’s any other possible way I can lose with my Ephemeron (curse you Nick Lovett). It was a very good deal for the players though, as sealed deck pools were being sold for the bargain price of 5 euros, and they got the opportunity to go into a raffle for beta boosters and other goodies. I also had the opportunity to drink plenty of free beer, yum.
Hmm, I wonder if that contributed to that 50% record or not.
Nah.
Unfortunately, amongst all the freebies I don’t think they managed to put on food. Given the remote location this was a shame, as it meant people had to go back into Amsterdam to get grub, and once they’d eaten the venue was remote enough that heading back for the continuation of the party wasn’t that enticing.
As a result we missed the dancers and possibly more free beer. Instead it was a very tasty Chinese meal just off Dam Square and then a chance for me to put on the tour guide cap and lead another group of unsuspecting souls around the red light district. I have no idea how I always end up in this role given that I am complete paragon of virtuousness.
You can stop laughing now.
Really.
The highlight was in the indoor section when one of the girls stole Craig’s hat and asked him to “come and get it”. Craig decided discretion was definitely the better part of valor and called a strategic retreat.
This again was yet another missed opportunity. I would have happily offered to take part in whatever “negotiations” were required to “retrieve” his item of headgear. However, this was deemed far too dangerous.
“I can risk it.”
“No you can’t, it’s far too hazardous…” or however the Monty Python sketch goes.
I’d only really gone in there because I thought there was a chance Spraggle might get dragged off behind one of the doors, and that would have been funny.
Anyway, all was not lost as the girl graciously returned Craig’s hat at the exit.
All good (un)clean fun.
We didn’t stay out too late as we needed to be at the venue for nine the next day.
Beer count = 6.
Lights out = midnight.
Be there for nine. Oh dear, who was I kidding. As I joked in the blog, it seemed like they were marking ten years of European Grand Prix tournaments with a homage to the bad old days when the tournaments never started until late afternoon. I don’t really want to lay into GP: Amsterdam as I know most of the people involved with organising it, and I know just how dedicated they are to the game and how hard they work… but this one was a shocker, possibly one of the worst tournaments I’ve ever been to. The European staff are usually fantastic, and have become very adept at dealing with the often monstrous turnouts of European Grand Prix, but Amsterdam simply pole-axed them.
DCI Reporter has to go. Or at least receive a major upgrade / rewrite. I can’t remember the number of times this piece of crap software has fallen over and completely derailed the smooth running of a GP. Throw in thirteen hundred players and a completely new format and you just knew the blasted thing was going to melt into a puddle of useless goo.
I don’t think we actually got to open any cards until one, and I think it was even later when we actually got to build decks. The sheer volume of people meant just trying to find out where you were supposed to be seated was a trial in itself. In the past they’ve got around this problem by splitting the tournament into two. I think they would have liked to have done this for Amsterdam, but with DCI Reporter in full meltdown mode they couldn’t risk it.
I could see where this was going and it seemed like approximately four in the morning. Would we be there?
Well, you can judge for yourself by looking at our card pool here. My comments at the time were probably right. Okay, but probably not good enough to Day 2.
The other factor to consider was the tournament slowly grinding to a halt. To do well at Magic you have to be motivated enough to win. My motivation was pretty much draining away. Be stuck at the venue until a ridiculous time, or go out and have fun in Amsterdam’s bars? At four o’clock, when we still hadn’t even got round to slinging a card in anger, those bars were starting to feel mighty tempting.
I think, in my heart of hearts, the tournament was proving to be such a negative experience that my motivation was nowhere near where it should have been. If I was on better form I might not have walked all our guys into their Sulfurous Blast, and I was possibly too greedy with a Grapeshot by holding it back a turn too long.
While these plays might have made a difference, the real problem was that my draw didn’t really pan out. I got stuck with both cards of my splash color I couldn’t cast, as well as a bunch of five- or six-mana spells and only four land. You really can’t win when it’s two versus one, and you don’t even get a second game to try and pull it back if your draw goes horribly wrong. The drop to 30 life has just exacerbated the problem.
We punted round 4, pure and simple. It was now around seven in the evening with another five rounds still to go. Once I’d worked out how the tournament was going to go overall there were really only two ways I wanted to it to go for us. In the ideal situation we’d start out winning and wouldn’t stop until Day 2. The second best scenario was we’d lose the first two rounds really quickly and get the hell out of there. The worst situation for me was we’d lose the first and then kind of stumble along only to pick up a second right near the end and then be eliminated by tiebreakers or something stupid after battling all the way to five in the morning
Well, we’d just lost round 3. With hindsight we should have probably just ticked the drop box, as I don’t think either of us really cared at that point. I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have alpha-striked all our slivers into a situation where about a billion cards would wreck us and allow them to counter-attack for the win.
I knew it was a dodgy attack, but the turn earlier they’d thrown away a Skycutter just to ground a Castle Raptors so they could get three damage through with a Basalt Gargoyle. As we were currently on five life, I did think it was now or never.
Then we screwed up. It’s not in the Player Blog, as I wrote it straight after and hadn’t even realised the mistake. Anyone with a shred of rules knowledge would have read that game report and screamed, “Weathered Bodyguards only takes the damage for one of the players.”
Yeah, it’s another one of those weird Two-Headed Giant quirks, like double-striking Hurricanes.
I was actually going to talk in detail about that game point, but my explanation actually went to a 1000 words so rather than end up with another article that’s too long for most people to read I’m going to save it for later, as it’s given me an idea for a future article. Something actually strategy-related rather than this travel piece / rant at Two-Headed Giant.
What rant at Two-Headed Giant?
Oh, this one just coming…
Having played the format a few times I do quite like it, but to be honest it’s in a bit of a mess and really needs to be cleaned up. Why on earth does a Squall Line do double damage? It’s a shared life total…surely it should just do X. I can’t think of any sensible reason why spells like this and Syphon-Mage do double damage. Null Profusion shuts down both players as they have a shared draw step. So if this is true, then why do some spells do double damage when in reality you’re playing against a shared life total?
At this point I can sense various judge-types bursting with eagerness to tell me why, logically, this is the case.
I don’t care.
Intuitively these quirks don’t make sense and are very easy for players to get mixed up. When you have something that is very easy for players to get mixed up, then it’s not the fault of the players it’s a fault in game design. Using this logic I would argue that Two-Headed Giant is in desperate need of a clean-up before it is used again as a high level format.
Angel’s Grace had to be fixed as otherwise it did nothing, and at one point Brine Elemental caused the opposing team to skip two untap steps.
Someone needs to clean this up so cards actually do what they’re intended to do (in my humble opinion).
I’m also concerned about its suitability as a high level tournament, and I’ve heard many pro’s also express the same misgivings. That thirty-point life total pretty much takes away any chance of recovering from a bad mana draw. Also, now it seems like you really want to go first, and in a one-game match winning a dice roll suddenly becomes extremely important.
For me, the biggest consideration is time. Going down to thirty life means that mana-troubled opponents get dispatched in fairly hasty fashion, but the other games are still going long. Waaaay too long.
Admittedly the delays in Amsterdam were mainly through other considerations, but I’d still be very nervous if I was the tournament organiser for either San Diego or the upcoming U.S. GP. I dread to think how long an untimed Top 4 game could potentially last, especially on top of an already long day. Sunday didn’t finish until two in the morning, and they thought they were making good time on that day as well.
But we’re still on Saturday. We bumped into Joules and Craig on leaving the venue. They’d also not spotted how Weathered Bodyguards is supposed to work, and it had decided one of their games. Keith and I headed back to the apartment to drop our bags off, grab some food with Nick and Fizz, and then meet up with Joules and Craig at a slightly less smoky bar than Hill Street Blues (because the rest of the apartment didn’t like it.)
The bar we found was better, apart from all the seats were all in a line. Oh well, who cares when you’re drinking? Around one the others were looking to head back but I robbed them of the keys with the aim of trying to keep up with Mr Jardine and Mr Stevenson. This is a dangerous proposition. Many a poor fool has broken themselves on the steady rock of alcohol consumption that is Joules.
Actually, we didn’t do too badly. Better than Eddie Ross anyway. We bumped into him on the return to Hill Street Blues, and his eyes were focused on some point about five inches to the right and maybe four inches above my right shoulder. Or at least one of them was. I did say the dope in that place was scary.
Well, all good things come to an end as Hill Street Blues closed up for the night, and so we moved onto another bar, and then another… and will you look at the time, it’s five in the morning!
I think what surprised me was that there was still plenty of action in the red light district. The last time I’d been to Amsterdam it pretty much shut down around two in the morning, with only the “last chicken in the shop” left. But that was a Sunday and this was a Saturday, and Joules did point out a brunette that looked dangerously attractive for someone who’d consumed as much alcohol as I had. Fortunately my Whitemane Lion, Mr Stevenson, was on hand to rescue me from any threats to my moral integrity (or rather what little of it remains). [Anytime, fella. – Craig.]
Well until I gave him the slip when they both retired to their hotel at five in the morning.
Which turns out was a fraction too late, as by that point the red light district really was closed.
Ah moral integrity, some day I will lose you… but not today.
Beers drunk = 9.
Light out = 6am.
Sunday, and Keith and Nick wanted to go to the venue to draft. No chance I was going to do that. Once you get sucked into Magic venues there’s less chance of escape than from rooms where scantily clad women run off with your hats.
Instead I did a spot of sight-seeing with Tina and Fizz that included the charming surrounds of the Torture Museum. Some very interesting implements. I did take notes for future reference. And design specs.
Fizz and Tina wanted to pick up some special brownies, but the shop they wanted was closed. We stopped at a little pub for some drinks, as the weather was really fine and it was nice out by the canals. Fortunately we dodged the wicked accurate pigeons, as one poor sucker got his best jacket and Mac powerbook completely splattered. I guess the pigeon must have had something against Mac users.
Hey wait a minute, wasn’t there something about the Chinese managing to remote control pigeons? Are these Microsoft remote-controlled pigeons?
The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. We caught up with Keith and Nick, and then returned to the apartment for another nice meal and a lot of very strong beers (some tipping 9%). Actually the restaurant staff were really cool, as we kept drinking there for another few hours. Tina wanted to head back, but my sleaze centre was kicking in again and I persuaded the others we should go back into Amsterdam to check out the Banana Bar. It was my last night in Amsterdam, and I didn’t feel like retiring just yet.
I haven’t been in the Banana Bar, but apparently women do very creative things with bananas. Exactly what I didn’t get to find out, as their cover charge to get in was way more than any of us were willing to pay. We’d lost contact with where Craig and Joules had got to, and the evening petered out as everywhere seemed to shut at two this time.
No more opportunities left to get filthy now. I knew I should have given someone the slip at some point. Maybe it was my good angel working in mysterious ways.
Ah, but maybe there was an opportunity. Yab Yum is actually just down the road from our apartment. For those that don’t know, Yab Yum is a high class brothel. I haven’t been in a high class brothel, and being someone of dubious morality who quite likes to try out new experiences I was a little tempted (and possibly a lot drunk). Our Internet connection was down again (the advertised wireless had basically not worked the entire trip), but for some reason I happened to have the relevant web pages including a phone number in my browser cache. Hmm, wonder how those got there…
One phone call later and I finally got to take my opportunity….
Don’t be silly. It was 75 euros just to get in. Despite possessing dubious morals and a desire to try out new and interesting experiences, that’s crazy money no matter how drunk I am. Who do you think I am, Kyle Sanchez?
Beers drunk = 6
Lights out = 4am
4am, ouch. That really wasn’t a good idea considering I had to be at the airport for 7:30 in the morning. And even less of good idea considering my Monday went exactly like this:
9:00. Board Flight
10:00. Land at Manchester Airport
10:59. Arrive at Manchester University
11:00. Demonstrate Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence to first year Undergraduates.
13:00. Die.
I really love Amsterdam as a fun city, but don’t you think there’s something sinister about it? You see, this was something I worked out on the flight home. It’s all a big conspiracy.
You take Amsterdam with its liberal attitude to drugs and, well, just about everything. This tends to attract a certain, should we say… Stoner element from all over Europe.
Now you need to look at Amsterdam itself. Think about all those coffee shops. Is it really such a good idea to have all those canals in a city where so much dope is smoked? One wrong step in the dark and splash, down with the old bikes for you!
And then there’s the bikes. And the trams. I don’t think I can think of a city more hostile to pedestrians. Pavements just run out in the middle of roads, or they’re really bike lanes in disguise. You have to keep your wits about you, otherwise you’re going to get smeared by a tram or sliced in half by a crazy cyclist. That’s if you’re sharp. Now just imagine someone whose wits might be addled by certain, shall we say, illicit substances. They’ve got no chance.
And those bloody stairs, they’re probably good for a couple of hundred dopeheads a year.
I’ve worked it out. I’ve spotted the master plan.
Amsterdam is the secret stoner disposal unit of Europe.
They’re attracted by the promise of cheap, legal drugs. and then they just… disappear. Between the canals, trams, bikes, and stairs they don’t have a chance.
Don’t tell me I never warned you.
Or maybe I’m just sleep deprived.
Until next time.
Prof