From The Lab - Beware the Spraggle! A Look at Two-Headed Giant

Bang-bang.

Erm, excuse the noise. Nothing to fear.

Sweat? Ah, bit of a problem with the air conditioning that’s all.

Bang-bang. Crash.

Mice, yes. Just some common-or-garden mice. They make a bit of a racket, all that running about. It absolutely has nothing to with any experiment that might have gone hideously and catastrophically wrong.

Rawghhhh!

Pipes! Amplifies the noise and distorts it. That’s really just mice squeaking, heh-heh. Just ignore it.

Now, where were we?

Ah yes, after my last few articles went through the various Constructed possibilities of Planar Chaos, we’re going to take a short break from Constructed while I look at the lush virginal territory of Two-Headed Giant. As you read this, I’ll be partying in Amsterdam before the Grand Prix tomorrow. Of course, being the true professional player that I am, I will not be consuming large amounts of alcoholic beverages or partaking of any of the other… erm… pleasures that Amsterdam has to offer. The StarCityGames.com guys might want to have a backup editor prepared, though. The other Craig is teaming up with Joules Jardine. He may not survive. [Don’t worry, I’ll wimp out LONG before I actually die. – the other Craig.]

First off, I’ll go on the record as saying I’m not a big fan of team events, and I never have been. With the exception of Charleston last year (which was Constructed), I’ve largely regarded the team season as a blank, a time when I get on with other stuff that isn’t Magic related. The reason is fairly simple. I come from a small rural county in England (a country we already know doesn’t have a fantastic pedigree at the game). It’s not exactly like the Netherlands or France, where you can easily find two other players with Pro experience to team with. Yes, Team Rochester is one of the most skilful formats in Magic, but it can also be a lock-out if you come from the wrong geographical location.

As skilful as it is, it appears that Team Rochester is being sent off to join its individual compatriot in the Great Format Graveyard in the sky. Instead, we now have the brand spanking not-quite-so new Two Headed Giant format debuting as the team event of choice this year.

Without wanting to sound like Jeroen Remie (sorry dude, it seems like open season on your rep at the moment), I think I have to say I have some misgivings about using Two-Headed Giant as a serious Pro format. My argument is fairly similar to why I was so violently opposed to Coldsnap being used as a draft format at Nationals last year. To me, Two-Headed Giant is a fun format, something you can enjoy with a mate at a pre-release or local tournament. Or rather it’s a nice tool for the Wizards marketing department to encourage new players into the game (bring a friend and teach them how to play at the same time!). Making it a serious format is going to taint it, and pull it away from the casual crowd that currently appreciates it.

Leave it to the Pros to suck all the joy and fun out of a format.

Well duh, that’s what they’re supposed to do. To me, one of the key distinctions between casual players (Johnnys and Timmys) and pro players (Spikes) is that Johnnys and Timmys want to build decks that do cool stuff, while Spikes want to build decks that stop their opponents from doing anything. Hand a fun format to the best players in the world for large sums of money, and they’re going to break it over their knee.

I think we’ve already seen the first consequences of this action, with the life totals being dropped from 40 to 30 after the eighty-minute average round time crawl that was PTQ San Diego at Geneva.

Unfortunately, I think this change has now damaged the whole justification of having each match decided by a single game. Free mulligan or not, if one of you gets a bad mana draw from a hand that didn’t pan out, then the game is going to be over very quickly.

But that happens in normal Magic anyway, and you always have games 2 and 3 to…

Oh, yeah. Single match, huh.

Exactly.

But enough griping aside. There’s a Grand Prix coming up, and then a Pro Tour later this year. As preparation, I’ve been playing a fair amount of Two-Headed Giant recently, culminating in the County / City / Can’t-be-bothered-to-remember Champs held last weekend. Two weeks ago I talked a little about a GP trial I played in. Since then, the starting life total has been dropped to 30 life, and I’ve played another trial (where we won two byes, sort of), and the Champs (where we lost in the final). Throw in an extra practise draft on top of the three drafts at those events, and somehow I’ve managed to accumulate a fair bit of experience in the format. I’m even currently tied for the number one ranking slot (with my partner Keith Spragg) for Two-Headed Giant in Britain (but as that ranking is only a meagre 1677, I wouldn’t bow down in worship just yet… we don’t play a lot of Two-Headed Giant in the UK).

As the current (until Champs goes on, anyway) UK (a country with a… ahem… fantastic reputation at Limited) number one Two-Headed Giant – Limited player, you might want to listen to about what I say about the format (or maybe not, it is Limited and I am English).

First off, a bit on my second head and co-pilot, Keith Spragg. Keith hasn’t been to the Pro Tour, ever, and this will be his first Grand Prix.

But Prof, you’re an internationally renowned professional Magic player, and possible contender for this year’s player of the year race, –

(Excuse me, I need to find a cleric to resurrect me after dying from laughing too hard.)

– why are you teaming up with a guy with absolutely zero experience at high level Magic?

Because he has a car, and I can tell him exactly what to do in any case. Obv. This is the well-known Meat Puppet theory of Team Magic.

Actually, it’s because Keith’s local, enthusiastic… and haven’t I already told you about my complete lack of respect for team formats? I’d rather play with a mate and have a laugh (plus Tiago Chan, Frank Karsten, and other similar pros were all mysteriously unavailable).

To be honest, I did have concerns about it. Joking aside, I do have some aims I’d like to achieve this year, and you could argue that I should have at least made an attempt to find another pro player to partner with.

However, so far it seems to be working out pretty well. We’ve made the finals for two tournaments and picked up two byes for Amsterdam by “winning” (more on this later) a Grand Prix Trial (As Keith has never played on the Pro Tour he has zero pro levels, which would have left our combined total two levels short of the full two byes).

One of the important things in choosing your partner for 2HG is being able to work with them. As it happens, despite his lack of Pro Points, Keith isn’t a complete numpty. He’s Top 8’ed PTQs, and has even come as close as one match away from earning one of the fabled Blue Envelopes (I say “fabled” as I’ve never ever seen one, and have yet to be convinced they actually exist outside the feverish recesses of Mike Flores brain, but then they might just be an American thing). His main weakness is being a little too reactive and not intuitively grasping how the whole game is going to play out over a sequence of turns. A lot of players have the same flaw. If you’re not sure you have it, then look back at your last Limited game and think about all the creatures you snubbed out with removal and when. Did you kill those creatures as part of a thought-out game plan, or because they just happened to be available when you drew that Dark Withering?

However, Keith is technically very proficient, and actually bothers to pay attention to what the cards do. This is quite handy when I look in danger of going into sloppy mode and do dumb things like forgetting to pay echo on an Uktabi Drake. This makes for a nice division of labor, as you have one player responsible for keeping track of the overall big picture while the other keeps an eye on the minutae of what’s actually happening in each of the phases.

As a partnership, this has worked very well so far, as our record in Sealed deck matches is 10-1-1 from three events. Unfortunately, the whole “division of labor” theory doesn’t quite extend to Draft (I’m the primary player, and while I’m fairly good at building the Sealed Decks, I have rather large blind spots when it comes to draft. Keith tries to fill them, and maybe one day I might actually listen to him when he tells me I should be taking that Piracy Charm to kill Mire Boa). Our record is a less-than-impressive 3-4.

For this article, I’ll talk a little about why I think we’ve been so successful with Sealed Decks (aside from getting good pools), and what I think went wrong with some of the drafts. Next week, Grand Prix: Amsterdam will have happened, and I’ll come back with how my knowledge of the format has been updated by playing in a more professional tournament as opposed to the local tournaments at which we’ve practised. I mention this because, like Constructed, the context of where you play the tournament actually has a large impact on strategy.

In the past, when I played Limited PTQs I built decks that were more focused towards being as powerful as possible. It’s quite simple: bombs win matches, and you should play as many as you can. My decks tended to have fixers, removal, heavy hitters like Molimo, and any bizarre combos that would be randomly devastating if the cards came out together. I wasn’t so good at remembering to put in those unexciting dorks that don’t do a lot except get in the way of their unexciting dorks, so you can actually live long enough to play the bombs or pull off the janky combos. Somehow I managed to get away with it and made Top 8s of a large number of PTQs.

Then I’d go to GPs and get ripped apart by guys who’d play dorks that weren’t very exciting, but came out on turns 2 to 6 and bashed away my life total before my more powerful spells had a chance to come online.

To be fair I’m exaggerating things a little, but in general the difference between local tournaments and more professional tournaments is a couple of turns. Against weaker players you will get one to two extra turns, because they will forget their utility creature can also attack, and are more likely to leave creatures back on defence when they should be attacking. When you know you’re going to get a few extra turns, then it becomes a better strategy to cheat on the mana curve and squeeze in a few extra high-end spells.

I mention all this because our current strategy has been to squeeze every possible point of power out of our Sealed Deck pools. In fact, that was pretty much the accepted strategy for 2HG before ten life got chopped off everyone’s starting total. I think you still want to be as greedy as possible when constructing your Sealed Decks… however, I’m curious to see if the reduction in life totals will enable some strategies to catch other decks with their pants down, so to speak.

Anyway, onto to our first 2HG tournament, a GPT in Bradford. I’ve already talked about this one two weeks ago. Unfortunately, I don’t have decklists for all of them, or rather fortunately, as it’d take forever to type them up. In any case, the deck construction for this one was fairly easy. Two Whitemane Lion and a Momentary Blink, plus Firemaw Kavu and Triskelavus, is a good starting position for a deck (as well as Magus of the Arena and Pardic Dragon – our first pool was fairly insane). Black was also heavy, with two Urborg Syphon-Mage (he drains for 4 not 2 in 2HG, in case you were not aware) and two Nightshade Assassin. There was also a Vorosh and Mystic Enforcer floating around that needed a home.

The biggest conundrum was where to put the weakest color, Blue. I think this is a familiar theme for 2HG Sealed. It is very easy to build two two-color decks and then wonder about what to do with the third.

Initially I wanted to put the Blue in the Red/White deck, as this would give the potential to flashback Blink and also include Riftwing Cloudskate, another card that fit in very well with the synergy of the deck. We also had a Serra Sphinx that needed a home, but then the Blue tailed off really badly.

Unfortunately, all the fixers were Green. There was just no way of working Blue into the Red/White deck without crippling the manabase. But while I could reluctantly give up the Cloudskate, there was no way the Serra Sphinx was not going into a deck.

By making the Red/White deck just two color, I was able to squeeze everything into a Green/Black deck that splashed for Vorosh, Serra Sphinx (got to love that double splash), and Mystic Enforcer. The synergy for this deck was held together by a Fa’adiyah Seer. I know Billy Moreno really likes this card, but it really has to find the right deck to shine in, and as it happens a deck with Dread Return, madness monsters, Mystic Enforcer, and four colors of mana is exactly that deck. That’s a lot of mileage from what is, in most people’s eyes, a junk common.

To me, that is exactly what you should be doing with your Sealed Deck pools for 2HG. Instead of defaulting to the stock “let’s play Green/Red and Blue/White” options, you should be looking to squeeze every possible drop of synergy and power from your pool.

A week later, and another Grand Prix Trial, this time in Coventry. We were also fortunate enough to open another strong card pool that included such juicy morsels as Oros, the Avenger and Jedit Ojanen (possibly the best card you might want to open in 2HG Sealed). We also had Ith, High Arcanist, which presented some interesting mana issues.

Initially, Keith wanted to put the Black and Red cards together, but that felt wrong to me. Both colors were very deep already, and it would leave the other deck as a very scrubby mess of Blue, White, and Green cards. As one of the goals is to try and get the most mileage possible out of a card pool, I don’t think you want to be combining the two deepest colors as you’ll probably be leaving good cards out of one deck while having to fill the other one up with sub-optimal choices.

Most people expect you to build either a two two-color decks or have one with a third color (the remaining one). During the day I was joking about how we had a four-color deck and a three-color deck. I’d put the weaker Blue with the strong Black and enough mana fixing (Totems, Vesuva – really good fixing in this format, Dreamscape Artist, etc) to support Ith, Oros, and the flashback on Strangling Soot. The other deck was Green/Red with a splash to take the remainder of the decent White cards, including tricks with Whitemane Lion and Thornscape Battlemage.

The decks were again very successful, as we went unbeaten for the swiss portion of the event, apart from a deliberate concession to some friends in the last round.

While playing, you also have to be aware that you’re not just piloting two separate decks, but a single strategy across two decks. This has obvious implications when talking about storm cards and slivers, but also stems from the other little interactions as well.

In one game I made Jedit on turn 6, and knew we’d probably won right there. Yes, Jedit is insanely powerful, but often you have to assume he’s just going to get fried by one of two player’s removal. Except in this case I’d told Keith to unmorph Voidmage Prodigy a turn earlier. With an active Kai and two Blue mana open I knew that by the time they’d actually be able to deal with Jedit, he’d have already created enough Forestwalkers (translation: unblockable) to finish the job. Think of how both decks can support each other, both when building and when you’re actually playing the game.

As a more concrete example, I have our card pools from the Champs last weekend. This will hopefully demonstrate my thought processes when building Sealed Deck. I’m not saying it’s correct – I’m sure considerably better players will have different ideas on what I should have built – but this is what has worked for us so far. This one was more interesting, as it isn’t as powerful as the other two pools and actually required some thought as to how to divide up the colors.

2HG Limited Champs Cardpool

Craig Jones

Test deck on 03-11-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (61)

Lands (1)

1 Academy Ruins

Spells (42)

The first step to look at what combos might be available. Academy Ruins and Serrated Arrows jumps right out.

What other artifacts do we have? We have a couple of Totems.

Straight off, I looked at Blue/White/Red and Green/Black. It was a mess, which is kind of what you expect with triple and even quadruple color commitments on some of the cards.

Keith thought one of the decks should be Green/Red, which was fine apart from the other deck looking like a mess. As Blue and Green looked to be the colors with most depth, I didn’t really want them in the same deck.

This time round I didn’t really see any synergies other than Academy Ruins (I’d missed Deadwood Treefolk with either the Blue or White bounce), so there was nothing that shaped any possible color combinations. We didn’t have any dragons either that might inform color choices, and instead had these powerful cards with heavy mono-color commitments.

This leads to the situation where you can make two two-color decks and bench the fifth. White had the least depth, but it also had Opal Guardian and Dust Elemental, and as far as I’m concerned you never leave any bomb on the bench. Even with the 30 life you do have enough time, and it is the overall power level of the cards that count. 2HG Sealed Deck is just a puzzle where you try to squeeze all of your powerful cards into two decks, along with enough mana in the correct ratio to be sure of casting them at some point.

This was when I noticed that the color with the lightest color commitments was Red. Only an Orcish Cannonade had double Red and could be left out. I would have quite liked to play the Aetherflame Wall, and maybe the Goblin Skycutter, but these could be cut to make Red a splash for the Pyromancer and three removal spells: Lightning Axe, Sudden Shock, and Dead / Gone. As Green had no color fixing apart from a Utopia Vow, it made sense to make Blue the three-color deck with both a Red and Black splash (Phthisis isn’t exactly a splash, but can still be suspended). This left Green and White as the other deck.

Our decks:

2HG Limited Champs Deck A

Craig Jones

Test deck on 03-11-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (15)

Lands (17)

9 Forest
8 Plains

Spells (8)

2HG Limited Champs Deck B

Craig Jones

Test deck on 03-11-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (11)

Lands (17)

Spells (12)

As is inevitable, the Blue/Red/Black had some cards sitting on the bench I would have liked to include, and the Green/White deck was also running some cards I would have preferred to leave on the bench. This is going to happen a lot when you split three colors one way and two the other.

The Blue/Red/Black deck basically has the finishers and removal while the Green/White deck has a few more random creatures if the ground should need holding up. It also has Dust Elemental/Whitemane Lion with Deadwood Treefolk for a nasty late game. Dust Elemental is also a strong finisher in its own right.

One of the important things to bear in mind is that there is only one game and no chance to sideboard. That means you need some way to deal with enchantments, artifacts, and land in the main, so you have an out to some random broken card like Pyrohemia. That’s basically what the Molder is there for. I also quite like Gaea’s Liege in this format. Left unattended he can quite happily screw a player out of one of their colors, and it becomes much easier to win when you’re playing two against one. This is also part of the reason why Volcanic Awakening is such a bomb.

This was something I learnt in the first round, when our editor mulliganed twice and got color-screwed. With ten life less, you really can’t fight one against two. Unfortunately, the same thing happened to us in the final of Champs as I mulliganed, never saw a third land and only played three spells the entire game. [Karma. – Editor Craig, bitter from Round 1.]

Having a starting total of thirty life does bring fliers back into the game, as I noticed more games where we basically crawled over the finish line just before superior ground forces were about to overwhelm us. This happened in round 2 of Champs, when we just took it before an army of slivers reached critical mass.

From then we won the next two, and didn’t actually lose our first real Sealed Deck match in three tournaments until the very last round, where a couple of kids with some very good pools and god draws battered us. You never want to see Kavu Predator after making a first turn Essence Warden, and then having them cast Empty the Warrens for ten after we pulled off tricks to try and deal with the Kavu was very bad times.

You want to be spotting the synergies between your cards and between both decks (and remembering things like Tromp the Domains is only going to affect your creatures, and not your partner’s guys), and you want to be greedy. Really, really greedy.

So that’s the part that’s worked… now to the part that hasn’t worked, namely the drafts.

The first draft was with a starting life of 40. My strategy was to take the best two cards, and ignore Black unless there was a good reason, because the swampwalkers will just kill you.

This one went wrong, as we were too lopsided on the colors. I gave Keith a really strong Green/Red deck that had both Spectral Force and Stonebrow (and maybe Tromp), but my deck was a distinctly average Blue/White concoction. We got to the final, and even though I think we managed to successfully dance around a Damnation, they just had more power in reserve. I seem to remember Reality Acid being horribly bad, mainly because they nailed my Tolarian Sentinel before it came online.

The second draft was at the GPT in Coventry where we “won.” I wanted to avoid Black, and maybe try and force something like slivers or storm. In the end I went for Slivers, and cleverly managed to confuse Keith until he realised I was drafting them across both decks, and that we’d actually be playing Green/White and Blue/Red and not Green/Red and Blue/White like it looked. This allowed us to splash for Sol’Kanar and Kaervek. Unfortunately, I managed to get the colors lopsided again and had to elbow out a lot of the Slivers to make room for independent bombs like Torchling and Jodah’s Avenger. This left the Blue/Red deck too top-heavy and the Green/White deck distinctly average. While we got off to a fast Sliver start, they took down the key Bonesplitter Sliver and eventually Swampwalked us to death through the solitary swamp Keith had fetched with Terramorphic Expanse to cast Sol’Kanar.

But I thought you won that one, you might ask.

It turned out Bill Johnson and Chris Harrold weren’t going to GP: Amsterdam anyway, and so they sportingly scooped with lethal damage on the stack. Then it turned out that one of the team members in the final didn’t have a passport and couldn’t make it either, and so they scooped to us too. I did say that UK players don’t bother going to most of the European GPs…

The third draft was a practise draft at Nick Sephton’s house in Bradford. This one went horribly wrong. My plan is to normally ignore Black without good reason… but it turns out that Sengir Nosferatu is a damn good reason. Unfortunately, we were so successful in cutting off Black, it just kept coming. We had a mono-Black deck complete about halfway through the fourth booster, but then we kept getting passed things we couldn’t turn down (like two Enslave) in Planar Chaos.

As a result we had two Black decks, but not enough depth from the other colors. Nick and Fizz were able to beat us by Nick causing most of our removal to malfunction through clever tricks from his Blue/White deck. The time I realised that there needed to be some form of land, enchantment, and artifact destruction in at least one of the decks was when Urza’s Factory hit the board. All the removal in world wasn’t going to stop that from eventually overpowering us, although as it happened my draw was so bad they never needed it.

Draft 4 was the Top 4 of Champs, and I thought I’d settled on a plan. This time we both kept track of the colors to make sure we were building the two decks evenly. Early on I took a Bonesplitter Sliver over a Rift Bolt, but the Slivers never really materialized after that. We did get a Volcanic Awakening though, and I think we had two fairly decent decks. One was Green/Red with Tromp and two Sulfurous Blasts, while the other was a nineteen-creature Blue/White deck similar to my favorite TTT strategy. We’d almost completed the deck sheets when I remembered Keith was going to splash White for Tromp and the second kicker on Thornscape Battlemage. With the Battlemage and other targets like Woodreaders, there was a hasty switch to give him a Whitemane Lion.

I was curious to see how effective Volcanic Awakening was, and this was probably why I told Keith to keep a sketchy five-land hand where Krosan Grip was the only other spell. Yeah, I know that’s a very dubious hand, and I was sweating a little when Keith managed to draw Whitemane Lion and an equally useless Tromp the Domains, but I thought my deck was creature-heavy enough to support his slow draw. As it happened, he found Sulfurous Blast to pull us back in the game, and then we took one of our opponents out of the game with Volcanic Awakening.

Yes, Volcanic Awakening is very effective.

The final was very irritating, and I went into grump mode as the two kids who beat us in the swiss managed to pull off perfect responses (again!) to everything we tried to do (Sulfurous Blast? How about we Honorable Passage that. Jedit? Oh look, here’s a Cradle to Grave), while I was stuck with two land in play. Manascrew annoys me, but the games where your opponent always has the perfect answer in hand from a deck you think is weaker annoy me even more. But that’s Magic, and if the Champs medals encourage them to go on to play the game more then that’s also good for Magic in the area. (Although I’m still bitter).

So yeah, Draft. Haven’t a clue. Sorry.

But there’s Amsterdam this weekend, and I’m sure that will teach me some more things about the format before the PTQ season for San Diego kicks off. (I actually get to play these – yippee!)

CRAAAAAAAASSSSSHHHHH!

Oh sh—.

It’s loose!

Run! Damnit man, run for your life!

Didn’t you hear? The Spraggle is loose!

…

Prof.