None were more excited than I when it was revealed that Two Headed Giant was becoming a sanctioned Magic format. Long have I been a dabbler into “fun” Magic formats while trying to remain as competitive as possible in tournament magic. Thoughts of Tooth and Nail decks with all basic lands while the teammate played Heartbeat of Spring and Vernal Bloom danced in my head.
Fast forward to Gen Con ’05 where I got my first chance to play the format. Obviously needing a second head, I recruited some random 16-year-old kid to team with me. Since you can see all the cards in your teammate’s hand, it doesn’t matter how bad they are at Magic, you can just tell them what to do. Looking at a preliminary Two-Headed Giant tournament the night before the 5K one we quickly, and correctly were able to ascertain the metagame. I have it ranked as follows.
1. Tooth and Nail/ Mono-Blue Control
2. Erayo-Rule of Law/Mono-Blue Control
3. Piles of Randomness
That’s it, a fairly healthy format. It seems that no matter what 2HG evolves into, the best strategy will be a combo deck paired with a control deck. Since combo’s greatest weakness is being vulnerable to disruption, and control’s is finding a way to kill the opponent fast, they make a great team. Sorry kiddos, if you like attacking 2HG doesn’t seem to be the format for you.
Naturally at the tournament small child and I played MUC and Tooth and Nail respectively, and of course we made sure to have our share of tech for the meta. My mono-Blue deck featured 4 Shifting Borders (Big Shifts!) in order to break up opposing Urza Tron as well as helping small child assemble his. The four Twincasts were obvious additions most people had, except the only creatures I was looking for were two Yoseis to effectively give us a Time Stretch. In my deck I made the mistake of playing a Meloku and an Uyo. Don’t play other creatures except only two to tooth for. If your team is resolving a Tooth, you aren’t losing the game no matter what so don’t bother. Creatures are just wasted space. The whole Triskelion/Mephidross Vampire/Uyo/Kiki-Jiki thing is cute in Type Two, but it doesn’t really belong in this format.
The Tooth deck only ran three of each Urza land to allow more Green sources, ran two Kodama’s Reaches, and only two Reap and Sows. This was mainly because the deck effectively had 4 free Shifting Borders, and with Rewind in the Blue deck, a Mox or Sensei’s Divining Top could effectively become an improved Dark Ritual. (The token spell is played, Green player floats some mana, Rewind is played, when it resolves you choose to untap your teammates land in order to give them a quick boost in mana.) Also the Tooth deck ran two Boseijus in order to still be able to smash through a field with a decent amount of Erayo/Rule of Law decks. You can still win the match even after they lock you down.
Also many people tried to play this format like it was regular Type Two, and didn’t play the obvious best card in the entire format: Mindslaver. We auto-included 4 and even ran 2 Squelch in the Blue deck to stop this monster from ever getting online for our opponents. Since you gain control of both player’s turns with it, there should never be a reason for losing a game when you successfully activate one. Besides the little bit of 2HG tech, our decklists were each pretty bland, to the best of my ability this is what they looked like.
MUC:
4
“>Rewind
4
“>Mana Leak
4
“>Hinder
4
“>Thirst for Knowledge
4
“>Wayfarer’s Bauble
4
“>Twincast
4
“>Shifting Borders
2
“>Squelch
2
“>Yosei, the Morning Star
2
“>Time Stop
1
“>Meloku The Clouded Mirror
1 Uyo, Silent Prophet
4
“>Chrome Mox
18 Island
1
“>Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
1 Oboro, Palace in the Clouds
Tooth:
4
“>Tooth and Nail
4
“>Sylvan Scrying
4
“>Vine Trellis
4
“>Sensei’s Divining Top
4
“>Mindslaver
4
“>Sakura Tribe-Elder
2
“>Eternal Witness
1
“>Duplicant
1
“>Sundering Titan
1
“>Kiki-Jiki Mirror Breaker
1
“>Bringer of the White Dawn
2
“>Reap and Sow
2
“>Viridian Shaman
2 Kodama’s Reach
2
“>Boseiju, Who Shelters All
3
“>Urza’s Tower
3
“>Urza’s Power Plant
3
“>Urza’s Mine
13 Forest
About midway through game 1 we realized we had misbuilt our decks. While we were 100% happy with the Tooth deck all tournament, the Mono-Blue control deck left a lot to be desired. Luckily for us most of the other decks were just Standard lists, not at all tuned for the format so it didn’t matter. The big card that should have been in our deck was the Disrupting Shoal. Since the entire point of the Blue deck is to just hold off opposing Tooth and Nails while protecting your own, having more counters is needed. Plus, unlike in Type Two where there are a wide variety of costs for spells there isn’t such diversity in 2HG. Since almost every round you will be playing against the mirror, you will almost always have a card of the correct cost to remove. Having a free counter helps a ton in the counter wars, as well as being able to stop an early Erayo. Meloku, Uyo, and the two Squelch should be removed for 4 Disrupting Shoal. Also take out 2 Time Stop and 2 Wayfarer’s Baubles for 4 Erayo, Soratami Ascendant in order to make the Rule of Erayo matchups almost byes.
We went 4-1-1 in the swiss, losing when we scooped to a turn 2 Erayo flip plus turn 3 Rule of Law. In reality we shouldn’t have, but we didn’t have a Boseiju out yet and didn’t really feel like playing out the game since we were sure they’d be able to kill us before we could assemble Tooth through Boseiju. We heard from a few other teams that their win condition involved something like Enduring Ideal or some nonsense, so it’s quite possible that we could have won the match regardless. We learned a bit from this matchup about what hands to keep in the format and how to play. Naturally against this deck you just try and get a Mana Leak for Erayo and they basically don’t have much of a deck. With Boseijus and Disrupting Shoal/Mana Leak, this is a really hard match to lose.
In the Top 4 we lost to the eventual winners in a mirror. We were basically outdrawn, which can happen in the mirror. The way we had our lists set up if we get outdrawn by the Blue side it doesn’t matter very much, since the raw power of the Tooth deck can get you through, and if you get outdrawn on the Tooth side, the Blue should be able to handle it. However both their draws were better than both of ours. Fighting through a total of nine Counters in a short game coupled with two Reap and Sows, two Plow Unders (which is a fairly sub-par card in 2HG, since the games go a lot faster it is too expensive for the small effect it has. Creeping Mold is actually better.) and a few Eternal Witnesses makes it almost impossible. They had enough counters to win the counter war on their own turn and on ours. However, it felt like if I ever had drawn a Shifting Borders the game would have been ours since it would have either forced them to waste an extra counter and mana on it during their end step, or given my teammate enough mana to cast the spells he needed to.
The other Tooth/MUC mirrors all came down to us baiting their counters with random spells or just Shifting Borders them right out of the game. Shifting Borders was amazing all day, and definitely warrants a 4-of inclusion in the deck.
What really surprised us was that nobody else seemed to be running 4 Mindslavers or even any at all. It is clearly the best card in the format and pretty easy to resolve. Since most teams didn’t have any artifact destruction, you didn’t even need to have mana open to activate it when you cast. it. We won almost all our matches by simply activating Mindslaver once to knock them out of the game, and then forced the concession by Toothing out a White Bringer.
Of course my only real complaint of the format is that it doesn’t really need to players per team to play. Since you get to share information and ask for help from each other, the better player tends to make all the difficult decisions rendering the little head useless. I was stuck playing a boring MUC deck that only ever cast 2-3 relevant spells per match, all of which just countered counters targeting the small child’s spells, whom I was taking orders from.
If you play 2HG Type Two, I suggest running lists similar to the ones we used with suggested changes if the format is expected to be similar. However the format seems like it could be wide open right now, especially with 9th Edition now becoming legal. I have been itching to combo Form of the Dragon with Zur’s Weirding… but perhaps I should save that for another day.
StrWrsKid
Clearly repressing the urge to make any dumb jokes about two Heads being better than one or other such nonsense.