Spring Colors are Out

What an odd weekend.

As anyone reading my blog should know, I was planning on 48 hours of Magic with the Two-Headed Giant States tournament on Saturday and Meandeck Legacy on Sunday. Long story short, the 2HG was as bad as the Legacy was good.

For convenience with respect to chronology, I’ll tell you all about the States tournament first.

I wasn’t really planning on playing 2HG until I was talking online to my friend Eric Butler who plays at the Gamers Lounge in Sandusky. We both implied that we kind of wanted to go, so he asks, “Are you aggressive enough to win this thing?” and I replied, “Uh, sure.” And that was it. Meetings were arranged and directions were given.

Plus, bonus for having a new Two-Headed Giant partner. I’m trying to have a new partner for every tournament, just because.

We were fully planning on being crowned Two-Headed Giant Champions of Ohio.

I would totally put that on my résumé.

Eric and his girlfriend Anna got to my apartment around 9 a.m., so we had plenty of time to kill before the tournament. We stopped at Tim Horton’s to get some Fruit Explosion muffins and then at an ATM, so Eric could get some cash for entry fees.

(An aside about Fruit Explosion muffins: Those things look kind of gross. The filling reminded me of the pickled pigs’ feet you see in jars but never actually see people consume. Eric insisted they’re delicious. Whatever.)

The Agriculture Hall of Fame parking lot was fairly empty when we got there, so we got to park much closer than I have in previous visits. We found the registration forms and filled them in, leaving space only for the team name. The all important team name.

Why do my teammates and I never consider this team name thing beforehand?

It was decided that since he was wearing black and I was wearing black, we’d be team Spring Colors.

It’s ironic.

Or something.

Shut up, we had a team name.

Anyway still lots of time to kill because this thing would never start on time. I found the restroom under the wall of agricultural honorees.

(An aside about the restrooms at the Ohio Agriculture Hall of Fame: These things are awesome. The sinks are sized for children, so I always feel like a complete renob washing my hands in them. Plus, there are showers. Sometime I want to take a towel and a change of clothes to a tournament and take a shower between rounds.)

Soon seating was posted and the organizers announced they were passing out “the product” and that there were 68 teams (not too shabby) and that we were to register “the product” on the sheets supplied. It was great, we opened some nice bombs like Red Akroma, Jedit, Empty the Warrens, Gaea’s Anthem, et cetera. Lots of playable stuff. Good thing we’d be turning this back in and getting new pack. Wouldn’t want anyone to cheat on this, right? Bring “product” from home, or Colombia?

Of course, when they redistributed the packs, we got absolute crap. Our rares were a foil Ancestral Visions (nice, but not quite game winning in limited); Stronghold Overseer (a big guy with evasion); Torchling (good, but he’s no Morphling); Mirari (good, not great unless you really push the instants and sorceries); Crovax Ascendant Hero (meh, probably okay if we play white); Imps Mischief (oh crap); and some other stuff that I can’t remember now because it totally wasn’t notable.

Seriously, Imps Mischief?

Where were the slivers?

Where was the removal?!

And where was my Bogardan Hellkite?! I’m supposed to open one of those at every event with Time Spiral. It happened twice before, and I wanted to keep up the tradition.

Red and blue were our two stronger colors and had a good storm suite in Empty the Warrens and Grapeshot and some enablers to that like the Ancestral Visions. So we threw those together as our “control” deck and started building green-white as a more “aggressive” backup.

I have the quotes in there because neither deck was especially good at anything special, like creating synergy or winning games.

Before registering our decks, we decide that either green or white was bad in comparison to Stronghold Overseer and that we’d rather play black just for that than a mealy-mouthed green-white.

We figured that white was easier to splash and gave us another madness outlet and possible game winner in Icatian Crier, plus some other goodies. Here’s what we registered

Deck 1 – UR Badstuff – Eric Butler

8x Island
9x Mountain
1x Mirari
1x Dead & Gone
1x Rough & Tumble
1x Basalt Gargoyle
1x Torchling
1x Flamecore Elemental
1x Grapeshot
1x Empty the Warrens
1x Undying Rage
1x Prodigal Pyromancer
1x Keldon Marauders
1x Aether Membrane
2x Plasma Elemental
2x Wistful thinking
1x Ophidian Eye
1x Spiketail Drakeling
1x Dreamstalker
1x Ancestral Vision
1x Piracy charm
1x Viscerid Deepwalker
1x Reality Acid

Deck 2 – BW Skunky Ale – Nat Moes

6x Plains
11x Swamps
1x Urza’s Factory
1x Assembly Worker
1x Momentary Blink
1x Children of Korlis
1x Icatian Crier
1x Griffin Guide
1x Fortify
1x Aven Riftwatcher
1x Castle Raptors
2x Dash Hopes
1x Corpulent Corpse
1x Melancholy
1x Imp’s Mischief
1x Dunerider Outlaw
1x Muck Drubb
1x Viscid Lemures
1x Faceless Devourer
1x Mindstab
1x Stronghold Overseer
1x Traitor’s Clutch
1x Gorgon Recluse
1x Trespasser il-Vec
1x Rathi Trapper

That’s right, Team Spring Colors played no green, and we got called out on that one more than once.

(An aside on registration sheets: Since registration sheets have you mark down the primary player’s last name’s first three initials, our sheet said “BUT.” I am five years old.)

Anyway, we got paired up, shuffled up, cut up and ready for:

Round 1

They were two high-schoolers from Westerville who were passing out sheets about a Legacy tournament and gaming club up there. I should have taken one (if anyone has that information, let me know). Their dominant head was kind of, well, domineering over the secondary player, but the secondary player didn’t really know what he was doing. This team seemed destined for great things.

Anyway, things started out slowly, but we wrecked their hands on turn three with my first-turn suspended Mindstab and Eric’s Wistful Thinking. Plus, their Durkwood Baloth got all emo and Melancholy. After that, this game was in the bag. Good thing too because their first turn play was to suspend Heroes Remembered:

Heroes Remembered
6WWW
Sorcery
You gain 20 life.
Suspend – 10

That’s like a 1-up mushroom; you get an extra guy. In fact it’s like an extra guy and a third since Two-Headed Giant games are 30 life now.

We got them down to 16 with two or three turns left on the Heroes Remembered (I had double Dash Hopes for that anyway), and they misread Basalt Gargoyle as pumping power, not toughness and conceded to perceived death on the board.

An auspicious start? Perhaps. Spring Colors decimated some guys who were not very good at Magic, so this match wasn’t all that telling.

Round 2 – Feature Match?!

Yeah, so we got paired against last year’s 2HG State Champs and were seated at a lone table, separated from the rest of the herd. How odd. Other than that, there was nothing special about this match, no bounty, no spectators. Whatever.

They seemed like pretty capable players to me, but Eric said afterward they must have worked mostly on the strength of their cardpool. I don’t know how they did this year, but they certainly had better cards than we did. They didn’t fall for my Dash Hopes on their Phyrexian Totem, and their green-red player curves nicely from Gaea’s Anthem into Empty the Warrens for six 2/2 goblins. That was good enough to beat us, especially after they Ovinzied our Torchling and ran it into a goblin token.

Even an Aven Riftwalker and Momentary Blink couldn’t save us.

We talked to them a little afterward. They were nice guys; if they won again, congratulations to them.

I don’t remember now what gave it away, maybe it was the Gaea’s Anthem and the Empty the Warrens, maybe they mentioned Red Akroma and Jedit, but I realized after we played that they were using the cards we registered. It was confirmed when they showed us the foil Wall of Roots. How lucky for them.

Basically, we had to win out and have amazing tiebreakers from this point on because this 68-team tournament was cutting to the Top 4 teams for a finals of drafting. Why only Top 4? No idea, but it seems like pretty slim odds for a field as large as that.

Round 3

This was a heartbreaking round. We were so strong in the beginning and had everything going our way. We had a strong aggro crowd going and had curved nicely into me playing Stronghold Overseer on turn six or seven, straight up.

Next turn, they Enslaved him:

Enslave
Enchantment – Aura
4BB
Enchant creature
You control enchanted creature.
At the beginning of your upkeep, enchanted creature deals 1 damage to its owner.

They got my 5/5 shadow guy, and he was slapping us in the face once a turn too. Needless to say, Spring Colors faded pretty quickly after that point. My notes aren’t very detailed for this game (they say, “We suck,” if you wanted to know), but I think you can see how a 5/5 unblockable dude can end you pretty quickly.

So that was it, we had some crappy cards that lent themselves well to a crappy finish. With a 1-2 record, we dropped and headed to Chipotle for some conciliatory burritos.

(An aside on burritos: I think the carnitas burrito is underrated—I’m the only person I know who’s ever ordered one.)

They were good.

Still, I like Two-Headed Giant. It’s a lot of fun to play just because having four people involved in the game, I think, leads to it being a little more casual. Plus, you get to meet two new people instead of just one at a time.

Dropping from 40 life to 30 does make the games go a lot faster. We got through three rounds in the time it would normally have taken us to do two and a half or so, and I think that’s a big positive. Since turns and especially combat math take so much longer in 2HG, having to do it with 10 fewer points of life to worry about or get through is a big speed boost. Count me in favor of that one.

Even though this particular 2HG tournament was a complete disappointment, I’ll be looking forward to the next one, which is what? The Future Sight release in April? Sounds good to me.

I’ll be taking applications for partners.