Two-Headed Giant... of the Future!

So my girlfriend, Elizabeth, now has a 4-0-1 record in Two-Headed Giant Limited events. She and I are as yet unbeaten as a team. Not bad.

We woke up semi early on Saturday, knowing that we wouldn’t have to be at the tournament site too early, had a leisurely breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, and packed the things we needed to take—books for downtime, lots of dice, extra cards, and apples as a snack.

I think we ended up getting to the Ohio Agricultural Hall around 10:30 a.m. or so and were the first ones on the registration sheet for Two-Headed Giant Flight 3. With her love for Seinfeld and mine for, umm… names that don’t make a lot of sense, we registered as the Van Buren Boys. Oddly, we agreed on the name without too much deliberation.

Being the first ones on the sheet, we had some time to kill, so we sat down at one of the tables in the back and reviewed the processes of the game like casting spells, attacking and blocking, and timing. She hadn’t played for a while and needed a bit of a brush-up. After playing a few turns, we breaked for the restrooms, then walked around a while and talked to Adam Budweg, who I saw building a RG draft deck.

At long last they called Flight 3 into the cafeteria for deck construction and competition. As Adam put it, “Aww, they put you in with the smelly food.” Yeah, so with flashbacks of fifth grade, we sat down at a cola-stained folding table and waited for our cards.

I took the opportunity to look over our prospective opponents, the other three teams in the flight. Two father-son pairings where the dads were in their forties and the sons were easily younger than eight, and a younger (seventh grade, maybe?) guy and girl. Okay, I thought, no one looks like too big of a challenge from the outside.

We got our packs and instructions on how to fill out the registration sheets (which seemed much more intuitive to me than they have in the past), and we started opening and organizing our cards.

Surprisingly, they weren’t too bad. We didn’t have anything terribly splashy, but our red and black removal was solid, blue had some nice counters, bounce, and card drawing, and there were a few bombs we could aim for, one of which was Empty the Warrens. Plus, our green cards contained three Kavu Primarchs.

In the end, despite having opened an Aven Mindcensor (about which I was thrilled), I decided we should forego white and focus on having an aggressive black and green deck supported by blue and red removal and control.

Here’s what we came up with:
My deck, Blue-Red Counterburn

1x Aven Augur
1x Cancel
1x Eternity Snare
1x Fathom Seer
1x Fool’s Demise
2x Foresee
1x Logic Knot
1x Maelstrom Djinn
1x Sarcomite Myr
1x Spin into Myth
1x Vedalken Aethermage
1x Venser, Shaper Savant
2x Venser’s Diffusion
1x Arc Blade
1x Bogardan Lancer
1x Empty the Warrens
1x Ghostfire
1x Grinning Ignus
1x Riddle of Lightning
1x Subterranean Shambler
1x Foriysian Totem
1x Lotus Bloom
1x Fungal Reaches
10x Island
6x Mountain

Elizabeth’s deck, Black-Green Kavu Primarch

1x Chameleon Blur
1x Edge of Autumn
3x Kavu Primarch
1x Krosan Grip
1x Llanowar Augur
1x Search for Tomorrow
1x Sprout Swarm
1x Thornweald Archer
1x Corpulent Corpse
1x Cyclopean Giant
1x Deepcavern Imp
1x Feebleness
1x Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
1x Ichor Slick
2x Putrid Cyclops
1x Skulking Knight
1x Smallpox
1x Strangling Soot
1x Sudden Death
1x Undead Warchief
1x Phyrexian Totem
1x Dryad Arbor
5x Forest
11x Swamp

For those of you counting (because I’m sure all of you did), yes, each of those decklists is 41 cards long. When we were deciding on cutting the 41st card from Elizabeth’s deck, she really wanted to keep the Llanowar Augur as a one-drop despite my suggesting that it really wasn’t much stronger than a Wall of Wood. Of course she was adamant, and I am weak to the wiles of my woman, so we kept it.

Then I went ahead and added another card to my pile too—why be different?

Before long, we were shuffled up and ready to get on with:

Round 1 – The New Avengers

The New Avengers were one of the father-son pairings. At least we assumed they were father and son, though Elizabeth pointed out that the boy called the guy by his first name so they could have been step-father and son, uncle and nephew, kidnapper and victim, really a whole range of combinations.

Anyway, they were friendly and having fun, and I later found out that this was the boy’s first tournament.

Unfortunately, winning wasn’t in the cards for them. First, both ended up mulliganing their first hands, and the man ended up going down to six, a rarity in 2HG, as far as I’ve seen. Then the boy (playing BW with lots of evasion) got mana flooded and the man (playing some combination of RG) didn’t see a second Mountain until well into the game.

Meanwhile, though Elizabeth and I kept hands that were slow to develop (our first plays were on turn three), we had a good mix of spells and mana after that to keep a consistent offense. Actually, our big star was Phyrexian Totem, which not only hit for five damage repeatedly but also got around their Grave Peril:

Grave Peril
1B
Enchantment
When a non-black creature comes into play, sacrifice Grave Peril. If you do, destroy that creature.

This Standstill wannabe kept their creatures off the board and let Elizabeth’s black attackers through.

The best creatures they managed to table were a pro-black aven guy that I bounced and, unfortunately for them, a spirit-linked shadow guy that gained them two life per turn but couldn’t block any of our threats.

After a while of making a three-point net life gain per turn, they slowed us down with a blocker capable of making Phyrexian Totem’s drawback a factor and seemingly turned the game around. Back-to-back kicked Kavu Primarchs (one of which was killed by something) from Elizabeth and an Aven Augur from me got us back on the right track, though.

Kavu Primarch
3G
Convoke
Kicker – 4
If the kicker cost was paid, Kavu Primarch comes into play with four +1/+1 counters on it.
3/3

The game went to time and was interrupted by a desperate restroom-break request by Elizabeth (she’d had a lot of coffee with a DaSani chaser), but we were never in danger and won at 11 life.

Round 2 – Team Two

Team Two, the middle-school aged couple, sat across from us while we were organizing, so I knew they had some pretty good cards. Unfortunately, I don’t recall any of them. It might also help to know that they won their first game in six turns on the backs of some very offensive slivers, namely Virulent and Shadow.

What a beating.

They were playing all five colors between them—him with RGu and her with BW—and had some trouble making all of their important plays. He in particular was stuck with some double-red burn spells that would have been very helpful against our Phyrexian Totem. As such, we were attacking for five past their Infiltrator il-Kor, which was getting us for three until I shot it down with Arc Blade.

He slivercycled for Virulent Sliver but it wouldn’t have been able to attack without dying, and it eventually died to an Ichor Slick of ours. And she morphed an Unblinking Bleb that killed off my Grinning Ignus, letting her scry.

Grinning Ignus
2R
R, Return Grinning Ignus to its owner’s hand: Add 2R to your mana pool. Play this ability only any time you could play a sorcery.
2/2

The death of the Ignus was unfortunate, actually, because it would have allowed us to build cheap storm for Empty the Warrens, which I drew the turn after. As it was, Elizabeth put a threat on the board and removed one of theirs while I Emptied the Warrens for six tokens.

That card is nigh unfair in Two-Headed play.

These six tokens were really all we needed to win.

We attacked next turn with the team, and when they tried to burn our Phyrexian Totem (which actually would have been too late to be effective), I sent the spell back to their hand with Venser, Shaper Savant, and we knew from then on that animating the Totem could be a bad idea. Our massive forces combined to take them out.

And that was it. Elizabeth and I are finalists in a prerelease 2HG tournament yet again as we add a first-place finish to our second-place at the Coldsnap prerelease last July.

For about two hours sitting around and two hours playing Magic, Elizabeth and I won eight packs.

When we opened those to do our own limited games, she opened Pact!

Of the Titan.

Oh well, lucky for her it’s probably the most playable in limited.

She and I both built UR decks, though mine also splashed black to support my Henchfiend of Ukor, which pummeled her both games.

Going through the rest of her cards, I saw that she had some really efficient green creatures and a Baru, Fist of Krosa, indicating that she probably should have played green, probably with her red removal to back it up. As it was, my blue counters were able to repel her efforts and I won easily in two games.

For the record, that makes us 1-1 in contests of this nature. Elizabeth beat me in three games after Coldsnap.

As for Future Sight, it was a lot of fun to play. We didn’t get a lot of the cards I wanted out of it, just one Aven Mindcensor and one Delay, but we certainly got enough swag to make it worthwhile. Plus, I got enough good stuff (like Lotus Bloom and Venser) to be able to trade for the things I need.

Plus, both of us had fun and got to spend quality time together doing things I enjoy. Rather than, say, shopping.