Two Headed Giant - Two Headaches?

Hello folks!

Like I promised a few days ago, I'd write a piece about my first experience in a tournament. It wasn't just any tournament, it was a two-headed giant, and a sealed deck event.

For those who don't know those two things, I'll give a brief explanation:

Two Headed Giant: It's a multiplayer variant of Magic where you play two vs. two. Each player, or head, has his own deck but the two teams share lifepoints, in this case 30. Next to the fact they share lifepoints, they can look at each other's hand and can strategize on how they will play. One could play offensive while the other plays the defense line, keeping the lifepoints high. Or a whole different strategy, but that's the fun of it!

Sealed Deck: It's a form of play where you receive a number of boosterpacks, you know, those packs that have 15 cards in them? You all open the packs at the same time and you build a deck from the cards you get. The only cards you can bring to the game from home as basic lands. The fun thing is that everybody has a limited number of cards, it doesn't matter if you've spent a 100 euro's on the game or a 1000, you only got the cards you've been dealt. The advantage is that you also only have to build decks that have at least 40 cards.

If you combine these two formats you get a fun game. The trick behind sealed deck when playing Two Headed Giant is that you and your teammate share the boosters. In our case every team got 8 packs, so we had 120 cards to choose from. It makes it easier and more difficult at the same time.

We played four rounds of Magic, each round being alloted an hour of game time. The basic rules of Magic still applied.

I played together with a buddy called Sijvert. Both of us haven't got that much experience so we made a good team! We quickly built two decks, his based around some milling, with two Mind Sculpts which makes you mill 7 cards from your deck, so that's pretty effective against these smaller decks. He also had cards like Archeomancer and Spelltwine in there so he could get Mind Sculptors back from the graveyard.

My deck was based around direct damage/attack, I suppose. I really didn't know. I put some cards together that made for a coherent set, a few direct damage cards that would burn and a few cards that I could pump up. It was just red and green.

We played our first round against friends of ours. Magic players that are a step up, at least for me. But we've played against each other and together that we had fun. We had some M&M's, laughed and tried kicking each other's butts. We actually got pretty close too, they just had one lucky draw at the end of the game. We had three lifepoints left and they drew a burn card that did exactly that, three damage. Otherwise Sijvert would've played Mind Sculpts agains, and with their 4 cards left, we would have won.

Our second round didn't go much better. The team we played was pretty serious and worked well together. It wasn't really a match you'd tell your mates about. They played strong, we tried our best but lost.

After the second round I decided it was time to change the deck a bit. Because you're allowed to edit your deck between matches, legal reason says that your whole cardpool is your sideboard and you're allowed to sideboard between matches. I threw in some black, and low and behold it worked.

Round three came quick, a match where we played against two boys who were quite a lot younger than us, around 12 or 13 years old. They played well, but we got a bit better in our rythem. We figured out that one of them had a thinner deck! Less cards means easier milling! So while I tried staving off as many attacks as I could and do some damage of my own, Sijvert milled our opponnet as quick as he could. And be amazed, we won! We actually won this round. We wouldn't finish last.

Then came the last round of the day. We played against a couple guys our age who, like us, play for fun. It was a fun match where there were a lot of jokes, like my very lame 'You know what, Fog you!' joke, which I make too often! But we had fun, and that's the most important thing. We actually won that match, again thanks to the milling by Sijvert.

It turned out we were ninth, which I don't think was a bad result. We both participated for the first time and never did anything remotely like Sealed Deck, we played Two Headed Giant before, but with our constructed decks, that weren't really atuned to each other, but nothing like Sealed Deck. Oh, and we actually won something! We won four boosterpacks too. We were allowed to keep the cards from the decks we built and the boosters too!

So, yeah, it was a good sunday and I'm very proud we won something!

I wish you all the very best!

Bye,
Twan.