Jeff Zandi is a five time pro tour veteran who has been playing
Magic since 1994. Jeff is a level two DCI judge and has
been judging everything from small local tournaments
to pro tour events. Jeff is from Coppell, Texas, a suburb
of Dallas, where his upstairs game room has been the
"Guildhall", the home of the Texas Guildmages,
since the team formed in 1996. One of the original
founders of the team, Jeff Zandi is the team's
administrator, and is proud to continue the team's
tradition of having players in every pro tour from the
first event in 1996 to the present.
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The
Southwestern
Paladin
Wrong-Headed Giant
The Fun Format That Shouldn’t Be Sanctioned
by Jeff
Zandi
March 24, 2006
The
State Championships of Two-Headed Giant took
America by storm last weekend. Literally.
Like the largest of dangerous storms, we
were warned ahead of time that these new
state championship tournaments were coming.
As Saturday’s tournaments arrived, many
players were excited about the new limited
format, while others ran away as quickly as
their legs could take them. Those who
endured the storm were trapped inside
buildings for many, many hours as the
laborious format plodded along slowly. The
tournament took twelve hours to run even
though it served only around fifty players.
At the end of the day in Wichita, Kansas, a
lot of us were left feeling that Two-Headed
Giant might be a fun format that shouldn’t
be sanctioned for actual tournament play.
I don’t know if Two-Headed Giant is fun to
play. To be fair, I think I need to say that
up front. I was the head judge at the Kansas
edition of this new annual state
championship format. As a judge, I hated it.
This was not the first time that I had run a
Two-Headed Giant tournament. Last year, at
the Wizard’s World convention in Arlington,
Texas, I had the opportunity to run a
Two-Headed Giant tournament, along with a
Duel Masters tournament. I really hate to
say bad things about Two-Headed Giant,
because, again, I have not tried playing the
format. I have nothing to say about how fun
this format is to play. However, I can tell
you how the fifty people playing in my
tournament felt about the format after
struggling with its slow play and with its
extremely problematic rules.
PECULIAR RULES HARD TO UNDERSTAND
There were a lot of questions about the
rules of Two-Headed Giant throughout the
day, understandably. (2HG for the rest of
this article) Unfortunately, a lot of the
rules for 2HG are not intuitive, and some
rules have simply been tied into a knot in
order to accommodate 2HG tournament play.
For example, the two players on a 2HG team
are considered, for most things, to be a
kind of single entity. Each team has ONE
upkeep step, ONE draw step where each player
on that team each draws a card and ONE
attack step where each player on the team
announces which of the creatures he controls
will attack.
Players share a life total, which begins at
40 points. Each player acts almost
completely independently, however, when it
comes to permanents. Each player on a team
plays land that only he can use for his own
spells and effects. Each player plays his
own creatures that only he can sacrifice to
his own spells and effects. You can play a
creature enchantment (known as ‘auras’ these
days) on one of your teammate’s creatures,
but you are still the controller of that
enchantment. Effects like Glorious Anthem,
which gives all creatures you control +1/+1,
would affect only your creatures and not
your teammates. Imagine all the questions
and confusion at Saturday’s 2HG state
championships regarding the Magemark
creature enchantments from Guildpact. You
and your teammate can each have Magemark
enchantments on creatures you control, these
enchantments DO NOT see the enchanted
creatures that your teammate controls.
ONE GAME MATCHES
Matches consist of only one game in 2HG.
This feature of 2HG has been explained by
WOTC as necessary since 2HG games tend to
take much longer than regular Magic games.
This might be a bit of an understatement.
Not only does it take longer to play a one
game match in 2HG than it is to play a 2-3
game match in regular Magic, but the players
in 2HG tournaments Saturday were given MORE
TIME in order to play their longer games.
The normal round length for tournament
rounds is 50 minutes. 50 minutes for
constructed matches. 50 minutes for booster
draft matches. 50 minutes for sealed deck
matches. Here comes Two-Headed Giants, the
tubby new kid on the sanctioned tournament
block, with a fat 60 minute round length.
The fact that matches are only one game and
the 60 minute round length are both clues
that Wizards of the Coast knew how ponderous
this format was long before they decided
that every state in the Union needed to have
an annual championship for this fat-laden
format.
The sixty minute round length added fuel to
an already slow-burning fire on Saturday.
Just as in other team events, the normal
number of Swiss rounds needed for the
tournament is INCREASED by one in order to
allow the tournament to be cut to a top four
(four teams) instead of the top eight used
in events featuring individual play. In
Kansas, we had a mere 24 teams consisting of
48 players. The number of Swiss rounds
needed for this relatively small number of
Magic players is six with the additional
round needed to cut to a four team playoff
bracket. The combination of 60 minute rounds
and an additional round of Swiss play
resulted in an additional two hours of
running time for the tournament. At LEAST
two hours.
A less obvious problem with playing a one
game match is the challenge of adjudicating
penalties to players. Penalties that call
for a game loss penalty in normal Magic
essentially become match losses in 2HG. The
bar for penalties was set a little lower for
Saturday’s state championships than they
would be for a Pro Tour qualifier, requiring
Rules Enforcement Level 2 instead of the
more rigorous Level 3. However, the ability
for a game-loss penalty to automatically
lose TWO players on a team their entire
match is, to say the least, very
problematic. The penalties for tournament
Magic have been very carefully put together
and have been worked on and changed in a
solid decade of Pro Tour tournament play.
The point of a game loss penalty is to give
a player a serious penalty that seriously
endangers that player’s ability to win his
current match, but not to be so serious that
(in most cases) the match will be
automatically lost to that player. These
battle-tested penalty guidelines don’t apply
very well to 2HG. A special set of penalty
guidelines was added for 2HG, but the
problem of the game loss being the same as a
match loss in this format is a major rules
hurdle that has not yet been solved.
TOO MUCH JIBBER-JABBER
The biggest problem with having two heads is
that inevitably, the two heads are going to
start talking to each other. In tournament
play, it’s usually pretty important for
players to work out problems in the game by
themselves.
In 2HG, you can throw all that out the
window. Players on a 2HG team are allowed to
talk to each other continuously throughout
the game. This is probably a necessary evil
in a format where you and a teammate are
sharing a single turn, but it certainly does
not help get matches finished in a timely
manner. In the final match in Kansas, when
each team had taken five turns, a full
thirty minutes had expired. I would have to
say that about twice as many matches as
normal required the extra turns after time
in the round expired (and this is with a 60
minute round instead of a 50 minute round).
Normally, players can easily be penalized
for talking inappropriately in a match. In
2HG, it is a lot harder to figure out how
much talk is sufficient.
It is just as difficult to control slow play
or even stalling. The rules of this
innovative format simply do not engender the
kinds of efficient play that makes it
possible for a high percentage of matches to
be finished in a reasonable amount of time.
HE’S SCHIZOPHRENIC, BUT HE’S GOOD PEOPLE
Players in 2HG not only discuss what plays
they should make, but they also argue loudly
at times when one player is about to make a
play his teammate disagrees with. I found
that it was often difficult to know when a
player had actually made a play, and when he
was simply considering a play. As a judge, I
generally let players take back plays
(especially at the 2HG state championship
mandated REL2) that they would have been
allowed to take back on Magic Online. If a
player has tapped mana and was about to
spend that mana on a card or effect, that
player can change his mind basically right
up to the moment he has played the card or
effect. We used to call this “keeping your
hand on the piece” the same way that in
chess you haven’t been considered to have
made a move until your hand leaves the chess
piece. The constant communication between
players on a 2HG team makes it much more
difficult to know when a player has
completed his play, making it much more
difficult to hold a player to his intended
action. In a lot of ways, this format plays
like an individual tournament in which every
player suffers from a multiple personality
disorder.
FIXING THE MONSTER
I believe that Wizards of the Coast created
a monster when they decided that Two-Headed
Giant was not only a sanctioned format, but
that an annual championship in every state
and province was needed to support it. This
year, Wizards has added two state
championships to the schedule, 2HG and
sealed deck. Also added to the tournament
schedule this year is the release of an
extra expansion set, the enigmatic Coldsnap
arriving this Summer. Is this the most
exciting year for Magic lovers ever, or just
the result of a very greedy WOTC? Maybe it’s
a little bit of both.
Can this monster be fixed? I like to think
that I’m more of a problem solver and less
of a whiney complainer. My first instinct
may be to FIX 2HG the same way that I FIXED
my male Shetland Sheepdog, but I’ll take a
deep breath and try to say something more
constructive about the two-headed format.
One thing that could be done that would give
back an hour to most of the players in a 2HG
tournament would be to play the normal
number of Swiss rounds, cutting to a top
eight teams that then play their quarter
final single elimination round with the same
decks they built at the beginning of the
day. Then, the four teams in the semi finals
would build new decks just as the top four
teams built new decks in last weekend’s
state championships.
The next thing I would do is tighten up the
play of each team so that their matches
could be played in the standard 50 minute
round time used in most tournaments. If
necessary, team life totals could start at
30 life instead of 40.
It’s even possible that the real problem
with this format is simply that it doesn’t
work well with too many players. Maybe 2HG
tournaments could be limited to 8 or 16
teams, or maybe as a *gasp* single
elimination tournament.
I can’t say that I’m confident any of these
changes will be made by WOTC to improve 2HG.
Even with changes like the ones I have
described, 2HG would still have some serious
problems, chiefly the continuous chat
between the players.
SOME FORMATS AREN’T SERIOUS FORMATS
In the end, I just have to say that
Two-Headed Giant might just be one of those
really fun to play formats that don’t need
to be used for serious tournaments. I know
that last week’s state championships were
intended to be fun. I think I mean 2HG is
better off as a casual variant format for
casual players who strongly desire more
exciting ways to play with their Magic
cards. If 2HG returns for another round of
state championships in 2007, I hope some
significant changes are made to make the
event more playable.
As always, I’d love to hear what you think.
Jeff Zandi
Texas Guildmages
Level II DCI Judge
jeffzandi@hotmail.com
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