Scars of Mirrodin 2HG Sealed Results & Standings Update

Our first Scars of Mirrodin event was a huge success, with our Two-Headed Giant Sealed event netting the largest attendance at a Magic event in nearly two years! 26 players decided to undergo psychedelic melding, forming 13 often-toxic monstrosities sporting 2 heads each. It seemed like everyone had a great time (except maybe me - I forgot how challenging it is to run events with multi-player formats!), and after 4 hard-fought rounds of Swiss, we had a winning team:

10/3/10 Top Finishers: Scars of Mirrodin Two-Headed Giant Sealed

1. 4-0 GB Infect by Bryant Benson & UWr Control by Helen Croce

2. 3-1 ??? by Jordan Arnold & ??? by Tyler Deforge (forgot to ask them; will update)

3. 3-1 Mono-White Metalcraft by Michelle Karl & BGr Fail by Dominic Casali

4. 3-1 UW Control by Nick Catalfano & BG Infect by Haren Lalchand

And yes, my deck was that bad. It does seem like Infect plus Control is a pretty good strategy for this format (I believe that's what Jordan and Tyler were playing as well; I'll update that as soon as I find out from them). I didn't get as good of a look at other people's decks as I usually do because most of my matches went to time and there were far more odds and ends than usual for me to take care of. The winning team featured an aggressive poison deck from Bryant (he had Cystbearers and I was stuck with Contagion Nims. No fair! :P), and a loaded removal suite from Helen. They took care of me and Michelle in the semis and narrowly beat Jordan and Tyler in the last round to take first place. Nick and Haren ran the table after a first round loss to finish 4th.

Sorry again for not having decklists, but frankly I'm just thankful the event is over and my brain didn't explode. That said, it was a lot of fun, and maybe we can do it again for Mirrodin Besieged - but I'm gonna need a little help next time (unfortunately Brent was out of town). Sorry if I was a bit edgy today, but it was very hard to keep everything straight, especially when people whose matches are over ask me how much time is left in the round every 30 seconds. In the future, if you finish your match early, report your result, but after that please be patient and let me get everything organized. The fewer extraneous questions I have to answer, the easier it is for me to keep everything straight and keep the event running faster. Though the pairings went smoothly, I actually made several mistakes yesterday, including:

- Failing to register a team and having to repair round 1

- Inputting an incorrect match result in round 2 (but I caught it before round 3)

- Losing two teams' index cards (fortunately they didn't care)

- Failing to start the round clock on time for round 3 (luckily all games finished early)

- Making a math error and giving away too many prizes (causing me a net loss of $18)

- Failing to give Bryant and Helen their Memoricide promos after the event

As you can see, I was very fortunate that the only bad thing that happened was that I lost $18, as several tournament-marring problems could have arisen from these mistakes, and they often do at other events. So I am very sorry if I offended you in any way and I'll try to keep better control of everything next time, but keep in mind that you can also do your part to help me and everyone else out in keeping the event running smoothly by giving me as much time and space to operate as possible - I'm far from perfect and it's very easy for me to make a mistake.

Now back to the interesting stuff: with so many players in attendance, more League Points were earned at this event than any other one so far this semester! This has caused a pretty major shake-up in the standings, and as a result there are a lot more people in contention than there were a couple weeks ago. I used a separate scoring algorithm developed for this format because I wanted to acknowledge that there were actually 26 players instead of the 13 "players" the computer recognizes as the 2-player teams. If you want more info on how this worked, email me, but hopefully it's sufficient to say that your point total is about halfway between what you would've gotten for your finish in a 13-player event and what you would've gotten for your finish in a 26-person event. The logic behind this is that the ease of placing was about that of a 13-person event, but since there actually were 26 players, I want the points to reflect that in some way as well.

This update includes the bonus point a few people received for attending a release party, as well as the 2HG Sealed points, which ranged from 1-10 points per player from last to first, so it was a pretty big mover for several people, and now a lot more people are within striking distance of the top 8. Finally, I want to announce that the number of events attended will now be the first tiebreaker. I've done some number crunching with the originally planned match win percentage method, but it's very clunky and also tends to reward people for not attending many events, which is the exact opposite of the goal of this system. I'll use that method for a second tiebreaker if applicable at the end of the semester. Here's the latest standings:

1. 30 - Michael Smith (8)

2. 24 - Emile Paul (8)

3. 22 - Joe Hammond (7)

4. 21 - Bryant Benson (8)

5. 21 - Hunter Garrett (6)

6. 20 - Skye Kutner (6)

7. 19 - John Kreinbring (9)

8. 18 - Haren Lalchand (8)

9. 16 - Scott Record (4)

10. 14 - Helen Croce (3)

11. 13 - Dan Hooghkirk (4)

12. 12 - Nick Catalfano (5)

12. 12 - Michelle Karl (5)

14. 11 - Liz DiGangi (6)

15. 11 - Alycia Johnson (4)

16. 10 - Brent Kollinger (5)

17. 9 - Kevin Crowley (4)

18. 9 - Jordan Arnold (1)

18. 9 - Tyler Deforge (1)

20. 7 - Stephen Kwok Choon (6)

21. 7 - Ben Monge (3)

22. 6 - Will Sturges (3)

23. 5 - Glen Parker (4)

23. 5 - Matt Wills (4)

25. 5 - Andrew Capik (3)

26. 5 - Mike Mooty (2)

27. 4 - Michael Carney (3)

27. 4 - Ethan Pepmiller (3)

29. 3 - Kareem Elashmawy (3)

29. 3 - Krystal Lutz (3)

29. 3 - Nikita Nikolayev (3)

32. 2 - Shawn Brabant (2)

32. 2 - David Chesnutt (2)

32. 2 - Greg Lovell (2)

32. 2 - Jennifer Mori (2)

32. 2 - Steven Nelson (2)

32. 2 - Noah Senzel (2)

39. 2 - John Chandler (1)

39. 2 - Anna Hallihan (1)

39. 2 - Kevin Hoover (1)

39. 2 - Aaron Macy (1)

43. 1 - Michael Cambata (1)

43. 1 - Thomas Fitch (1)

43. 1 - Brian Lam (1)

43. 1 - Dane Newton (1)

43. 1 - Mike Sedivy (1)

43. 1 - Hannah Sharp (1)

43. 1 - Trish Vincent (1)

Our next event will be a Scars of Mirrodin booster draft at 11 A.M. on Saturday, October 9. This is a little earlier than usual, but I want to make sure we get the event finished before the FITSSFF LAN Party, which many of you have expressed interest in attending (see more at fitssff.com/lanparty), will begin at 4:30 P.M. in Crawford 402-403 that same day. I only have enough product for 16 players, so sign-up via email is required! The week after the draft that will be Legacy (with proxies), followed by another Limited event (format TBA) and then a fairly casual Halloween event featuring a format I've developed myself - more details on these events will be posted in the near future! Have a great week!

- Dom