Welcome, one and all, to the two-headed Giant cube! One of my favorite parts of pre-release weekends is the two-headed-giant portion, where teams of players who normally wouldn't come out to play could go head-to-head and learn more about the game we all love. This is my attempt to capture that lightning in a bottle. It's a 6-team sealed pool, with one of each nonland card, and a design that's meant to push for high-synergy based on two-player teamwork, without giving anyone too low of a floor for what their deck is capable of.

For sealed (which this cube is designed for), each two-person team starts with 6 booster packs of 15 cards, totaling 90 cards to build two 40-card decks (using an average of 23 nonland cards per deck, and thus ~46/90 of their availbale cards). This cube is designed for six two-person teams (totaling a 540-card pool for 12 total players.)

This cube was designed with draft in mind for those who want to draft it, but it is primarily meant to be a sealed environment. Sealed allows the cube to be picked up and played, but because it’s slightly lower power and has more variance, there is more time for players to put together mechanics and hair-brained schemes to the best effect.

As with all 2HG formats, games go long because of the extra life and resources. This means that going first is much less useful than drawing first (unless you decide to go aggro, which is difficult but possible), as two cards over your opponent’s team is a big advantage. In addition, aggro is generally difficult to pull off when there are two players who can block, so midrange and control are much more viable. There are enough cards to support aggro here, however, if both players are dedicated to it and get the right cards in their pool.

In addition, when constructing decks, adding more lands than usual is suggested, as curving out is much more important, and the power level of individual cards is higher. Evasion, naturally, is essential to break board stalls, which occur more often. This format has a lot of Treasure tokens and a lot of "untap target land" in blue & green, however, so it's much easier to prevent stumbling in the event of a player's land drying up.

Despite this cube not being designed for draft outright, there are different throughlines in the cube that are designed to show players' how to possibly build their decks and how they may work together. After all, this isn't 1v1, and it's best to think of how both of your decks will work in tandem. In 2-Headed Giant, the two decks should try to be more than the sum of their parts.

Major Themes

In this cube, there's a lot of different parts, but there are a few mechanical themes that help it feel more cohesive and like a "set" pre-release. In general, if you keep an eye out for things that reward these, you'll be able to easily slot into at least one strategy in your deck. These are as follows:

• Adventure
• Investigate (Clue tokens)
• +1/+1 counters matter
• Amassing artifacts matters (i.e. Treasure, clues, etc)

Here's some more detail on the mechanical themes & identities, and how to approach them:

It's Adventure Time

Adventure is a mechanic that's inherently a two-for-one, but it has the added bonus of often being on simpler cards. It's pretty easy to play with: you get one half of the card, or both halves, played at different times. Because one half is a spell that's often fairly cheap and small, and the other half is a larger creature, these cards are fantastic for offering players additional options and routes to victory when playing their game that a normal card wouldn't. It also makes it easier to have cards that are relevant during the different phases of the game: the cards are often good early game AND late, reducing the odds you "draw the wrong half of your deck" when playing.

Treasure

Treasure is one of the forms of both ramp and fixing in the cube, and found on a lot of spells and creatures, but there are a slew of cards that reward a player for using Treasure, including cards that trigger on artifacts entering the battlefield or you sacrificing permanents.

In addition, Treasure is one of the primary ways for players to take advantage of a third color splash. 2-headed Giant is as much about card power as it is card advantage, and I've included multiple 3-color cards and the off-color adventure cards to reward players for having a more adventurous, Treasure-based mana base.

Call for Backup

There's a lot of rewards for having +1/+1 counters in this cube, but a lot of it is baked into the mechanic 'Backup'. Backup lets your put a +1/+1 counter on a creature when it enters, and it grants that creature abilities temporarily. This combines nicely with rewards for counters, sure, but gets extra good when you add in flicker effects, or can combine abilities on your allies' creatures to swing the tempo of the game in your favor. Plus, it just feels really 2-headed-giant-y.

Gates Are Your Friend

The land fixing in this cube is primarily done via the choose-a-color Gate cards from the Baldur's Gate Commander set, and in doing so I've been able to include some Gates-matter cards to give players a thread to follow in deck building. The cards that they support are (mostly) far from powerful, but do some fun stuff when you try.

Two-Headed Giant is a fun multiplayer format where two-player teams battle against one another. Each team takes actions as a team rather than individually. There are some rules for Two-Headed Giant that differ from other multiplayer formats:

Each team has a shared life total that starts at 30 life.
Each team takes their turn together, meaning they draw as a team, attack as a team, block as a team, and go through all phases of the turn as a team.
The team that goes first skips their first draw step.

Teams do NOT share any resources other than life--meaning players can't share cards in hand or mana. The short way of remembering this is any reference to "you" on cards still means each individual player.
Teams may share information and strategize together.

The first mulligan is to seven cards, then each mulligan afterward results in one fewer card (six, five, four etc.).

A teams loses when their life total is 0 or less, when they accumulate fifteen or more poison counters, or when either team member is unable to draw a card from his or her deck. Damage and loss of life happens to individual players, and the effects are applied to the team's shared life total. For example, once blocks are determined, any unblocked creatures are assigned to deal damage to one of the two players. Afterward, the damage is totaled and subtracted from the team life total.

Effects that read "each opponent" or "each player" affect each team member separately. For example, when Rabid Bloodsucker enters the battlefield, each player would lose 2 life—meaning each team loses 4 total life.

One of the big chances for a 2-headed giant cube is to put Magic cards everyone knows in a new context. Playing alongside a second player means that you can count on attacking with creatures which you neither control nor own. And playing across from two heads means you always have two opponents. Here’s some abilities that get a new life in the format:

Battle Cry

Because the mechanic boosts all attacking creatures, your ally also gets a boon for all of their creatures for each instance of Battle Cry.

Land Untapping

It’s already good when spells make themselves free, but when you can cast a spell to progress your board and then untap your allies’ lands to ramp them for a turn, you’re in business. This is how you can work together to do fun things like ramping into some Eldrazi on turn 4 if you play your cards right. 2HG isn't just about building two good decks, but two decks that make one another better in tandem!

Mentor & Training

As worded, you only have to select another attacking creature. In 2-headed giant, this means you can select one of your allies’ creatures instead for mentor and your allies' larger creatures can help your smaller team train.

Support

Used in Battlebond, support saw new life because you were likely to have more creatures to target. This is used to great effect here once again.

Political Measures

Cards designed for free-for-all multiplayer formats like commander often let you choose another player to give a 'gift' of some kind in order to reap the rewards. I've selected a few for this set that let you choose your ally so you can reward yourself!

Cards that Directly Help Allies

Some cards reference "your opponents", which means they reward both members of your team. These have great scaling effects, and oftentimes are found on red aggressive cards.

So get out there and put your heads together!