Some Rules F.A.Q.
We often receive questions about some Team Commander rules and people asking for exceptions.
Let us clarify some points:
Play the cards as they are printed / ruled by oracle. If you don’t like a card, better ban it. But is never good to tell a player „We found out that Guttersnipe deals too much damage, so we reduced it to 1 damage.“ This is asking for confusion, anger and is no good at all.
Play the abilities and rules as they are. Once again, if you don’t like a card, better ban it. But is never good to tell a player „We found a Wasteland in turn 1 too hard, we just destroy lands if a player has at least 5 lands, before that you can’t use it.“. Storm is just counting for 1 player – Landwalking or Annihilator is for the whole team – simply nope.
Play fair and use our Mulligan. Some players argue that the London Mulligan is the newest and applies to all variants of Magic: wrong. The multiplayer bonus is above this, and variants are free to decide their own rules, so the official Free-for-all Commander still officially uses Vancouver Mulligan. And Team Commander ? We use the Teamcommander Mulligan. No exceptions.
We like to answer to some mails regarding the Mulligan:
So what do you do…
… when you have 1 land in hand ? Or 0 lands ? Or 7 lands.
Read the rules. The Team Commander Mulligan has exact rules for Mulligan without exceptions. If you have 7 lands in hand, you are lucky. You can freely decide how many lands to put aside, draw that many new cards, and start playing. As Team Commander games usually go over lots of turns, it is likely you will draw some non-land cards and contribute to the game. If you have 0 or 1 land in hand, we recommend aggressive mulligan, set aside all nonland cards, draw 6 or 7 new cards. With a ratio of about 1/3 lands in Deck you should draw about 2 lands. Remember, the first mulligan is free. If you are not lucky, you can mulligan again. Let’s say you had 1 land, set aside 6 cards and drew again 6 cards, still drawing no land. Then you mulligan again, setting aside 6 cards and draw 5 new cards. So you effectivly drew 7+6+5 cards, which is about 1/5 of your deck. If you are still screwed, and have no lands, then… you should reconsider deckbuilding and adding more mana fixing/lands/additional mana sources, or you are maybe not taking mulligans aggressive enough – some players think: hey this card is supercool and all I have to do is draw another Red mana… don’t. If you are color-screwed or generally mana screwed, it is no fun, and it is your own risk to play in such a way if you either build multicolor decks, have a too scarce mana base in your deck or your mulligans are lousy.
Ok, there are some games in which you just have bad bad luck in drawing. What can you do? a) Simply play and expect too loose… or maybe you draw lands ? b) give up and start a new game.
We don’t recommend to give players unlimited free mulligans !!! We heard about players who „endlessly“ mulligan again because they have just 0 or 1 land in hand, nearly drawing half their deck for free and then starting with a perfect hand. NO. This is not fair to your opponents. If you are unlucky, bear with it, or start a totally new game, take a new deck, and reshuffle your old deck completely before reusing it again. While we don’t imply you are cheating or abusing the rules and intentionally build a deck with too low land count to take „unlimited mulligans“ for gaing the perfect starting hand and „searching“ for key cards, it is not fair to your opponent to blame your bad luck against him and bend the rules to his disadvantage.
We like to answer some questions regarding Teamplay (Two Headed Giant):
So what about…
… Lifegain ?
Let’s say I have a Well of Lost Dreams in play, which let’s me draw a card whenever I gain life, and my Teammate attacks with his Baneslayer Angel with Lifelink, so our Lifepool goes up by five, ergo I gained life and can draw cards, right ?
No, this is a bit tricky. You are sharing a lifepool in 2HG, but although the team’s lifepool changed, YOU didn’t actively gained life. cards like Crested Sunmare require YOU to gain life. Have a look at the magic judges FAQ here : https://blogs.magicjudges.org/2hg/hour-of-devastation-two-headed-giant-release-notes/
You is still just you, even in 2HG. These rules also apply accordingly to loosing life for cards like Vilis, Brooker of Blood – you have to loose life, not your teammate.
… True Believer, Circle of Protection Red, Glacial Chasm – so they are worthless in 2HG ?
Yes, you are quite right. At least they aren’t that effective as you were used to: a True Believer gives you shroud, but your teammate can still be targetted. Better go for Imperial Mask. You can still play a COP Red, and prevent YOUR part of the damage from an Earthquake, cutting the damage in half at least.
Once again, you are attacking the team, so why is Glacial Chasm bad ?
The Chasm isn’t a bad card – but it works different than you expect it: in 2HG there was a rules change in Dominaria [LINK here], to get in line with Archenemy, shared team turns and for Battlebond.
Basically you are not attacking the team any longer, but when declaring attackers, your creatures attack indicidual players respectivly their planeswalkers. If a plaayer has a Glacial Chasm out, he wouldn’t receive damage, but in 2HG the opposing team can circumvent this by simply attacking the other player. Let’s build up a more complex example: If Player A has a forest in play, and Player B has a Freyalise, LLanowar’s Fury planeswalker but no forests and a Wall of Roots. Player C as an opponent wants to attack with an Erhnam Djinn, which has Forestwalk. If Player C attacks Player A… the Djinn is unblockable, because Player A has forests. If Player C attacks Player B, who has no forests, he can be blocked by the Wall. If the Djinn attacks the Planeswalker which belongs to Player B, he once again can be blocked.
So, declaring attackers is getting a bit more important, especially if you have triggers like Hypnotic Specter (which pplayer should discard?) or Artisan of Kozilek (Annihilator trigger just counts for the defending player which was attacked!).
You said that the turns are shared ?
- If a trigger says “at the beginning of phase/step on your turn” (such as God-Pharaoh’s Gift) there is only one of that step each turn so it will trigger once.
- If a trigger says “each player’s phase/step” (such as Howling Mine) or “each opponent’s phase/step” (such as Luminarch Ascension it will trigger once for each player in that step, so twice in 2HG.
- If a player would skip or get an extra step, phase, or turn, that player’s team skips or gets one instead.
This is the reason we banned all „take extra Turns“ cards, or cards which take over another player’S turn (= take over the whole enemies teams turn) – as they are way out of scale, when both teammates get an extra turn. And same goes for cards like Luminarch Ascension or Time Stop. We know there are still some cards out, which aren’t banned (yet), which abuse this mechanisms, but we consider them as not that harmful on gameplay to need a banning.
And yes, we know that a lot of cool cards get banned by the „no extra turns“ rules – and we know lots of you ask for exceptions and say „my planeswalker never triggered ultimate and I will never ever take extra turns…“ but here we do not dissent from our rules : no exceptions, sorry, extra turns for a team are too strong, even if they are not likely to happen.
Have Fun and Good Games ! – The Team Commander-Team