Magic - the Cheatering

[Humphrey]

While I was watching the tournament marathon this weekend (Eternal Champs and BoM), I noticed many many "mistakes".
Players
-trying to respond to trigger, they cant (Orchard in resp to Oath)
-drawing 3 cards with BS, putting none back
-using sick creatures (not only in the finals)

and many more. (Paper)Magic has become or always was a game of cheating.

Bertoncini was a good mentor it seems


The rules need to be a lot more strict. If a player produces a gamestate error or is trying to resolve illegal actions, he should get a gameloss.
If youre playing on high level tournaments, you should know and follow the rules and keep track on the game. It might not be always cheating, but
all those rewinds are stupid, in what sport you can rewind your mistakes? They didnt even get warnings for this.

"Sry I scored an own goal, I didnt know it was the wrong one" - "No problem, we take it back"

I can remember, back in the day, we didnt even allow to untap lands and got mana burn then.

[JDK]

They didnt even get warnings for this.

If it gets caught (and they call a judge), the judge will hand out warnings or infractions.

I don't think you should get a gameloss for every mistake, unless you repeat those mistakes (intentionally or not).

Your comparison to other sports/games is shortsighted. In MTG you get a warning or an infraction as 'punishment', in football the own goal is part of the game (it's a legal action) and 'punishment' itself. A more appropriate analogy would be casting Innocent Blood accidentally, when you have a Griselbrand on the field and your opponent nothing. You cannot "take it back". Anyway, it's a far stretch to compare different games and their rules...

[Arsenal]

In professional sports, it's exactly that, a team full of professional experts at their respective craft. In CCG tournaments, not every participant is a professional; to expect that level of play out of each any every participant is a lot to ask for.

[Koby]

Magic is a hard game of mental exercise. It's not uncommon for mistakes to occur, unbeknownst to both players and the judging staff.
It's one thing to be actively cheating, and another to be misplaying.

Cheating is judged by the intent of the player committing the violation through investigation. Equating knowingly playing multiple lands per turn to missing a trigger 40 minutes into an intense game is disingenuous.

RE: Oath of Druids -

10/1/2009: The targeted player controlling more creatures than the current player is a part of the targeting requirement. A player can't be targeted by this ability unless it's true, and the ability will be countered on resolution if it's no longer true at that time.

Oath of Druids will only trigger if a player has fewer creatures than an opponent. It will go on the stack. Then, upon resolution, it will check again. If creatures are at parity, the trigger will fail. What you described can and does happen as it should.

[danyul]

Legitimate errors and cheating are two very, very different things. We are humans trying to adhere to a game of rules. Look at humans at the highest levels of rules enforcement - government. They mess up all the time. How can you expect a regular dude playing a card game for funsies to be a perfect paragon of professional play when other people, who are paid to live by rules, also cannot do so? I don't mean to throw a red herring at this argument or anything, but the idea that we should all play perfectly seems misguided to begin with.

Humans are playing this game. Humans make mistakes. If you don't want to play this game with humans, or any game with mistake-prone meatbags, then you might prefer something more clean, perfect, and pure like...I dunno...Solitaire or Final Fantasy XXX: Anime Island.

[Arsenal]

Also, in professional sports, mistakes do get undone. Instant replay overturns mistakes. When a player does make a mistake, there's a punishment comiserate to the infraction. What the OP suggesting is analogous to a NFL game where the defense has 12 men on the field... then the referee awards the game win to the opponent.

[phonics]

Also, in professional sports, mistakes do get undone. Instant replay overturns mistakes. When a player does make a mistake, there's a punishment comiserate to the infraction. What the OP suggesting is analogous to a NFL game where the defense has 12 men on the field... then the referee awards the game win to the opponent.

Just look at the nba during the playoffs and you will see refball everywhere, people dive in football because they hope the ref will make a mistake. Any competitive activity that isnt enforced in a black and white manner (like modo) will have this sort of thing.

[sdematt]

While people make mistakes in Magic, I agree certain actions are quite bad. The Brainstorm one is a good example, and it's why I always ask my blue opponents to count back the cards being put on top of their library, and I do the same. I know it doesn't help when you're viewing it through a stream, but in all honesty, if they have to make a Sylvan Library announcement at every Star City I've been to, make a Brainstorm announcement too. Depending on the sleeves and the pace of the game, it can be hard to see how many cards someone puts back.

-Matt

[TsumiBand]

While people make mistakes in Magic, I agree certain actions are quite bad. The Brainstorm one is a good example, and it's why I always ask my blue opponents to count back the cards being put on top of their library, and I do the same. I know it doesn't help when you're viewing it through a stream, but in all honesty, if they have to make a Sylvan Library announcement at every Star City I've been to, make a Brainstorm announcement too. Depending on the sleeves and the pace of the game, it can be hard to see how many cards someone puts back.

-Matt

It started with some recent footage of someone Brainstorming for 4, but I've noted that many "high-level" players will make allllll kiiiiiinds of shitty shortcuts. It's one thing to shortcut a draw-go or an attack step, but shortcutting physical iterative actions that aren't part of an infinite loop is IMHO unacceptable.

I'm sure that it is just a residue of honing their craft or whatever, but like... bear-pawing 3 cards off the top when you quickly draw 3 and put 2 back, to me, just opens up the potential for questions to be asked, right? I get that everyone at that level is well-reheared in going through the motions, but why would you ever obfuscate the number of drawn cards by reducing it down to an indeterminate motion? I know it speeds up the game or whatever, but God, just demonstrate clearly that you have in fact drawn exactly the correct number of cards per the effect causing you to do so.

It's like how it's supposed to be bad form to show magic tricks to your Poker buds. Is that really what you want to be doing -- pulling your friend's card out of their own wallet before a game of Texas Hold 'Em? Everybody just show their actions plainly, roll their sleeves up and relax -- remove that whole dynamic from the game. It's useless.

[lordofthepit]

Do you know what cheating means?

I'm all for harsher penalties on cheaters, but you don't start by classifying unintentional errors as such.

[Quasim0ff]

ATT attacking with Sum Sickness creatures in the finals:

https://twitter.com/shaharshenhar/st...44363513704448

http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...-Elves!/page87

[Megadeus]

Agreed. Mistakes happen. I sure as hell am super guilty of mistakes. I fetch and accidentally record it as life gain, my opponents life loss, and even forget sometimes. Shit happens. If mistakes keep being made like this then slow down, but you can't just claim someone is cheating late in a long tourney just because a mistake is made. No one is perfect. Except Reid Duke it seems.

[PirateKing]

What about the players, who are by no means scarce, who count out every drawn card face down before they look at it. Brainstorm is 1-2-3 face down on the table, pick up, look over, 1-2 face down on the table, then on top of the library. I agree these players who develop Brainstorm muscle memory do it without thinking, but I've seen just as many careful habits as I've seen sloppy habits. Which as others have said is not an indication of cheating, but sloppy play does make things harder to follow. If you stack all your lands into one large pile along with your FTV Dryad Arbor, I'm not going to call foul, but I am going to be put on edge.

That being said, these small mistakes that are being made in the finals of large tournaments, a lot of them are 1 day events, these people have been playing since 10am straight.

[Megadeus]

Ah FTV Dryad Arbor... I will admit that I have won a game because he was in my yard and my opponent had an active Scooze and didnt realize he could put his Scooze out of PFire range by eating the Arbor. Card is so super cheaty.

[Phoenix Ignition]

This is actually one of the reasons I like MTGO better for competitive play (although I miss the social aspect, but hey, if I'm playing exclusively to win I'm fine with not making friends).

The biggest "cheating" I see all the time is slow play, but it's also the hardest to actually check. It can even be legal slow play, though, like people taking the normal allotted amount of time to shuffle a deck, or doing things that don't really help (like cracking 1 fetch land at the start of the opponent's turn and one at the end, possibly to bluff extra mana for something but also possibly to avoid shortcutting the shuffle into 1 instead of 2 times). They are legal things to do, but it can be with the intent to draw out a matchup, like if you play miracles and won the first game.

This is my favorite part of Magic Online, they give you the equivalent of a chess timer set to 25 minutes. If you want to play a deck like Miracles, you're welcome to, just make sure you don't play extremely slowly. I've never run out of time without being AFK, even though I play really grindy decks that have 1 win condition (Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas). The opponent can't stall and win a match, the only thing stalling does is waste your own timer.

Having chess timers in a normal paper magic match would be incredibly difficult to integrate now. You get a chance to respond to everything, so after pretty much every action you'd have to both hit the button. This may not be such a bad thing, though, because you'd have irrevocable proof that you decided to not counter a spell, instead of the often horrible version of, "yep"... "No, I was just saying yep like I was going to counter it with this card, not that you got to resolve it."

It might also stop stuff like people missing their Living Weapon triggers and promptly losing the game because of it. But it would be hard and a lot of work, so won't happen.

[Barook]

Except Reid Duke it seems.

I agree with Phoenix Ignition here.

MODO is great to sharpen your sense for rules, triggers, etc.

That's probably one of the main reasons Reid Duke has such great mechanics - he grinded like a madman on MODO before making the jump into the Paper scene. It really shows when you watch his games.

[Koby]

That's probably one of the main reasons Reid Duke has such great mechanics - he grinded like a madman on MODO before making the jump into the Paper scene. It really shows when you watch his games.

Hrmm... that's not true at all. He's been playing for 20 years...

[JDK]

I mostly agree with Phoenix Ignition, but MODO has the disadvantage of not allowing shortcuts. For example "going infinite" with Pod or Kiki-Jiki, which steal a significant amount of time (e.g. when you are playing against crappy lifegain decks or your opponent is messing with his pauses of passing priority). These things could become implemented, though.

[Megadeus]

I played MTGO for like 2 months before I jumped into competitive play, and I will say that I think it helped me become a better player.

[Barook]

Hrmm... that's not true at all. He's been playing for 20 years...

Actually, he started playing with 5 years:

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazin.../activity/1126

Doesn't change the fact that he grinded MODO for years before making a jump into the actual paper scene.