Magic the Gathering

Rules

An Aside From the Other Side — Cheating

By Erik ⋅ May 17, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Through no fault of Erik’s, his arti­cle did not get to me in time for his Fri­day pub­lish­ing. So here it is, a spe­cial Sat­ur­day arti­cle to dis­cuss his input on cheat­ing. — Trick

Hope­fully every­one has watched Trick and Lee’s episode this week. There is some good advice there and I think they did a great job in help­ing hon­est play­ers while not help­ing the dis­hon­est ones. If every­one would pay more atten­tion to the game instead of their friends or iPods, there would be many less oppor­tu­ni­ties for the cheaters to ply their trade.

I would also like to thank them for ham­mer­ing the one thing that every­one should do when there is a ques­tion about what’s hap­pen­ing. Call A Judge! Trust me; we don’t want cheaters in our game any­more than you do.

How­ever, they are also going be respon­si­ble for my first example.

You and your oppo­nent sit down for your match, intro­duce your­selves and get down to shuf­fling. You notice that your oppo­nent is mana weav­ing, orga­niz­ing their deck in a spell-spell-land con­fig­u­ra­tion. He does some half­hearted shuffling-like maneu­vers but you know that the deck is still stacked. He presents his deck and you take your DCI–given right to pile shuf­fle it and do so into three piles, neatly mov­ing all of his land in a giant clump then give it back to him. He real­izes what you have done and calls for a judge. Guess who gets DQ’d?

Both of you do.

This is a case of “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Manip­u­la­tion of Game Mate­ri­als is cheat­ing no mat­ter what the rea­son is. Please don’t try to “fix” cheaters or even hon­est mis­takes on your own. There is very lit­tle tol­er­ance for vig­i­lan­tism as it were as you may make a bad sit­u­a­tion worse.

Another thing that was touched on is lying. The new Com­mu­ni­ca­tion pol­icy has clar­i­fied a lot of what you can and can’t and don’t have to say dur­ing your match. But if you’re not care­ful, it can get you into big trou­ble. This includes not only lying to a judge about some­thing that hap­pened, but lying to your oppo­nent even if it is by omis­sion. I’m not talk­ing about bluff­ing. That’s just part of the game. I’m talk­ing about delib­er­ate allowance of ille­gal actions and game states.

A player after los­ing game 1 counts his oppo­nents side­board dur­ing game 2 and finds out that there are only 13 cards in it. He is about to win game 2 since his side­board is designed with his opponent’s deck in mind. He doesn’t say any­thing and wins game 2 eas­ily. No one side­boards for game 3, and his hand is poor and he’s mana screwed to boot. He chooses this time to call a judge and inform the judge about his opponent’s ille­gal side­board hop­ing for the game loss. This is a great exam­ple of Fraud. When you observe some­thing wrong, you have the respon­si­bil­ity to point it out, regard­less of whom the error benefits.

Like Trick said, no one wants to be “that guy”, but the rules are in place to pro­tect every­one and the integrity of the tour­na­ment. We’re not going to yell at you for call­ing us over for a legit­i­mate issue. State your case calmly and we’ll listen.

Until next PTQ!

– Erik