Defending Against Cheating

This past weekend featured the first World Magic Cup, and the presentation was great. If you missed the coverage, I’d wholeheartedly encourage you to head over to the Wizards twitch.tv page (www.twitch.tv/magicprotour) and check out a couple of the matches. It’s a great tournament, with strong coverage segments, and the usual great casting team from Wizards.

That said, since the tournament ended, there have been some allegations thrown around. Some people, analyzing the video, think that a member of the Puerto Rican team cheated in the finals (and who knows how many other matches off-camera).  The video in question can be found here: Was Jorge Iraman Trying To Stack His Deck at the World Magic Cup?

Now, I’m positive that the DCI is investigating this at the moment – that is, after all, their job. So I’m not here to pass judgment or blame or even say if I think he actually did cheat or not. But one thing that this event does highlight is that players need to be careful. At competitive events with cash (or plane flights, or trophies) on the line, people will cheat, and we need to be prepared for it.

Today, we’re going to go into a couple of different ways that someone can try to cheat you, and some easy remedies for it. Note that I’m specifically talking about ‘things that will get him disqualified if a judge is watching.” This is not meant to address someone trying to Jedi-Mind-Trick you into using Esper Charm on yourself. Slimy play is an entirely different thing from cheating.

The methods that a cheater will use vary greatly. Go watch a few magicians (the ‘real’ kind, not the ones playing MtG – the guys who make stuff disappear, or manage to pull a royal flush out of a falling deck of cards [Source: Reddit, thanks /u/SlimGrim]) and you’ll see that their acts are likely very different. Same goes with MtG cheaters – the ways that they can cheat are as numerous as the stars, and there’s absolutely no way that you can be trained to identify and stop all of them.

A quick aside here on what you should do if you notice someone cheating. Immediately raise your hand and call for a judge. Ask to speak to him away from your opponent. The judge is trained in being able to investigate these situations. He will make inquiries into the situation and, if unsure, discuss things with the head judge (if the event is large enough to merit multiple judges). They will come to a conclusion and everyone can abide by it – one way or another. It is not your job to execute a punishment. It is not your job to determine guilt. Your job, as a player, is merely to bring the matter to the attention of a judge if you believe that something suspicious is going on.

Good, now that we’ve covered that, the first major ways that people are going to cheat happen before the game even starts. Our cheater sits down at the end of the last round and carefully stacks his deck to be perfectly spell-spell-land-spell-spell-land all the way through. This devious player is now guaranteed two or three lands in his opening hand, with a third land on the way quickly if he doesn’t have it. Of course, we all know that he has to shuffle before he actually presents, so he makes a great show of cutting the deck a few times in front of you before passing it over. You cut the deck and begin play. He doesn’t mulligan, because his deck is still stacked.

However did that happen?

This is called mana weaving, and it’s one of the oldest cheats in the book. By mana weaving, you make your spell-land density uniform across your deck. This is not randomized. It is important to know the difference between a completely randomized set and something that it uniformly distributed. In this case, they’ll even look similar to the naked eye. The couple of cuts that have gone into the deck will make minor inconsistencies in the perfect weave, but the vast majority of the deck will still be prearranged.

Similar things can happen with a variety of other cheats. Subtly moving a card to the bottom of the deck, then manipulating your shuffle to bring it to the top is not only possible, but extremely easy. Doing the same so that the card ends up in the middle of the deck, slightly off-kilter to encourage you to cut directly to the card, is also possible. It’s even possible to do this while nominally rifle shuffling the deck. There are dozens of variations on these cheats, but they all boil down to the same thing – deck stacking.

How can we stop things like this? Simple, actually. The number one defense against deck stacking, mana weaving, and any kind of nonsense is twofold, and actually required by the rules of Competitive REL tournaments.

He must present his deck to you to shuffle. You, as a cheating-conscious player, should pick up his deck and shuffle it. I don’t mean cut it. I mean shuffle. You are well within your rights to randomize the deck however you find sufficient as long as you don’t damage the cards. (I’d like to take an aside here and remind you to be gentle with your opponent’s deck. We’d like to think that our cards are important to us, and could even be worth a fair bit of cash. No reason to cause damage here. Just be a little gentle with them.)

Cheaters practice at what they do. There’s a good chance that you won’t notice it if they shuffle in a slightly shady manner. However, but shuffling the deck thoroughly – every time, even after he just searches the bottom five cards for a land off his T1 Evolving Wilds – will prevent any kind of weaving or searching or ordering of his deck.

Realize that – you can completely blunt an angle of cheating by playing fairly! That’s awesome.

Some other methods of cheating are a little more insidious and require us to actually pay attention to things. Periodically keep track of the opponent’s number of cards in hand – ask him if need be, and write the information down on your life pad. If it seems like he has more than he should, look back and make sure. If he has drawn an extra card at some point, call a judge – that’s a game loss for a good reason. For all you know, he could’ve subtly moved a Batterskull back to his hand after you Cliqued it away.

There’s one more kind of cheating that I’ve heard about – but admittedly never experienced myself. It’s most endemic at small store FNM’s, especially involving players that don’t necessarily have the best grasp of the rules, or if there’s no official judge present. It usually involves one player bullying the others into accepting ‘his ruling’. Often this player is just lying because he thinks he can get away with it and win the tournament as a result, but sometimes it’s accidental. As always, your best weapon is simply knowledge – know the game you are playing. I’m not saying that you need to be Judge-level-knowledgeable (though that certainly helps) but if you have a smart phone, there are plenty of apps that let you look up a rule if there’s a dispute. (I’d like to publically call out MTGJudge from the iTunes App Store on this one, because it is a *spectacular* resource that also provides a card lookup.) Don’t be afraid to bring the question to an outside party. Remember – your opponent has a vested interest in you losing! Don’t trust that his ruling is correct.

In conclusion, know your rules, and be willing to look them up if you’re uncertain. Shuffle your opponent’s deck. Make sure that you are clear in your declarations and actions during the game, and you’ll find that a healthy amount of cheating just isn’t possible against you anymore.

Personally, that’s worth the extra thirty seconds of shuffling to me. I bet the Taiwanese national team feels the same way, and are extremely happy that they didn’t just leave that Etched Champion on the top.

Also, congratulations to the Taiwanese team. They played some great magic throughout the weekend and provided quite a bit of quality entertainment for me and my friends. I’m already looking forward to the next segment of the year – complete with 2 GP’s, a couple of Star City Games events, and countless other opportunities for me personally– not to mention judging and some other projects I’m working on.

It’s a good time for Magic, cheaters or not. Let’s make the best of it.

Till Next Time,
Andrew

[Editor's Note: It has been brought to my attention that Mike Flores has written a few articles on this topic as well. Please find links to them if you'd like some additional reading:
The Miser's Guide To Savage Cheats
How To Cheat

Thanks to /u/0rangeSoda on Reddit for the tip! Enjoy!]