![]() First, if you believe that your opponent isn’t being malicious, but you want to document whatever violation took place, then you should simply explain the error. Here, I recommend taking one of two paths. After apologizing to your neighbour for your lack of situational awareness, a judge shows up. A player was caught and disqualified in this very way, death by a thousand warnings, at GP Toronto!Īlright, we’ve made the difficult moral decision to raise our hand and scream judge at the top of our lungs, and the player sitting next to us is visibly startled by the wail you just unleashed. It can be rather hard to discern whether or not a player’s errors actually constitute a cheat, but significant mistakes are documented as warnings first on the match slip, and eventually in the DCI database. That said, if you have any doubt about the honest integrity of someone’s actions, any at all, you should probably call a judge. Many new or more casual players are easily spooked by the hard rules enforcement of the competitive scene, and it’s good for all of us to ease them into things in a way that a judge might not have the mandate to do. If your opponent is clearly new to competitive magic, it might not play-out well to call a judge on them for shuffling their deck at the wrong angle, for instance. On a fundamental level, we as players aren’t actually authorized to repair broken game states and are more or less obligated to involve a judge. Catching cheaters is a non-starter without the participation of your friendly neighbourhood judge program. This has been beaten to death before by better writers than me, but it’s a point that bears repeating. ![]() It’s the role of judges to discern intent, and in many cases, we as players need to learn how to help them solve the puzzle. Most well-known players have made errors that the less-than-savvy viewers on Twitch chat are quick to call them out on. Magic is a very complicated and often stressful game, and mistakes do happen. Therein lies the biggest struggle with catching cheaters. Casting Negate on a creature, spending mana you don’t have, playing two lands in a turn, drawing extra cards, misrepresenting non-hidden information? Cheating, as long as it was done intentionally. Stacking your deck, peeking at your neighbour’s picks in draft, hiding a clutch sideboard card under your life-pad? Cheating. Simply put, cheating in Magic is breaking the rules of the game or the guidelines of the tournament to gain an undue advantage. I’ll be referring only to Competitive REL events here, but remember that cheating at the FNM level is obviously also unacceptable, and must be dealt with appropriately by judge or tournament staff. While this makes for a horribly boring section header, we do have to define the scope of cheating in what’s ultimately the very technical issue of the Infraction Procedure Guide, or IPG, the document that judges use to define and penalize errors in tournament play. I’ve reached out on social media to see what content people want me to cover, and while I hope to hit as many points as possible, forgive me if I miss your question. Today, I’m going to try to share my experience with you, be you a player or a judge, in the hopes that I can make at least a small difference in improving the integrity of the game, and teach you the best ways to use the judge program to protect yourself and others. I also hate cheaters with a passion and have way too much free time to dedicate to flushing them out. I have a unique perspective on the issue of cheaters, being the rare intersection of the judge program and an occasionally successful competitive player. In my years working at card shops, I’ve learned that we have it good compared to the communities of most other card games, thanks largely to our developed judge program, but it seems like nary a weekend passes without a viral story of a cheater or an angle-shooter blowing up on Reddit. However, the use of YuGiOh strategies inexplicably didn’t quite erase the scourge of cheating from our game. As legend has it, Chris Pikula rose above this hell-scape and banished the cheaters to the DCI Shadow Realm once and for all. ![]() ![]() You hear fables of the wild west of the Pro Tour’s early years, where unsleeved cards were marked and sketchy play was the norm, rather than the exception. Cheating has been a persistent blight on competitive Magic since its inception. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |