Magic: the Gathering's Most Infamous Cheaters | MTG 

I was playing in a $1000 dollar money tournament. My first round opponent dropped a 20 sided die as he sat down. It came up an 18 and he pointed at me and said, "your roll to see who goes first". I called a judge right away as I knew I was dealing with a cheater. I asked him, it if had come up a 1 would you have told me to roll or just went on with sitting down and arranging your stuff. Judge gave him a game loss for it. Then when we got around to playing our first actual game I saw him draw an extra card on his 2nd turn. I called the very same judge over and told him it was his turn 2 and to count his cards. He did in fact have an extra card. Instant match loss and dude went ballistic. I can't stand cheaters!!

Shout out to that judge who was ok with digging through trash just to catch a cheater.

The main thing I learned from this is that all professional Magic players can also do magic tricks with cards

In 1994 my roommate invited Mike Long and another player who was in his playtesting crew to play at our apartment. I was a budget player at that time and he refused to play a game if his opponents didn't put up an ante so we never played head to head. His cards were curved because he used a bridge shuffle and when he turned them he didn't actually turn them he just started them spinning; At one point, when he was playing against my friend, he tapped a land by starting it spinning and when it stopped it looked like he hadn't tapped it. He tried to tap it a second time, my friend called him out for it and Mike's friend told me that he'd once seen Mike tap the same land three times in a turn.

Imagine doing something shady, then asking your opponent to do something shady, then calling a ref because your opponent did something shady.

"What turn is it?" "Two explores" No mention of lands, no "hey you've got too many lands," just asking what turn it is, and Alex immediately tries to cover his cheat

That awkward moment when you see one of your favorite poker dealers on a list of the 10 most infamous Magic cheaters for stacking his deck....

Lessons from this video: -Always SHUFFLE your opponent's deck in a Magic match with stakes, don't just cut. If they don't present, ask to shuffle. If they repeatedly fail to present, call a judge. -Pay attention to the little lapses in attention that favor your opponent. True sloppy play will favor the opponent in my experience certainly less than half the time but maybe somewhere between 20-25% of the time. Cheated "sloppy" play is calculated never to give up an edge. -Pay attention to the nagging feeling of doubt that you can't put a finger on. Trust your instincts and don't let seemingly innocent breaches of the rules pass without a judge call. Warnings are important for judges to dish out because they allow habitual cheaters to be sniffed out more easily. TL;DR Call a judge, pay attention, trust your instincts, CALL A JUDGE

I like how a "four year sentence" is ridiculous for misconduct that took place in a trivial card game, even though that sentence is just a ban from that trivial card game

Good old Mike Long. I would have had an invite spot a bajillion lifetimes ago, but his cheating and leveraging his name to the judge meant he got the win because he drew 5 extra cards. The judge after 20 minutes of talking to Long decided there was simply no way to be able to count how many cards each player should have by that turn in the game, which is absolute non-sense on turn 12 or so. Of course you can figure out the number of cards and Mike had 5 too many. He was trying his be annoying and rush the game when he was loosing. He would then keep trying to rush the end of my turn to his draw phase, so he'd go ahead and cup his hand over his deck like he was ready to draw and keep running his thumb across the back edge/corner of the cards to be able to pull two but make it look like 1. He tried to be loud and boisterous because there was a crowd watching and also acting like I was simply just taking too much time, although I was perfectly within my allotted time per phase/turn. It was really easy for me to notice the extra cards he ended up with because Hymn to Tourach and Hypnotic Spector do pretty specific things to your hand size, so it didn't take a genius to see what was happening since I was playing discard against him and had wrecked his hand in the first 2 turns of game 3. This made me question how he pulled off game 2 against me as well, but I was too focused on me and my play and didn't pay attention until things shifted so much during game 3. I ended up hearing it was actually that judge and the shop owner that got him to come to that qualifier in the first place and paid for his travel/expenses, but who can say. At least there aren't videos all over the internet of me acting like an unsportsmanlike d*ck and coming in #2 on MTGGoldfish's cheaters list. I guess I am a tiny bit salty because back then as a teenager I was trying so hard to qualify, driving insane distances, having to hustle ever local tournament, draft, and sealed within 100 miles 4 or 5 days a week like a job to earn enough cards to sell to fund these out of town qualifier attempts. I pretty much gave up after that because I didn't see a use when someone could so blatantly cheat and but get handed the win because he was a "known" player. So there is my sad Mike Long story.

Once had regular EDH play group at a hobby store. (12 regulars) This one dude always had the best luck when it came to drawing what he needed. Real “Heart of the cards” stuff. One day, I was using a mill deck and targeting him hard. Someone did the math on his graveyard and accused him of having more than 100 cards. Turns out that the bastard always played with a dozen extra cards in his pocket or on his lap. How we never noticed is beyond me! Never showed his face at the store again.

All of this shuffle cheating could be solved by forcing an aproximate 50/50 cut before the deck is returned to the player. Also, watching some one vigorously shuffle your 2,500 dollar modern deck like that would drive me insane.

Mike Long actually taught me to play mtg. He was a super nice and generous guy .... until you played against him and he was ruthless and bent any rule he could to win even just a casual match.

Anyone else remember that Dredge player who cracked a fetch for Stomping Ground, realised he'd milled all his copies and just scooped one of them out of the GY in order to "find" it while searching his deck? Blew my mind how jaw-droppingly obvious it was, like he had forgotten the match was on camera or something

You could tell the last guy was cheating because when the camera man asked “what turn is it?” Instead of just answering him he straight up says “2 explorers” which to me would indicate that he had his answer ready to go if anyone called him out on cheating, even if they weren’t calling him out on cheating yet…

Damn, this recap really makes you appreciate just how easy it is to rig the outcomes of tournaments, especially when such high-status people defend and protect cheaters from punishment.

Bertoncini was my first opponent at my first ever PTQ way back in the day. And to this day I’m sure he cheated his mana count off his 2 Lotus Cobras to resolve both Avenger of Zendikar and Time Warp in one turn to stop me from winning 2-1. Couldn’t prove it so I let it go, but it was nice to feel vindicated once the “2 explores” thing happened a few years later.

My favorite example of Jared Boettcher cheating is the game against Thomas Ross you showed clips from, because he was so focused on cheating he actually gave Thomas the land he NEEDED to beat him the next turn, and he was obviously mana screwed up to that point.

I thought this was a parody by the voice at the start

I was the reanimator player mentioned at 22:48, pretty sure my claim to fame in mtg lore is being the first person with documented evidence of Alex cheating. The reason theres no footage because this was a text-only feature match. Firstly, I was friends with GerryT at the time and on day 1 we put together a reanimator list for legacy day 2, which was how Alex knew what I was playing. IIRC, he had played a Sower main deck at a previous but recent SCG so he had plausible deniability. He cast a sower to steal my reanimated platinum angel to kill me while i was at negative life. He was caught by me one week later, when i pulled up his 2nd place merfolk list to build for a legacy local, and stared in disbelief. I contacted the SCG TO, and after a couple weeks of discussion with them they basically said they talked to him and he said it was a mistake and they believed him. And lets be real, they wanted to believe him, he was their star. It would have been a scandal. I beat him a couple years later in a ptq quarterfinal, and I watched him like a hawk but the matchup was so lopsided in my favor that it didnt matter. And I won the ptq which was dope.

I feel for Tom Ross as he was used in this video several times as he played against what is the top tier list of cheaters.

Of course the biggest cheater was selling NFT’s lol

I still can't get over the Stephen Speck one; dude was a close friend in college when this happened, looked up to him and everything. Then this happened. Haven't talked to him in years now, he really vanished.

My very first local draft tournament, I excitedly confided in my first opponent that I'd reached 8th place on Planeswalkers 2013 leaderboards for xbox, so I was looking forward to doing well in this event. He airily declared preconstructed deck users as noobs (an odd comment to make at a draft). A few turns in, he declares that if I draw before untapping my mana one more time he'll make me take mana burn. I ignored him, but he pushed the subject so aggressively I had to call a judge over to explain to him that there is no mana burn. Forfiet the second game, I went on to place second. Never saw that loser again.

fabrizio Anteris mindset comes down to a sense of entitlement that makes me shiver. in his mind, he DESERVED to beat those 'lesser' players so he could have a shot to play against the better players, he wanted to play with good players and didnt feel he actually needed to earn it or prove himself so he simply cheated to sweep the lesser players out of his way and not risk losing to them. his wins were something he deserved, not something to be earned.

I was playing at Brothers Grimm when Humphries got caught cheating. The next week at draft everyone was awkward. At the time I didn’t know what happened and someone told me. A friend of mine who played against him told me he was an intimidating jerk. And then I looked it up and saw his response and how his cards were up for sale. I loved it.

I tried competitive play back in the late 90's. I quickly realized that not only were probably 1/3rd of players cheaters, but hobby shops enabled it. See, if you were a regular customer of XYZ shop and spent a lot of money there monthly, they'd overlook your cheating to avoid losing you as a customer. I played in probably 20-30 tournaments(in my home state of Kentucky and in Michigan where my cousins lived and I regularly visited) and I don't think I ever saw a legit winner a single time. One store in Michigan even straight up told me and my cousin that "their guy" spends hundreds a month there and could do whatever he wanted, openly in front of a score of other players. That was one of the last tourney's I played and I've not looked back at competitive MtG since.

Something that I've seen from speedrunning is that it's usually the good players that are cheating. They're the ones with the knowledge to actually cheat effectively, and the better you are the more you want to eliminate luck from the equation because "I'm so good, i deserve this win, the deck is just fucking me over"

Good video, but it's a shame there was no mention of Chris pikula. Chris pikula is an early pro tour legend who basically forfeited his rightful spot in the pro tour hall of Fame for his crusade against cheating. In a video about cheating I feel like it's worth an honorable mention to talk about pikulas commitment to fairplay.

Only cheater i caught that never came back was a dude who tried to draw 4 on a 2 card draw spell. When he got in my face about it, i called a judged and he left before the judge could arrive at our table. When i explained to the judge, the judge agreed i was in the right and the guy had been a known problem in the circuit but was a close friend to event organizers.

There's one guy at my local shop that will try and tell me I'm playing wrong if he's at disadvantage. I've flashed their attacking creature during combat, and I've attacked with my 3/3, they swing in with their 4/4, and I cast a +2/+2 on my creature. They tell me that's not how the game works. Well isn't that how instants work?!

It's really stressful not only thinking about your plays but constantly having to watch what your opponent is doing with his deck. That's why I left the competitive circuit because cheaters are more common than they seem.

Magic cheating has nothing on Chess cheating, 0 vibrating remote plugs to be found.

Jason Gordon should have been in that list somewhere as most of the 90's cheaters wouldn't have been doing what they did without him. His father was a lawyer who threatened to sue WOTC when he was caught cheating. He forced a whole handful of rules to get changed in the early days of competitive MTG

There was a player known for cheating, at a Sydney GP, that intentionally played a card wrong. It was pointed out to him a few times that he was playing it wrong and he accepted it, but lots of players didn't realize. The same judge never saw him do it twice in the tournament. We pieced it together afterwards, but didn't have a paper trail.

At my first local tournament way back when Ixalan was about to come out, I played vs someone who, without any possible reason, was just looking at the top cards of their deck when they thought I wasn't looking. I think it was because they were playing red deck wins and needed to know if they could get lethal or not before I could combo. Called a judge and unfortunately he didn't do anything because he didn't see it and said it didn't matter. He and the cheater obviously knew each other. I later played against that judge in an FNM at a different shop. He didn't remember me. When I won our draft match up, he got mad that I was thinking on my turns and lost it when he finally lost the game. Really nasty and angry guy. Looking back, I think he did know his friend cheated but chose to do nothing because he didn't care about fairness and I wasn't going to top 8 anyway.

You neglected to also mention that Saito was removed from his position at Hareruya earlier this year after getting arrested and indicted for illegal gambling (poker, though there's no indication of cheating there).

10 most infamous cheaters that got caught…

The judge blinks right around 14:29. Great video!

Would love to see this video done for Pokemon cheaters. So many big names come to mind. Xiao Xiao Long, Jimmy Pendarvis, Rahul Reddy, Cal Conner, Gino Lombardi, etc. Would be a great video

Weaving was not only widely accepted in the early days, it was often taught by people to new players as common sense to avoid non-games.

The Yuuya cheat hurt, he was one of my favorite pros at the time.

as a new player this is a very helpful video. i now know i need to keep an eye on my opponent's moves. i haven't been directly exposed to cheating but i have played against a player who rushed my turns and tried to get me to fold when he had a big board state. while not necessarily cheating, it is an annoying and distracting tactic that tries to take my head out of the game and disrupt my focus. i would call it unfair sportsmanship

I was a lvl 2 yugioh Judge. We had a guy who was rich and stole side decks, then because the side decks were only like $250 they couldn't do anything about it. The place had cameras and eventually a person got pissed off and told them that there side deck was $750 worth and had requested a police report and video of the scene. He was arrested 😂

Man, Wantanabe cheated? And got removed from the Hall of Fame? That's heartbreaking, I watched him back in so many pro tour finals..

The MTV ad 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Best part about the Trevor guy’s outburst is how it undermines itself at every turn. Saying it’s just a card game and comparing it to murder, when your only punishment was that you temporarily can’t play that very game competitively… seems exactly relevant and proportional lol

I've got the incredible honor of having been screwed over by 3 of these cheaters in actual tournaments! Yay!* *I don't actually know or have a reason to think they cheated in my particular match, but considering how prolifically they cheated it'd be weird if they *didn't*.

Surprisingly Alex is playing pro poker and doing really well at it... can't help but wonder....

"Alex never made a 'mistake' that didn't go in his favor"

All the Guillaumes in the world just casually friends that play mtg? That's sus.

Note how the people stacking their opponents' decks are always engaged in talk with people, adding distraction to the mix.

Yeah, the mistakes always being in the favour of the player is a pretty big signpost. I have some friends that play Warhammer, and whenever there's a new edition, a rules update, or just something that doesn't come up too often, one player in particular always seems to understand the rule in such a way that it maximises the benefit to him. Not necessarily cheating in that case, but a willingness to not dig deeper and just accept the first answer that's good for him.

Cool video. I knew most of them, but seeing it in this condesed form blew me away. Also, what I took away from this: holy moly, Magic was on MTV in the 90s??

So that dude from the 90s MTV tournament with the Bandana is Mike Hammer. He owned Hammers Comics. I played him a bunch of times in the 90's and beat him every time and he would throw a hissy fit. He thought he was big because he was a professional arm wrestler. Total Dbag.

That first one reminds me of the Super Smash Bros player who unplugged his controller mid match, and his opponent paused the game as a courtesy. He then called for a PENALTY to the opponent since pausing is against the rules (technically true). Thankfully the judges shut him down and told him to just play.

Love this vid, Seth. As someone who has played for awhile but never got into the pro scene it’s cool to learn about the history of the game!

Excellent content! While I of course love gameplay videos, I would love to see more of this kind of stuff. Maybe "worst interpretations of new spoilers" or "most contentious card bannings".

Shoutout to that guys strong shirt buttons. Saving humanity from the horrors 😂 2:23

Is that your real voice?

I genuinely blame starcity judges for how many cases of cheaters there are, 9 times outta 10 they are barely watching games and barely know the rules. I watched a standard event and they had to call 4 judges for a simple rule clarification. It is sad to see what is essentially a referee not paying attention to a match.

Loved this style of breakdown with the use of tournament footage that shows the cheating. It’s Super informative as someone who always heard about how these players had cheated, but never saw any of the images or footage that showed it. It gives me a better idea of what to look for when playing in person. As an aside, I like that you can shuffle an opponent’s deck and your opponent can shuffle your deck, but I would also like there to be a rule that allowed you to cut your own deck when your opponent hands it back after they shuffled it in order to reduce an opponent’s ability to stack your top cards. To be clear I’d only like such a rule to allow for you to cut your deck (not shuffle a 2nd time) and you’d be allowed to do this cut ONLY IF your opponent shuffled your deck.

I tried to jump right into this video to just get a view of an entirely foreign community I know nothing about to see if I could understand it. And No. I cannot understand a word of it. I don’t understand what’s happening at all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The video is still pretty interesting even as an outsider who can’t even understand it. Good job!

Glad that you note that there are basically two eras of cheating: The early stuff in the '90s (Long, Justice) and then the stuff in the early-to-mid 2010s on the Pro Tour and (especially) SCG circuits where a ton of these guys got busts. The latter group, guys just cheating plainly on camera, is the most infuriating. (Then again, that's when I was playing competitively, and I played against some of those jackasses... so I admit it's a bit personal.)

The Mark Justice thing is a little more complicated than him just cheating, he came from a Mormon family and he cut ties with most of them because they disapproved of Magic. In his newfound freedom and fame, he started getting into drugs and would even go to tournaments tripping on acid or high on cocaine. He became unhappy with his new life, and he has said since then that the muscle sliver incident was him hoping to get caught so that he could be forced to stop, a little self-sabotage in that way. I highly suggest reading Generation Decks by Titus Chalk, it's a history of MTG that talks a lot about Mark Justice's story.

I think you guys should do a “Best Local Cheater” contest. Where, you ask us for our best local cheater stories and determine like a top 5-10.

I refuse to believe you actually talk like that

I met Alex once a few weeks before his lifetime ban. The game store he was at when he got his lifetime ban is about 20 minutes from the place I used to play magic at a few years ago. I was getting into modern and asked a friend to borrow a deck and he said his friend had one available. I showed up and was handed modern humans by Alex. Didn't even know he was notable until when he got banned and I found out who he was lol.

Oh my God, the absolute cherry on top at the very end. He has a literal full Bingo card of grifts and scams. That was a masterfully assembled breakdown and it culminates in this completely unexpected and sublime final revelation...! I feel like the critic at the end of Ratatouille. Bravo, Seth! Bravo!

It would be funny to see a tournament with only these guys in it

On mana weaving, I never played competitively back in high school but I played with friends who taught me that mana weaving was perfectly acceptable lol I didn't learn until after college that it was cheating and thankfully I learned in a casual environment and before I tried my hand at competitive play. All my friends at kitchen table were doing it so I had no idea

I grew up playing magic in the '90s and the way you talk about it is if it was the Stone age really makes me laugh

This video reminded me that I gotta practice shuffling my deck properly more

Here's a bit more info about Alex getting banned for the last time. He was playing in a smaller event in upstate NY, and he tried to take a Hardened Scaled off of an Ancient Stirrings in modern. He got called out and judges reported him to WOTC.

Oh Jared Boettcher... I remember watching the findings and what he would do with his shuffling when he was initially caught. I remember when he got 9th at pro tour Born of the gods? (I think it was born of the gods) playing Ad Nauseum, which while a modern deck you could play, wasn't that good at the time (i'm probably misremembering here but i don't really remember seeing it doing all of anything in modern at that time). I did think to myself that this dude was really good and got really lucky. then the SCG event the following weekend came around, and he was good, but not sharp at all. There was another SCG Tournament that he and alex met in the finals, and that was super awkward, because alex was a known cheater, and Boettcher had yet to be discovered. looking back on it now, it's one of the more painful things to watch back.

I strongly considered punching Bertoncini once. It was right after he'd come back from a suspension in 2013 and I played a Legacy side event he was also in where he treated me like an idiot for not agreeing to a prize split. As a grinder at the time I obviously knew he was an amoral sociopath from being in the tournament scene with him. I got uppaired against an opponent who I could have conceded to for a slightly more favorable split and instead squashed them. He approached me after the match and asked why I didn't concede and I told him that I came to game. He rolled his eyes comically and said "that was dumb." I refrained only because I was serious about the game at the time and didn't want to get a lifetime ban. Now that I no longer play I really wish that I had rearranged his smug face because it absolutely would have been worth it.

If you are caught intentionally cheating then you should be banned from competitive play for life. These people have demonstrated they lack morals and will continue to cheat because it is worth the advantage they get if the price they pay if they are caught isn't substantial.

Seeing all the punishments in a row, I kinda would also freak out at being handed a 4 year ban if you off set it to Berticini who got two bans for more with less time.

Wow, I didn't know it was like all of this. I just played for the fun and challenge. I played against someone a very long time ago in a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament just to see how it went. This kid just kept putting cards down and stared at me. Then got mad. I had to ask what it was that he played and what did it do. He yelled for a judge who told him that he was required to explain the card function since not everyone has every card memorized. He let out this noise and sulked. So here I am, at 21, playing against this teenager who is getting pissy about having to explain a card. He gets more aggressive with every time I ask. Couple this with my defensive deck that was about destroying his hand and deck, not life points, and he started throwing a tantrum. Now people are watching and it's getting worse because they're laughing too. He had played something that made discarded graveyard cards go out of play and it worked against him. Half of his deck was out of the game in about 6 turns. Finally he just yells that he forfeits the whole match because it was boring and he would lost by deck out. It turned out he had been the terror of these tournaments every weekend and had won in the double digits. He was mean-spirited and known to mock the youngest players. Never shook hands before or after a game and was known to end a match in single digit turns. He stormed outside with screaming and cursing about trash players. Never wanted to humiliate anyone but I heard that he never came back after that. The store banned him.

@12:45 I love the ad. Its very early 90s. Also, you can see it was shot on tape. The interlacing sawtooth pattern around every movement is... well part of the charm at this point, I suppose.

The classic days of pro-level unsleeved magic content.

I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a standard procedure for exactly how you must shuffle your own deck and cut your opponents. I think the lack of variance in this procedure would eliminate a lot of options for cheating, create awareness for the avenues that someone could cheat, and reduce cheating overall

The old bloom titan deck could actually kill on turn 1 with hive mind. T1 you go exile simian spirit guide for 1 mana, play amulet, play a bounce land for 2, play summer bloom, play the bounce land 3 more times to cast hive mind and then cast summoners pact and your opponent loses on their upkeep

I never got anywhere near a championship but a buddy of mine used to lie to win games. One example, I built a deck around the Kor damage transfer ability. When he realized he couldn't reliably break it -- not that I was consistently winning, mind you, just that he couldn't go 4-1 against it -- he told me the ability had been errata'd away, it simply didn't exist anymore. When I expressed doubt, he shrugged and told me I was "cheating, but if you wanna play anyway....." As if he was willing to do me the favor of lowering himself to play me after he was the one who lied. He'd lie about how combat timing worked so you couldn't block his creatures, then lie in the opposite way during your attack so HIS card would work when it shouldn't have, lie about how mulligan worked to make your hand even smaller, anything he thought he could get away with. Never occurred to me until watching this video that he was probably shuffling dirty and palming cards on top of everything else. No wonder he always had Fork and Mox Ruby in his starting hand. I am such an idiot. Anyway, I started carrying and reading the full "lawyer version" of the rules and up-to-the-minute errata on my decks. When he realized he was going to get called out literally every time, he wouldn't play me anymore. It was a moral victory.

I actually played against Tomoharu Saito at a side event once. I asked about the name Hareruya 晴れる屋, and he said it was not based on Hallelujah, but rather hare = sunny and ya = store.

At SCG Boston in 2011 Calasso Fuentes hit 4 flash freeze in games 2 and 3 very quickly against me with little deck manipulation. That loss knocked me out of top 16. A few weeks later he was banned for cheating. Absolutely infuriated me.

I normally pile shuffle outside of games and rifle shuffle inside them. This is mainly because I suck at shuffling and am trying to be careful not to damage the cards. My group also has the owner of the deck shuffle their own cards while the opponent cuts the deck. With the added rule that you can cut the deck multiple times as long as you only handle one pile at a time, it helps prevent cheating and keeps decks in the hands of those qho own them.

I remember when I "cheated" at GP Las Vegas. I played a tournament the night prior and heard someone say you could sideboard before game one(I barely knew what a sideboard was at the time). In the 0-2 bracket, I saw my opponent had red in his deck, so I sided in blue elemental blast(The deck was something I designed and I had NO IDEA what I was doing. The judge deck checked me and gave me a match loss(I think). I met with the head judge, and he had a hard time believing my story since I had a Beta Wrath of God in my deck (I bought a big collection online for 1000 dollars when I found out what ebay was). Don't listen to what other people say, know the rules. If you don't, ask a judge. I wish I hadn't sold off that Beta collection. I could've bought a house for what those things are worth now.

@13:10 "these guys don't look that tough"🤣🤣🤣 this brings tears to my eyes

David Williams should have at least an honorable mention, since while he is a very nice person and a wonderful magic player, and an outright celebrity in his own right from poker and other stuff, he was indeed caught cheating at one of the biggest tournaments of the year, Worlds 2001

I remember Mike Long being at all the major events in the early 2000's buying peoples collections and selling power cards. He offered me a mint Beta Lotus for 500 bucks but I was a broke 19 year old at the time so...really regret that decision. He would also order pizza and sell it by the slice, the dude always made out like a bandit at those events.

What I’ve learned from this video is whenever I’m playing a card game where my cards/deck are allowed to be in my opponent’s possession before I conduct any form of draw I need to make sure they shuffle cards facing down or blindfolded…😅

As a follow up to the Alex discussion, how interesting do you think a video about the worst *negative* cases of sloppy play in mtg history would be? Near the top of the list would have to be the guy (who's name I sadly forget right now) who lost a tournament because he had two cards in hand and entered combat before using the discard ability of his Hazoret and wasn't able to attack with them.

Making your opponent forget they were on the play is a good way to squeeze an extra land if your a ramp deck

The mall in my hometown was throwing a local tournament. The prize was 2 booster boxes. The deck I made wasn't great, it was kinda a jack of all trades Tempest block deck. The final guy I played had enchantments that were preventing my slivers from doing any damage to him because he was just healing way more than I could do. The card finally came, good old crappy card Tranquility, destroy all enchantments. The guy forfeited and then tried to convince the judge that I played it for free. The judge at the time was all like, you lost to Tranquility, sorry man, clearly saw my tapped mana, lol.

i amazed that you can (or could I hope) draw, shuffle etc. so fast and in such manners in pro tournaments : even when casually playing with my friends, we draw cards one by one, we shuffle cards face down and letting our opponent cut before picking up again, to ensure no "errors" are made.

LOVE the retro MTV MTG footage

Person: *Cheats at a card game because they're desperate to win* Same person: "OMG YOU CAUGHT ME CHEATING CALM DOWN IT'S JUST A CARD GAME WHY DO YOU CARE?"

I was an alternate on the worlds team in 1995, and played against both Justice and Long, Justice WAS known as a cheater back then, I remember that for sure.

Back in 2003 I played in a Grand Prix and was doing well enough that I was poised to make day 2 if I wun my last round, no idea what my opponent needed, but at 1-1 and 15 minutes left on the clock I was well ahead in the game and looked to finish him in a couple turns, he started stalling hard, after a few minute I eventually realised what he was doing and told him to play faster, he was Italian or something so he further stalled by pretending not to understand me (I had previously talked to him just fine in English). Luckily although younger than my opponent and a bit flabergasted that he seemed to be trying to cheat me, I called a judge, quickly explained the situation, but my opponent tried stalling even more with the judge proclaiming his innocence in far too many words, the judge cut him off and asked for play to continue watching over us, I did my obvious plays quickly and when my opponent again got his turn and had to show his hand to the judge he had nothing that could possible alter the game and started stalling again, the judge gave him a warning that if he didnt make a play he would get a game loss. The guy finally conceded a game that had been over for 10 minutes, snarling and muttering in italian at me and the judge before making his exit, I shared a smile with the judge and he just shaked his head, saying, im paraphrasing "Sadly cheats like these are very common and we cant catch everyone doing it". Oh btw this was a limited grand prix and day 2 went horrible in the draft and I was quickly eliminated.