I Want to Play a Fair Game

This is one of those pieces I talked about making publicly available, because I want it to reach as many folks in the community as possible!

Table of Contents

• Being a Little Shit to LSV

• The Levine Trench and Rules Lawyering

• Cheating and You

• What Do We Do About It?

• Judges, Warnings, and Witch Hunts

• I Want to Play a Fair Game

Being a Little Shit to LSV

In the interest of not getting too preachy right off the bat, let's start by being clear about who this piece is really preaching to: my past self. Behold, 2017 Ryan's "Team Sealed Mental Approach" document:

Team Sealed is my favorite MTG format, and you can see I used to be a bit of a psycho about it.

This was a document I wrote up and shared with my teammates who I went to some team sealed Grand Prixs with in college. (who were already my friends and were bought into taking the whole thing seriously, but who I considered slightly worse players than me, and I wanted to make sure as much as possible to have them follow my lead so that we could win).

There's some good stuff in there, but there's also some stuff I'm not very proud of ("if this flusters them, good... we will not sacrifice an edge to be nice"... yikes!!!!). These bullet points overall don't describe behavior that creates a welcoming community. It's not like I was just a dumb tryhard kid either (or rather, I was, but I was old enough not to be). This was junior & senior year of college, I was at least very close to being an adult if not one already.

I didn't exactly face many negative consequences for this approach. My teammates Avi, Mora, and Griffin bought in, and we had a great time at these tournaments while following these guidelines. Grand Prix Cleveland, Amonkhet Team Sealed, even brought us a taste of high level success for the first time. On day 1 we beat a Ben Stark-led team, and on day 2 we got to play against Peach Garden Oath, the best team sealed team of all time, and a team with LSV and some other CFB folks (I don't remember exactly who since it's been so long). We ended up in 11th place, a single win away from all of our first Pro Tour qualification. We lost both matches, but put up a real fight. I remember feeling like I belonged among the best.

Afterwards, I was so excited that I posted in the LR subreddit just to brag about the accomplishment - and I tagged LSV to ask him a question about something that had happened in our match. He responded with some kind, but challenging words:

This naturally kickstarted a long discussion among other LR fans that I don't think it would be productive to link to here, but safe to say that lots of people thought I was an asshole, and current me thinks that LSV is entirely in the right.

Today I want to talk about the 'why' behind this story-- Why I was like this earlier in my Magic "career", why it's such a common pattern of behavior, and why I think we need to continue growing past it.

The Levine Trench and Rules Lawyering

To do this, I'm going to shamelessly steal content and wisdom from my elders (thanks Luis!), and try to add my own contributions about how we can all try to carry this torch forward as much as possible. But first...

This is what's known to Magic boomers like myself as "The Levine Trench". You can read about it here:

https://www.raginglevine.com/levinetrench

The basic idea is that assholery is highly correlated with being good, but not great, at the game. I think when I was writing these team sealed rules, I was smack dab in the "almost good" tier -- and though I don't think I was quite a horrible misanthrope, I was for sure engaging in some behavior between the "average" and "kind of a dbag" categories. Let's try to understand why.

To understand how this curve gets created, we have to understand a few things:

• Magic is a welcoming place for people with poor social skills

• Success in competitive Magic comes with social rewards

• Magic is a game designed to hide its' difficulty and get you to focus on the wrong things

Magic has been, and always will be, a space for social misfits. This is a good thing! I wouldn't want it to be any different. Competitive and casual players alike enjoy playing the game because it is a social setting that feels more comfortable for them than more mainstream ones.

I can't speak to how the Magic social system works on the casual end of things, but I can certainly say that in the competitive scene, there is a high correlation between a player's tournament success and their social success. This is, to a certain extent, unavoidable -- Any competitive endeavor necessarily directs attention, praise, and social connections towards those who succeed.

However, the combination of this with the social illiteracy of many magic players means that lots of players end up internalizing the lessons of this system a bit too literally. People like me love clear rules about how to socialize, and the structure of Magic tournaments provides this: Follow the rules to the letter, maximize your chances to win, and you will be rewarded. Oh, and try not to be an asshole I guess... outside of the things you do within the rules that would normally be asshole behavior but are, here, completely legal and allowed.

The final piece of the equation is that Magic is a game that is extremely "lenticular". What do I mean by this? I'm borrowing this usage of "lenticular" from Mark Rosewater when he talks about Lenticular Design. The basic concept is that there are aspects of card design/utility that are invisible to newer players, and only able to be recognized by more experienced ones. For a very simple example, most newer players will view Searing Spear and Volcanic Hammer as extremely similar cards, almost the same card, but experienced players will recognize that Spear is a lot more powerful (and harder to play with) because of the significant added optionality.

All of Magic is like this, all the way up to the highest levels. There are many aspects of skill in the game that newer players will see as simple (and drastically mess up without realizing they're doing so), but experienced players will have a hard time with, yet handle significantly better - simply because they are operating at a level where they can see the difficulty. The biggest barrier to improvement in Magic tends not to be ability to think through difficult questions, but the ability to ask them in the first place.

So, to recap: We've got a game that is appealing to people who have a hard time connecting with others socially in general, a system that provides social rewards for success, and a game that well-obfuscates its own difficulty and complexity.

Players who get to the "almost good" section of the difficulty curve often run into a point where they can no longer figure out how to improve. They're better than most of the players at their local shop, and can consistently win against the average player, but for some reason (probably just variance, right?), they seem to come up short in their opportunities at the higher levels of play. Clearly, they're already good enough, so what's missing?

This is when we see players like me in 2017, deep in the "almost good" trench, focusing so hard on tournament rules and how to operate within them so precisely as to give themselves the maximum possible advantage while not technically doing anything "wrong".

Magic is a game with incredibly complex rules - So complex, in fact, that you can literally create a computer within Magic's rules engine. On top of this, Magic also needs to have an entirely separate set of rules for how to run its tournaments, an entirely separate set of rules for how to do so digitally... you get the point. I'm not going to make you read through all the pdfs, I certainly haven't.

The complexity of these rules (and the nature of rule systems themselves) make it very difficult to navigate games and tournaments of Magic perfectly, and somewhat possible for people to exploit them in bad faith to gain unfair advantages. Not only does this create a pretty intimidating environment for newer players who are interested in starting in the competitive scene, it also is the perfect scapegoat for more experienced players who run up against a wall where they can no longer figure out how to improve meaningfully at the game.

If you can't see what you're doing differently from players who seem to be succeeding more than you, it's very easy to treat navigating the Magic tournament rules as the only remaining battlefield on which to fight. At best, this looks like the hyper-compliant but unethical and unsporting behavior I directed my team to engage in above, sometimes it looks like more blatant angle-shooting.

Some players take it even further -- at its worst, this behavior turns into blatant cheating.

Cheating and You

We need to talk about cheating.

Cheating is, to some meaningful extent, a continuation of this mentality, albeit one that represents crossing a line, and is a deep personal failing, both morally and in becoming skilled at the game you care so much about.

I won't pretend to fully understand the psychology behind someone who consciously decides to cheat at Magic and spends tangible effort developing this as a skill, but I do think that for a lot of people who do, something like the rules optimization above taken to an unethical place is what's going on at a fundamental level. Entitlement is an emotional trait that cheaters consistently demonstrate when they are being investigated or caught. Players who get caught consistently cheating over long periods of time almost to a person tend to react as if harm is being done to them, as if they have an inherent right to their achievements and status. This obviously makes no logical sense, but the emotional sense it makes is pretty clear -- These players were starting from a point of believing they were good enough to win, and the cheating, to them, was just the necessary step to actualize their "deserved" success. It might even start as a desire to "optimize" their performance under the tournament rules, and slowly bleed into exploiting and avoiding the rules as if that's just another area of skill to master.

That being said, I don't think systematic cheaters are the only danger area for Magic.

As convenient as it would be to believe that there are cheaters and then there are good people, and the categories can be cleanly split, this is just not a true fact.

We have to reckon with this if we want to have an accurate understanding of why tournament rules are necessary and how to conduct ourselves in relation to them. Some people might not understand what I'm saying here, so I want to give a few examples:

• It's round 7, game 1 of Worlds. You're 5-1, and off your Thundertrap Trainer, you see an Into the Flood Maw. which is a sideboard card. You don't intend to take it, but you know for a fact you've forgotten to de-sideboard from the previous match. No one's watching -- you just reveal the TTABE, shuffle the rest to the bottom of your library, and proceed with the game you're already winning instead of calling a judge and risking a game loss.

• (I actually called a judge and got a warning)

• You're playing at the Pro Tour with a deck that contains Blightsteel Colossus, a card that your deck usually cheats into play. You're a Magic boomer, and remember that Darksteel Colossus cost 11 mana, and you realize you have 11, so you can hardcast your Blightsteel. A turn later, you realize that Blightsteel actually costs 12. You call a judge, and they rule that it's too late to back up, so the creature stays in play. You have gained a game-winning advantage that you could have gained by acting intentionally without anyone knowing, and it's even been explicitly allowed by the judge. You decide to keep playing the game as the judge instructed you to do.

• (This happened to Martin Juza, who ignored the colossus until he could tap 12 mana to "cast" it)

• You figure out that you have a life total discrepancy with your opponent in your PTQ win-and-in. They think you're at 14, and you think you're at 16. They try to recreate the combat math from the last couple of turns and say "sorry, I'm wrong, I only attacked with my 2/2 twice". Two turns later, you glimpse a Street Wraith in your graveyard but decide to say nothing, since both players have already made decisions based on the current life totals, and you rationalize that it's just been missed. You're a Death's Shadow deck anyways, so being at a higher life total might not even be advantageous for you.

• (I made this one up)

• You say "combat?" and your opponent says "yup", and then you say "okay, I'll attack with these". The opponent says "in response, I'll tap one of them". You say "just to be clear, are we in my attack step?" and they say "yes, but I wanted to tap one". You say "you can't do that, attacking doesn't go on the stack, so you can't respond to my attack, you have to do it before my attack step." Everything you've said is one hundred percent true - you understand the rules of the game better than your opponent. You didn't tell them that there is a beginning of combat step that is different from the declare attackers step, and capitalized on this misunderstanding to get them to communicate the wrong thing.

• (I made this one up too, but it's loosely based on the vehicle crewing/"combat?" shortcut drama from almost a decade ago)

These are all unethical behavior, but only the first and the third I believe are clearly defined as cheating by the tournament rules. The second one is legal, but clearly egregiously unfair, and the last one is something I think many existing players would argue is "fair" in some sense, but also is a very disrespectful way to treat your opponent. They each have different levels of impact on the outcome of the game, different degrees of legality, and degrees to which they are ethically wrong.

The unfortunate fact is that you can come up with a scenario for pretty much any combination of impact, legality, ethics, and stakes. These situations come up in tournaments all the time -- sometimes due to players being insufficiently skilled at keeping track of their own games, sometimes due to players having poor rules knowledge, sometimes due to poor communication or language barriers, and sometimes due to fatigue at the end of a long day or the pressure of a high-stakes match.

Some folks may feel like these scenarios are all obviously wrong and are things they'd never do. Some might be feeling slightly defensive about one or two of them, thinking that they might be fine, or fine if slightly modified. The point I'm trying to make is that there is almost infinite variation in possible scenarios that can come up - which is why the stakes can become a factor if we're not careful.

Psychological factors matter here. We are in competitive Magic because we want to win, because succeeding gives us a sense of empowerment, pride, and accomplishment. When we crank the dial all the way up on the stakes side of things and all the way down on the impact, it's easy to see how the weight of potentially getting a game loss at a top-tables Worlds match vs. the impact of "just having a sideboard card on the bottom of my library" could at least present some challenging emotional scales to wrestle with.

Earlier in my Magic career, I have certainly thought more strenuously about letting low-impact things pass by unnoticed when I cared deeply about the stakes and didn't want something I had worked so hard for to slip by because I'd made a mistake unrelated to the game that gave me an extremely minor advantage. If someone can't admit this, it's possible they're a perfect angel both inside and out. I'm sure some of those people exist, but I think it's more likely that they don't have good tools for self-perception, or are just conveniently omitting something that makes them look bad (who would ever do that?? clearly not them...).

Another thing we have to deal with is that fundamentally, many of these behaviors are indistinguishable when it comes to intent. If a player makes a mistake and never acknowledges it, there's just no way to know whether they knew about it or didn't. The reality might even be more in the middle than that! Some players spend more effort learning to detect their own mistakes, and some spend less - so even though they might actually be making many mistakes in their own favor without being aware of it, it's not obvious to me that this is completely morally acceptable behavior either.

The point I'm trying to make is that the thing we have to deal with isn't just that there exist some evil people called cheaters who intentionally set out to win games of magic by tricking their opponents and the judges, and the rest of the innocent population who must be protected from those monsters. Those people do exist, and need to be proactively driven out of our spaces, but the reality is that there is a spectrum of possible bad behavior in Magic tournaments, and the fantasy of a clear-cut line between ethical and abhorrent, legal and illegal, clean and dirty, is doing us a disservice if we want to play a game that is both fair and welcoming to all.

What Do We Do About It?

There is always going to be drama and intrigue in the Magic community about cheating. It's never going to be possible to completely eliminate or detect with perfect certainty - the rules are too complicated and the game is too difficult to track to ensure 100% detection of instances where people try to operate illegally in the fine margins. Moreover, quite often, intent is genuinely impossible to prove. This means that it will always be possible to get away with cheating... sometimes.

To me, there are two goals -- Detection of people who systematically abuse or disobey the rules for their own advantage, and creating an environment that is welcoming enough to newer players who, when they eventually make mistakes, will still be able to have a good tournament experience and come to love this beautiful game and the joys of competing in it.

These goals might feel at odds with each other, or at least it's very easy to create a lot of tension in one area by attempting to solve the other. How do we solve both problems at once? What is the kind of behavior that is needed to create a culture that can do this?

I want to argue for a proactive ethic in the community that is focused on playing fair games of Magic.

What does it mean to play a "fair" game of magic, and why does this theoretically solve both problems? Let's discuss. To me, this is what a fair game of magic means:

A fair game of Magic is one that is decided by a combination of the natural variance in the game and both players' in-game strategic decisions in a timely manner.

There are multiple elements of this that I want to cover separately.

First off, and very importantly -- Magic is a game of variance. This definition is not at all related to any notions of a "fair game" being one where both players had interesting decisions and a real chance to win. Games where one player mulligans to 4, keeps a 1-lander, and dies without playing a spell are equally "fair" games to those that go 20 turns and swing on multiple key decisions, because they are an outcome of the game's rules engine, which includes variance, working properly. If you don't understand this you are not ready to play tournament Magic.

Let's touch on the last part too - "in a timely manner".

Playing at a reasonable pace is an essential part of keeping a game of magic fair.

Playing significantly more slowly than your opponent is stealing from them. Even if it's not intentionally being done to stall a match towards a draw when you'd otherwise lose and is just because you can't make your decisions quickly enough to finish the match, it's still unacceptable behavior.

I wish tournament Magic didn't have to test the skill of playing quickly, but in order to give everyone else a good experience, this is a necessary skill to test. If you want to play competitive untimed Magic, you have ample opportunities to do that on your own (it's an extremely rewarding activity!).

The 50 minutes allotted for a match is intended to be used by both players to roughly equal degree. I really wish Magic worked in a way that was conducive to real-life chess clocks, but with the way priority works, it just isn't - and this allows players to very easily abuse the system, even unintentionally. Playing quickly enough so that your actions take roughly half of the allotted time is part of playing the game ethically.

The last time I had a draw in a big paper tournament (tracked by https://mtgeloproject.net) was in 2014. It is my only recorded draw out of 168 matches. Unintentional draws happen, but they happen rarely enough for me that I'm quite sure I'm not accidentally stealing from my opponents. Are you?

This is the most difficult aspect of the game to enforce. It is uncomfortable to be asked to play faster, especially if you're a newer player who's still overwhelmed with the tournament setting and the complexity of the games. If your opponent is clearly struggling with this, I'd really encourage folks to do so with as much kindness as possible, but people should be encouraging opponents to play faster far more than they actually do because of the social difficulties it entails. Obviously, the corollary to this is that if your opponent is encouraging you to play faster, unless it's egregiously aggressive and clearly trying to get in your head, you shouldn't get upset or think they're being rude. If you think something actively shady is going on, call a judge and ask them to watch the match for slow play on both sides!

The best way I've found to do this is to first say something like "let's make sure to play at a pace where we can finish the match", then if the issue persists, something slightly more directed at them like "I'd appreciate if you could play slightly faster so that we can finish in time", and finally, something explicit like "I'm going to respectfully ask you to make a decision pretty soon".

Finally, the big one, is that the game is otherwise decided by both players' in-game strategic decisions. This means that we need to do our best to factor out things that aren't in-game strategic decisions. What is NOT an in-game strategic decision? What are we trying to exclude as factors in deciding games?

• Communication errors like your opponent saying "in response to your attack, I'll tap one of your guys"

• Communication errors like your opponent saying "I'll block here and take 10, wait no that's lethal -- okay I'll block here" (when they meant to say, or could have easily said, "IF* **I block here I WOULD take 10")*

• Your team sealed opponents showing you part of their deck while they shuffle

• Your opponent saying "play this, your go", and then quickly adding as you draw your card "wait, and also play this land, sorry. Is that fine?"

• Your opponent forgetting their speed trigger and remembering it on your turn, after you've drawn a card and played a land

These things are all plausible ways that mistakes could happen in a game that, if the players involved choose to rigidly enforce them, will take away from the impact of the actual gameplay decisions being made on the game's outcome. If you treat every mistake like this as an opportunity to gain a legal in-game advantage over your opponent, you are trying to win tournament matches by means other than playing games of Magic well, and I believe this is a focus that will ultimately result in you stagnating in your improvement at the game.

However, there are also different ways the game can be affected by outside forces that are not mistakes, but malicious activity:

• Your opponent casting their Traverse the Ulvenwald without delirium, but tutoring up a creature anyways

• Your opponent realizing that you probably have a trick when your hand twitches ever so slightly towards your cards after they declare a block, and immediately "clarifying" that they're still thinking about whether these blocks are final

• Your opponent consistently "forgetting" their own painland damage, but remembering to mark your life total down with every hopeless nightmare

• Your opponent forgetting their speed trigger while at low life, then playing a Speed Demon on their next turn

Some of these, like the last example, are not so easy to disentangle from the first examples. I'm obviously advocating for choosing to allow some degree of "takebacks" and giving your opponent their missed triggers, but I'm not saying you should do this blindly. Minor infractions, especially if they're rare and accompanied by other non-beneficial mistakes are one thing, but anything that has the potential to give them a large advantage (even if it's just an information advantage), a mistake that would be hard to make accidentally, or a pattern of minor, but consistently beneficial errors, is something to at least call a judge about, and consider holding your opponent to the consequences of based on your read of the situation.

The unifying theme here is playing fair games of Magic. When this is the bedrock principle, both leniency and vigilance start to make sense together as a coherent framework for how we want to operate at the table.

We also need to apply this to ourselves. The larger the mistake, the more potential it has to give us an unfair advantage, the less we should ask for it to be corrected, undone, or allowed to affect the game in our favor.

There are many good reasons to be even more strenuous in the standards we hold ourselves to:

• It has signaling benefits for creating a community of responsible "fair game" operators

• It trains us to pay attention to our communication and operations in games of Magic, which can have benefits to our play & concentration

• It can provide long-term selfish social benefits!!

• (If you haven't read Gerry's Social Currency article before, now's the time. It's probably one of the best articles ever written, and it's kinda about magic too.)

Players who hold themselves to high standards, try to give their opponents every opportunity to play a game decided by their own strategic decisions, and play at a reasonable pace create a good environment and set a good example for newer players. They are also well liked, and this is a well-earned social benefit of being a heads-up player who is explicitly not trying to use every edge available to them within the tournament rules.

Doing this also doesn't have to come at the expense of being vigilant about people trying to cheat - In fact, practicing tight game operations and the ability to distinguish between genuine errors and patterns of opportunistic behavior will make you a stronger community member when it comes to sniffing out foul play. The two don't have to be at odds.

Still, this system isn't enough to protect ourselves from cheaters entirely. It's time to talk about judges!

Judges, Warnings, and Witch Hunts

It turns out there are people who actually have read the long-form rules of Magic, or at least train in trying to apply these rules in a fair way! These people are called judges. They provide the underpaid labor that is completely essential to the existence of Magic tournaments in the first place.

Unfortunately, this section of the piece has to acknowledge the difficulties the judge program has faced in recent years. I am not the best person to tell this story, but my friend Elliot has written an excellent piece about it. In short, WOTC got scared a few years ago by a group of judges trying to argue that they were legally employees of the company, and fully pulled their support for the entire judge program. Since then there have been various organizations trying to fill this void, but none have successfully replicated the support and infrastructure that once existed.

Judges serve multiple absolutely essential purposes at Magic events. First, they actually run the tournament -- Setting up tables and table numbers, distributing packs for limited, generating pairings, etc. They also act as an impartial rules enforcer, who you can go to if you don't understand how the rules work in a certain situation. They also serve as a protection system against cheaters.

Judges are almost always neutral, well-meaning, and trained on how the rules of the game and the tournament system work. That being said, they are not robots or gods, they are people. They will make mistakes sometimes. Just like referees in sports, judges are often the easy scapegoat when anything frustrating happens at a tournament. The important thing to know is that there will be a certain mistake rate -- usually one that is lower than it sounds from the amount of complaining that players do -- but judging mistakes do happen, especially when the community is as under-supported and decentralized as it is right now.

That being said -- It's so, so, so, SO much better to have judges present and involved in adjudicating tricky tournament situations than to not have them. You know who makes lots of mistakes in making the game & tournament function properly? PLAYERS!!! Not only are players biased towards their own tournament performance, most are just plain bad at understanding the game rules, the tournament rules, and detecting cheating. This isn't our fault -- we are not trained to do this! But it becomes our fault when we try and do something we are not trained to do, and pretend like we have more knowledge than the people who are literally being paid (admittedly, not enough) to know.

If you don't know what to do at a Magic tournament, call a judge. Call a judge!!!!!!!

With that basic PSA out of the way, the main reason I wanted to cover judges is to talk about their role in detecting cheating. This is a severely misunderstood thing in the Magic community, and there has been a lot of drama around it recently - some of it justified, most of it not.

We talked before about how many behaviors can either be cheating or honest mistakes, and the only way to tell the difference on a case-by-case basis is by interpreting intent. The only way to tell if someone is exploiting the rules in their favor is by watching them over a long period of time, usually significantly more than a single round or even tournament, and see if they are consistently making mistakes that only benefit them and never hurt them. This is impossible to do if you're their opponent for only a single round!

The judge system fills this gap by issuing and tracking warnings. Warnings are escalating penalties that start off without impact, but can grow to game losses, match losses, or even disqualification from the tournament. If a player is consistently making mistakes in their favor, the idea is that every time they do so, they'll get a warning, and these warnings will start to escalate into harsher and harsher penalties, disincentivizing the repeated pattern.

I cannot emphasize this enough...

THIS. SYSTEM. ONLY WORKS. IF A JUDGE IS CALLED. AND A WARNING IS ISSUED.

You should call a judge for any mistake that is significant enough that it could be used to give one player an unfair advantage -- either by you or your opponent.

You should be glad that the tournament rules are working effectively when that mistake results in either or both players receiving a warning!!! Yes, even if the mistake was completely unintentional, and yes, even if you think you could fix it on your own. We need to track these mistakes in order to detect cheaters. I'll say it again: WE NEED TO TRACK THESE MISTAKES IN ORDER TO DETECT CHEATERS.

It's understandable to be frustrated when you make multiple low-impact mistakes and end up getting a penalty like a game loss for behavior that was completely unintentional and ends up in a penalty that feels way harsher than is necessary -- but I want to make the argument that in most cases, when a penalty like this is issued, it is a fair outcome. It's not that we want to punish players severely for making mistakes - it's that we want to have harsh enough punishments for making repeated mistakes in your own favor, or mistakes that are large enough to give someone a big advantage if made intentionally.

Whenever you get a harsh penalty for making a genuine mistake at a magic tournament, it is because you unintentionally behaved in a way that was indistinguishable enough from cheating that the tournament system needs to punish it in order to disincentivize cheating. This is a necessary part of running tournaments fairly.

The final piece of the puzzle here is a system where long-term, repeated patterns of sketchy behavior have very severe consequences for the players we actually need to root out of our game. If someone is continuously getting caught for things that are hard to distinguish from cheating, even if there is a way to construct a plausibly deniable case for their innocence, it is extremely likely that they don't belong in the community, and we need good mechanisms to enforce this.

Unfortunately, WOTC and the diminished judge program have been failing at this task recently. Last year, the winner of the European Regional Championship Marc Tobiasch committed multiple highly impactful mistakes in his favor on camera throughout the tournament, including the casting Traverse the Ulvenwald without delirium and tutoring a creature example that I mentioned earlier. If these all happened on camera, surely Marc had even more opportunities to gain advantages with these "mistakes" off-camera. Marc won the tournament, and to my knowledge received no formal punishment. Cedric Phillips and Patrick Sullivan talked about this on their podcast, and I highly recommend watching this clip about it -- they are great folks to follow if you want to absorb more "boomer knowledge" about how to spot cheaters in Magic.

When the judge system and the larger competitive play structure refuse to crack down on patterns of consistently unethical tournament behavior (in the case of WOTC, likely because this would be a tacit acknowledgement of a problem and a bad PR hit for tournament magic), it falls to the community to regulate itself via social sanctions, which are often brought about through drama and gossip. This is not inherently a bad thing -- it's good for the community to be able to talk to itself and recognize the patterns of bad actors within it.

Unfortunately, lots of Magic players are extremely bad at figuring out what is cheating and what isn't. The main mistake that constantly gets made is people trying to interpret whether a specific situation IS or ISN'T cheating. As we've already covered, the answer most of the time is simply "you can't know". Sometimes a cheat will be blatantly obvious, but most of the time, players who are able to succeed in tournaments while cheating are going to be good enough at it to not get caught red-handed -- they'll have some extent of plausible deniability.

The key is to watch for the patterns -- and the entitlement. Typically if a player is called out for sketchy behavior and they mean well, they'll be able to accurately describe & apologize for what they did wrong, adjust their behavior to strenuously avoid making the same kind of mistake, and maybe even take proactive steps to show the community that they care about playing fair games of Magic by allowing some degree of leniency for their opponents' mistakes (imagine that!).

If a player reacts by being defensive and entitled, saying they are being unfairly maligned and targeted and shouldn't have to change or justify themselves -- well, you've either got a cheater, or a sloppy player who is unwilling to take responsibility for the way their behavior lets bad actors operate in the margins. Either way, it's a reason to push back socially, and to make it clear that this kind of thing isn't acceptable in our community. (Obviously, there should also be some extent of "watch their hands, not their lips" here -- if a player apologizes profusely but continues making sloppy mistakes that are consistently in their favor, that's a dangerous sign).

I Want to Play a Fair Game

My brother (a pretty skilled Magic player in his own right) is a world-class Ultimate Frisbee player.

Ultimate is an intense, competitive sport with professional players and high-stakes tournaments.

They also have a deeply ingrained cultural practice of self-officiating.One sentence from this page particularly stood out to me:

"Teams consider ‘The Game’ to be more important than winning or losing and thus strive to treat each game, their opponents and their team mates with equal respect at all times."

The part I love most about this is how it emphasizes "the game" itself as something that needs respect. I have a massive amount of respect for the game of Magic, and if you're ever going to get anywhere in the competitive scene, you need to as well.

Obviously, Magic is a different game. I don't know how an entirely self-officiated Magic tournament would go, even in a different world where we had a long history of building this kind of culture, and I'm not by any means saying that we should try to apply this today (you can probably tell based on how much I value the presence of judges).

That being said, I think we could learn a thing or two, or maybe three, from Ultimate. The Magic community has a long history with cheating, rules lawyering, and community drama when it comes to both. Most of the time, the emotional thrust of this discussion is how we can all protect ourselves from cheaters -- but I love this community enough to see how narrow-minded that focus is, and I think we can do better.

I started this piece because I thought there were lessons to learn from my past behavior - trying to operate as tightly within the game & tournament rules as possible to gain maximum win equity. I can now see how this focus was compensation (and cope) for my inability to see the higher levels of skill within the game. Luis was right when he said "I think you can find plenty of ways to win without employing bush-league tactics such as these". As I've gotten better, I've only kept realizing how many more productive problems there are to solve in Magic than how to gain advantages by peeking at your teammate's opponent's cards while they shuffle or accepting the legal benefits from errors they make in the game that are truly unintentional. Worrying about things like this is literally a poor use of your time and mental energy and bad process when it comes to getting better at Magic.

Trying to capitalize on my opponents' missed triggers and communication errors (when it's clear they're not being used to gain advantages) might benefit me in the very short term, but it also directly alienates me from the outcomes of the matches of Magic I play if they had been played "fairly" within the spirit of the rules. This is a barrier to getting better in the long run, something I now value more highly than any individual tournament match.

I want to become the best player in the world more than I want to win the specific game in front of me, and the only way I'll do that is by focusing on the things I can control and the things that matter. I truly believe now that what matters above all else, not just for ethical reasons but for actually improving at winning matches, is respecting the game.

Reaching the highest levels of achievement in Magic involves seeing how many opportunities there are for improvement and skill expression within the existing rules engine, and without turning the tournament rules into their own battlefield.

• When I mistakenly cast my Aatchik without double black in round 1 of an RCQ the other day and only realized it a turn later, I called a judge and expected to receive a game loss (I only got a warning, which I'm not sure was a good decision).

• When my semifinals opponent in the same RCQ targeted an 0/4 with a 3-damage removal spell, thought for a second, and then said "sorry I'm going to target this 3/3 instead", I let him take it back.

• When Martin Juza passed the turn in our Pro Tour match without creating an Everywhere token and ticking down his overlord, then realized it on my turn, I first called a judge, then allowed him to put the triggers back on the stack after he'd received a warning.

• (For an example of when this behavior might be sketchy enough to raise alarm bells, look no further than James Dimitrov, the finalist of the same PT, missing his Everywhere trigger during a top 8 match when he knew his opponent had Sunspine Lynx on top of their library... while remembering the trigger from his white overlord. Later, he would tweet that he "could've and should've been a champion").

• When I milled a Glitch-Ghost Surveyor  in the first round of day 2 of the same Pro Tour, I fanned out the milled cards, and when I wasn't sure if my opponent had seen it, I pointed it out to her to make sure she knew it was in my graveyard.

I went 11-5 at the Pro Tour and I conceded the finals of the RCQ (I didn't need the invite).

It turns out I'm extremely good at playing magic now - and I believe I'm taking the right approach to getting better.

I believe in our community's ability to do better. I want to play a fair game.