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.

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.

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

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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…

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?!

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.

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

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.

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.