MTG Salvation

I'd like to begin by assuring any readers that I do not cheat at, nor plan to cheat at Magic: The Gathering in any way, shape or form. Now due to several games against a younger player at my school in which this player cheated, my curiosity was peaked (the player in question is currently at a poor skill level at both magic and cheating, and was caught in each instance) at the particular methods and more importantly, how to counter cheating.

Now in my quick google search, I came across more links to "Duel of the Planeswalker, Cheats and Walkthroughs", then I did to the topic in question. My stubborn persistence won out over the unhelpful links however, and I came up with enough information to learn quite a few things. Now there are a number of different ways to cheat, and while I won't detail those (for obvious reasons, i don't wish to teach people how to cheat, but aid in the fight against cheaters and cheating), the information on how to defeat cheating was scare and hard to come by. Some of it is common sense, some of it is not.

Now on to the first counter-measure! Fighting the stack. In this case, I don't mean the stack we use to resolve spells and abilities, but rather the method of arranging cards in a deck to a certain pattern. There are many ways for a cheater to stack the deck, some obvious, some so subtle that even with a judge watching the shuffling, nothing seems amiss. The easiest way to combat this form of cheating is relatively simple; when it comes to your opportunity to cut your opponent's deck, riffle shuffle it at least seven times before handing the deck back. This does entitle your oppoenent to a final cut, but any pregame arrangement is rendered useless by doing this. NOTE: ALWAYS BE GENTLE AND RESPECTFUL WITH YOUR OPPONENT'S CARDS. THERE IS NO REASON TO WARP THE CARDBOARD BEYOND WHAT IS NEEDED TO SHUFFLE THE DECK.

This does raise the question, isn't pile shuffling sufficent randomization? Easy answer. No. The proper ratio can be tricky to work out, however if you pile shuffle the proper number of times, the order of the cards in the deck will have undergone no change. This is why you always want to shuffle your opponent's deck if all they have done is pile shuffle (or better yet, call a judge over. It won't win you the game, but by doing that you alert the officals that your opponent might be up to something fishy). In any case, it is a good idea to shuffle your opponent's deck even if you don't suspect foul play.

The second biggest tip to combat cheating is to, at the end of every turn, ask how many cards in hand. Yes, the person can lie, yes the person can palm a card or stack a card behind another, howeverbeing attentive can shut down most cheating methods. If there seems to be an issue, ask your opponent to backtrack over the last few turns and find out where that extra card came from. If that person shouldn't have it, call the judge. Likewise, try to keep track of the cards in the graveyard. If there should be a Doomblade in your oppoonent's graveyard, then when your opponent plays a second one, logic (and basic addition) dictate that there should be two Doomblades chilling in the graveyard.

Track life totals on pen and paper. This is just a good habit to be in. It takes a little extra effort, but in the long run it is worth it. How often has your table been bumped, shifting the life counters by a side or two. Ever sworn that your opponent was down one life that would put him or her into perfect Lightning Bolt range? Pen and paper are much more resistent to random happenstance then dice are, and much easier to use as a record of the game.

It is at this time I'd like to point key differences between the great cheaters, the good cheaters and the bad cheaters. With a great cheater, we'll never know if it was dumb-luck or great skill, but that is why taking precautions (such as always shuffling the deck), is so important. Great cheating at magic is incredibly hard to do, near impopssible to combat and few people have ever mastered it.
A good cheater is not so subtle and/or not as intellegent about his or her cheating. This is the cheater that convienently forgets tiggers, or happens to end up with an extra card in hand. These are the cheaters that can and do get caught. Remeber, when you do catch them, call a judge and calmly and clearly state your case and suspicions. The majority of the time, the judge will set things to rights and the game will progess (if you weren't the first to call the cheater into question then the judge will take that into account in his or her assessment).
A bad cheater is just utterly transparent to everyone about. These are the players that sort through their deck, put a card ontop, and then find that land they were looking for. These are the players that seem to have the same opening hand, game after game after game, and these are the players that magically have the same removal spell for the fifth time in a row.

A common misconception about cheating in a magic game is, "oh, if I just put these three cards on the top of my deck, I'll win." I suppose that can be true, but shuffling will utterly collapse that strategy. The great cheaters always seem to have that one card in hand to disrupt our combo, just happen to top deck just what they needed to win, and never get caught. The talent it takes to cheat well often goes hand-in-hand with the talent to play magic well. Agaainst such a subtle character, it is probably you'll never actually see something, but if you are at all suspicious, call a judge over to watch or explain your suspicions after the game. By letting an official know that a person might be cheating, it increases the chance of that person being caught, and that is a good thing for all the magic players out there, playing by the rules.

OKay doke, starting to allot slots to thigns, assuming a non-standard 38-22 land split (might've gone 36-24, but I've got a couple fixers in the mix).



These leaves how I'm going to sort the land balance. Which I'm going to do later.

Well I have some idea of what cards go where (in relation to sideboard, main deck, and cards I'm just not sure about) so I'm sorting my pool by that first and then I'm going to be looking for appropiate filler.

Just a pet project of mine, hopefully will take off a Black-Green Type 2 deck. Looking aggro/kill or something along those lines. Anyways:

• Sword of Vengeance
  
• Grave Titan
  
• Primeval Titan
  
• Obstinate Baloth
  
• Acidic Slime
  
• Cultivate
  
• Mitotic Slime
  
• Leyline of Vitality
  
• Doomblade
  
• Duress
  
• Rise From the Grave
  
• Sign in Blood
  
• Memoricide
  
• Necrotic Ooze
  
• Skinrender
  
• Plummet
  
• Mul Daya Channelers
  
• Pelakka Wurm
  
• Vengevine

This is list that I'm working from, with a little tweaking.

So yes, I am a budding programmer/gave developer. I am currently working on two different projects, a combat arena racer and a limited 3d space rts (whoo-hoo for vagueness XD). I am fairly competent at making models, and once I finish getting all the pieces together, should be good to program it all and get them both moved out the door like unwanted stepchildren (actually that was a bad joke, makes me a bad person and a lier, because I love these games like my yet to be conceived children XD). But one of the worst things about me is that I have absolutely no attention span for making, cleaning, tweaking and fixing the texture maps for my models. For example, I whipped up a star fighter model in about an hour. I had the UV map sorted in thirty minutes and a basic texture map done in another half hour. I then have spent 6+ hours cleaning the texture map across the past 4 days and it bugs me. However I've gotten better so the rest shouldn't be as such a big deal. I might post pictures of this model and a teaser for this new game I'm working on (I also might start a development thread where I'll ask people for opinions and whatnot depending on the legal ramifications because I don't want to have to fight for ownership rights for the intellectual property that I have come up with, screw sharing, it's mine! >.o all mine!)

Anyhoo, teasers to come soon!

After an awesome prerelease event (I mean my girlfriend was able to root for me throughout the whole thing and it was awesome!), I'm making plots to hit the release party this coming Saturday. I ran r/b/g for my first two matches, and w/b/g for the last few and left the event with a 2-1-3 (w-t-l) record and a foil (yes, that's right), a foil Lighthouse Chronologist which I'm considering gifting to my girlfriend for being such an awesome sport about being kept out to past midnight (she plays magic too!). Anyways, I'm working on a g/b t2 deck that would like to see some more RoE fodder to be completely finished.

Cracked those nine packs that I got from CVG United in a three man draft with a couple buds of mine. I drafted BGR due to my first three picks, a Anowon, The Ruin Sage, Stone Idol Trap, and Terastodon. I ended up with a fairly good card pool. Mr. Wood forced Allies and went into Bant colors and Mr. Red ended up red/black I believe.

The deck that I'm running is:


We're playing games today and I'll have the results up soon!

Trying to help a new magic forum get to its feet, needs some people willing to help out. There's a prize for posting if there's enough people posting, namely 9 free boosters of worldwake! I just got mine and am planning to pull of a three man draft with a couple of buddies across the next few days (stay tuned for the dialouge on that!). Anyhoo, any support for CVG United's new magic board would be much appreciated!

Well if anyone else is heading to the Richmond area for the FRL competition, I wish you good luck! As part of Team 401 I'm going to heading there to compete. I usually have a deck or two on my person and if the time is right would welcome a random game with people (though I'm a casual player mostly so I'm not bringing a-game stuff). For those unaware FIRST robotics is a program to teach high school age kids the engineering and design process. During January Team 401 spent over 80 hours a member working on our robot for competition and this is the first of two that we are compeating in. If you live in the Richmond area you should definantly stop by for a look-see later in the week! Anyhoo, good luck to everyone!

So I'm learning how to program for the Itouch from my buddy and my computer can't handle the software...so I'm resurecting my old gaming rig that died last year due to OS issues. It's being a real biatch to put back together, I spent 3 hours try to get it to output a video feed, then another 2 getting it to display a boot menu (had a bad hard drive I turns out) and now I have to ai through several windows installers, find all the drivers and get he hung to accept the 2 gigs of RAM, again (yeah I know, not all that great for a gaming rig, but it was FREE so I'm not complaining). I'm bored outta my skull and can't leave it unattended
Hopefully it won't have anymore issues after this. /rant

Pingers are always a fun thing to run, R or U (and even better put together!) it usually ends up being one of the more annoying decks on the table. With a score of 2-4 drop pingers about with varying abilities and stats, it is hard to beat a board-full of pingers. The one downfall to such a wonderful ability is the usually pathetic 1/1 statline. For example, take the classic Prodigal Pyromancer, the slightly cheaper Razorfin Hunter, or the old fogie Prodigal Sorcerer.

Now in limited formats, the power of having a pinger is unquestionable, being able to simply shoot your opponent's creatures off the board, but do these fellahs have any place in a competitive deck? I certainly believe so! They won't stand up to any of the hurricane combo decks that hop about, probably won't even stand up to a well themed, tribal deck. But of the fun pingers are at the top of the list!

Now comes the fun part, what cards to go with the pingers to make them viable? Excepting Vulshok Sorcerer (and possibly a card or two that I don't know about) there are no creature pingers with haste built in. Therefore we need to do something to enable the pingers to do what they do best, ping! That being said, let's do a quick recap:

We're looking at a deck that:

• That is UR
• Runs a bunch of pingers
• Needs to enable pingers

Looking at speeding pingers up we could turn to cards like Fires of Yavimaya or Madrush Cyclops but that would stray out of the two colors we'd really prefer to stay in. The easy solution? Running Thousand-Year Elixir. This Elixir is pretty much the perfect enabler for pingers, costs three mana, allows them to ping right after hitting the field and maybe best of all, let's you untap them! Now with a rather basic idea, lets take a look at what this would look like:


Now that we have a basic idea of what cards the deck might be running, we're going to want to look for other, synergistic cards that play well with the whole concept of t:effect. Crackleburr, Tradewind Rider, and Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind all float to the surface. They all have the t:effect clause and they all play well into the deck. Crackleburr can play with two creatures to not only burn, but also bounce things you can't deal with. Tradewind Rider also falls into this category. Niv-Mizzet is a nice card, he pings once every time you draw and draws you cards when he taps, whats not to love? A little fun thing to include in this deck running Mr. Firemind is Curiosity and Ophidian Eye which allows you to kill your opponent and fits nicely on your other pingers. With all of these cards our pool is looking something like this:

Alright, tossing in the pinging shard, Granite Shard, some soft counters, Power Sink, and an oddball spell, Swerve, we're nearly to completion of our cardpool. However we're still lacking two important things, a honest to goodness beatstick and some burn! I mean how can you have a RED deck without a little bit of burn? My solutions to this is to run Lightning Bolt and Deep-Slumber Titan.


This gives us 18 cards in the pool, giving a fairly solid base to do some wiggling and trimming.


Since we really don't need two version of Prodigal Sorcerer, I'm cutting the Rootwater Hunters. This gives a deck of 37 cards which is nearly perfect. Land in this deck is important, having the right colors, and having it drop down ready to go. However it also allows for a bit of evasive damage which can be veryvery useful (and since I'm not made of money this is the land selection most anybody should be able to get their hands on)


This gives us a 61-card deck that is fairly well balanced. For sanity's sake I'm doing one last formatting so it doesn't explode people's minds.


This is a loose list that is happy to be twisted to your own evil plots. Adding in Time Stretch or Time Warp is a great way to up your pingers power. Tossing in a few Everlasting Torments can be an evil way to up the stopping power of your pingers.

As always magic is about doing your own thing, I hope you enjoyed this brain-child from start to finish and gives you some ideas of your own to play with! Take care!