This originally started as a small section of a new article I’ll have for Premium about Critical Mass later this week. However, after some thought and a lot of discussion with players and personalities around Magic, it morphed into its own little issues article, something we’re trying to feature more of lately. The Critical Mass article will be long enough on its own without this section, and publishing it here will keep this subtopic from utterly dominating the forum feedback from that article.
Antonino De Rosa’s recent article over on Brainburst has kicked up some behind the scenes discussion that was a hot topic shortly after Worlds (but has since died), mainly regarding the question of whether or not some Japanese players are cheaters. Personally, I think the cheating issue is beyond all of us at the moment, but I had some serious issues with how Ant went about saying what he had to say, so I figured I’d cover them here.
First of all, if you are going to start off an article with a quote like the following, you probably should avoid heming, hawing, beating around the bush, or not actually saying anything substantive about cheating in your article:
Coward writers beat around the bush, calling them cheaters and then saying how they are just kidding. You cannot make jokes like that with no concrete proof.
Setting the stage like that would seem to indicate that you will, in fact, be saying something concrete perhaps about someone(s) in specific. Sadly, that is not what happened. In fact, after all the discussion about how mathematics should preclude Fujita’s Boros Deck Wins from performing well enough to make the Top 8 (or presumably 37th in the case of Shuuhei Nakamura, who played the same deck as Tsuyoshi), Ant concludes with a hyperbolic whimper:
Now, there is only one explanation. They are either several billion times better than all of us, which I don’t think is the case, or some of them are extremely lucky. That is all I am going to say.
Personally, I am fine with outing cheating players if you have some proof, or in rare instances, just some very strong suspicions. In fact, this is a time-honored tradition in the Magic writing community, where players often police themselves as much as judges do. However, I have a major problem with insinuating someone is cheating simply because their decklist appears to be off by a single land. Paskins had his own comments about this on Monday, but let’s just say there are a lot of rationales for why Fujita’s deck just might work well enough to win.
De Rosa’s next paragraph where he talks about an unnamed Japanese pro who seems shady every time Ant plays him is actually more damning than the nonsense above, because it casts doubt on the entire lot of Japanese pros. “Oh noes,” says possible Pro Tour player, “I could be playing a shady Jap this round, I have to watch them closely for the cheats!” Welcome back to 1996 – you’ve just turned every Japanese player not named Kenji or Masashi (who are given free passes) into Mike Long with cooler hair and a better complexion. Egads, man!
If I were going to discuss cheating from a specific player or a specific group of players, I would want to name names. Fujita and Nakamura are indirectly indicted for the Boros Deck Wins scenario because they played Tsuyoshi’s deck, but where’s the rest of the info? Have these two players earned your suspicion in some other way? Haven’t we been taught that cheating breeds cheating? Typically there is a pattern of behavior that you can follow regarding certain individuals that at least lead you to believe things one way or another – where is the discussion of this? Ant could at least have included anecdotal evidence from other pros (assuming he received permission first) that tell their tales, right?
For example, De Rosa could have discussed the fact that Josh Ravitz intentionally three-piled Nakamura last year when he was reasonably certain Nakamura was stacking against him, resulting in a mana screw mulligan. (No complaints from the judge community please, one “issue” at a time.) It’s just one incident, but if you actually believe someone is a cheater, you’d probably dig a little further for such incidents involving this particular person, wouldn’t you?
If the player who De Rosa was trying to indict was instead Katsuhiro Mori, De Rosa could have dug around and found out that Mori occasionally appears to be the master of the “misunderstanding.” At Worlds this year, Mori was playing Jelger Wiegersma, had three mana open, and attacked with a Selesnya Guildmage and Llanowar Elf into Jelger’s empty board, saying “Take 3.” Wiegersma then reached for his Quicksand and Mori quickly untapped his guys, playing it off as a misunderstanding when a judge was called. Rumor has it that a similar situation came up against Ben Caulmes in the same tournament.
If De Rosa was trying to indict me, he could read the MagictheGathering.com forums where tireless crusader Dragon Bloodthirsty suggests I was a player who was once banned or “something like that”, while Bedford Crenshaw outs me for thinking Legions was overpowered, and the beatific PaulThomas insists that I have no integrity whatsoever, but at least I am qualified professionally to take up my new position. Even I would feel I was sketchy after reading the testimonials of those three, and as we all know, I have a pretty high opinion of myself.
To give you an idea of how this sort of thing can go wrong, there was a lot of discussion around Hall of Fame time about Olle Rade’s 18 land, 62 card deck from back in the day, with some folks suggesting that Olle had to be stacking his deck to survive with that mana base, or at least be able to tell which cards were which from looking at their backs. (This was technically legal back then and falls under “Operations Management.”) Olle insisted for years that there was no way he would be bad enough to run 62 cards, but there it was, the decklist in the coverage said “62 cards.” Well, BDM found the old video of that event and after enough prodding from Rade, he actually went back and counted as Olle pile shuffled in the footage. The verdict? The person who did the decklists got it wrong – Olle was only playing 60 cards.
Don’t believe everything that you read, kids.
Back to the topic at hand, if I were really certain that someone was running land-light decks and cheating through whatever method, I’d guess that they might have done it in the past too, especially if they had been having recent, newfound success. This would probably force me to bother to go back and check the decklists they’ve played for the last season and see if there was any pattern of behavior there as well. These are readily available for nearly every Pro Tour, and while that might not give you a complete picture, it’s certainly a place to start. In fact, you can find some of Shuuhei’s recent Constructed decklists here, here, here, and here and come to your own conclusions.
In short, if you want to make insinuations, accusations, or even flatly label someone as a cheater and someone is actually cheating, there’s probably a good chance you can find the information you are looking for if you take the time to dig around. Additionally, casting doubt on the fair play of one or two (or three or four) specific individuals is much better than casting doubt on a whole group of players from a specific country. Last, unless you actually want to take the time and effort to detail who you think is cheating and how and you are reasonably certain you have your facts straight, perhaps you should do as the rest of the pro community has done to this point and not make accusations at all.
It still baffles me that anyone would start off that article in the way that Antonino did and then fail to actually call someone on to the floor for their actions.* This is especially worrisome when not naming a name is actually far more damaging to the innocent than naming one ever would have been. Pretending to have balls is not the same as actually having them.
So are the Japanese cheating?
Well, let me start by saying that, contrary to some forum posters opinions, there is nothing culturally that absolutely prevents them from doing so. If this were the case, then Tomoharu Saito never would have been banned for doing stupid, cheatery things, nor would Masami Ibamoto (an extremely nice guy, by the way) have received a DQ in Columbus for running the Ibamoto shuffle. Japanese players have cheated in the past and I am certain there will be some who cheat in the future, just like players from every other country in the world.
It is a fact that some people definitely believe certain Japanese players are cheating, though as yet nothing bad enough to merit a penalty has been noticed in the last year. It is a fact that Japanese decks frequently look very strange to foreign eyes (some would dispute the fact that Japanese decks are strange, so I’ll leave that alone). It is also a fact that many of the Japanese players are very, very good at the game of Magic, and they are great guys, and they are as honest as anyone you will find. Some of them are among my favorite people to just hang around at a Pro Tour, which is interesting, considering there’s a rather large language gap. Oddly enough, I often have the same thoughts about Antonino.
Do I believe the Japanese pros are cheaters?
I’ve seen a lot of Japanese Magic in the last two years and I don’t have any evidence that says they are. Until such time as I do, you can expect me to remain mum on this issue. We’ll see if the rest of the community does the same.
Cheers,
Teddy Card Game
[email protected]
*Especially when De Rosa has seemed fully willing to call what he feels is a spade a spade in the past.