War is mad fun. @yuyuke and I did 2HG sealed and went almost 3-1 with a Gruul/Sultai set of complementing decks.
CSB
Back when I was in the Magic scene, I used card sleeves to cheat on occasion. Iâd lick certain cards to stick them to other cards with which the combod well.
Even if my opponent shuffled my deck, they couldnât do a thorough riffle shuffle (due to said sleeves), so the handful of combos would stick together. Didnât fly in tournaments even if I wanted to cheat, since they would never let me use card sleeves back then. While a lick-and-stick did work for non-sleeved cards, it also damaged the cards (which I considered a monetary investment at the time.
Some local tournaments had rules about how your cards all had to have âsimilar levels of wearâ to be allowed in tournaments⌠I quit a tourney once over that, since I was playing a red deck, but my Shivan Dragons were pretty worn out compared to all my newer cards.
Yeah, I still say sleeves should be banned. The card game companies like them because it means they can make money selling sleeves. Also, the solutions to make non-sleeves are also not in favor of their profits.
The argument in favor of sleeves seems to be that cards wear out over time. Some cards wear more than others, now they are marked. If they were sleeved, you could just put a new sleeve on it, problem solved.
I say the solution isnât sleeves. The solution is twofold. First get higher quality cards that donât wear out, like at least as good as a Bicycle deck from the drug store. Second, stop making CCGs with crazy rarity and extreme card value. if my card wears out, just print me out a new one for like two cents. The cardboard obviously costs nothing. It costs as much to print a basic land as any other card, yet they give land away for free.
Bicycle decks wear. They just wear consistently because you use all the cards equally. My Euchre decks, you could definitely tell which cards were 910JQKA versus the 5s versus everything elseâŚ
CCGs and TCGs⌠The cards will experience different amounts of stress in all cases.
How about⌠Who cares if cards are marked? Just make it part of the game. If you can tell which card is on top of the deck because of a mark, awesome. If you notice marks on the other playerâs cards and figure them out, awesome.
Go nuts. You canât change the order you draw them.
So I just riffle shuffle until a couple of my marked Urzatron lands are on top, helping me to get it online turn three and start kicking you in the nards.
(The real solution to that is that the judge just shuffles both decks, or you use a fair card shuffler. Maybe we can finally snuff out the insipid âpile shuffleâ while weâre at it)
In any contest where value can be won, you should expect cheating. Iâve seen all variants of it, from draft fixing to marked sleeves to browbeating to straight up lying. At the professional level you should assume the players are sufficiently knowledgeable about the game that any suspect shenanigans have a high chance to be intentional cheating. While it is an objectively shitty thing to do, Iâve been pretty disappointed in how the general audience reacts to the news. The internet hate machine will inevitably overreact to this, and god forbid the player was female.
If you want to not be the victim of cheating always call the judge when something fishy happens, itâs literally their job, and any reasonable person wouldnât be offended at the accusation.
I know, but they are higher quality and wear slower than garbage CCG cards.
Much easier solution. Any time a deck must be shuffled, the opponent properly riffle shuffles it exactly 8 times. No more, no less, and no other shuffling methods are permitted.
Letâs make it even more financially painful to play such games and have the cards be able to only be played once then destroyed.
by official DCI rules you must present your deck to your opponent after shuffling it, at which point they may shuffle it to a reasonable amount. The true way you combat marked cards is you ârandomizeâ their deck such that all their marked cards are on the bottom
@PrinceRobot
that actually was a functionally right at the beginning with ante, no matter how valuable your cards were there was the risk of losing them if you lost the game
If the cards are sufficiently worn after a single game such that they need to be destroyed so quickly, those are some shitty cards.
What if all cards were the cost of basic land?
Scott, youâve said some crazy shit in the past, but this is one of your crazier ones.
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Card game companies donât make sleeves. They do make some money if a company licenses artwork from the game to put on the backside of the sleeves, but only a single company has those licensing rights, and the majority of players prefer sleeves without artwork. Particularly the highest quality sleeves are without artwork, and that is true even for the company with the license.
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Sleeves protect not just against wear, but also other hazards such as body fats, beverage spills, and cheating to a certain extend. Some cards you canât play without sleeves, i.e. cards from Alpha which have slightly different corners, and double-sided cards which you would always need to use a replacement checklist card, which are in the game but annoying.
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Your solution of just making the cards cheap to produce and print them on demand is also not feasible. Not only would it mean that youâd have every single card in existence in print for eternity, which is unreasonable, but how do you work distribution? How does the customer prove that they owned the card in the first place? To what reasonable extend do you allow replacement (if the card is unrecognizable burnt, water-damaged, etc.)? Do you send individual cards off to those customers by mail?
In any case, maybe you could make this scheme work for a new card game, but not for MtG where this method would undercut both the business model for WotC and one of the appeals of the game for its players. I also think you guys are seriously overblowing the issue with those marked cards, in particular with Rymâs nonsense-story.
Actually, yeah you can to a certain extend as in MtG there are tons of cards which allow you to filter for cards deeper down, like Ancient Stirrings, Faithless Looting, Opt and Serum Visions (which just happened to be among the most popular cards in the tournament where the cheating occurred). If you play with marked cards, it very much makes your decisions when to play such cards during a game much easier.
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Really this is all of solved by playing online. You literally -cant- cheat, your cards donât wear out, sleeves are just cosmetics, and with MtGA itâs free and fun to play without spending a dime.
True. Iâm saying itâs impossible to reliably and objectively detect marked cards, so one way to go would be to balance the game assuming people might have marked them, and make it not against the rules to do so.
Some cards need to be banned or re-imagined in this world, but it makes the officiating objective. As it stands, whatâs the definition of a mark?
whatever the head judge at the tournament deems unacceptable
Your post proved my entire point. Without sleeves the entire business model of MtG would crumble.
Also, as per Rymâs point. any cheating as a result of marked cards is equally possible with and without sleeves. Clearly the sleeves did not prevent cheating in this way. So marking cards isnât even part of the sleeve discussion.
What is part of the discussion is that with sleeves it is very difficult to shuffle properly. The integrity and randomness of almost every game with sleeves is compromised by lack of proper shuffling. Even if nobody is cheating, the game isnât properly random if you donât shuffle sufficiently.
citation needed. Dragon sleeves shuffle just fine, even with EDH decks
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When playing Netrunner I used lots of sleeves. Dragon Sleeves are rubbery bullshit. Every sleeve I have ever used, the best of which were the KMC Hyper Matte (before they changed them) and the Ultra PRO Eclipse, were garbage for shuffling. I have been shuffling playing cards since my hands were large enough. I learned while playing Poker and Gin Rummy with my grandfather as soon as I had the mental capacity. Best card shuffler in the FRC, theyâll probably back me up on that.
Cards with sleeves can not be shuffled with proper riffle shuffles easily, if at all. The cheapest deck of Bicycle playing cards from the drug store will blow even the best sleeves in the universe completely out of the water.
I wonât disagree that cards shuffle easier without sleeves, but youâre overblowing how much more difficult sleeves make it