Today @mtgonline made a brief statement on Twitter saying Wizards of the Coast still love all their customers – even those boycotting the PRs – and that they also have “a mountain of data” that says, “They [Prereleases] serve a huge (+growing) portion of our customers who clearly (again looking at behavioral data) enjoy the offering.”

Now aside from the tenuous causation argument (Magic is growing – 100% over the last three years! – therefore PR attendance on Magic Online is growing), what this basically translates to is, “You people keep paying an enormous premium to participate in our Prereleases – you have proven this time and again by flocking to them in droves – therefore we’re happy to keep charging you to do so.”

Enormous premium? What do you mean?

Imagine a new movie is coming out this weekend and you are faced with the following choice: You can either a) be one of the first people to see the movie THIS weekend at a cost of $16. This cost will be fractionally offset by the fact that you get a shiny commemorative ticket stub, or b) wait until next week to see the movie and pay $10.

Now it will be exactly the same movie either way. You get an identical experience, the same theater setup, the same popcorn and drinks… the only difference is the cost (where you pay a premium for seeing it this week) and the shiny ticket stub.

Which do you choose?

On Magic Online, a normal draft costs you $2 fee to enter in addition to $12 of product  for a total of $14. To draft during Prerelease week, you have to pay an $8 fee + $12 product for a total of $20 per draft. This 8$ fee is 300% mark-up over the normal fee for the privilege of playing the set online as soon as possible. It might not seem like it, but that is a huuuuge price increase versus normal business, and one that you absolutely should not be happy to pay. The very fact that they try to charge that premium makes many of us angry.

While I’m here, it also deserves mentioning that the shiny ticket stubs they give you in return for your premium fee have also gone down in value. When they first started Online, PR Drafts gave you a mythic rare promo, as did Prerelease Sealed Deck flights. Now both of them give out rares, so you are getting even less value in exchange for increased fees.

The same thing is true of 4-3-2-2 (which I cover in more detail here). You are being charged an extra fee ($.50) per draft for choosing this queue for no particular reason other than that you keep choosing it – it is the most popular draft queue – so WotC can get away with subtly charging you for it. (Though I would guess that at least a few more people are playing Swiss since I wrote that article and made the choices you are faced with more explicit.)

Anyway, the point of all of this is that by playing in Prerelease Drafts, you are making an explicit statement of, “Yes, please charge me four times as much to play Magic as you would normally because the set is new and I can’t wait to draft.”

If this makes you happy, so be it. If not, boycott Magic Online during Prerelease week until Wizards of the Coast starts charging a fair premium (like saaaaay $2 – you can even keep the shitty promo rare) for the exciting experience of drafting the set a mere three weeks after it debuts in the real world.

Best of luck,
–Card Game

Post Script - Every time I write one of these consumer advocacy blog posts regarding Magic, the guys who are on the Magic team – friends of mine like Worth Wollpert and Aaron Forsythe – who are just doing their job of extracting as much money as possible from customers like you and me while keeping us happy end up hating me a little more. So there is a cost involved (much like in outing cheaters), but I keep doing it because I’m a customer and I care how we’re treated. You should too.

The 2010 SCG Talent Search
For those of you who don’t know the back story, I was asked to revamp Star City in August of last year. The content had grown extremely stale, and compared to what ChannelFireball was doing, SCG was in a spot where if it didn’t get revamped soon, it ran the risk of becoming mostly irrelevant. People were coming to the site more out of habit than because they desperately wanted to read the content (excluding a few superstars like Chapin that were still killing it), and that wasn’t a good thing. So Pete (the owner) asked me to do what was necessary to try and make it the best Magic site for all players again (and all potential buyers of Magical cards. If you have ever wondered why SCG runs content on so many different topics, there you go).

One of the big issues the site had was that, in addition to having too many old pros phoning in boring, craptastic ‘tech’ articles, the stuff on the free side had grown really stale. So along with getting rid of some writers and recruiting some new ones, I also decided the site really needed an infusion of new blood. I put a couple of the very old school writers on hiatus (Abe Sargent and Peter Jahn, both of whom may still be pissed at me) and neglected to fill out the rest of the free roster in order to make room for an X-Factor style contest that we ended up calling the Talent Search.

Why do this? 
First of all, you have to understand that almost all of the old-school Magic sites used to operate almost exclusively on submissions. However, since I had left the site at the end of 2005, SCG had gradually moved away from this model for a number of reasons. First of all, once you get big enough, you don’t need to do this any more. It is soooo much easier to run a daily site when you know what to expect, who to expect it from, and when. The submissions plan also takes a fuckload of time to sort through all the drek, and that time needs to be paid for, either in money or in blood and tears of a typically overworked editorial staff. If you already have a ton of regular featured writers and a good content flow, dealing with submissions is expensive and doing it all the time isn’t really that much fun.

That said, running a regular submissions contest is still a cheap way of finding new writers and getting them to voluntarily come to you. It also keeps your site in touch with the readers in a way you really don’t get otherwise. If Star City ran their submissions contest these days, they would probably get 100 articles a week, trying to fit into 3-4 total slots, for a measly 50$ store credit. (At the submissions-era peak we averaged 60-ish for 10 open slots.) At that level of filtering, I guarantee you the quality of articles printed on the site would go up, but the cost would be a shitload of someone else’s very valuable time.

Honestly though, how could you be pissed at this man?

The second reason here is probably the more important one… I was pissed at LSV and Bill Stark. I had written a Facebook update last summer(2010) bitching about the quality of modern Magic writing, particularly lamenting the fact that so few new great writers had been discovered over the last 3-4 years. This was especially concerning in light of the fact that the game had been growing, so the talent pool of writers to pick from was/is larger than ever. And yet very few new, exceptional writers were on the scene. Bill and Luis told me that I just didn’t understand how difficult it was to find and groom new writers.

Are you fucking serious?

I edited StarCityGames.com from October of 2003 until the end of 2005, and back in my day, that was all we fucking did, because that was all we fucking had. You’d troll the submissions email queue like an 1840′s prospector desperate for a nugget or two of the dirtiest gold that you could polish to a nice shine. Some mornings you woke up knowing you had maybe one article of the required five for tomorrow’s publication schedule, so you cracked open each email like Charlie Bucket, ever-so-slowly opening the Wonka bar that didn’t have a golden ticket, checking, double-checking, and going over it yet a third time, hoping you missed something. Or just kind of hoping what was there wasn’t really the steaming pile of shit that it seemed like on the first two passes.

There may have been regular tears. There was definitely a lot of wishing that the 5000 words Oscar Tan wrote that week were a golden ticket out of this mess. (Even though it was really clean, I fucking loathed Oscar’s writing, and his forum presence was that much worse.) The amount of re-writing that Ferrett and I did to make some people’s ideas presentable enough to put on a page was… extensive. (And Ferrett had it far worse than I did – at least he left me with a foundation to work from, not the muddy hole in the ground that he started with.)

It only got worse when I started recruiting a bunch of foreign pros whose grasp of English as a written language was tenuous at best (Terry Soh, Antonino… Gerard…). A number of those old articles were half me taking their ideas and putting them into actual English, and half them being awesome enough to give us a chance to do so. They were actually hugely welcome additions to our growing stable, but god damn were they a lot of work to publish.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on what life was like during States and Regionals time. The Pro Tour back then rarely had Standard as a format, which meant that States and Regionals were hugely open formats where semi-pro brewers attacked it from every direction imaginable, hoping to find the best deck and win a trophy or maybe a trip to Nationals. Those were great times, actually, but where you would normally get 60-80 submissions a week, you suddenly had 2-300 for multiple weeks. As an editor of an up-and-coming Magic site, this was the absolute best time to find, recruit, and mold new featured writers, but surviving it with your sanity intact was always a bit up in the air.

So yeah Bill, Luis… fuck you*. You have absolutely no fucking idea what you are talking about. But they said it, so now I felt the need to prove that this type of thing really wasn’t that hard, you know? By going out and finding new, unknown writers, I’d not only help the community, but I’d make my own leisure reading better as well. A clear win:win:go fuck yourself scenario.

* Not really. This was just what was going through my head at the time. I really like those guys (especially the avocado-loving LSV). Even at my ripe old age, the motivating power of proving someone wrong remains strong. Ferrett also wrote about something else Bill said regarding the quality of Magic writing versus Magic tech here.

Where was I? Oh yeah, new blood, submissions, contest… Talent Search. The other thing I was generally annoyed about regarding Magic writing was that the actual writing part was soooo bleh. What happened to the fun? To the funny? Where were the people who could tell a story you wanted to read, instead of dissecting decklists and matchups over and over again? I swear to god, I was so sick of deck tech articles at this point that the thought of reading another boring Frenchie on Frenchie article that did not include a ménage a trois with Audrey Tautou made me want to vomit. (Audrey makes me want to do anything but that.) The community felt like it was devoid of newer writers that you would read regardless of whether or not they were writing about Magic. I hoped we could change that.

I had actually pitched this to the SCG team before I came back on board, but everyone in their managerial team thought it was too complicated and not worth the effort. I am, however, a stubborn, pushy, occasionally intractable old son of a bitch, and once I became editor again, I ended up getting my way.

Me: Look Pete, just let me do this. It won’t cost you much, it’s free content for freaking ever, it has a really good PR vibe about it, and I think the community will love it.

Pete: Sigh. Fiiiiiine.

Here’s what I wrote explaining why people should enter.

A Note About Contests
For some reason I get the sense that the current generation of editors and site owners don’t quite understand how interesting and valuable these things actually are. I think I alluded to this some above, but let me be more explicit here.

The Magic community is an awesome, teeming mass of cleverness, creativity, and unfocused energy. Offering them a content contest (it’s not just writing these days, it’s comics and podcasts, graphic design, alters, 3-D cards, video, whatever) with some sort of moderate prize gives them an outlet for these energies, and usually pays off in ways so much better than you can envision initially. There are a huge number of talented, unknown writers out there just waiting for an excuse to produce interesting things. Sure, a lot will be a bit less talented or interesting than you might initially hope for, but until we come up with a method of waving a magic wand and having kickass, fully-matured new writers appearing in our inbox, content contests are the next best thing. In other words…

Never, ever underestimate the ability of the Magic community to produce things that are unexpected and amazing for little-to-no reward.

For medium-sized sites, running content contests is a no-brainer – you just have to make certain you publicize it well enough to get a critical mass of entrants to make it worth your while. Even larger sites like ChannelFireball and Star City should be running contests (though perhaps a bit shorter than the SCG search) with some regularity because it refreshes the creative atmosphere at the site and it makes it easier to replenish your writing staff for when you actually need it. Additionally, it also serves as a boon to the Magic community itself, both by discovering potential new stars to follow and by providing an outlet for regular readers to prove themselves in a challenging environment.

I got my start via an open submissions contest. The same is true for Evan Erwin (he wrote before he started The Magic Show), and many, many others.

However, if you do choose to run a contest, try to remember that the next section is also pretty important in developing entrants to be all they can be. (“Find your future, in the aaaaarrrrmy.”  Because clearly, the goal is to produce the finest solider possible. Wait, what?)

Mentors

I implore you to stop sucking.

I find the X-Factor format with four judges who are mentors to a specific category of charges far more engaging than the Idol format, so that’s what I decided I wanted to do for the Talent Search. However, since X-Factor hadn’t actually appeared in the U.S. at that point, no one really grokked what I was trying to do.

So I explained it.

Again.

And again.

Luckily for me, The Patrick Chapin thought it was cool and wanted to be involved. Mostest popularist Magic video persona evar, Evan Erwin was also on board, and all I had to do to rope Ferrett in was say the words “Casual category” and he squee’d like a little girl. (He does this regularly. It’s surprisingly charming.)

Fucking. Awesome.

Let me be very clear about something here – Ferrett and Chapin were fucking awesome mentors. As in, holy shit, you would be lucky to pay them to have them spend time helping you conceptualize, critique, and revise your work, and they did it all for free. The amount of time and effort they put in to merely selecting their category finalists was epic, and the work that came after that even more so. I probably didn’t thank them enough at the time, but will do so again here – Thank you for everything you two did. The idea and contest would not have worked at all without you.

Evan was also great, but had a much smaller work load due to his category (New Media) kind of fizzling in terms of entrants. I was far less awesome than any of them because I was working 70 hour weeks for 3 months, but I don’t think my category suffered that much for it, mostly because I had good material to work with.

The Turnout
I remember talking to The Bleiweiss and Evan before things ever started and discussing expectations for how many submissions we would get overall, and what we needed to consider things a success. I said I expected a 200 or so total, but even 30-40 per category would have been fine. Ferrett received 130 alone for his Casual/Other category and I think the final number of submissions was something like 300 in total, competing for 5 slots in each category. The only one that was light (and expectedly so) was New Media. It turns out finding Evan Erwin 2.0 is not that easy.

I don’t really feel the need to relive every detail of the search, but it ended up being a rousing success. Next week (time permitting), I’ll take a look at some of the more notable contestants one year later and see how they are getting on.

–CardGame
@mixedknuts on Twitter

[Publisher's Note: I started this blog as a venue to talk about and publish things that would not make it onto the mainstream Magic sites. I also have a long history of catching people who cheat at Magic and detailing their exploits. What Drew details here will be controversial to some, but the evidence presented is about as damning as it gets. That said, if Alex wants to tell his side of the story, I will agree to host and promote that as well. -- CardGame]

A joke, to start us off:

It’s Saturday night at a Grand Prix. A group of people are sitting around a table, having dinner, chatting about nothing in particular. The subject of Alex Bertoncini comes up.

One says, “Oh! Did you hear that story about him cheating?”

Another chimes in, “Yeah, I heard it!”

Yet another, “Weird. Me too.”

One of the players stops, then points across the table at the first person. “Wait a minute, what’s your story?”

They listen. Brows furrow. The second person says, “Hmm…I heard a different story.” They go around the table.

Six players, six different stories of Alex cheating.

I met Alex Bertoncini three years ago. I was barely a player then – I played awfully, knew nothing about deckbuilding, and I didn’t know what I was doing in the tournament scene. Alex was relatively new to the competitive scene as well, having seen his first real tournament success with Faeries earlier in the year. As an avid coverage reader, I knew his name. As an 18-year-old who respected – no, admired – status far too much, I wanted to befriend him.

Over the next few years, I got to know Alex. I stayed at his house, he stayed at mine, we drove with each other to tournaments, shared rooms, worked on decks, discussed tech, and talked about life. For a time, I considered him my best friend.

To understand this article, you have to understand that I am not impartial. Objectivity doesn’t exist. My actions at various points are colored by emotion. Sometimes this turns out well and sometimes it does not. Still, before you judge everything else, understand that this is someone I once trusted deeply and stopped trusting primarily because I felt strongly that he had cheated me and cheated the game that we bonded over.

This is no public hanging. Only the DCI bans people, and only judges disqualify players. As a player and neither an official of the DCI nor a high-level judge, I have more information than a judge or official but am less able to do anything with it. Having collected it meticulously for months, I have realized that the best thing to do is to turn it over to the community. Only officials ban people and only judges disqualify players, but who calls the judges over? Who spots a cheater in the act? Once someone does spot a cheater, what moral and communal obligation do they have?

I’m not just writing this to disseminate information. I want to send a message to anyone who, when they’re in a losing spot, considers playing an extra land or drawing an extra card. I want them to know that there are people in the Magic community who will see their lack of integrity and work to expose them. I don’t want the Magic community to look or act like a safe haven for cheaters. I don’t want our community to defend cheaters – all that serves to do is foster the growth of a new generation of stackers, peelers, and advantageously sloppy players. This is about a long history of Alex cheating, but this is also a warning to anyone who would consider replicating Alex’s success by replicating his methods: cheaters are not welcome in Magic and there are people who will wade through a lot of blowback to make that clear.

I’ve spent quite a few weekends of this past year on the SCG Open circuit, for better and for worse. I became one of the faces of the circuit, one of the “grinders.” I started writing a Select column on Starcitygames.com, eventually getting bumped up to Premium billing. I dove into this community headfirst, and I have a story worth reading.

It is a story about how Alex Bertoncini, a player who repeated as StarCityGames Player of the Year at this weekend’s Invitational in Charlotte while also winning the entire tournament, is a methodical and repeated cheater.

To fully understand where I’m coming from, though, I have to take you back to the beginning and tell this story in the proper order.

The Sower Cheat
My side of this story starts in June 2010. I was driving to visit my girlfriend for the next month, while Alex was making his way into St. Louis to play Mono-Blue Merfolk. We talked on the phone, I wished him good luck, and hung up. I read the coverage, texted him my condolences at his second-place finish, and worked on my deck for Grand Prix: Columbus.

Over the next few weeks, whispers of “Alex cheated in Round Three” made their way around the Internet. I didn’t believe them, and so I didn’t bother checking the facts. Why fact-check when I’d hung out with him for hours and hours, know that he’s a good guy, and heard him fume over peoples’ accusations of foul play? I’d seen him play long enough to know that he was no cheater, right? No point in following up, he’s obviously innocent, fuck the haters, and so on.

As we now know, Alex cheated Andy Hanson in that feature match. It can be found here. To highlight the relevant parts of game 1:

Andy Hanson, who had opted to run Reanimator before it lost Mystical Tutor to a recent banning, opened on Thoughtseize and forced Alex to discard Daze. A second-turn Silvergill Adept for Alex drew him a card but it was Sower of Temptation, not a counterspell of some type for a potential second turn combo out of his opponent.

With the turn back, Andy cast Entomb on his upkeep to fetch a Platinum Angel which he put into his graveyard. Alex commented on the unusualness of the 4/4, which wasn’t in most versions of Reanimator, but Hanson missed land yet again and passed with just an Underground Sea fueling his game.

Later on, Alex had no choice: he had to pull the trigger on his Sower of Temptation targeting Platinum Angel for the win or die himself to the 7/11 Leviathan. He tapped four mana, leaving one Island untapped, and plopped the 2/2 onto the table. Andy cast Force of Will exiling a Daze but Alex checked with a judge on whether the play was legal. “Can you pay 1 life when you’re on -16?” When the judge confirmed you could not, Hanson simply scooped up his side of the table.

That’s all well and good – Alex sandbagged his Sower until he had Andy dead, then stole Platinum Angel for the Force-proof kill. Pretty simple, right?

Well, except for the part where Alex didn’t maindeck Sower of Temptation that day.

Maindeck Kiras? Check.

A bunch of 4-ofs? Check.

Sower of Temptation? Sideboard, two-of.

This could have been an innocent mistake, I’ll grant you. It could have been… but Alex isn’t the sort of person who forgets what’s in his deck. There is no chance that he forgot what his decklist was. He’d just registered it three hours prior, after all! This is not rocket science. So now we have two uncomfortable possibilities. Either:

Alex forgot to completely desideboard from the previous round, a round where he boarded in exactly Sower of Temptation (and either didn’t board any other board cards in, or didn’t draw them in his protracted game one against Andy),

OR

Alex presideboarded Sower of Temptation for Kira, since Kira is Wind Drake and Sower is g-motherfucking-g.

Even setting all of that aside, we come to the moral/ethical dilemma of what happened when Alex picked up his sideboard and saw his Kiras staring back at him. Call a judge and have himself game-lossed for the game that he just stole? Sure, maybe.

Or, you know, just jam your sideboard into your deck and beat poor Andy down in game two, thanking your lucky stars that you heard about Andy’s Platinum Angel tech before your round so you could make sure your deck had a two-outer in it. Life is so much easier when you don’t remember what decklist you registered. Plausible deniability is a beautiful thing, right?

I bought Alex’s side of the story.

Here, I’ll write it again.

I bought Alex’s side of the story. After all, my narcissistic (very dumb) paradigm went a little something like this:

• I am an excellent judge of character.
• I judge Alex to be a Good Person because He Is My Friend and I Am Friends With Good People.
• If he’s a Good Person and I like him, he can’t be a cheater! Cheaters are evil people and immediately identifiable by their tendencies to kick puppies and randomly attack people. Cheaters are not charming or in any way kind.
• Cheating is totally, completely, irrevocably related to personality. Since I trust him, he’s not a cheater.
• I know how to catch a cheater, so if Alex were to cheat, I would be able to figure it out.

If you just take the opposite of all of those statements, you would have a good idea of what was actually going on. Funny how that seems to happen. Anyway, I remained Alex’s close friend through 2010, eventually spending the time between Christmas and New Year’s with him.

The Kira Cheat
Fast forward a bit. It’s 2011, I’d decided to spend a bit of time on the SCG Open Circuit, and so I hung out with Alex a lot. He and several other players stayed at my house for SCG: DC, which took place in February. I had no inkling of what had transpired in San Jose, and for a long time, the events of Alex’s Round 7 feature match stayed pretty far under the radar.

It was only over the summer that I came across the Kira video. This happened well after he and I had fallen out of sorts with each other. While I was researching several players’ claims that Alex was a perpetual cheater, a friend asked me if I’d seen “the Cursed Scroll/Kira cheat.” No, I hadn’t, and would he mind sending me a video? Sure, it’s Round 7 of the San Jose Legacy Open from January, take a look.

The video playlist can be found here. Around 32 minutes in, the important stuff starts happening. To summarize:

Vidianto Wijaya is playing a UW Counterbalance deck with Cursed Scroll, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and a bunch of counters. He probably isn’t playing a ton of removal, but Cursed Scroll is supposed to play the part of Grim Lavamancer against Merfolk. Kira’s job is to stop that, protect the troops as they deploy, and attack for two in the air while this is happening.

Alex is stuck on three lands. From the looks of it, it’s pretty late in the game. Vidianto has a commanding advantage with Sensei’s Divining Top, Jace, and Cursed Scroll in play, since he can kill Kira by breaking its shield with Jace’s -1 and then shoot it down with Cursed Scroll.

Gavin Verhey, Brian Kibler, and Patrick Chapin are commentating on the match. Vidianto untaps with Jace in play on two counters, a Cursed Scroll, six lands, and two cards in hand – Vendilion Clique and Spell Snare. Vidi untaps, draws a land, plays it, and activates Jace to break Kira’s shield. He Vendilion Cliques Alex, sees two Coralhelm Commanders, a Lord of Atlantis, and a Merrow Reejerey. He leaves them, Scrolls the Kira revealing Spell Snare, and passes the turn. To review:

Vidi: Jace on 1, seven land, Top in play, Scroll in play, 1 card (Spell Snare) in hand.

Alex: Island, Island, Mutavault in play, three Grizzly Bears and one Grey Ogre in hand.

Alex draws his second Kira, plays it, and passes. Here’s where it gets interesting.

Vidi draws a Brainstorm. He casts it, drawing two lands and a Jace. He puts a land and a Spell Snare back, keeping his eighth land and a second Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Although it’s obvious to us at home, consider the following chain of events from Alex’s position, where you don’t know that the last card in his hand is a Jace. Vidi plays his eighth land, moves his six-sider off of his Jace, and taps the Kira with it – a clear “Unsummon your Kira, my Jace dies, this ability is countered.” Before the Jace flips over in Vidi’s hand as the Cursed Scroll reveal, though, the Kira is…

…wait, you didn’t see? Took your eye off of it for a sec? Believed that when you saw it sliding toward the  graveyard, the motion would carry through and the Kira would, y’know, actually hit the bin?

Go back and watch it again. Don’t watch Vidi show Alex the Jace this time. Watch Alex. Watch him slide the Kira toward the bin – you know, the same one that isn’t splayed and has Kira on top and then pull his hand – Kira and all – back off the table, slipping his last chance at victory back into his grip.

Let’s note the amazing execution of the cheat. In the first game, Alex splays his graveyard, displaying every single card at once. As he executes this cheat, he has it piled, showing only the Kira at the top of the pile. How many Kiras are in your graveyard? I don’t know, but there’s a Kira on top of it, just like there’s supposed to be. Don’t worry about it.

It’s so well-executed that three commentators – none of them slouches – all missed it. In fact, the only indication that something might be amiss is from poor Gavin Verhey, who notes:

“Is that another Kira? That’s the third Kira…he only has two, right?”

But Chapin keeps rolling, and Gavin falls back into conversation with him about what sorts of runner-runner outs Alex has to the situation at hand. Confusion forgotten, Vidi crushes him anyway, and Vidi wins the game a few turns later anyway.

This was the moment that I was totally, irrevocably sold. I must have watched those two minutes a dozen times, just dissecting every nuance of Alex’s cheat execution – the minute changes in how he displayed his cards, his temperament, how he shuffled his hand before and after he cheated, the way he induced Vidi into a mental shortcut that led Vidi to assume that Kira had been put in the graveyard – the list goes on and on. At its core, though, Alex ran a cheat and lost.

Now what? I saw this video and went a little nuts. I started asking everyone I knew if they had any stories about Alex cheating. I found several and collected them, planning on writing an article excoriating Alex for his dastardly ways. I went on a podcast and told every story I could remember of how big of a cheat Alex had been in the last year.

Then, I slowed down. “What if,” I thought, “this isn’t about catching a cheater, but instead it’s about ‘getting’ him in some way? What if you’re not noble and you’re just some kid using a rules institution to antagonize a onetime friend? What if you’re just full of shit? Maybe you should slow down.”

So I slowed down. I questioned myself, my motives, my assumptions, my data, my friends, and everything else that I could question. I held off on the article. I talked to every smart person I could find at Grand Prix: Pittsburgh, asking their advice about what I should do. My survey of intelligent human beings came back with three strong pieces of advice:

• I had done a fair bit of messing up already by discussing this publicly, but going further would be even more damaging to my goals. This is about him cheating. Treat it like that instead of as a witch hunt.
• In following with #1, go through the DCI (and specifically, Sheldon Menery) instead of through the public square.
• None of the smart people I talked to thought for a moment that Alex wasn’t a cheater, but I still had to prove it. So, prove it.

I took their advice to heart and kept looking for strong examples. I could share some of the stories I collected with you, but word of mouth is less meaningful than hard evidence.

Magic’s Greatest Explorer
Fortunately, Twitter was on my side, and one Matt Pratser had quite the video for me to look at. He told me that it was a short clip from Kansas City, the first Open Weekend of the year.

His video can be found here.

Yet again, I didn’t catch the cheat the first time. I closed it out and had my email half-typed:

“What sort of joke is this? There’s no cheat here! He just casts some Explores and you miscounted!”

Then I watched it again and realized that Alex was playing with the best Summer Blooms in existence. His sequence?

Draw, land 4, tank.

Explore, land 5 (second of the turn), tank.

Preordain, tank.

Push both (doing so in a way that probably gave him a peek at the bottom of his deck), draw.

Tank. Visibly count the number of Explores in your graveyard.

Play your third land for the turn – land six in total – and immediately pass.

When questioned about what turn it is, brush the inquisitor off with “Two Explores.”

Alex’s dedication to the cheat is very professional: he never breaks rapport with his opponent, never treats Matthew – the person filming the game – as a legitimate concern, and makes sure that his opponent is happy with how the game is going. By the end of it, the guy who just got cheated stands up for Alex, who just cheated him.

This was the third piece of recorded evidence that I sent Sheldon Menery, back in late August. I had collected stories and hard proof and sent them off to official that ran the Investigative Committee for the DCI. I had a lot of people asking me for an article on Alex’s habits, but I wanted to let the DCI run its investigative course. So I sat on my hands and waited for several months.

When it became clear that Alex would play in the Invitational, I knew that I had to get my letter to Sheldon out to as many people as possible. The last thing I wanted to have happen was for Alex to cheat a bunch of people who have no idea what cheats he’s capable of running. Although I couldn’t get this article to Ted in time for the Invitational, I sent my letter to Sheldon to over 300 people in the span of a day and a half. I regret not moving faster on the issue sooner in the week, but I would rather turn in a good, well-written article late than turn in a half-assed smear job early.

Still, you may be left unconvinced of Alex’s faults. “Drew, people make mistakes. Alex has told me that he’s a bumbling idiot, he’s sloppy, he’s not malicious, and I believe him. All you’ve done is show me a bunch of things that I’m sure plenty of people have done before. I don’t think any of these are that bad. Besides, if the DCI saw anything really egregious, they would’ve banned him.”

A Word of Caution
I have my own story to add to the pile of evidence. It’s from SCG Nashville. Alex and I planned on spending a week testing and hanging out with Adam Cai in Tuscaloosa, Alabama between SCGs Nashville and Dallas.

It’s Round Six, I’m playing Team America (a UBG disruption deck with Stifle, Daze, Force of Will, Hymn to Tourach, Tarmogoyf, and Tombstalker) and he’s playing Mono-Blue Merfolk. It’s a pretty good matchup for him, but he needs to kill me before I draw too many huge threats. On his turn, he Vials in a Merrow Reejerey and puts both his hands on his creatures, turning them all sideways with a flick of his wrists. I stop him:

“You just Vialed in that Reejerey.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, my bad.”

[raising my hand to call for a judge] “Judge!”

“Oh, come on, man, I said I’m sorry, we don’t need to involve a judge, we can just back up.”

I held my ground on this one. How many people had he said that to? How many people are afraid of a warning enough to shame a friend for calling a judge to appropriately discipline sloppy play? After all, a Warning isn’t a Game Loss – it’s a Warning. Don’t do it again.

The judge came over and I explained the situation. Alex agreed, but, in a moment indelibly etched in my mind, Alex then asked for the Warning to be downgraded to a Caution. This may not seem like a big deal or even something worth mentioning, but how many of your opponents have ever asked for a Warning to be downgraded to a Caution? Who is the sort of person who asks for Warnings to be downgraded to Cautions? Maybe we should start with the simplest point: what’s the difference between a Warning and a Caution?

A Caution doesn’t go on your DCI record and a Warning does. If you accumulate enough Warnings in a tournament, you get a Game Loss. If you accumulate enough Warnings and Game Losses for the same offense, you get investigated for cheating. If you get a bunch of Warnings downgraded to Cautions, you effectively prevent the DCI from noticing that you are getting warned for something a lot.

Think again about the sort of person who asks for a Warning to be downgraded to a Caution. I have never and will never do that. Neither will anyone else I know, with the exception of Alex. Want to know why? Because my friends and I don’t cheat, so we don’t make a habit of accumulating Warnings. Since Alex plans to get a lot of Warnings, he habitually asks for the downgrade. Doesn’t hurt him at all, there’s no opportunity cost, and sometimes he gets to freeroll a tiny little bit of a small cheat that he got caught trying to pull. That adds up.

The reason that Alex is so successful with this variety of cheat is that he is a very nice and friendly person. In the past couple of days, I’ve heard a lot of the same argument from people all over the community. It goes,

“Alex is a really nice guy. I’ve met him, he was really cool, and we played a few games and he didn’t cheat me. There’s no way that someone that nice can be a cheater!”

I don’t really understand these people. They’re the same people who vote for awful Presidential candidates because they would like to have a beer with them. Do they really not understand the difference between personality and substance? They are people who don’t understand what is being discussed, and so they conflate the actual issue – Alex’s capacity and willingness to play honest games of Magic – with a perceived issue – in this case, Alex’s capacity to be a charismatic person. At least, I hope that people are just mixing the two up. The other possibility is that those people believe that no cheater is a kind person.

I have some bad news for all of the people reading this who think that you can either cheat or be a nice person: you’re wrong. Not all scumbags look, talk, and act like Snidely Whiplash. Mike Long was probably a really nice guy. That doesn’t mean he didn’t stack his deck, stack his opponents’ decks, draw extras, and run every other cheat in the book. It does mean that a lot of people probably defended him precisely because he was a nice guy. It’s just not useful to be disliked and also be a cheater – people are far less likely to look the other way when you “make a mistake,” people are far less likely to defend you when you’re not present, and you might even have a few people who actively dislike you and try to mount a case to prove that you’re a cheater.

Since Alex is a guy who isn’t going to no-pay on a team draft, isn’t going to short you on a hotel room, and isn’t going to steal your stuff, it’s that much more unbelievable that he would cheat you in a game of Magic. Still, even beyond the Kira video, the Explore video, and the Sower coverage story, there are dozens of stories I’ve collected from credible sources over the few months I’ve been looking for them. As some of these people have asked to remain anonymous, I won’t recount their stories in full or quote them, but the list of cheats I’ve heard them tell me of is as follows (and there are surely more out there):

• Drawing eight cards in his opening hand
• Drawing an extra card off of Ponder following a mulligan
• Casting spells that he doesn’t have correct mana for
• Pre-sideboarding against an unfavorable matchup
• Free-casting Submerge against an opponent without Forests
• Playing a Merfolk deck with all-foil spells and Mutavaults and all non-foil Aether Vials and Islands
• Brainstorming with Jace, the Mind Sculptor and not putting two cards back

I have no way of communicating with the entire Magic community and finding every story of Alex cheating, but I’m confident in calling him a cheater based on the evidence I’ve gathered. There are other videos that I’m less than confident about the malice of. One such example is his Round Six video feature match against Alex Smith in SCG Atlanta just a few months ago, where the community has raised concerns about both his Brainstorm-as-Ancestral in the second minute and his potentially four-card Brainstorm in the seventh minute.

It is possible that Alex is a sloppy player. I would almost believe that, but for one thing: in the long history of Alex playing under a very public eye, I have never once heard of him making a sloppy play or error that was not in his favor. When people are sloppy, they occasionally give away percentage points in doing so – consider Luis Scott-Vargas’s “land, go; Preordain, pass the turn with a second land in hand.” I have never seen Alex make a mistake that doesn’t favor him. The case for Alex-as-sloppy-player would be a lot more convincing if he didn’t gain every time his sloppiness went unnoticed. And finally, a bit of sage advice from a member of Magic’s old school:

A little history lesson: when there’s a ton of momentum about someone being a cheater and a bunch of “misunderstandings” and “weird situations” that have occurred, the guilty rate is 100000000000%.

This isn’t an article meant to crucify Alex Bertoncini. All I want to do – all I’ve wanted him to do since the moment I knew he was a cheater – was for him to either stop cheating or get caught and banned. Either way, I just want a cheater to leave the Magic community and never come back. If a clean player replaces him, so be it. If his seat remains empty, so be it. Cheating has no place in Magic.

I look forward to a lively discussion.

Drew Levin
@drew_levin on Twitter

Pillars of the Genre
I was going to start off discussing children’s fantasy but quickly realized that deserves its own section, so we’ll instead start with the pillars of the genre. These are heavily weighted toward classic sword and sorcery fantasy, mostly to make this entry more wieldy, since the term ‘fantasy’ now encompasses an enormous raft of books that would otherwise be difficult to categorize. (Note: This means I’m leaving out some awesome stuff like Neil Gaiman and many others, but I’ll come back to them soon.)

The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (1954-55) – JRR Tolkein
Obv. The writing might feel a bit archaic and wordy at times, but Tolkein deserves at least partial credit for basically founding modern fantasy writing (and probably Dungeons and Dragons as well). I’ll spare you the additional superfluous detail here and send you to the Wikipedia page if you want to know more.

The Wizard of Earthsea(1968) – Ursula K. LeGuin
To me, this series and the Belgariad represent the perfect transition from childhood fantasy stories to more adult stuff (LeGuin won a number of awards for the series, including the Newberry and the Nebula). It starts with the usual coming of age trope, but moves on to some interesting morality discussions. Earthsea is quirky and easy to read, but touches on topics with some depth to them.

I actually think some of LeGuin’s science fiction work is some of the best the genre has ever seen, but Earthsea is excellent and a timeless classic.

The Chronicles of Amber (1970) – Robert Zelazny
This series begins with Nine Princes in Amber(1970) and runs in two five-book arcs through the Prince of Chaos (1991). I remember reading these in college and thinking they were really, fascinatingly different than pretty much anything that I had read up to that time. In fact, having read hundreds of books since then, I still think that. Elements of the Amber series were woven into the MUD that I played with my friends at the time, so it seemed like useful and interesting reading, even if I had never heard of the books before. And it was.

Even to this day, these books are criminally underrated for how good they are and how many derivative ideas they spawned for future writers. I don’t want to go into much detail except to say that the first five (at a minimum) are outstanding adventures and you should read them if you haven’t.

The Belgariad (1982) – David Eddings
It’s rather simplistic by today’s standards of epic fantasy, but in 1982 this was hot stuff. It starts with a farm boy and ends with him saving the world, with a fun journey, spiffy companions, swords, and magic along the way. As I grew older, I gradually tired of Eddings’ style, which is one of the reasons why I think of this as young adult fantasy instead of more high fantasy like many of the other books listed here, but The Belgariad (and to a lesser extent The Mallorean) are worth reading and have had a huge impact on future generations of readers and writers both.

The Wheel of Time(1990) – Robert Jordan (and now Brandon Sanderson)
You know the jokes about fantasy authors starting a great series and then dying before they finish them, thus causing legions of fans to despair that hours of their lives and thousands of pages of reading will go to waste because the idiot never finished the fucking books?

It’s Robert Jordan’s fault.

Not just because what supposedly started as a six-book series has apparently turned in to a fourteen-book monster (so sayeth Wikipedia), but because Jordan actually died.

It’s tempting to knock this series off the pedestal because the later books in the series (depending on who you are, are usually from book six or seven on) range from inconsistent to worthless, but you can’t deny that a) the first five books are pretty freaking awesome and b) The Wheel of Time series is incredibly popular. Even in the later books, the parts with Rand and Mat are still a joy to read (though anything with Sansa, er Perrin is probably not – oh well).

I actually stopped at book 10, pledging to finish reading the damned things once Sanderson finishes writing them, but I have to say I really enjoyed the early stages before Jordan had to juggle so many characters that he forgot to move the plot along.

The Song of Ice and Fire (1996) – George R.R. Martin
Probably the most currently popular adult fantasy stories around, Martin’s books are masterful at creating interesting, brilliant, deeply flawed characters[spoiler coming]… and then killing them. I’m not going to elaborate much here outside of saying Martin is awesome and this series is fantastic (assuming that he doesn’t die before he finishes and that the series finishes well, anyway). At this point, many of his fans have started wondering if there will be anyone alive at the end of the book or if Martin will wind things up by just offing the whole lot and maybe all of humanity in the process.

Hey, it would make for a clean ending, right?

The Shannara Series (started in 1977) – Terry Brooks
I personally found The Sword of Shannara (the first book in the series) to be a bit boring, but a big part of that was Brooks finding his feet as a writer. Thankfully, I was desperate enough for interesting fantasy at the time, that I happily plowed through it and quickly started on book two. Also to be fair, that book was the first fantasy novel ever to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, so it represents one of the first real breakthroughs of fantasy into the popular mainstream.

The next two books in the series (Elfstones of Shannara and Wishsong of Shannara) are written at a more brisk pace and the quality of prose improves as well.  There are now scads of books in this universe, most of which are pretty good (and popular – Brooks has 23 NYT bestsellers). I also found Brooks’ Landover series to be fun, though considerably more light-hearted, so if you find yourself enjoying the writing in Shannara, check those out as well.

Elric of Melnibone (1961) – Michael Moorcock 
This series is dark and weird and kinda cool and really funkily counter-culturey, but still fantasy and alternate Earth at the same time. Fifteen years after having read it the first time, I’m still not really sure what to think of it, except that it is definitely a classic of the fantasy genre and should be read so that people can make up their own minds about it. Here’s the wiki summary

“Elric was the last emperor of the stagnating island civilization of  Melniboné. Physically weak and frail, the albino Elric must take drugs — later retconned to mean special herbs — in order to maintain his health. In addition to herb lore, his character becomes an accomplishedsorcerer and  summoner, able to summon powerful, supernatural allies by dint of his royal Melnibonéan bloodline. Unlike most others of his race, Elric possesses something of a conscience; he sees the decadence of his culture, and worries about the rise of the Young Kingdoms, populated by humans (as Melniboneans do not consider themselves such) and the threat they pose to his empire. Because of his introspective self-loathing of Melnibonéan traditions, his subjects find him odd and unfathomable, and his cousin Yyrkoon (next in the line of succession, as Elric has no heirs) interprets his behavior as weakness and plots Elric’s death.

[…]

Elric’s finding of the sword Stormbringer serves as both his greatest asset and greatest disadvantage. The sword confers upon Elric strength, health and fighting prowess but must be fed the souls of those struck with the black blade…”

I know one of the things I didn’t particularly like about the ‘series’ is that many of the books are constructed of loosely connected short stories and novellas, which is probably more a product of how things were published at that time (via magazines and journals), and less a product of planning. Otherwise I found it worth a read and some thought, even if it’s not one of my personal favourites.

Tomorrow – The Best Stuff (Fantasy)

For those who may not fully understand the history of this, Worlds is a hugely important tournament for international Magic, and the most historic institution on the Pro Tour. The Regionals/Nationals/Worlds Pro Tour chain represents a tremendous dream for every Magic player in every part of the world. The decision to do away with this revered event after 2011 is extremely worrying. In fact, the decisions that Wizards of the Coast Organized Play (OP) have made recently seem to signal a move where five years from now we won’t have a Pro Tour unless we do something about it now.

I’m guessing that the Pro Tour players at Worlds will have some form of protest in store, but more importantly, what can those of us who care about Worlds, the Pro Tour, and the health of competitive Magic in general do to support them? We represent a much larger population of players and money than those who will be attending Worlds and showing that you disagree with the recent changes is at least as important as what those guys have to say.

I’m proposing two things, both of which coincide with the upcoming events in San Francisco:

1)      From Thursday Nov 17 until Sunday Nov 20, don’t log in to Magic Online. If you want to make your voice heard, hit Wizards of the Coast in the pocket book. Magic Online is the biggest cash cow they have and is central to every strategy they have for the game going forward. Assuming you are a regular player, your absence from that platform for four days WILL be noticed.

2)      Boycott your local Friday Night Magic on November 18. We keep hearing from OP that Friday Night Magic is more important than ever, so show solidarity with other players from around the world in not attending. The entire organized play system is tied together, but you need to show that decisions made that affect the Pro Tour are extremely important to FNM players as well.To clarify: You can still go and play EDH or a casual draft or what have you to continue to support your LGS (or even better, play board games like Puerto Rico/Agricola/Learn Ascension?), but just refuse to FNM that night. Explain to your friends why you are doing this and why it matters to you, and get them to join in.

I’ve seen a ton of outrage on the internet about this, and I am cheered that so many players have seen through the spin of the Press Releases to the real issues. However, to make sure that WotC truly understands how important these changes are, you need to take action.

Best of luck,
–CardGame
@mixedknuts on Twitter

I unleashed a series of tweets yesterday detailing my recent frustrations with Magic Online, with special regard to Online Prereleases and PTQ prize support. Needless to say, many of you had similar feelings and unleashed a wave of support for what I had to say. Tweets disappear quickly though, so today I figured I’d some up a number of action points we, the Magic community, would like to see addressed on Magic Online.

#LetUsPlay
First off, and this one is simple, get rid of the arbitrary dead zone after online prereleases and before the release events kick off (usually from Monday until downtime occurs on Wednesday). There is no sensible reason for this to occur. You told us “playing Magic is good. Playing more Magic is better.” So why do we still have an artificial dead zone after prereleases where we can’t play the new set? Many of us prefer to use Magic Online because it means we’re not constrained by real world deadlines – we have busy lives, and time to play comes at odd hours and sometimes unexpectedly. Making it to FNM can be difficult, but thankfully we have Magic Online. Except when we don’t.  Some of us have time to play at point X and then that time is gone, and with that time goes a portion of our business. It doesn’t come back later–it disappears into thin air along with dollars you could have made from us using the service, and it builds up negative feelings toward the product in general and prereleases in specific.

Stop the arbitrary dead time after prereleases and accept the money we are trying to give you. #LetUsPlay

Prize Support
Your online PTQ prize support is now way past bad and resides somewhere between Chip and Dale and beyond terrible. It’s the exact same whether a PTQ has 128 players or caps at 768 like the first Innistrad PTQ did. This is absolutely ridiculous. We have heard vague rumors that you can’t scale prize support because you might run afoul of online gambling laws, but the fact of the matter is a) nearly every TO in the entire world already does this making you out of sync and b) you have to be clever enough to figure out an alternative that works (promos? Point systems for redemption?), especially with the amount of time you have had to do so. By not doing so, players can only come to the conclusion that you are using a potential legal issue as an excuse to justify your greed.

To give a brief (if slightly skewed) comparison, Grand Prix Brisbane had 389 players (which is big for Australia) and you paid out 30,000 in prize money. Your first Magic Online PTQ had 768 players and you paid $2922 in prizes. Both events were run directly by Wizards of the Coast. The PTQ had twice the number of players and one tenth the prize support. If I were trying to interpret your intent via incentives, I would conclude that you want me to attend your Grand Prix and don’t want me to play in your Magic Online PTQs.

This is weird, since you seem to earn a ton more money from the PTQs. (Up to 320K per season – at that rate you may want to add a Pro Tour back, just so you can run more online PTQs…) It’s clear that there is a lot of interest in playing online PTQs, but it is also clear that there is a mounting backlash against your inability to increase prize support with more players, which will eventually hurt online PTQ attendance.

Fix it soon, please.

Online Prerelease Price Gouging #MTGNO
Somehow, despite the fact that a new set has already appeared in the real world and we’ve likely had 3-4 weeks of chances to play with it, you still think you can attach a premium to playing in online prereleases, including paying $20 to play a Swiss Draft. The justification for the incredible draft prices (43% more than a normal draft!)  has been that you also get a promo version of a card for playing in these, which goes toward offsetting the cost, but not a single one of those cards has had enough value to make up for what is pretty clear price gouging.

Some of us have gone so far as to boycott prereleases since you started doing this as a form of protest. Despite repeated complaints and pleas from the community, you have failed to change your behaviour, so now instead of merely boycotting Online Prereleases, we will start reminding others that Wizards of the Coast is trying to dick them with surcharges and encourage others to boycott as well.

Every online prerelease will come with any number of reminders via Twitter and Facebook that the extra money you are charging for drafts is bullshit and people should just not play until the release events start.

Competition for $$$ is Higher Than Ever Before
Magic has gradually become more and more expensive to play over the years, and yet you have actually lowered prize support on Magic Online. There is more competition than ever before competing for entertainment dollars and yet, in the current economy there are fewer of those dollars to go around. Somehow, Magic: The Gathering as an institution has continually cut what they give back to the consumer in search of greater profits.

We keep hearing about how Magic is doing better than ever. Sales are up. Profits are way up. Well outside of the corporate world, disposable income is way down. While you have been squeezing every dime you can out of the Magic Online system, forcing us to pay more and more for less and less, our ability to keep paying to play this game has gradually deteriorated. You make more money from your customers than ever before and are failing to give a single fucking thing back.

In fact, in the real world, your Organized Play changes have actually made it harder for most of us to play. When we can find local prereleases, we can’t get in to them because there isn’t enough space to hold the demand. When we can get in to them, they run out of product because someone neglected to account for the fact that we kind of want to play and play a lot. Most of the highly populated areas in Europe lost Friday Night Magic support when you attached that support exclusively to stores (that don’t exist because of property costs) and exclusively to Friday nights. You even stopped sending us cards in the mail as rewards for playing the game a lot. Oh, and it seems like you are on the cusp of radically changing the Pro Tour (again) just like you did with Planeswalker Points, but no one has been clear on what is going to happen, and if change does happen, there is little expectation that these changes will be positive for the players.

So yeah, the game is pretty great – except maybe for those six months this year we had to deal with CawBlade because you screwed up with Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic…

But how you treat your customers lately? That is anything but great. In fact, it’s awful.

Stop trying to squeeze every single extra penny out of us that you can and just be happy that we’re happy paying to play the game. Meanwhile, realize that it is not a privilege to do so, it is a hard choice and one that we can change at any time. The obvious cash grabs have become so annoying and overwhelming that you will cause many of us who have been in the game for years to leave eventually, and it will hurt your business in the long-run.

To put it another way, stop mugging me for the money left in my wallet, especially when the platform your program runs on has been (and continues to be) a steaming pile of shit for the last decade.

Fix your shit, increase prize support, let us play when we want to, and let players be happy about playing your game instead of grimacing every time they have to reach for their wallets to pay for Magic.

Sincerely,
Magic Players

Appendix 1 – Other Things We Hate About Magic Online
I’m going to say up front that this section won’t even discuss the Magic Online User Interface, which has been publically ridiculed for the last decade and is so bad you could use it as a case study for what not to do in a university UI class. It’s terrible, everyone knows it’s terrible, and supposedly some day in the far distant future (which is rumoured to be not so far as it was in the past) the User Interface will change to… something better. We’ll see about that. For now, we’re going to give you a pass here and discuss other things that irk us.

“ Why do we even have 4-3-2-2s again? Is this a commemorative missing pack formation for a format that died? Couldn’t we setup a memorial burial ground somewhere that people can visit, and have our pack back instead? ” 4-3-2-2 = Subtle Price Gouge

“ I hate how it makes you close the program to log into a different account.  Or if you get disconnected you have to close and reopen.  I’m not sure if this is a measure against people using multiple accounts or just an accident of shitty programming.  Either way, I have neither the time, nor the inclination, to be constantly closing and reopening MTGO. ” LogOff != Close Program

“ Has anyone at Wizards of the Coast actually used their deckbuilding program or tried to make trades? Do they have any idea how terrible every facet of the program is in this area? I’ve had better deckbuilding experiences on freeware programs – how the hell has it been like this forever and no one has made it better? ”    Chinese prison camps believe trading cards on Magic Online is a punishment more severe than death.

“64-man drafts should be a regular event/queue.

4322 sucks – 3 ticket 6422 would be sweet.   That way you could come out ahead but still win something if you windiest round.  (note I most play classic drafts where this is only option)

The DE schedule has lots of events that do not fire… Change them. Personally I want a 6pm classic friday nights but that is just me. Meanwhile, schedule MORE 64-man drags during releases. DEs aren’t firing, but these I can never sign up for because they are always full. Is anyone remotely intelligent paying attention? “

“ If I had to pick one thing about MODO I don’t like (and this is a completely different direction from the current conversation,) it would be the entire trading experience. They make it too difficult to find cards you want, especially if it’s not something hot that people will list in their classified ad. “

“ The trading interface is hideous, and I really hate the fact I can’t just throw away cards I don’t want, I wish I could just delete anything over 4 copies.

And I wish there was a decklist browser, where I could actually manage the decklists properly, having them all stored as text files is ridiculous, what is this 1998? I want to be able to browse my decks, delete the ones I don’t want and then tell the client to make all cards (over 4 as a sub option) tradeable except the ones in these decks. There’s just too much pointless inventory management in the current client, it’s like a really shitty mini-game all of its own.

Why they haven’t opened up the API to programmers for proper store management rather than these crappy bots is beyond me. ”

“The standings keep scrolling so I can never see my tiebreakers during PTQs. I don’t care how small a deal this seems like, it is infuriating.

I have to be ever-vigilant of the possibility that my clock might be ticking down even though it looks like my opponent’s clock is.

Bots are warping the economy and providing a continuous income stream to their owners in a fashion that is completely unregulated. The economy isn’t remotely efficient for customers, but no one really notices because it’s still better than what happens in the real world.

I have to close the program periodically so that it’s going at a “slow” pace rather than a “glacial” one. ”

“You asked for examples of things WotC is doing w/MTGO that make people mad, well here’s mine:  The OUTRAGEOUS price of prerelease drafts.

I think Innistrad is amazing and I was pumped to give it a whirl online this weekend.  Logging in to discover that they wanted $20 for a Swiss really pissed me off.  I’m already paying $14 for a couple hours of entertainment plus digital objects in an 8-4…  not exactly a bad deal for Wizards.  $20 for a SWISS is a straight up fleecing of their customers.

It’s not a question of whether or not I can afford it, I can.  It was just a huge turnoff, it makes WotC look sleazy and at $20/pop I ultimately chose to boycott the drafts.  MtG is expensive enough as it is. “

Appendix 2 – Event Revenue and Payout
Let’s look at some examples of other tournaments run by Wizards of the Coast in the real world and compare them to the recent online PTQ. (I am going to factor out pack costs here because I don’t want to argue about the actual cost and I’m also factoring out tax paid to local authorities because we’re dealing with events in 3 different countries. If one of you is an overly pedantic international accountant who wants to do all the proper adjustments, let me know – it doesn’t change the conclusion.)

GP Brisbane – Worst Case Scenario
389 people played at Grand Prix: Brisbane, presumably resulting in something like $11,670 (389 * 30) in revenues for a prize payout of $30,000. (The amount of revenue taken in was in Australian dollars and varied based on prereg versus paying the day of, while the payout was definitely in USD but I’m trying to keep the math simple here.) There were also hosting costs involved as well as judge compensation/housing, coverage, all of which eat in to the bottom line

Net : -18330

Note: Wizards of the Coast took a substantial loss on the main event here, especially when you consider the cost of the space.

GP Milan – Potentially Best Case Scenario
1785 players paid $47.95 to play sealed. Revenues were 85590.75, prize payout was 30000. There were also substantial hosting costs involved (you have to rent a big space to fit in 1800 players) as well as judge compensation/housing (and you need lots of judges to make the event run properly), coverage… that’s a ton of extra expense that eats in to the bottom line

Net rev less payout: $55,591

Anyway, those are Grand Prix – enormous events that Wizards of the Coast uses for marketing the game and their Organized Play system. PTQs are run almost exclusively by local tournament organizers, and the only thing Wizards of the Coast likely gets from them is the resulting card sales, etc, which is still enough to make them run the events.

Except… when it comes to Magic Online, where they are now running sixteen PTQs a season. And they don’t have to split the profits with anyone.

ISD Online PTQ #1 – Probably Best Case Scenario
768 people played in the first Magic Online PTQ for Innistrad resulting in $23,040 (768 * 30) in revenues for a prize payout as follows:

$1848 in pack payouts
$1000 cash from Superdraft
$73.5 from pack payout from Superdraft divided by 8 (8 PTQs feed in to each draft)

Total PTQ Prize = $2921.5

There is ZERO hosting cost for this event, no one pays for judge housing or coverage costs. There is also no direct tax from this because that is paid up front, by the user when they purchase tickets. Programming and/or platform hosting as a cost is extremely marginal and you can’t possible spread R&D costs here because as we already know, they do their job whether Magic Online exists or not.

Net rev less payout: $20120

I tend to read a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy, along with some sports books and quite a few mainstream economics books (like Predictably Irrational, Freakonomics and their brethren). I’ll sometimes read other topics that I come across that look interesting, but those are my usual areas of interest. I also read a number of comic books when I have time and extra cash to spend, so expect to see occasional recommendations in that department too. I’m not planning to do in-depth reviews here because many of these are books I haven’t read in over a decade, and many more I no longer have copies of as they were left behind during two different intercontinental moves. These are just ones I would wholeheartedly recommend reading to anyone who enjoys reading books.

Where to start?
My first thought was to hit all the fundamentals, but after you’ve been reading for enough years, you start to accumulate so many of these that they become unwieldy to recommend unless you want to write an entire book. This is a good thing, because it means there are a ton of great, enjoyable books to be found if you look hard enough. Today I’ll just recommend a few of my (many) favourite authors to get you started. (Typically, if you end up liking one or two of an author’s books, you will enjoy the whole lot, so keep that in mind.)

Fantasy

Guy Gavriel Kay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Gavriel_Kay

The two things that typically make my knees weak for certain authors are witty, clever dialogue and deep, interesting characters that you form an emotional connection with. Kay is a master of the latter, which is one reason why he has so many devoted female fans. He also tends to use history as a source of inspiration (his work is sometimes categorized as ‘historical fantasy’), which make his books a little less might and magic-y and a little more mainstream. (Translation: these are good gateway drugs to give to fantasy skeptics.) The Lions of Al- Rassan, A Song for Arbonne , and Tigana (all of which are one-offs) are books that reach the very heights of what fantasy writing is about. The Fionavar Tapestry is also excellent, as is just about anything Kay has ever written.

(Note: I read Ysabel about two weeks ago and wasn’t overwhelmed by it. The book was fine, but he seems to have skewed more into young adult fantasy, an area where I am no longer the target audience.)

Robin Hobb ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_hobb )

Anyone who has ever read the Assassin series from Robin Hobb usually gets a twinkle in their eye when someone starts talking about it. It is about as brutal and brilliant, vibrant and painful a journey as you’ll find in the written word.  The Fool series that followed it was also wonderful, and I also enjoyed her work with the Liveship Traders.

She also wrote as Megan Lindholm for about a decade, though at this time I am only familiar with her work as Hobb, every bit of which has been good to fantastic so far.

Patrick Rothfuss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Rothfuss
I know everyone and their dog has probably recommended The Name of the Wind and A Wise Man’s Fear to you already, but Rothfuss is a golden god of fantasy writing, and some of the most enjoyable writing (period) you will encounter these days. It is impossible for me to recommend this highly enough.

The Kingkiller Chronicle is supposed to be a three-volume work, but I have a very hard time believing he can (or should) pull this off. The first two books are so good, my hope is that he expands into five books of similar quality to tell the full tale. He’s also only 3 years older than I am, so there is slightly less worry about Rothfuss dying before he finishes than someone like George R.R. Martin or Robert Jordan. (Oh, how we used to laugh back in 1994 about Jordan maybe dying before he finished. What a ridiculous idea ha ha *thud*)

Science Fiction

Orson Scott Card http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card
Card’s body of work is pretty inconsistent, but Ender’s Game is my favourite book, so Card gets a mention. Ender’s sequel, Speaker for the Dead, is a totally different book and is also in my personal Top 10, so while I am frustrated by the quality of some of his later work, Card’s best writing is as good as it gets. Regarding Ender’s Game, it’s hard to imagine a book that would form a deeper connection for smart, disaffected teenagers. I always purchase it when I see it at used book stores, and have given away double digit copies to friends and family over the years.

Aside from the first two books of the Ender series, I generally enjoyed the Bean side of the coin and remember finding the book Lovelock very interesting as well. Alvin Maker seems well-loved, but I have mixed feelings about that series for reasons that would take forever to explain here.

Lois McMaster Bujold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_McMaster_Bujold

It’s strange to me how many people who actually like Sci Fi and Fantasy have never heard of Bujold. It’s not as if she’s a nobody – she’s won more Hugo awards than anyone else except Robert Heinlein (both have four) and has apparently sold enough Miles Vorkosigan books that she can make the entire saga free in electronic format (which you should absolutely, positively download and read).

Remember up above where I said clever dialogue gets me going? The Miles Vorkosigan series (Sci Fi) has plenty of that and also a host of strong stories and characters. Her Chalion work (set in a fantasy realm this time) is also amazing stuff, and hugely recommended (though these you will likely need to pay for). I actually started the entire Vorkosigan series again from the beginning when I got my Kindle because it had been about five years since I read any of it and it was that good.

Robert Heinlein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Heinlein 
Heinlein deserves a lot more attention than just a paragraph or two. Let’s just say you should definitely read his stuff because he is a) awesome and b) moderately crazy. Start with the book of Starship Troopers (not the abortion of a movie whose only saving grace was Dina Meyer’s tits) and Strange in a Strange Land. We’ll come back to Heinlein in the future.

Economics
Dan Ariely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely
I’ve linked to Ariely’s TED talks via my Twitter account a couple of times. They are basically excerpts from his first book about behavioural economics, Predictably Irrational, but even if you’ve already read Predictably Irrational, I recommend watching them because Ariely is really funny and engaging. He’s exactly the type of guy you would want as a college lecturer in Econ (though in truth he is a professor of Marketing – go figure), and he would definitely make you show up to class. I have just started his second book The Upside of Irrationality, and have found that both books are classics that will fundamentally change the way you look at the world. They also provide you with a few fun anecdotes to discuss with anyone who hasn’t already read them, which should prove useful at dinner parties or on blind dates.

That’s all I have time for today. If you hadn’t heard or read any of these authors, I likely just set you up with reading material for the next three months. If you had already read all of them, good for you. Most of you fall somewhere in between.

From here on out I will try to do this at least bi-weekly and add an extra layer of structure so that they don’t seem entirely ad hoc, but I make no promises.

Image from The Guardian

Today I want to briefly discuss one of the new rules of the modern world:

If you get almost any portion of what you consider to be actual news from your television, you’re doing it wrong.

In actuality, this rule has likely been true since television’s inception (with exceptions made along the way), but these days it is overwhelmingly the case, especially in America. Most stories on the nightly news for any of the network channels are equal to an extended tweet on Twitter, which, when it comes to informing you about the news, is the equivalent of a fart in the wind. They don’t have time to even give you the entire story, let alone a nuanced look at important events in the world today. They also invariably contain some amount of spin, even when they are trying to be objective, often because the sources they receive the news from have already spun the story.

In most cases, they are intentionally telling you only part of a more complete story while adding political spin. In some cases they are actively lying to you.

To put this another way, the MOST spin-oriented (and likely to lie to you) news organization in the United States is Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Their motto is “fair and balanced,” when almost nothing they report on the television channel is. In other words, they START the conversation by lying to you – how much of what they report can you actually trust?

The deeply concerning part is that formerly centrist, legitimate news organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post, places with long histories (and awards) for investigative journalism have now been deeply, unexpectedly compromised. You could provide almost any number of examples for this in the last decade, but in particular look at how the NYT (whose editorial department was ideologically opposed to almost everything the GWB administration did) dealt with the entire George W. Bush era. The number of lies put forth as “simple truths” from that presidential administration was staggering, and a number of the largest ones were easily proven to be lies after some relatively minor digging many years down the road. (The streets of West Baltimore had more ‘WMDs’ than the nation of Iraq.) However, during this time the NYT allowed itself to be stonewalled again and again – for no apparent reason. To understand how alarming this is, imagine a Rupert Murdoch newspaper doing the same thing when a party they oppose was in power. Some of the Murdoch publications/channels go so far as to make up lies regarding the opposition, so why wasn’t the New York Times scrounging for existing legitimate news that would detail how corrupt and dishonest the second Bush era was*?

This is why WikiLeaks and the work they do uncovering bullshit around the world actually matters. The vast majority of news organizations in the purported ‘free world’ are so deeply tied to figures with agendas that objectivity has mostly been eradicated, and nowhere is this more true than television news – regardless of your political viewpoint**. Watching it is a waste of your time, so if you find yourself doing it, just stop. Doing anything else would be more productive and less disingenuous.

What Can You Do If You Want to be Informed?
Make no bones about it, actually being informed about what is happening in the world around you takes time and effort, but most intelligent people (and all of your college professors) will tell you it is worth your while. Once you decide you want to stop being a mug and become knowledgeable, the problem is how to get informed in the most efficient and least spun way possible. What follows are the news organizations and blogs I have learned to follow over the years for useful information, all of which exist in some form or another online.

There are two newspapers left in the world that are producing great work on a regular basis: The Guardian and The Financial Times. FT obviously skews economic and business in their reporting, but seeing as how the last five years have contained the economic fallout of the largest financial crisis in the last 50 years, that type of news is damned important. The Guardian is the best of the remaining old-line newspapers, and their investigative journalism department is still top-notch. FT has a pay wall, but you can get some number of stories free a month by registering with them – The Guardian is still free. Between these two, you will get most of the world news you need, but despite some missteps in recent years, the New York Times remains a pretty solid news organization as well.

(Aside: Chris Mascioli noted that Al Jazeera is worthwhile and important as well, which I completely agree with but doesn’t normally make it into my rotation for time reasons. It is certainly not a ‘”U.S. government approved source,” which alone makes it more valuable than almost anything in the U.S. mainstream.)

If you find those too heavy (you shouldn’t, but I not here to judge you), you can lean on the BBC, which is the national broadcasting arm of Great Britain. It is taxpayer funded, still does some excellent investigative work, and is watched like a hawk from both sides for partisan slants, which in turn makes it about as neutral as you can get. National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States is similarly useful (and sometimes even more wonderful), and is also available entirely online these days. The stories often aren’t as in-depth as you will get from the print sources, but they are still miles better than anything you will get from television.

After that, it’s time to hit some magazines and the blogs.  The Atlantic and New Yorker are still producing great work by some amazing writers, even if their prominence in the American consciousness has diminished over the years. Business Insider is now a daily stop for me as well, especially after producing this piece of material explaining why Americans should be angry and occupying things (Wall Street, Washington, Banks, etc), with this slide in particular inducing one of those crazy “Holy shit, the U.S. is a banana republic when it comes to income inequality” epiphanies.  I will also pop over to The Economist about once a week and buy one to read every time I travel. I don’t always agree with their editorial (which is probably useful), but it’s hard to find more information packed into one place.

These are the economic blogs I will stop by on a regular basis. Some tend to lean a bit more conspiracy-heavy, while others (like Delong) are very academic (and sometimes ranty). Conspiracy leanings might seem weird at first, but one of the things I have learned from following the news for the last fifteen years or so is that there’s a LOT more bad shit going down than any government or corporation ever wants you to know. The stuff that Seymore Hersh***, WikiLeaks, and The Guardian dig up have often been decried as conspiracies before all the facts were brought to the table.

Brad DeLong (Chair of Political Economy at UC Berkeley)
Economic Populist
Zero Hedge
Marginal Revolution

Obviously this list is not comprehensive – no matter who you are, there is a finite amount of time to be spent reading news on the internet – these are just the ones I frequent. As you become active and engaged, you will find your own sources along the way with interesting and useful information. If you have any you want to add, feel free to post them in the comments section.

As for political blogs or magazines, I simply don’t follow them. These days there’s just too much noise to be bothered, so while I respect some places like DailyKos and the New Republic, I’m well-informed enough that I don’t really need the slant along with the events. The system is corrupt and broken – I already know that. The politicians are impotent, say stupid things all the time, and always fatten themselves from the money teat of their donors, most of whom are rich beyond belief and trying to rig things to stay that way/get even richer – I already know that too. What I really want are facts about who did what to whom in the library, and I can’t get there from those sources.

Conclusion
No matter what age you are, or what country you live in, it behooves you to stay informed about events in the world around you. With the current state of the economy, about 95% of the potential readers of this blog should be fucking angry, but general anger is pretty useless – walking around kicking dogs because you are upset at the state of the world is pretty dumb. However, by reading up on events, you can gradually figure out who is to blame for whatever particular debacle you are pissed at today and target your anger at the people and institutions who deserve it (unlike dogs, kicking them is likely a crime and is not recommended, though plenty probably deserve it). Who knows, once you have the information at your fingertips, you might even help enact change that will improve everyone’s lives.

Then again, you might just be more useful at pub quiz nights. Either way, it’s better than where you are right now.

–TK
@mixedknuts on Twitter

* A listing of crimes committed in the eight years under George W. Bush read like a litany of accusations for someone being prosecuted at The Hague for crimes against humanity. They include – but are not limited to – unjust and unnecessary wars, kidnapping, suspension of basic human rights, suspension of due process, frequent and flagrant violations of the American Constitution, assassination, and probably the greatest transfer of wealth (read: THEFT) in the history of the modern world.

** There are exceptions to general TV news truthiness including the BBC, The Daily Show, news programs on PBS and others I am sure I am not aware of, but the vast majority are a waste of your time.

*** If the name Seymore Hersh is new to you, you should go out of your way to fix this. His lifetime compilation of work is truly incredible.

Growth takes time. As some of you may or may not be aware, SCG started a reboot in mid-September of 2010, at which time it was clearly lagging behind ChannelFireball.com in quality writing, name recognition, video technology that did not involve Evan Erwin, and general site quality. The Open Series was already under way at that time, but they weren’t directly covering it themselves and it wasn’t intertwined into both the front end of the site and everything else. Since that time a TON of changes have taken place.

**) New editorial staff w/ a Content Manager and a Text Editor.
1) They revamped their writing lineup to cut the dead weight, while making sure you got regular headliners that people would care about.
2) They slowly got going on the video front.
3) The free side of the site is MUCH better than it was last year.
4) The Premium side of the site is ALSO much better. They added two more headliners in Flores and Brad, better drafting vids including those from Anton, and they get more content from those headliners.
5) The content on the site has shifted from a PT focus to more of a MTGO focus. This was huge. BDM (quietly) and Steve Sadin have pushed this area so that SCG has stuff appearing all the time from people who are MTGO savvy, and that immediately translates into SCGOpen tech as well.
6) They added their own tournament coverage. So now people consistently have a reason to hit the site on the weekends. This also lets them churn out two new sets of decklists every week (the power of decklists is immense).
7) Social media integration is light years better.
8) Actively marketing via weekly emails with content bonuses.
9) Added a mobile platform.
10) Cross-platform marketing on nearly every front.

Combining all of these improvements and becoming the obvious leader in the independent tournament scene (where it’s not even close) SCG has made their content quality better, more accessible, and more important on a consistent basis.

There’s still a lot left to do, but by any standard you would have to say it has been a good year.

For those of you who have never heard of him, Peter Szigeti – pretty much always referred to as PTR – was a legend in the Magic community. Viewed by judges and organizers as a scourge, Peter was alternately hilarious, disruptive, and completely over-the-top with his behavior toward opponents and his attitude toward authority in general. It wasn’t anything personal, he was like that a lot the time outside of Magic too.

Due to his antics, his absolutely scathing articles (some of which I’ll try to republish soon), and endless beats delivered to people at tournaments, Peter was viewed by some as a villain. Others viewed him as a hero, a clown, and a source of endless entertainment, provided they weren’t the target for his barbs or pranks. Peter apparently passed on this week after a prolonged period of illness. I say ‘apparently’ not to disrespect the dead, but because there is no one on the planet I would believe has a greater chance of possibly faking his own death than PTR. I’m not the only one – most of his friends I have talked to won’t believe the truth without a body check. This is just everyone who knew him from back in the day paying him his propers for what he was capable of with that incredibly inventive, devious mind.

Because Magic has been losing history for some time, and because this is definitely one man that deserves not to be forgotten, I put out a request to people to tell stories about Peter, to be gathered and run here as a way of celebrating one of the more controversial figures in Magic history. That invitation will remain for a while, so if you have something to say, send me an email or Facebook message.

Villain, hero, clown in search of attention, or slightly evil genius – how you viewed him depended on your perspective.

Any oral history of of Peter’s Magic career has to start with what Jeff Cunningham wrote about him after Peter was officially banned from the game in 2005. This was the introduction for that article we ran on the front page of SCG, which lends some context to how big a deal PTR managed to make himself over the years.

Tommy Ashton
At Nationals in 2002, I was waiting at the airport for a taxi with a friend when PTR walked by. He figured we’d all take the same cab together to the event site, since we were obviously gamers. PTR started chatting with the cab driver, asked him to speed up, told him he’d pay any speeding tickets, then began berating him endlessly for not having EZPass and having to stop for a toll. When he got out, he paid the entire fare and left without looking back at us. My friend and I had not spoken the entire ride.

PTR briefly attended MD area PTQs in 2003. At an Onslaught block PTQ, he got into a huge row with his opponent where judges were called multiple times to keep the match under control. PTR ended up winning, and in some misdirected show of “being the bigger man,” his opponent held out his hand for a post-match handshake. PTR looked at him, snorted, hocked a loogie into his hand and held it out. The guy took his hand and shook it. PTR was disgusted.

At the same event, I purchased a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar. I had just unwrapped it when PTR came by. I said hi; he just took a huge bite out of the ice cream bar (with an actual haumph sound) and walked by without responding to me.

Finally, in the top 8 of that PTQ, he was told by judges that any further antics would earn him a disqualification. PTR’s quarterfinals opponent was using Siege-Gang tokens that were pictures of himself in-costume at Otakon. PTR was practically silent during the match, and his good-natured opponent tried to talk to him about anime. At a crucial point in the match, PTR tapped six lands, put the top card of his deck face down and told his opponent he was casting Akroma’s Vengeance. The card was Akroma’s Vengeance. He lost the match.

PTR showed up to another MD event with a huge bag from Taco Bell. He had gone to the drive-through window and ordered 100 soft tacos, presumably just to see what would happen. At the event, he was giving people soft tacos in exchange for them doing things for him. Around this time he referred to me exclusively as StateChamp, because I had just won the MD state championships with Wake (I am positive he never knew my actual name). I asked for a taco, and he said he would not give me one unless I told him that HE was the state champ. I did. Then he said to say it to a complete stranger who was hovering around in the hopes of scoring a taco. I did. He gave me two. From that day forth, the owner/tournament organizer of that store referred to him as the nicest Magic player she had ever met.

Those are just my experiences with him; wish I could have been there to witness Searing Flesh, Blatant Thievery on Wooded Foothills, anything with Farid and much more. There are few Magic players who have generated as many good stories as PTR. And dear god was it miserable when he targeted you.

Stephen King
I first met PTR at GP New Jersey when I was only thirteen years old. It was my first Grand Prix ever, and I was pretty star struck by all of the pro players I had seen in coverage, but never seen in person. PTR had showed up with a copy of “Guess Who”, but he had replaced all of the faces with pictures of players who were gravy trainers at the time. This was clearly an attempt to mock as many of them as possible, and one of the questions he asked was something along the lines of “are you really, really, fucking fat? Like really fat.” and when his opponent said no, he turned down the picture of Alan Comer.

PTR had memorized one of the boards, so he always made sure to play with that one so he wouldn’t know who his opponent had. I was watching this go on the day before the GP, and after he beat Kibler very convincingly, I decided to make my presence known. “He must have both boards memorized” I said, hoping to earn some kind of a laugh. PTR stared at me right in the face and said, “HA HA Professor, may I have another?” Realizing that my “joke” had failed, I sheepishly retreated.

PTR wasn’t done with me, however, and he wanted to know more about me, so he started asking the other people around whether I was a “barn”, which at the time was brand new lingo and I had no idea what it meant. I had played against Huey, Brock, and Linde in the finals of a Team GP trial the week prior, so he asked all of them their opinion. Brock didn’t seem to care enough to respond, while Linde responded, “I don’t know, probably.” When he asked Billy (Huey) however, he was nice enough to say, “nah he’s fine.” PTR was satisfied, and for the rest of the weekend he was very nice to me. He would ask me how I was doing in the GP between rounds, and express disappointment when he found out about my eventual failure, while also making sure he would get my vote for the Magic Invitational. I was also present for almost all of the stories Tommy mentioned, but I’ll definitely never forget the first time I met PTR.

Morgan Douglass
At US Nationals in Florida one year, I stayed in a hotel room with PTR and zeejustin (Justin Bonomo). I had known ptr from IRC and it seemed like it made sense to share a hotel room. Justin was all of 13 years old and barely knew ptr. When Justin fell asleep on the first night, ptr covered him in hair gel and then mummified him in Magic cards. Justin despised ptr for it, but eventually learned to love him like we all did.

Later in the weekend, a group of about 10 of us went to an IHOP for dinner. ptr was charming our 50+ year old waitress in his usual way when it came time to order our meals. I thought maybe, just maybe, ptr was going to order one of everything like he had done a few times in the past, but this time was different. He ordered smiley-face pancakes, but demanded that the cook make them frowny-face pancakes. The waitress didn’t seem to think the cook would like that, but ptr convinced her that it had to be this way. Instead of a side of toast and bacon, he ordered a side of corn and ketchup. He had no intention of eating any of his food, he just did it to be hilarious. After she brought the food, she left to smoke a cigarette and ptr followed her to the smoking section of the IHOP and they had a heart-felt chat for five minutes or so. I don’t know what they talked about but they had a lot of laughs. Afterwards ptr came back and extinguished his cigarette into the frowny-face pancakes and the meal was over.

I know a lot of second-hand stories that others would be better at telling. How about any time he ever ordered one of everything at a restaurant? He did it multiple times. There was the time in Japan where he went to McDonalds, filled up his cup with fruit punch, stared the employees in the eyes and then tipped it over. As they looked on in horror he fillied it back up again, stuck his index finger out again and pushed it over again until they decided to kick him out. There was the cave room story. The blatent thievery story. I forget the names but there was the time he did a 3 on 1 draft with BenS and Huey(?) vs a dealer at GP Miami where ptr drafted and played an Atogatog in an attempt to lose and throw the draft.

The Searing Flesh Incident

Luckily I witnessed the Searing Flesh incident first hand at PT Yokohama in 2003. It was the last round of the PT, and ptr was playing for T32 vs. a Japanese player. They had a young table judge sitting down next to them observing the match, since it was one of the last matches going on. ptr, dressed in his usual massively oversized sweatpants and always-matching zippered sweatshirt, draws his card and then immediately springs up onto his feet. His chair slides backwards 6 feet and ptr raises a leg, takes the card, reaches behind him and wipes his ass with it a few times to make sure that the Japanese player understands what he’s doing. He then slams the card down on the table in front of him and yells at him to eat it. The player drops his head into his hands in shame. ptr signs the match slip, flings it at the judge and player and then walks away. Somehow the table judge didn’t think that this was unsportsmanlike behavior and proceeded like everything was normal. Standings go up and ptr makes Top 32. Afterwards, the head judge got wind of what happened and gave ptr a retroactive matchloss, moving his Japanese opponent into top 32. Because of that qualification, his opponent, Tomohiro Yokosuka qualified for the next pro tour and made T8.
Alex Borteh
Peter was perhaps my best friend for a number of years. I recall the Pro Tour Guess Who incident fondly. We created the game together during a week he spent with me in Columbus before we took a road trip to GP New Jersey. We drove around the Columbus area for a few hours trying to find a copy of the game… eventually finding it at a Toys R Us. I recall him having an exchange with the cute girl who was working the cashier. She was wondering why on earth two people are age were purchasing “Guess Who,” at which point Peter expressed his pity that she was unable to see the value of one of the greatest games ever created.

After finally tracking down a copy of the game, we dined at Charlie’s Steakery, which Peter had always claimed was the main reason that he chose to visit Columbus so often.

We stayed up all night having heated discussions about which PT players and friends to include in the game. Peter wanted to make sure that there was a good mix players that would allow him the ability to compliment or insult specific people to amusement of his friends.

We scoured The Sideboard coverage archives trying to find the perfect picture of those that he wanted to include. After many hours of printing, cutting, and pasting we finally completed the game. It turned out be a much bigger project than we had anticipated, but we were extremely pleased with the end product and couldn’t wait to bring it to the GP to see what people would have to say about it.

Even when Peter was picking on you, it was in some ways a compliment. He always realized that Magic was about the people that you meet, more than the games that you play. Whether he gave you a silly nickname, or made fun of your outfit… it was still a privilege to be acknowledged by him, and to be included in his world.

I still have the PT Guess Who game to this very day, and still play it on occasion with old friends from that era, despite the fact that plenty of people don’t remember everyone on the board. It’s sort of weird having to be like, “wow… you don’t know who Sol Malka is?” “You never heard of Alex Shvartsman?” and then having to explain who these people were, and why we would have included them in a Guess Who game.

Here are some pictures I just took of the game for those who have never seen it. I have always treasured it, and it means even more to me now.

For all of his pro tour antics, I think something that people might not know is that he actually was a pretty good Magic player, and he was always trying to win. The group of people that we hung out with at the time all thought pretty highly of their Magic-playing prowess because the game was very important to us. Peter didn’t want to seem like a “scrub” in front of his friends. He actually got nervous during key moments in matches because he didn’t want to mess up… especially considering he almost always had a bunch of railbirds watching him who would have been quick to point it out.

If he was crushing you, he’d love to trash talk and try to sweeten his victory. I used to always try to watch his matches once my round was over… and sometimes I’d see him in a situation like the one above, and he’d make a pretty heads-up play and walk away with the win with no fanfare whatsoever. I’d be confused… “Peter…you just outplayed that guy! What’s wrong with you? What, no lap around the room?” It was weird- it always seemed like whenever he made a truly world class play, he would become very humble about it and not rub it in or boast.

I remember this story from PT New Orleans… we had all just gotten in to the hotel and wanted to meet up with our other friends. Supposedly there was a gathering going on on one of the upper-most floors where there was sort of a lobby. Specifically I remember Mike Turian being up there and being rather tipsy… which was a side of him I hadn’t seen before. A lot of the PT players were up there, most in various states of intoxication. PTR was walking around with a big cigar in his mouth, and of course I had one too because I wanted to be just like him. There were some long tables set up for money drafting,  so we did that for a while, until eventually the hotel staff kicked us out for the night.

At that point there were still a few matches yet to be played in some of the drafts. Luckily there were some coffee tables set up near the elevators so we moved over there to let people finish up before going to bed. At some point Peter gets the idea to move one of the coffee tables and two chairs into the elevator. He demands to borrow someone’s draft deck and begins to play Magic in the elevator (I think with Huey). Eventually some unsuspecting hotel patron on another floor pushes the button for the elevator, and Peter gives this big stupid grin and elevator doors close and the players vanish out of sight.

For a good 30 minutes or so, everyone in the hotel that wanted to use that elevator was greeted by an intense match in progress. Peter, wanting to take the joke to its fullest potential, just pretends that nothing at all is out of ordinary about this. People walk in…”I cast my Cabal Patriarch… lord of the swamplands! Go! … What floor do you want?”

Jesse Vandover
I can tell you the Blatant Thievery story, since I was the one playing PTR, and the deck was of my own creation.

I created a URg Form of the Dragon deck for GP: Detroit back in 2003. The deck was then tweaked by Alan Jackson. A couple of pros (Chris Benafel, PTR, Gabe Walls) saw it the night before, and I believe they bought the decklist from Alan, or maybe he gave it to them, I don’t know. I know Chris claimed he got it from “some kid”.

I end up playing PTR round 3, we are both 2-0. The details of the whole match are pretty hazy – I believe I won game one, and the Wooded Foothills part comes in game 2. I have him on complete lockdown in game 2, Form on board, Future Sight on board, tons of lands in play, and I believe several cards in hand. He might have been at 10, I was a couple turns from taking the match anyway, and the only real thing I need to counter is Chain of Vapor on Form.

He taps 7 lands, and casts Blatant Thievery on my Wooded Foothills.

This threw me off in a huge way for two reasons:

1. I made the deck. I don’t have Blatant Thievery in the list! (Turns out he ran it over a Cromeshell Crab.)

2. Why would he target the Foothills of all things?

So I sit confused, and thinking for a minute. What could he need one more land for? Of course, that is a narrow way to look at it, he needed me to sac it, which I stupidly did, and he promptly shocked me twice. He actually didn’t get all that out of control about it – he was more relieved, and incredulous. I remember him asking “WHY!? WHY WOULD YOU SAC IT!?” I was stunned. We shuffled up, and he beat me easily game 3. All in all, he wasn’t that big of a dick about it, even talking to me a couple times later in the day to see where I was at. He did, however, call me Wooded Foothills at every chance, at that tournament and future tournaments.