Well, if he's cheated so much in the past that he can't get the benefit of the doubt from the judges now, he won't get a ton of sympathy from me either.
Evu
joined 2 years ago
That's valuable context, thanks.
It's not like they don't know they're on camera, and on top of that, Van Etten was up a game already. Who would intentionally cheat in a situation where you're pretty much guaranteed to get caught, and you don't even need the advantage that badly anyway? The only thing I can think of is that Van Etten told the judges "Yeah, I realized it a couple of turns later but didn't say anything."
By the way, speaking as someone who's played my share of paper Magic and made more than my share of judge calls: call the judges when this happens. Their top priority is to fix the game state, not to punish you. Sometimes if the game has progressed too far to fix, they'll let the mistake stand. I don't know offhand how enforcement differs at a high-level event like this, but I think there's a real chance that Van Etten could have salvaged a match win out of this if he'd called the judges on himself in time.
The announcement says turn 3 of game 3, but it means game 2. Their game 2 starts at about 5:30:15 of the official coverage, and the play in question happens at around 5:34:00. Twitch chatters catch the mistake immediately, and the commentators bring it up around 5:35:35.
I could easily see myself doing something like this by mistake. I wonder what the judges heard when they interviewed the players that convinced them it was intentional.
Yeah, but they can go up to four copies of Yotian Frontliner. It's not as good, but I don't think it's bad enough to sink the deck. And that's assuming that neither color gets an artifact-producing one-drop in the next set. Or lands that make it viable to go into a third color for Spyglass Siren.
Interesting that they considered banning Atraxa or Knight-Errant from Standard. While I wouldn't shed a tear for either one, I can't honestly say that the format is unbalanced right now. Those decks are strong but beatable, and their metagame shares are reasonable.
In fact, I've been playing Poison Burn for so long that I actually look forward to facing Domain Ramp. And I think losing the triomes, and thus the potential for turn-two Leylines, will slow the deck down by a lot.
On the other hand, I don't understand the argument that losing Voldaren Epicure will significantly hurt Boros Convoke. I hardly ever see that deck play Knight-Errant on turn 2, and yet I still lose to it plenty. If I could ban one card from the deck, I'd choose Imodane's Recruiter, or maybe Warden of the Inner Sky.
before we put our children onto the battlefield, not 'create' them like some rules committees would have you believe.
A real Magic fundamentalist would put them into play.
When they started doing borderless cards and showcase art, I thought they were going to use those things as an excuse to stop printing foils. "Let's face it, we've never been able to figure out how to make foils that last, but it's okay because we've got multiple other cool, popular premium treatments to take their place." But here we are years later and they're just... still printing foils? Even though they don't have to?
If I were in a draft and got passed a foil and non-foil version of the same card, I would most likely take the non-foil.
As someone who rarely plays older formats, the only reward I value in here is the draft token. Drafts normally cost 1,500 gems. Unlocking the Horizon Hideaway costs 2,300 gems. Are a bunch of cosmetics, mostly for cards I won't play often, worth 800 gems to me? When I put it that way, it doesn't sound like they should be. I guess we'll see what they look like?
The Ashling avatar looks pretty cool, although I prefer my avatar not to be a named character (currently using the Dreadhorde one).
I've been playing Magic long enough to remember when a 3/4 for 3 mana would need a pretty significant drawback to even be printable. So I'm still surprised when they come out with broken nonsense like Nadu, even though I shouldn't be by now.
This Pro Tour had lopsided numbers and non-interactive games and just wasn't much fun to watch. Wizards should consider it a disaster, but whether they will probably depends a lot on MH3 sales numbers.