Soft Cheating, and how to prevent it. Part 2.

Duel!

Both players draw their 5 cards, and your opponent draws one to begin the game.

She summons Armageddon Knight, uses its effect to send Cross Porter to the graveyard, and uses the Porter's effect to search out Neo Spacian Black Panther, shuffles, and passes you the deck to cut.

You take a random half off the top and pass back the deck. She follows with Allure, feeding the panther to it.

Turn End. You draw.

After some rather amazing comboes, you manage to summon 1 Gigaplant, and drop a Copy plant to your graveyard. You revive gigaplant, activate supervis, Synchro into Powertool, and Priority is eaten by Supervis, which wants to revive your gigaplant.

Knowing your last card in your hand is United We Stand, its clear that if your powertool can call out a Mark of the Rose, you have game. (2300 Powertool + 1400 Armageddon Knight + 2400 Gigaplant + 2400 United We Stand Buff).

But theres a problem. Expecting the Dimensional Eatos matchup, as well as deckspace, you put two, so it wont be a 100% search.

So, taking the chance, you trigger powertool, choosing Double tool C&D, and two mark of the Rose. 2/3 Chance of OTK, 100% chance the opponent will be under pressure next turn, right?

You take the 3 cards out of your deck, and your opponent takes them and shuffles the three face down. She then hands you one card out of the stack, and puts the remaining two back in your deck.

Pretty standard procedure, right? Only she just passed you Double Tool C&D, and she knows it.

She then cuts your deck. The same way you did to her deck.

You just attack, without using your remaining hand cards, reducing her LP by 3300.

Then, she drops Gorz on your Powertool's direct attack. Your OTK wouldnt have worked anyhows.

Perfectly fine situation right? Completely due to bad luck.

Wrong.

You may not have noticed it, but your opponent has "soft cheated" you not once or twice, but THREE times in this short span, all three times using almost the same concept.


What concept?

The fact that super rare, Ultra rare, and Common cards all have different physical properties.

Foil cards are harder and tend to bend over time(not much or slowly depending on how much you take care of them). Without sleeves, they also slide more than commons.

Both these properties are used to "search packs", to find the foil cards in packs without the use of scaling.

What most people dont know is that these same properties can be used to search out foils and non foils within the deck and in the hand(or in the example, what is being chosen for Powertool).

Most of the time, foil cards are better than the non foil ones(Starlight Road sure beats Watapon, right?), but there are exceptions(DAD).

Additionally, if one has seen what hand cards you have(through either side shuffle cheating or Trap Dustshoot), one can pinpoint with a higher chance what card they want to destroy with removal cards or hand discard cards such as Spirit Reaper.

So, one time was when she gave you the double tool.

What about the other two?

Both times was when you cut the deck, and she cut yours.

When she cut yours, she used a lesser version of this trick to ensure the top card of your deck would be a common.

By feeling quickly what cards were foil, she could ensure, using the cut, the next few cards would not be foil.

The other time was your screwup, which let her top Gorz with allure.

When people search or burial something with cards like Foolish or Armageddon Knight, it is possible to quickly swap card positions while looking like reviewing what card to send.

Which is supposedly, in theory, useless, because of the cut and shuffle. Right?

Well, sorta.

As mentioned before, a good shufller can place one or a few cards where they want them to be with each shuffle, the hindu shuffle requiring the most practice and skill.

But thats before the cut, so most of the stacking goes out the window.

Unless you can predict the cut.

Statistics say that almost all cuts are made almost at the center of the deck, or at least more towards the center than to the ends.

By taking advantage of this, and putting Gorz near the middle, she can effectively have a high chance of you cutting along the middle, and thus letting her draw into it.(Not that Junk and debris NEEDS to draw anything in particular. Its just nice to hold Gorz.)


How do I prevent this?

Foil feeling with a few cards is hard to avoid. The only real way is to either have almost all cards foil, or to have an equal number. Having a low number only lets this feeling happen easier.

Also, if cards are available in different rarities, such as mark of rose, it might help to have one super rare and one common (DT).

For "Power cards" such as torrential and Mirror Force, it might be nice to use one as foil and the other common, since this lets you draw into these power cards even if you are being stacked.

Other options include taking ridiculously good care of your cards, which has zero practicality, since its easy to feel through the flattening of cards, or to use many layers of sleeves(I can personally feel through 5 layers of sleeves(on my Devilguy Beat deck, for example)), so you can see how easy this is to do.

As for the cut psychology abuse, its easy to simply cut a few off the top, or all but one card on the bottom, from time to time.


Thats all for today. Not much compared to yesterday but I also have less time to waste :p