Illegal deck mistake

I recently won a store tournament night and swept the competition with my corp deck. The next day I played it against a friend and noticed my deck was noticeably slimmer than my other corp deck. I realized my mistake, that I’d transferred over 8 cards from winning deck and forgot to put them back. They were 3x hedge fund, 3x jackson, 2x Eli. I was running an unfavorable, but still illegal deck. Should the season points total be rescinded? What would you do as tourney organizer? Obviously I let him know already.

Seppuku time.

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I don’t think there is much you can do at this point personally. On the other hand… Count your deck every time you sit down to play a game(both sides), you never know when agendas might have gone missing etc. Should have been caught before the tournament even started.

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I have, in two instances, asked my opponent if their deck was legal. In both games they were on Corp and I accessed 30 or so cards and hit 1 agenda. We got down to a handful of cards left and I had lost. In both instances they showed basically 5-6 agendas in the bottom 6-7 cards, fair enough. In one instance, at Worlds 2013, against the French Champion, I had a game with my Weyland deck where all of the agendas were bottom decked. I played accordingly (being the Corp you have the information). He was asking about agendas and I felt compelled to reveal all my R&D cards to him and show my deck as legal, even if he didn’t formally ask. I knew exactly what he was thinking and empathized.

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Just shuffle it by creating 7 piles when you play a 49 cards corp deck. If something’s wrong then you will always know it.

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Played this yesterday to great effect. Seeing 13 unique cards on 2 Medium Runs in Reg MaxX was great.

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As a TO I would do this:

Tournament is already over so the results are “already locked” especially because mistake is noticed during the next day. Optimally this should had been noticed during the tournament or right after it. This situation falls more to accident than cheating category so there is not a huge damage done by this mistake. Still deck being unfavorable is a bit irrelevant for me during the tournament and illegal deck is a straight disqualification in my tournaments (not in casual game night tournaments).

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Wouldn’t this be more appropriate?

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I agree with you on the path forward here from a TO perspective- stuff like this (especially accidental) really should be noticed the day-of. with 9 cards missing, every one of your opponents had an opportunity to notice that your deck was 20% too small.

In terms of what he should do as a player, I think which cards were left is relevant (if only for his own conscience); if for example he had discovered that he had been missing half his agendas, it would be clear that he won at least a few of his games explicitly because of his illegal deck: in that cas it might be worth asking the TO to go out of his way to correct the standings and shuffle the prizes down the list. As it stands, it is still shitty, but at least he can be relatively confident that his error didn’t cost his opponents any wins (missing exclusively top-tier, non-agenda cards) so if the TO lets you keep the win that’s fine.

Really though you mainly need to follow your TO’s lead on this - it’s his call, and I don’t think he’d be wrong to decide either way.

This is exactly how I do it. It seemed like a logical way to recheck your card count, and reshuffle your deck at the same time.

I don’t think it is obvious that the illegal deck hurt the OP. If this was NBN for example, making it that much easier to find those Astros could give you an advantage.

I think the fact you are posting here means that you feel bad about this because you know you had an illegal deck. Thus, really the only option that is reasonable, and will give you closure, AND make sure all your local compatriots understand that YOU understand that this is not something you are hoping to repeat, is to forfeit your winnings to the best of your ability.

This happened to me a while back. For some reason my deck was short one Clone Retirement, and I figured it out after I got home. I asked the tourney organizer to rework the stats assuming that I had lost all of my Corp games. It resulted in one person moving into the prizes and me moving out of them, so I contacted the guy who moved into the prizes and gave him the store credit that I won.

I now do the 7 piles of 7 thing before every tournament (and usually before casual games too).

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Ok, I can see your point here. I still think it needs to be up to the T.O. because this

Isn’t always great practice, unless the tournament was a true round-robin (i.e.: you played every other player in the tourney an equal number of times). Depending on the number of opponents and the order of the standings it might be better to score both sides of your games as a tie/loss - scoring them as a win for your opponents could give them an unfair advantage over players who didn’t face the cheater but won their games anyways.

The takeaway here is that “fixing” the standings after the fact is not always a straightforward affair, and sometimes as unfair as it seems the best way to deal with (accidental) cheating is to just not do it again. Given that missing these cards could have given only a marginal advantage at best, and a significant disadvantage at worst, I think it is the T.O.'s prerogative if they decide to let the results stand.

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How many games did you play? I’d definitely notice if I never drew a single hedge or JHow all tourney.

The biggest problem with giving people retroactive wins and altering standings is that every round after round 1 in the tournament is incorrectly paired, so in reality nobody knows what would have happened. You basically get into “What if…”,

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3 games. The first game I won early with an unchecked, mushined ronin. The second game I won early on a scorched earth. It was only the third game that I was hurting for cash and Eli, but still won on a scorched earth by turn 10

I don’t mind surrendering wins. I’m in this for fun and to bolster the community. If moving a new player up the ranks into prize range helps secure him as a netrunner fan, I’m more than happy to pay for my mistake.

I always do a 100% deck verification on the winner of any tournament I run. If I win, I get someone else to do it for me.

In the event I discovered an illegal deck, his results would immediately be forfeit. The top prize would be knocked down to the 2nd place… The playmat would probably be kept as a booster prize for a future event. I dunno, unless the cut was super fierce (large tournament) and 5th place seems like he deserved a prize.

I dunno. I feel as though that practice would prevent this situation from happening.

Since you walked out the doors with all of the prizes though… At this point IMO it is too late to do anything about it.

I recommend to suggest to your TO to just have a deck check for the winners in the future.

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