Tournament rules regarding different backs on cards.

Aaron wrote:

I only rarely sleeve my decks. Maybe it's a cultural thing: I'm American, and not everyone sleeves their decks here. I usually sleeve my crypt in order to save wear and tear on those cards. If I felt that my mix of cards would give me an advantage (or would be judged to give me an advantage), I would sleeve them in a tournament. Usually I have random staple Jyhad cards that are truly randomized. Possible example of Jyhad cards in a Tremere deck: 2x Magic of the Smith/ 1x Govern the Unaligned/ 2x Wake with Evening's Freshness/ 2x Taste of Vitae/ 1x Conditioning/ 2x Deflection. That kind of thing.

I don't want to have to sleeve every deck I play with. That's too much work. I want it to be easy to alter, dismantle, and build decks.

How many other copies of those cards do you have with other backs?
In a game with that deck where you've got 2x Magic of the Smith/ 1x Govern the Unaligned/ 2x Wake with Evening's Freshness/ 2x Taste of Vitae in your ash heap or hand, you will have a very good chance of knowing what card you'll draw next if your top library card has a Jyhad back.

Kushiel wrote:

It doesn't, unless you can prove that it's somehow impossible to make a sleeved deck in which the Deflections or Freak Drives are marked. And, again, the method you're describing here is much easier to catch - call a judge over and have him go through the deck. If every Jyhad card is a Freak Drive and every FD is Jyhad, that's very easy to spot. Much harder to spot deliberately marked sleeves. me, it's true. That's good enough reason for me to not want to sleeve my deck.

Can I then put 8 deflections and 3 freak drives as jyhad cards in my deck? Or some other combination which will help. My point is more that there is automatic advantage when playing without sleeves with jyhad cards even when you are not "cheating" (and I think non sleaves allows easier ways to cheat also).

Xaddam wrote:

KevinM wrote:

So you believe that people that don't play with sleeves have no integrity, or their integrity is somehow less than yours? I see.

Oh, my Paypal address is , I'll be awaiting your $10 so that I can start sleeving my cards. ;)

I'm not a native speaker, so my syntax or semantics might off. I'm sorry if that's what's happened here.

Of course I don't mean that. By 'integrity of the competition' I mean our ability, as community members, to say "our competition format is fair and results reflects the participants' skill". If someone might have cheated and we didn't do our utmost to hinder it it's hard to claim the competition has integrity.

Your English is excellent.

What I'm saying is that there is no reason to assume that people are going to cheat and to create barriers, however slight, above and beyond the rules of the game, to play, and the lack of such barriers, however few, are not grounds to state that a community does not have 100% integrity in regards to leveling the playing field. The non-sleeve-based rules are completely sufficient to ensure a proper, legitimate, integrity-based game.

There is no reason that I can see, other than fear -- of the rules, of the unknown player, of the unwanted player, etc -- that a gaming community would institute "house" rules above-and-beyond the given rules of the game which mandate barriers, however slight, to entry into the community.

If the rules of a game aren't sufficient for the community, I'd suggest that the community STOP playing the game, to lessen the fear in their lives, and play something properly and completely designed.

Brum wrote:

EDIT: I don't understand how it is possible to be against Proxies by counter argumentation of the money issue for new players, and claim that the cost is an issue for sleeves and that it would be a barrier to new players. Yeah, I'm looking at you Kevin

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Can you be more specific so that I can respond?

henrik wrote:

Either you're going to create that thread yourself or you're being a jerk. If the former, I look forward to discussing it in your thread. If the latter, please stop.

When you come up with something on your own, feel free to let me know. Maybe I'll reuse it over and over again because it's as cool as what I came up with.

henrik wrote:

And as I've stated before in this thread, opaque sleeves are needed due to the very different colouring of the sets.

They've very obviously not been needed in the past, since they haven't ever been required by the VEKN tournament rules. What's changed since you started this thread to make them necessary?