Magic: The Gathering Player Reveals How He Cheated in A Grand Prix

Wizards of the Coast

Magic: The Gathering player Fabrizio Anteri has released a statement on his Twitter account detailing how he cheated in Grand Prix Manchester 2016.

Anteri was disqualified in Round 4 of Grand Prix Manchester for mana weaving followed by an 18-month suspension the week after.

According to GP Manchester head judge Alfonso Bueno, "Fabrizio Anteri has been disqualified from Grand Prix Manchester 2016 for deck manipulation. He repeatedly used a shuffling technique which made his deck have a beneficial distribution of lands and spells. Based on our investigation, we came to the belief that Fabrizio Anteri was doing this on purpose to gain an unfair advantage in game play."

Over on Twitter, Anteri explains what "mana weaving" means and how he did that. Mana weaving is "sorting your lands in your deck while shuffling between games in such a way to never draw too many or too few lands (sorting a ratio close to two-spells one land), having a perfect distribution of lands and spells and basically never having to mulligan, get mana screw or mana flood."

Anteri went on to reveal how he was able to accomplish this between games, saying that he would move the lands around, sorting them between spells while looking at the deck after replacing main deck cards with sideboard cards. He would pretend to do mash shuffles to make it look like he's changing the order of cards. According to him, he used the technique against less experienced players who tend to just cut the deck and not shuffle them.

You can read the rest of Anteri's statements below, including an explanation on his thinking process that made him cheat.

Talks of cheating in Magic: The Gathering tournaments recently surfaced after two-time Grand Prix champion Daniel Lanthier was caught cheating on camera. He was already banned for three years for his actions.

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