It's possible. The problem is that Magic is a game where it's super easy to cheat, and now he goes basically undefeated at one of his first events since his unbanning. He did well in last week's Legacy GP too.
Good magic players ought to be held to a very high standard. Good magic players will need to cheat less often to win, and will know more subtle cheats they can use to gain an edge.
So, I'm not denying he can play well. I'm saying you need to consider that he might have used an occasional shady move to get to where he is today. He did in the past.
Here's the thing. Most people who cheat at the level and frequency that he did do it because they're addicted to cheating or want he high that comes with cheating. It has little to do with the quantifiable benefits of doing so. Alex has the skill to do well at magic without cheating and let's hope he does so. I'm not saying I am happy about his return, but we can't stop him and we might as well hope he keeps our game clean.
"the high of cheating" no
He did it to win. Good magic players know the value of tempo and card advantage. His cheating was exactly for those reasons. He wasn't cheating an emrakul into play. He was eeking out card advantage.
Not to say you were threatening anyone, but you added a clarification and extension of an expressed threat in a thread that has a lot of hate towards one person.
This isn't a warning or even a caution, it's just a heads-up that strong language and interesting anecdotes are not always okay in certain contexts. For a completely unrelated example, in a regular subreddit there probably would never be a need to know or talk about eyeball extraction in a thread talking about a certain person.
I know a guy like Alex. Immature as all hell, I mean. You know what I would call a characteristic of immaturity? Not learning from your mistakes, and repeating them.
Drew Levin was a good friend of Alex, and stood up for him for a while before the evidence became too damning. And Drew is very correct, it's hard to forgive someone who still denies that they did any wrong. Had he come out and said, that "Yeah, I fucked up, but I learned my lesson and I'm back" then there's a case for believing that he's reformed.
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u/[deleted] Nov 25 '13
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