Playing card games like Magic: the Gathering can be a lot of fun and a great way to hang out with friends.

Unfortunately, sometimes you end up playing with someone who loves to cheat, which can ruin it for everyone.

That is what the young lady in this story experienced, but she found a way to get revenge.

Check it out.

How I got revenge against a compulsive cheater

I usually am not the one to take revenge since I’m risk-averse.

However, in this case, I found it was the most logical thing to do since I knew ahead of time that the other guy was going to try and screw me.

There was this fellow in my high school. His name was David.

He was one grade above me and he was a complete jerk, a compulsive liar, and a compulsive cheater.

Often times during lunch hour, students would get together at the tables to play card games and such.

I usually got involved in these games as well.

David did too, but not as often.

When he did, I watched him.

Honestly, this kid fascinated me since he was completely blatant about his lying and cheating.

I remember distinctly watching him play a game of Magic: The Gathering with another student and I would watch him take 2, 3, even 4 cards at a time when he should have only been drawing 1.

His opponent was completely oblivious to this and was so concerned about her own cards to really pay attention to what David was doing.

I just kept my mouth shut.

Pretty soon he had something like 20 cards in his hand while his opponent had 4-5.

It was very ridiculous.

I usually avoided playing with him, but I must have played with him at least once.

David sounds insufferable.

He would continue to cheat in the open until you called him on it.

Of course, he would try to lawyer himself out of it or tell me I got it wrong.

He would try to change the rules of the game to benefit him in the moment for his specific situation.

He would throw a fit if you tried to argue and would only back down if you got the whole audience to agree unanimously that he was wrong.

Playing him was an exhausting experience since you spend more time arguing and watching him than playing the game.

It was 1995 at the time, and I had played some Magic: The Gathering (MTG).

I was nearly finished with this game since all the great expansions came out before I even got involved, and people with money held all the power cards.

I had dropped my own money in the new expansion “Fallen Empires”, which turned out to be one of the worst expansions ever made in the game’s history.

Therefore, I was pretty sour and was basically giving up the game since I didn’t see how I could ever catch up.

A guy I knew, Alex, decided to organize a starter pack tournament, where the players had to compete with only the cards they got with the starter pack.

This sounded like an interesting variation on the game, and I thought I might join to try and squeeze some fun out of this game I was quickly losing interest in.

Incidentally, David joined this tournament.

Now, his reputation was well known by Alex, but he let David join anyway.

The logic being that he needed people, even if those people were jerks.

There was only something like 5 people in the tournament so it was hard to argue with that.

Of course, it was.

Can you guess whom my first match was against?

That’s right. It was David.

Now, I didn’t want to lawyer and argue with David the whole game since that was no fun at all.

If I was going to play him, I wanted to completely royally screw him over and embarrass him in front of the whole player tournament.

A sort of preemptive revenge for the stuff I know he was going to pull on me.

Knowing that he was going to cheat ahead of time gave me some unique opportunities.

I felt it relieved me of any ethical obligation to play a fair game.

I needed to stack the deck in my favor, so to speak. Let me explain what I did.

So, each player was given a starter pack and one booster pack (MTG Revised Edition for those who care).

This gave you an assortment of cards that made overall fairly weak decks.

Most games resulted in waiting for the person to get enough land to play a monster and start doing damage against their opponent.

Any sizeable monster in play usually results in that player winning since our decks were so weak.

In order to give yourself a chance of getting the right cards, you need to strip out all the fluff that was going to do you no good.

So your cards were divided into your active playing deck and your reject pile.

You only played with your active deck.

At the end of the game, the winner gets to draw at random a card to keep from the loser’s active deck or your reject pile.

It’s the winner’s choice. This is important later.

Good luck.

My deck had an unusually useful card for this sort of tournament called a Demonic Tutor.

It essentially lets you go through your own deck and pick out the exact card you want.

If I ever got this card, it would be my key to winning since I could pick out the only monster I have that actually does damage.

So now I have two chances of winning. If I draw my monster or draw the Demonic Tutor.

David also had an unusually useful card in his deck as well.

I think it was some kind of rare card and he cherished it so much.

I don’t remember what card it was, but I remember it did him no good against me.

My goal was to completely win the match and then pilfer his Precious Rare “at random”.

To prepare, I took my uber-powerful Demonic Tutor card and oh so gently, put a tiny fold in the top right corner of the card.

This way, if you put it in a deck, you can see it stand out from all the other cards.

You only see this if you know what to look for.

When we met for our match, we get to browse each other’s cards so we know what to expect.

I browsed through his deck and took out his Precious Rare to admire.

While David was too busy looking through my cards, I put the same tiny fold in his rare card and put it back in his deck.

I didn’t have time to check if it stood out, so I crossed my fingers.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Next we shuffled our cards.

Since I could see where my Demonic Tutor was, I shuffled it carefully so that it was below the 75% mark in my deck.

So when he cut my deck, there’s a good chance that the Demonic Tutor would end up near the top.

If I didn’t end up getting this card, I have a second chance of getting the monster instead.

Luckily, when he cut my deck, he cut it above my Demonic Tutor’s location, so I was good to go in that department.

Next, I cut his deck, but since I could see where his Precious Rare was located, I made sure to cut the deck so that his card was as close to the bottom as possible and wouldn’t show up during the match.

David was too self-absorbed to suspect that anyone other than himself might have evil intentions.

Things are going well so far, and I’m starting to feel bad for David.

I’m starting to question whether what I’m doing is the right thing. These doubts are quickly erased by subsequent events.

We start to play.

My job here at this point was to watch him like a hawk and call him out every time he tries to cheat.

And try he did.

He tried to do the whole multiple card-draw on me. I called him out on it.

Is it even fun to cheat this much?

David tried to act like it was an accident.

This got the tournament organizer’s attention and David a verbal tongue lashing from Alex.

Alex basically told David to stop acting like a jerk and play the game.

This had the effect of crucially destroying David’s credibility and getting everyone in the room on my side.

I shined a spotlight on his ways, so to speak.

Next thing he did was try to lawyer his way to do something that was clearly against the rules.

Of course, I made a calm but loud enough scene for everyone to notice and eventually called Alex over again to adjudicate.

Alex told him he’s full of it and ruled in my favor.

Soon enough, I had the Demonic Tutor in my hand after several turns since it was near the top.

By this time, I had all that I needed but the monster.

I pretended to act joyful and surprised when I threw down my Demonic Tutor and went rifling through my deck to get that monster.

David’s face started to go red and his body was very agitated.

The next round, I threw that monster on the table with gusto!

Great acting!

I celebrated with “Yes!” and “I can’t believe it!”.

The other people in the room were starting to admire my skill and good luck.

They were really watching my game now and clearly wanting to see me win.

The best David can do at this point is pull out a monster to block me or somehow get rid of my monster.

Knowing that the only card that has a hope of achieving that is his Precious Rare safely at the bottom of his deck, I was inwardly confident, but acted nervous to lead him on that he actually had a chance of pulling one out.

Every subsequent round, I would attack him with the monster, pinging his life down.

Of course, during this time, nothing good came out of his deck.

Slowly, his chances for winning dwindled and his fury grew.

Then it was over.

I celebrated and other people in the room marveled at my amazing play style.

David was so mad he was shaking. Whenever he spoke, he was petulant and angry.

While I was making a big show of celebrating my good fortune, David had already planned and executed his next cheat.

He took both his active pile and his reject pile and mixed them together as soon as the game ended.

If you recall, these piles are supposed to be separate so that I could choose which pile to pilfer from.

By mixing them up, he reduces the chance that I’ll randomly take any of his good cards, including his Precious Rare.

I immediately called him out on it as he’s mixing them together.

He starts arguing about the tournament rules and his interpretation of them.

She was cheated.

I make a big show of arguing and acting like I was cheated.

Honestly, it didn’t matter that he did this since I could still see where his Precious Rare was.

This final act of cheating showed his petulance and completely ruined any reputation he had in the room.

I called over Alex the organizer to adjudicate and demand restitution.

Clearly there was no way to unmix the decks unless you have an entropy reversal device, so the damage was done.

Alex called David a jerk for what he did, and Alex tried to placate my hurt feelings.

Acting hurt and angry, I told him “Fine! Let’s get this over with.”

David had a smirk under his face, thinking he’d finally pulled one over on me.

Oh, how wrong he was.

While making a show of concentration and trepidation, I spread his deck out and made a show of going after a card, but changing my mind a couple times.

What a surprise!

Finally, “at random,” I pulled out the card with the tiny folded corner and with drama turned it around to show everyone at the same time that it was the Precious Rare.

Immediately David let out a scream of anger that made the whole room silent.

He quickly packed up all his crap and stomped out of the room. But I had his Precious Rare.

Everyone was overjoyed that I had completely and totally demolished David and dealt a slice of righteous karmic justice at the same time.

We all agreed how much of a jerk he was and that he got what he deserved. Honestly it was the highlight of the tournament.

David dropped out of the tournament after that and no one was sad to see him go.

I never told anyone about my deception.

I think people are happier thinking the universe conspired against David to deliver justice.

He only got what he deserved. Well done.

The people in the comments also seem to appreciate it, let’s take a look.

Here is another MTG player.

It was a great story.

Card games were so fun.

This person admits to cheating.

There is one in every group.

A well-planned revenge is a thing of beauty.

That’s what we’re all here for, right?

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.