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Comment by MrJagil | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in this kind of thing, Tavis King is one of the more knowledgable people with regards to mtg. Here's him mapping a booster to print sheet, to see how many Lotus' are still out there, possible to be opened: https://youtu.be/nnYe8FWTu_o?feature=shared&t=184

edit: If you want the very technical version, here's a video from his own channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnYLvWdNd8

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I remember reading a story about a (now) well-known MTG player. It was about their experience at one of their first tournaments, and had this detail about how during the tourney he got some pointers from Kai Budde (I think) on drafting - and in particular on print sheets.

My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."

I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)

But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.

(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)

edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!

There is a woman who found a way to game casino black jack and made millions out of it before getting caught. It's nearly impossible to replicate but it involved spotting imperfections in the way print sheets are cut up into individual cards.

I don't remember her name but she was an associate of poker legend Phil Ivey, and there's a whole documentary on YouTube about it. It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.

Cheung Yin ‘Kelly’ Sun. The tactic is called edge sorting [1], they played Baccarat and had the dealers turn certain cards 180 degrees "for luck".

Here's a great doco about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEkl2yAdoHw

Lots of coverage around the gambling news sites too:

https://highstakesdb.com/news/high-stakes-reports/phil-ivey-...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_sorting

I thought this sounded familiar, and yeah it was covered here in the past https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226725 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7631091

You are absolutely right, sadly i can't edit my original comment anymore. Also that's the exact documentary i got it from, thanks for posting it.

They were actually changing the deck in way that survives shuffling, not just looking at the differences.

They were using the offset on the printing as a way to tell orientation of the card. Since auto shufflers never rotate the cards, any rotation they added would persist allowing a way to tell good from bad cards in future hands.

Yes that is why I mentioned it was nearly impossible to replicate. The final optimized method involved a lot of social engineering, which required to have very high standing in the casinos. She had to request, under the guise of superstition, a specific setup with a specific style of dealer, who never changed decks, and to be authorized to call out certain cards as "lucky" which the dealer would flip themselves.

It also required deep pockets, as just playing the shoe enough to sort it could take a few hours of regular gambling. That's the crazy thing, this elaborate setup just got them a few % edge on the house which they milked relentlessly.

>It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.

I feel like it's less greed when they're gaming back casinos that already have a house edge.

Counting cards ,being able recognize cards, it seems like anything where a person might use their brain to deduce what's next is "cheating"

Greed and cheating needn't be realted. The players are following this strategy to make money, presumably more than they should want. Whether they're taking it from moral or immoral sources should be a separate issue, imho.

> The players are following this strategy to make money, presumably more than they should want.

I’m not sure I understand this. Why should there be a limit to the amount of money someone wants?

I say greed with absolutely no moral implications here ! But when you watch the doco it is pretty apparent that this kind of hunger is compulsive.

Its greed from a game theory perspective. She could have walked away at 5 million and gotten away with it.

Reminds me of Michael Larson’s breaking of Press Your Luck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Your_Luck_scandal

I thought it was less that you could predict across packs and more that you could infer what card had been taken given what was left. That meant you had a better chance of not getting cut during the draft.

Yeah I'm sure I've fumbled some details here (sorry!) - I'm searching for this story again and haven't found it, but have found a few things about draft techniques that use print sheets[1] that focus on what you describe - reasoning about the original pack based on the current contents. The technique is pretty interesting!

[1] https://imgur.com/a/how-to-use-print-runs-to-gain-advantage-...

Most of MtG’s secondary market value is protected by how difficult it is (or how costly it is) for cheap printers to match Cartamundi’s (and other global printers) offset printing processes. The number of counterfeit tests (green dot, black layer, Deckmaster, etc) that are simple and useful for basic users to determine counterfeits all trace back to the printing processes WotC uses.

I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail

It relies heavily on the security and trustworthiness of the printer as well though, same as any kind of company where their product's value far outweighs its production cost (like cash money); I can imagine that before the big boom, employees would be able to take some cards / boxes / sheets home if they wanted to.

I worked on an application used in a paper factory that produced paper for banknotes. The entire point of the application was to make sure every single sheet of the paper was accounted for. There were unique barcodes printed on it as soon as it was dry enough to do so, and tracked throughout the production process.

Fun fact: confirming the proper disposal of damaged sheets required special privileges, and the name for the user role was "destroyer". So someone could rightfully claim their job title was "destroyer".

yeah, there is a lot of control of printing artifacts that are required. Some of those do make it out, either through QC issues [0] or through WotC itself gifting test print cards and full sheets to employees or as prizes. However, the ability to generate truly authentic MtG cards requires two things: million dollar Heidelberg offset printing machines and the original offset printing files for the card backs (which have not changed since release as far as I'm aware).

[0] - https://blog.cardsphere.com/misprints-and-human-mistakes-a-b...

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