“Did he just turn his deck over?” The decorated player who went from Vault Tour winner to community outcast. [Hobby Drama Archive]

For several years, a KeyForge player soho_jin has documented KeyForge's more dramatic and interesting moments for the r/HobbyDrama subreddit. While the stories he tells involve low points for the game, he always uses them to point out the best of KeyForge and the community that keeps it going. KeyForge Public Radio is proud to archive these important pieces of KeyForge writing, with permission from the author. The original version of this post is here; the below post is unmodified from its original posting on March 28, 2021.

I love Keyforge.

But from time to time, mistakes can be made. Given the sheer number of effects that cards can have, I’m sure every player has found themselves forgetting things. Who hasn’t drawn up to the standard six cards while the opponent has Succubus in play? Or left Berinon intact upon a mutant creature entering play, when he should have become enraged? It’s easy to simply go on autopilot instead of slowly and methodically going through the motions, eyes sharp and alert to all that occurs. With that in mind, let’s take a trip back in time to October 2019, meet the professional player who walked away with a tournament win, and the drama that followed.

Before we proceed, I should say that I do not condone people making personal attacks or threats against anyone involved. This should not be turned into a witch hunt. I will be using the real name of the player in question since it is mentioned in the links I’ll be using, but please refrain from contacting him or anyone else mentioned.

Anyway, let’s first go over some basic information.

Keyforge and the Vault Tour

Keyforge is a game all about forging keys, as the name would imply. In order to forge keys you need ӕmber. Six ӕmber makes one key and the first to three keys wins. If you’re more interested in the quirks of the game itself – from overpowered cards to confusing rulings – check out my previous Hobby Drama articles on The LANS combo, Bait and Switch and Archimedes.

The Vault Tour is a series of official tournaments run by Fantasy Flight Games, the creators and publishers of Keyforge. While not as large as tournaments for the likes of Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! the Vault Tours still garnered a respectable number of players for a new card game, peaking with the Birmingham Vault Tour in June 2019 which saw 388 players compete. Whether things would’ve gotten bigger in a non-COVID alternate timeline with the announcement of the Vault Warrior series, I guess we’ll never know.

The most common formats were Archon Solo – where players bring one deck to stick with for the entire tournament – and Sealed Solo – where players use a brand new, unopened deck to compete with, usually from a selection of three potential decks. To the uninitiated it should be noted that the sealed format can exist because Keyforge has no deck construction. All decks are generated using an algorithm, and every deck in the world is unique. Mixing cards from multiple decks is not allowed, and is safeguarded by each deck having unique names and archon artwork printed on each card as well as a printed decklist available to both players.

The Las Vegas Vault Tour was played using the Archon Triad format, in which each player brings three decks. Before each match players are allowed to check their opponent’s decks and choose one to ‘bench’, disallowing them from using it.

Just your Average Joe

Enter Joe Huber, a professional player who was part of Team SAS, one of the most successful competitive teams ever. Made up of multiple Vault Tour winners, event organizers, streamers, podcasters, and the creator of Decks of Keyforge – a site that pretty much every Keyforge player is intimately familiar with – these guys were a pretty big deal in the competitive Keyforge community.

As stated on their site, their members hold Vault Tour wins in Denver, Ohio, Nuremburg, Madrid, Indianapolis, and Albany. You’ll notice that nowhere in that list does it say Las Vegas, despite the fact that team member Joe did indeed win the Vault Tour there. Or at least, he was a member of Team SAS.

Joe won the Vault Tour on October 4th 2019, battling his way through a slew of skilled opponents and high level decks. While his win was initially celebrated, suspicions began to arise a few weeks later. The main cause for this was footage of Joe’s quarter finals match against Kirkman. You see, in most card games when a player runs out of cards in their draw pile they suffer a punishment, usually by having their life total depleted or simply losing the game outright. In Keyforge, if you are due to draw a card from an empty deck, you simply take all of your cards from your discard pile and shuffle them face down to create your new draw pile. Yet on the stream of Joe vs Kirkman, at a time when Joe was due to do exactly that, he instead turned over his discard pile to create the new deck, without shuffling. (See the 36:45 mark on the video)

It wasn’t until after the tournament when the stream was eventually uploaded to YouTube that the footage was pored over and people noticed the rule-break. Given the fact Joe had won the entire tournament, the news spread like wildfire, quickly gaining the attention of Joe and the other members of Team SAS.

There’s more to this incident, and I’ll be getting back to it in a moment, but first I want to talk about Joe’s response to the cheating allegations. In it, he says this ‘cheating’ was simply a mistake on his part, and wasn’t intentional. He apologized for his actions, endeavored to do better in the future, and linked an hour-long podcast explaining his reasoning in full.

I will not pretend to know this man or to be able to say definitively and with absolute conviction whether he did or did not cheat intentionally. Far be it from me to claim faultless knowledge on this issue. But as far intuition and looking at the evidence goes… Pretty much nobody believed him.

Community Judgement

With regards to the introductory segment of this post, yes, honest mistakes can and will happen in Keyforge. People aren’t perfect, and in games where a multitude of card effects take place it’s always possible for both players to forget about one of them. However, this particular incident was not viewed by the majority of the community to be such a case. The reasons for suspicion were as follows:

1. Instances where players are required to shuffle their discard pile after exhausting their deck aren’t rare. At all. This is a common occurrence that happens on a regular basis in both casual and competitive play. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that in around 50% of games at least one player will end up needing to reshuffle. In decks with high efficiency – which are generally popular at high levels – cycling through your deck is an expected part of the game. To any seasoned player, reshuffling after you empty your deck should be an ingrained habit. (Something that has ruined a game or two of Aeon’s End, I can tell you) And yet, Joe didn’t shuffle.
2. It is common practice for players to offer their opponent to cut their deck after shuffling. This is to prevent players from holding key cards at the top of the deck while shuffling, which is an easy trick. (We'll be coming back to this one later) While there are no hard and fast rules to force you to do this, players are fully entitled to ask to cut their opponent’s deck after any shuffle. In competitive events, doing so is a must. And yet, in this particular instance, Joe didn’t offer his deck to be cut.
3. Most crucially (and perhaps the biggest reason people refused to believe that it was just a mistake), Joe can be seen actively looking through his discard pile, checking which cards were situated near the top before simply turning the deck over without shuffling and drawing into the cards that he’d just looked at. One of which was the card Smith, which given the board state ensured he would gain 3 ӕmber on his turn, allowing him to push towards that third key.

With all this in mind, few were willing to believe that such a thing could possibly be an accident. Many were shocked that this wasn’t picked up on as it happened, especially considering that there was an official judge present. (This was, after all, a top 8 match in one of the game’s biggest tournaments)

Before I sum up what followed, I think it best to let everyone in on a rather knuckle-biting piece of information. If we are to assume that Joe did cheat intentionally to gain an edge in this match, it would surely be embarrassing to note that at the time Joe’s unshuffled deck was brought back into play, the game was pretty much over. Even without Smith, Joe was far in the lead at this point, almost at three keys with far greater board presence. The chance of his opponent staging a comeback was basically zero. That’s right, everyone. He was called out for cheating in a game that he had essentially already won.

As for the podcast that Joe had linked to explain everything, some took it as an insult. “I like how he turned this into an advertisement for his podcast...” wrote one commenter. As for the actual content of the podcast, people weren’t impressed either. “Jupiter: Do you know magic tricks? - Joe: I do not -Jupiter: Therefore he did not cheat.” Was how one commenter summed it up. Things were looking grim for Joe, but it didn’t stop there.

Tales From The Crucible

At around this time other Keyforge players began speaking out against Joe for other incidents, claiming this wasn’t the only time he’d been involved in something suspicious. While the video for this next instance is no longer available, comments from this Reddit post give a general idea of what was going on.

Remember when I said about the etiquette of players cutting their opponent’s deck? That’s because of how easy it is to keep one card in place, which is what Joe appeared to be doing. The Terror is a card that you ideally want in your opening hand if you’re going first, as it guarantees you’ll net an extra 2 ӕmber. Well… it seems like in that same tournament in Vegas, Joe could be seen checking the underside of his deck to find The Terror, then began shuffling in a rather suspicious way, almost as if he wasn’t shuffling a portion of the deck. Then he draws his cards and plays The Terror on the first turn.

In addition to this, other players accused him of being toxic and disruptive. “You pushed people out of the way to get to the pairings sheet instead of waiting for people and when called out for it you didn't respond apologetically for being an asshole, instead you were rather entitled and said that everyone else should've made a line (probably because there were no cameras on you then)” said one commenter, stating that many others had also expressed negative opinions of him for his disrespectful conduct.

Joe’s apologies and attempts to appeal fell on deaf ears. The community called for action, and action certainly came. Soon after the accusations, Team SAS stated that Joe would no longer be part of the team, reaffirming their stance against cheating. The community was generally pleased with this announcement, despite a small minority being displeased by the cordial and professional statement, wishing that Team SAS would have come down on Joe with an iron fist and dragged his name through the mud. (Not how I personally felt, but each to their own.)

Up next came Fantasy Flight Games bringing out the ban hammer, suspending Joe from partaking in any official FFG event for six months. Many in the community felt that this was too soft-handed a punishment, with some saying that a permanent ban and a revoking of his title would be much more appropriate. I personally think FFG refrained from handing out a harsher punishment simply because they couldn't prove outright that Joe had intentionally cheated, even if the evidence was stacked against him. Regardless of people's stance on the issue, the decision was final. It would at least mean that Joe wouldn’t be eligible for Worlds 2020, one of the biggest upcoming tournaments. With the power of hindsight, we can see that this decision didn’t exactly prevent Joe from entering major tournaments, as in March 2020 Fantasy Flight announced the cancellation of all organized play events due to the pandemic.

With IRL play suspended for now, most players have migrated to using TCO, a fan-made site that allows people to play online. Tournaments – mainly hosted through various Discord servers – occur frequently and in a wide range of formats, from the established Archon, Sealed, Triad, Reversal and Adaptive to community made formats such as Survival, SAS-cap, SAS-ladder, Appraisal, Tesla and Moirai, with the potential creation of others down the line. Shout out for the people behind TCO for keeping the game alive all this time.

Whether Joe is still active through online play, I have no idea. His Reddit account has gone unused for some time and I’m not aware of accounts that he may have for other platforms. When IRL does come back (or if it ever comes back given the state of the world right now), the question remains whether Joe will return or if his infamous status within the community presents too big of an obstacle. While other players have made bad reputations for themselves on some level, Joe is by far the most well-known. Mention “the ‘turned his deck over’ scandal” and you’ll be sure to find plenty of players who know exactly what you’re talking about. As the old saying goes, the bigger you are the harder you fall. Only time will tell if Joe ever makes a successful comeback.

That’s all for this time! I don’t have any other Keyforge articles in the pipeline for the moment as I’m pretty sure I’ve covered pretty much everything. But the game is still going strong, so who knows?

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Have a nice day! 😊