Love your YGO spreadsheet! I have a couple questions. What counts as cheating at a card game? In particular, are you counting uses of the Millennium Eye/Millenium Necklace? Does Zigfrid's hacking of the tournament count?
(I can only think of three instances of cheating off the top of my head - Mai's scented cards, Bandit Keith's cards up his sleeve, and Espa Robas whole setup, and am confused how it goes up to 9).
Also, what are the instances of the Pharaoh committing murder, if you don't mind?
link to the original post here.
great questions! I counted cheating at card game as the usage of any outside, non-magical force for personal gain at no consequence of the user and to the detriment of the opponent. So for example, I did not count Kaiba threatening to jump off a building in Duelist Kingdom because that would've been a detriment to himself had he followed through with it.
I didn't count Millennium Item usage as cheating at card game, mostly because it gets very tricky to parse. If I draw the line at Pegasus using the Eye to read people's minds, then does the Pharaoh being able to draw whichever card he needs count as cheating at card game? Acts of magic which could be filed under Acts of God so I limited it to non-magical sources.
As for the 9 instances, they are:
Mai's scented cards
Bandit Keith's cards up his sleeves
the rare hunter with his fake Exodia cards
Esper Roba's set up
Weevil paying a kid to steal Joey's duel disk to slip a bug card into his deck before their duel
-8. THREE separate instances of Johnson (Big 5 member, ironically a lawyer) cheating against Joey by manipulating the probability of his dice rolls. You could count this as one, but I counted it as 3 at the time
9. Zigfreid's illegal use of the Golden Castle of Stromberg
notice how most instances of cheating are against Joey and he still wins.
Obviously, there's a chance that I might've missed some instances or not been as consistent since this project went on for over a year. I had even considered using TCG rules, but coaching happens all the time and the Pharaoh was making up rules in early s1.
My ultimate goal was to gauge cheating using the guidelines presented in the context of the show. So, simply put, I considered cheating to be what the show frames as cheating. Interpret the law in the spirit of the law, as the legal researchers would say.











