I'm not familiar with James Fazzolari, save for the fact that he is now a known cheater. There's no redemption for cheating. Even if you're one of the best of all time like Tomaharu Saito, that stuff sticks with you. It's hard to consider any of your achievements completely legitimate, even if we know that you have the talent.

That said, I was relieved for once to see a cheater not pretending like they were the victim, or trying to use the circumstance to spend more time in the limelight. Fazzolari owned up to his actions on the reddit thread about the incidnet, without an single disparaging word towards the keyboard cage fighters of the world, or whatever nonsense cheaters spout these days.

Reddit isn't known for its ability to spawn interesting discussion, but I was intrigued by this post by Fazzolari:

Nothing in this statement makes anything about what Fazzolari did okay. He does have a point about the community at large- there is definitely a lot of confirmation bias when readers evaluate ideas, but that doesn't justify cheating.

Would I like to see more ideas evaluated on their conceptual merits instead of tournament wins? Sure. What I'd rather see though, is people realizing that in a world where results are what matters in a game largely defined by variance that careers in Magic are going to be exceptionally rare, and should not be pursued by most. If you're not winning enough to get what you want out of the game no matter how hard you try, then suck it up and get a day job. I've always desired to make Magic my career, but in reality I'm lucky that I'm turning a profit on my hobby.