Severity of punishment should depend on several things and should almost always be taken on a case by case basis.
First, can you prove intent? In Long’s case you can almost guarantee he intended to hide a card in his lap, but then again how can we be absolutely sure? The card could’ve easily slipped out of his hand and landed in his lap without him knowing about it. Is that the case? Probably not, but it’s a possibility. Most of what is labeled “cheating” isn’t actually cheating but more of a “penalty” like holding in football. Mistakenly activating an ability under Garb lock or benching a 4th Pokemon under paralell city, those kinds of things. Should they be penalized in-game? Yes and probably more severely than the are currently, but they should almost never result in outside-game penalties, unless a specific case warrants it.
Also, is there a history, both at the current tournament and/or at previous tournaments? A player who has never once been flagged for any kind of infraction and is found with a card or cards in his/her lap should definitely not recieve the same punishment as someone who has been flagged multiple times over a long period of time for a variety of reasons.
Next, what sort of competitive setting are we talking about? In MTG, there are REL levels, which we don’t have in PTCG, mainly for consistency’s sake. But I think something should be taken into account about the notoriety of the event. If someone is caught blatantly cheating (marking cards, moving cards from discard pile to hand, cards hidden in lap, egregious stuff) at a prerelease, the penalty should not be as severe as it would be at a Regionals or Internationals. BUT, these flags should be cataloged in a database so if a player does something apparently small at World’s but it’s discovered they have a number of serious flags at lower level events, the baseline punishment should immediately be increased.
In this particular instance, we have a player with some previous allegations looming, an egregious action, and all of it happening at a high level event. I’d say a one-year ban would be a good place to start. At the very least, he should be shut down for the rest of this season.
I’d be very hard pressed to ever dole out a lifetime ban, just because I’m a naive optimist. But I could get behind a 3 strikes and you’re out mentality. Let’s say Michael gets banned for the rest of the season. That’s level 1. Next would be a 1-2 year ban. That’d be Level 2. Level 3 would be 2-4 years. After that, it’d be so obvious the player would be beyond rehabilitation and therefore deserves a lifetime ban.
Lastly, we as a community need to agree on 2 things. First, we must find a range of acceptable in-game actions that could almost never be construed as cheating. Quick example, before every game I play, both Pokémon and MTG, I do a quick 10 pile shuffle. It takes me 20-30 seconds and it performs 2 basic actions. I reassure myself that my deck contains a legal number of cards and I also show my opponent that my deck is legal as well. I also never peel cards off the top of my desk and put them directly into my hand. I deal out the exact number onto the table, count them so both my opponent and I are sure I’m drawing the correct number of cards. There are a lot of little ways you can make your play more transparent and not enough players do this.
Next, let’s use the example of the high-level player dropping cards from his discard onto his hand. NEVER let your opponent have a freebie. Even during a friendly at your locals. Call a judge or whoever you consider the judge. Always. Because if you don’t call them out publicly, sure they prb won’t try to cheat against you anymore, but they will try against someone else, and that’s just as much your fault as it is theirs at that point because your silence empowers them.
