In the end, mana-weaving to some degree, is "wishy-washy" ok.
You are wasting time in most cases no matter what, but its not like we are super optimized shuffling machines, we will allways to some degree waste time, as we arent doing it perfeclty quick.
You have 2 minutes to shuffle your deck after all, shouldnt allways take it to the maximum, but that gives you at least an idea that people can have a fairly high variance in how quick they can shuffle and theres room to do "useless" stuff aswell.
After sideboarding putting your lands in your deck like manaweaving has the problem that theres room to assume you dont shuffle properly, and especially against newbies, that will allmost be the case "guaranteed" , people cheat a lot more against bad players, as they know these newbies wont see or even think they get cheated (especially in lower levels of magic, like an FNM, people cheat because they "need" to win, not because of money, just because they need to win to feel better, some simply cant handle to lose, especially if they "think" they are superior to the other player, some players are simply unable to accept that magic has that luck factor that is part of the game, and thats the people that will most likely cheat at some point, and the only chance for a quick redemption is to identify them as cheaters quickly, tell them and make sure they wont do it again, simply out of fear to get a harsh punishment ; and still, it will happen again and again, as people will think nobody minds anymore ; so in the end, cheaters are allways a thing, doesnt matter if money is involved, some have a wrong idea of pride that requires them to cheat, its a sickness and only a strong mind can stand firm against that temptation to cheat, not everyone can do that).
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That said, mana weaving doesnt have any purpose that simply counting cards wont do the trick.
You can be quicker at both, even a pile shuffle will do (quick 6 piles, then shuffle your deck "properly", just to count the cards and quickly see if a card is damaged or you have a "wrong" card in your deck from the opponent etc.).
As i said before, WotC should really put some effort into education for shuffling. Do some basic shuffling tips & tricks cards, tell players something about the rules, tell them to do a pile shuffle only at the start, then shuffle properly afterwards ; stuff like that, WotC can do a lot of good if they spread the word on the cards they sell to us every time and then.
If I read the link provided, it really doesn't give enought information about what happenned.
I mean, having lands evenly distributed in a deck is the whole point of buidling a deck...
when I decide to shuffle my deck I would make four pile evenly distributed with 1 land 2 cards, 1 land 2 cards...these 2 cards being the same cards on each pile...then i'll put the 4 pile together and shuffle enought time to randomize the pile and allow my oponent to cut the pile if need be.... so that I get something random but have a sens of evenly distributed deck so that it represent whats i've built
But I don't play tournament anyway, no interest in that....just playing with friends
If I read the link provided, it really doesn't give enought information about what happenned.
I mean, having lands evenly distributed in a deck is the whole point of buidling a deck...
No it isn't. The point is to have a sufficently randomised deck. Having clumps of lands and non lands is normal, as is the potential for mana screw/flood.
when I decide to shuffle my deck I would make four pile evenly distributed with 1 land 2 cards, 1 land 2 cards...these 2 cards being the same cards on each pile...then i'll put the 4 pile together and shuffle enought time to randomize the pile and allow my oponent to cut the pile if need be.... so that I get something random but have a sens of evenly distributed deck so that it represent whats i've built
But I don't play tournament anyway, no interest in that....just playing with friends
So anyway, more details would have been nice
He was probably doing something very similar to what you were doing. Stacking your deck. Which regardless of levele is something that should be frowned upon.
As has been said several times above Mana weaving in any form is either utterly pointless as you are shuffling enough afterwards to remove any trace of your mana weave or if it is having an effect to reduce the chances of getting flooded/screwed you have cheated by stacking your deck.
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My way of shuffling is not up for discussion Kahedron. Logics implidge that putting all lands together and non land cards together will favor deck misbehavior even after intense shuffling knowing that you will not bend the cards by riffle or weave shuffle.
Therefor if you must not put all your lands together, then you must take into accounts how they are place before the shuffling...then my technique allows an evenly place deck before shuffling which allow a deck
representation... its simple math....and you may feel free to do so as well...and each players may shuffle their opponents deck as long as it is fairly done...no problem with that
But if you and those like you dont have a sens of logics, than it is your problem and you will just not sit at my table...
Well, assuming he did something similar, this is settle, I would have respect for the guy that got ban...as it isnt consider cheating in my book....
I mean, we live in a crazy world, they are all sorts of crazy people, even some making rules...lmao
Scenario 1: Mana weave before shuffling, shuffling occurs enough times that the deck is sufficiently randomized.
Result: Randomized deck. Lands may be clumped together or they may not be, it's random. Not cheating. Why are you mana weaving if your deck is randomized in the end anyway? Not really a big problem, just wasting everyone's time.
Scenario 2: Mana weave before shuffling, shuffling occurs but not enough times that the deck is sufficiently randomized.
Result: Lands are less clumped together than a randomly shuffled deck, leading to smoother mana draws. This is cheating per the rules of Magic as I understand it.
My way of shuffling is not up for discussion Kahedron. Logics implidge that putting all lands together and non land cards together will favor deck misbehavior even after intense shuffling knowing that you will not bend the cards by riffle or weave shuffle.
Therefor if you must not put all your lands together, then you must take into accounts how they are place before the shuffling...then my technique allows an evenly place deck before shuffling which allow a deck
representation... its simple math....and you may feel free to do so as well...and each players may shuffle their opponents deck as long as it is fairly done...no problem with that
But if you and those like you dont have a sens of logics, than it is your problem and you will just not sit at my table...
Well, assuming he did something similar, this is settle, I would have respect for the guy that got ban...as it isnt consider cheating in my book....
I mean, we live in a crazy world, they are all sorts of crazy people, even some making rules...lmao
Your form of "shuffling" is considered cheating and stacking a deck.
Its very simpel.
If you gain an advantage by your form of shuffling, its not ok.
A properly randomized deck will have equal chances for any possible distribution of cards and you cannot say that a card will be at any point after you are done shuffling (and that includes what you consider a "distribution" , its only properly randomized if you have no information of any distribution of the cards, its only random if all information is indeed random).
If you know a deck and place a single card in a different spot "randomly" , you would allready consider that deck randomized, which it is, but its still stacked allmost entirely, so for in context of the game, the deck is not properly randomized as you know the specic locations of cards.
Even if we cut this deck like 20 times, its not properly randomized, as some cards will still be together, never moved, and we have full controll of the cut (the bottom card will just be the bottom card if we cut the cards allways on top of each other) ; so while a lot of the deck got randomized, its not entirely random, so the deck is still not properly randomized.
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In the end, you absolutely have to perform shuffling methods that result in a good randomisation result. Mash shuffling and riffle are the only reasonable choices.
Pile shuffling wont do it at all, and overhand shuffling is way too terrible in archiving a good randomisation , and to get a good result you still need a bunch of iterations of a riffle/mash , like 10+ will do the trick even if they arent perfectly performed, the result is as random as it will get (doing more shuffles after that point wont hurt, but wont make the deck "more" random, its random as it is).
For casual play, a serious shuffling is not important, especially big EDH / Commander decks are rarely really well shuffled, they are quite stacked. But people dont mind, as its all just for fun. While its "ok" here (still questionable) , its totally not ok in a tournament and the line between the lack of knowledge and intentional cheating with full knowledge of what you do is very very small (theres plenty of people that dont properly shuffle, simply because they have no idea they arent properly shuffling, they just "assume" its random, while its not).
Very good start is to stack a deck all lands , all spells ; then shuffle in a way of your choice. The result should be fairly random. An even look of an distribution will happen "often" but not necessary, random really means any order of cards is possible and nobody knows the position of any card, not even relative.
What difference between an unknown pattern (in card distribution) and no pattern ?
You dont need a pattern.
Its enough if you know that card X and Y will be reasonable near each other, even after the shuffle.
It doesnt matter if they are "exactly" together and it doesnt matter at which spot in the deck they are, as long as you can say "they are reasonable close to each other", thats allready enough information you are not supposed to have.
A properly randomized deck will have no information, you simply dont know anything about any card position, any card could be anywhere and all the other cards could be anywhere just aswell. The deck could completly random end up perfectly stacked like a manaweave, thats a completly feasable result of a proper shuffle (not terrible likely, but still).
People somehow assume that a "random" deck will still have some form of distribution of lands and spells , but thats not the case. Proper deckbuilding will increase the chance that all the random patterns result in playable hands, but in the end, a properly randomized deck will have any possible order of cards as an option, the important part is, neither player should have any informations of card positions in the deck, thats the definition of a properly shuffled deck.
If I read the link provided, it really doesn't give enought information about what happenned.
I mean, having lands evenly distributed in a deck is the whole point of buidling a deck...
when I decide to shuffle my deck I would make four pile evenly distributed with 1 land 2 cards, 1 land 2 cards...these 2 cards being the same cards on each pile...then i'll put the 4 pile together and shuffle enought time to randomize the pile and allow my oponent to cut the pile if need be.... so that I get something random but have a sens of evenly distributed deck so that it represent whats i've built
But I don't play tournament anyway, no interest in that....just playing with friends
So anyway, more details would have been nice
That's just cheating. Anytime you are trying to make your deck more "evenly distributed" it is cheating. The deck is supposed to be random. It is supposed to have runs of lands or non-lands, that is just part of the game.
Funny story on that note: I had an opponent do what you described in a local draft inbetween games. Blatantly do the land-nonland-nonland 3 piles thing, then present after having just cut a few times, no real shuffles. I guess he expected me to just cut too...but instead I opted for a 3 pile shuffle. He had to mulligan that one.
What difference between an unknown pattern (in card distribution) and no pattern ?
You dont need a pattern.
Its enough if you know that card X and Y will be reasonable near each other, even after the shuffle.
It doesnt matter if they are "exactly" together and it doesnt matter at which spot in the deck they are, as long as you can say "they are reasonable close to each other", thats allready enough information you are not supposed to have.
A properly randomized deck will have no information, you simply dont know anything about any card position, any card could be anywhere and all the other cards could be anywhere just aswell. The deck could completly random end up perfectly stacked like a manaweave, thats a completly feasable result of a proper shuffle (not terrible likely, but still).
People somehow assume that a "random" deck will still have some form of distribution of lands and spells , but thats not the case. Proper deckbuilding will increase the chance that all the random patterns result in playable hands, but in the end, a properly randomized deck will have any possible order of cards as an option, the important part is, neither player should have any informations of card positions in the deck, thats the definition of a properly shuffled deck.
About cheating judges assume players cheat but since proper shuffling can bring to the same result as cheating how to prove it's intentional?
It's a shame for me players aren't innocent until the contrary is proved.
Oh you totally are innocent , and judges dont DQ out of fun, you have a reason to do so and thats usually a very good one (as people dont really get a DQ until its pretty damn sure they did something seriously wrong and judges are pretty sure about it).
In this case here, it didnt happen just 1 time , it happened a lot, it was visible in his sideboarding and if you know the cheat, you see what he does and it matches.
Its not like a judge looks at your deck sees some "potentially" stacked cards in some super specific pattern and DQs you, thats not going to happen, decks can end up and look like stacked, but that doesnt happen game after game, and you have to do something explicitly shady to end with such a deck way above average (and average for such a stacked deck is very very small, like really small).
In the example here its pretty clear he did it intentional, as he did all of it knowing what he did, its not a newbie that you can believe that they really didnt know (and in low level events, a player will usually just be educated by a judge, ask why they do what they do after sideboarding etc. which will usually solve any missing knowledge and if they continue to do it, they know and do it intentional).
I always pick up my cards, put them on top of my library, pile shuffle then do "normal" shuffling. I'm not ordering cards or land in a specific order, just starting from a more uniform distribution/
The reason, is that I'm a human being and I recognize the fact that I'm not a perfect shuffling machine. I fully expect that, sometimes, some clumps of cards at the beginning will still be clumped together at the end. It's not what I aim for, but I recognize that it is bound to happen because I'm not a machine. People on this thread calls this cheating, but in my view they're being naive about their own imperfect ability to shuffle. I'm also very happy when my opponent carefully re-shuffle my deck.
I want randomization. I just fully expect that I may not 100% achieve it every time. Maybe I'm tired. Maybe I'm having a banter with my opponent and put my full attention to my shuffling. Maybe we're running out of time and trying to have enough time to get a full 3rd game. The reasons are not as important as the fact that it's impossible to always do everything right, 100% of the times.
(I've post in these kind of threads before, so cue in the "then improve you shuffling technique" apologists. It's not about the technique, it's about the normal, expected variation in performance. But what do I expect? Everyone here always hits the nail on the head when hammering, never stumble, is a perfect pitcher, etc.)
OTOH, I admit I may be wrong and that I may have, for all these years, been always sufficiently shuffling and that I've been unnecessarily wary. That my deck always has been perfectly randomized.
EDIT: Golden, I find funny that you accuse people of start by pile-shuffle of being, even if unintentionally, cheaters, but then admit, straight out, to have cheated. When you did that three pile shuffling instead of (best choice) calling a judge or (bad alternative) properly correctly shuffle, you cheated very explicitly. It's very clear in the rule, and you did it very intentionally. How ironic.
Like I said, you may feel free to evenly distribute your deck before the games too and I will not change that behavior as I feel it to be logics
But the funny thing is always when someone gives you an argument that you can use against themselves
"Even if we cut this deck like 20 times, its not properly randomized, as some cards will still be together, never moved, and we have full controll of the cut"
You see it this way because you don't want the person to get the cards in a stack thinking its cheating while on the other end if I put all my lands together and my other cards together, by cutting the deck 20 times, I would still have those lands stack with each other....and therefor knowing that would increase the probability of having multiple lands in a row which is not random either...you're just more likely to prefer your opponent to deck misbehavior.... you should ask yourself why, is it the fear of lack of skills to build a deck
Therefor id rather have it my own way because it at least gives me a deck representation instead of some garbage 10 lands in a row non sens
The person who said that nobodys perfect at shuffling is saying it in a better way ....better than me punching the face of my opponent in front of everybody for tryin to weave or riffle shuffle my cards because of some garbage excuse....im not gonna tripple my sleeve for some nuts behavior
It has been said a lot of times, but I try to reiterate:
You may do as you wish, when playing casually with your friends. It is even better if your whole playgroup agrees on some behaviour. But as soon as you enter tournaments with the official rules, you are obliged to obey them. This whole shuffling / not shuffling is only relevant in a public / official setting. Privately just do w/e floats your boat. As you stated you are not entering tournaments you should only discuss this topic within your playgroup.
A common misconception about randomness is, that people think it implies some kind of even distribution of subsets of cards. This is NOT random. As others have stated before, a deck is sufficently randomised if every possible arrangement has in approximation the same likelihood of appearing. This means that by drawing a card you gain (close to) no additional knowledge about the next card in the deck. Therefore by drawing multiple lands /non-lands in a row you are not more likely to draw a card in the different subset (apart from the fact, that these drawn cards are no longer available).
The point about not being perfect in shuffling is also true, therefore you should aim to shuffle a little bit more than those quoted simulations suggest ( 7 riffles for 52 cards ). Additionaly if you leave cards untouched by riffling / mashing you should switch riffle and overhand up a little bit. Bear in mind that you need to shuffle more the more cards you are shuffling, so 60 cards need at least 8 riffles.
Just to summarize: you should always communicate your play behavior in your playgroup and agree on guidelines within the people you play with.
Still claiming that you are doing nothing wrong in accordance to the official rules of the game (what is a random deck) is simply not correct.
What the rules aim for is not true randomness since we as humans are not capable of achieving that. What we can achieve is sufficiently random, and this can be tested by a few mathematical tests. The consensus for sufficiently random is 7 good riffles for 52 cards.
I always pick up my cards, put them on top of my library, pile shuffle then do "normal" shuffling. I'm not ordering cards or land in a specific order, just starting from a more uniform distribution/
The reason, is that I'm a human being and I recognize the fact that I'm not a perfect shuffling machine. I fully expect that, sometimes, some clumps of cards at the beginning will still be clumped together at the end. It's not what I aim for, but I recognize that it is bound to happen because I'm not a machine. People on this thread calls this cheating, but in my view they're being naive about their own imperfect ability to shuffle. I'm also very happy when my opponent carefully re-shuffle my deck.
I want randomization. I just fully expect that I may not 100% achieve it every time. Maybe I'm tired. Maybe I'm having a banter with my opponent and put my full attention to my shuffling. Maybe we're running out of time and trying to have enough time to get a full 3rd game. The reasons are not as important as the fact that it's impossible to always do everything right, 100% of the times.
(I've post in these kind of threads before, so cue in the "then improve you shuffling technique" apologists. It's not about the technique, it's about the normal, expected variation in performance. But what do I expect? Everyone here always hits the nail on the head when hammering, never stumble, is a perfect pitcher, etc.)
OTOH, I admit I may be wrong and that I may have, for all these years, been always sufficiently shuffling and that I've been unnecessarily wary. That my deck always has been perfectly randomized.
EDIT: Golden, I find funny that you accuse people of start by pile-shuffle of being, even if unintentionally, cheaters, but then admit, straight out, to have cheated. When you did that three pile shuffling instead of (best choice) calling a judge or (bad alternative) properly correctly shuffle, you cheated very explicitly. It's very clear in the rule, and you did it very intentionally. How ironic.
Oh I know, I just didn't care given the event type and the nature of my "cheat". It was vigilante justice at its best. You can just call me Batman from now on.
Good speach but i'm curious what shuffling technique you would suggest so that none of the cards get bend regardless of their values.
Curiosity purpose
Second of all, it doesnt mean that because it is a rule, that it is right.... and personal opinion, it is a rule that cannot work
Furthurmore, by taking your pile after a game, regardless of how you arrange or not rearange them, you would still know how the cards were placed... that if you have the capacity of an AI, you could still predict the outcome.
It makes no sens either to take your pile of lands, pile in the graveyard and then the pile on the battlefield and stack them together.
Thefore i'd rather start with an evenly place deck and then create randomness arround this than start with a screw up setup and create randomness
Both of them will lean towards the medium where it is perfect randomness but it will never be in the middle....
Therefor it will eitheir lean toward a screw up setup medium or a even setup medium
Id rather have a even setup medium and id rather have my opponents have the same...as these are more representative of what we both build as a deck and this how I beleive it should be... actualy it should be, make your deck evenly distributed, put it in a machine that will shuffle for you for 5 minutes without bending your cards and that would be done but no such machine exist....that I know of
And you wanna know what this drama at GP feels like from an outsider perspective? It feels like what happenned to the New England Patriots... they got accused of spygate and blame for it and every team would bable about how wrong this is, later to discover that all 32 teams were doing it to a different extend.
So at least my way would offer the same bounderies for everybody instead of inquiring if the person looked at how the cards were place after a game before placing them with the rest of the pile for a new shuffle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxJubaijQbI
I am going to base my remarks about sufficient randomisation mainly on this video. The author states, that by riffling your 52 cards seven times it achieves a state of sufficently random. This means that it passes various tests for random permutations.
This means when shuffling your deck you should either riffle shuffle your deck or aim for a shuffling method which emulates a riffle reasonably well. Usually the so called mash shuffling is close enough to a riffle. Just be careful that you
a) mash your whole deck
b) have no cards on either top or bottom which stay at top or bottom in every iteration of your shuffle
c) do not try to have the cards mash in each other that always one card of each pile goes between two cards of the other pile (in riffling this is called a perfect riffle or faro(?))
Since after seven riffle shuffles your deck is sufficiently random. In theorie this is still a deterministic way of rearranging your cards, since if you COULD track every card in each iteration you would still have perfect information about your deck.
Perfect information means in this case, that if you know the arrangements of the cards before the shuffle you would still know the arrangement.
Practically on the other hand it is reasonable to assume, that you can NOT track your cards in a riffle/mash shuffle and the randomisation comes from the assumption that usually between 1-3 cards of each pile goes between the cards of the other pile RANDOMLY.
Since you end with a random stack of cards it does not matter in which order you started. The model predicts that after seven riffles it simply does not matter if you stacked your cards in a certain manner beforehand. The result is (sufficently) random.
On your worries that people might not be able to shuffle perfectly:
This is a reason to increaes your shuffling iterations und switch up a little bit your shuffling methods.
I.E. primarily using mashes and some overhand shuffles in between.
Regarding the damages:
I assume you are playing with sleeved cards. Usually mash shuffling does not damage sleeved cards and are not that damaging to your sleeves either. I think some tutorial videos on how to mash properly are available on youtube. Mashing also does not bend your cards, if you are careful enough.
In Summary: you should learn to shuffle properly if you want to play with a random deck. If you do shuffle properly it practically does not matter in which state your deck is in when you start your iterations. To be on the safe side just shuffle a couple more times, since additional iterations do not unmake the random nature of your deck, if it was random it simply will stay random.
On a side note:
This is also the reason, that mill if not used as a primary win conditions, is practically useless and you should generally mill yourself if given the choice. Since all cards are random
Yes my entire collection is under ultra pro magic backs....this is to protect the cards from dust, finger print etc....it won't prevent bending the cards
I've asked a way not to bend the cards, you've proposed a way to bend the cards....but i must admit for half a second there he seemed to riffle shuffle gentely without bending them by puting the pile side by side on the table...
But like he says at the end of the video, there are still traces of the original shuffle no matter what. So id rather start with my 1 land 2 cards setup... and considering your previous comments saying that 7 riffle shuffle is enought, then you shouldnt have any problem with that....assuming I would allow genttle riffle shuffle no bend
As I said, try looking up "mash" shuffling. This is a practice where you take half of your deck and let it slide between the other half. "mashing" the two halfs together.
after a game where i may have 10 lands out i grab my GY and 2 spells whichever they are and put a land a repeat - Mash that into my deck , sideboard putting on of my SB cards randomly in a different location and then shuffle mash 10-15 times. Occasionally after a game i may look at what happened (if i lost) where all lands were (if i got manascrewed) and randomly disperse them throughout the deck. then shuffle 10-20 times.
It seems like some people in this thread believe that wether manawaeving is acceptable or not is a question of opinion. But it is not.
The game of magic relies on the fundamental assumption that your deck is completely randomized, which means that any order of cards has the same likelyhood as any other order, or in other words, revealing a card in the deck gives absolutely no information on what the next card could be (apart from being the revealed one). After you have sufficiently shuffeled your deck, absolutely NO assumptions can be made about the pattern of the deck, otherwise you have cheated. If you do ANYTHING to your deck to increases or decreases the chance of a certain phenomenon to occur, then you have cheated. This is mathmatics, not personal opinion.
Bearing that in mind, mana weaving makes no sense. If it has any effect on your draws at all, you have cheated because you did not sufficiently randomize your deck after stacking it. If it does not have any effect at all then you have sufficiently randomized your deck and have not cheated, but then it was unnecessary to manaweave in the first place.
So please people, get used to proper shuffling and not to inproper deck stacking.
EDIT: If you cannot properly randomize your deck because you are afraid of damaging your cards, then you cannot play magic without cheating.
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You are wasting time in most cases no matter what, but its not like we are super optimized shuffling machines, we will allways to some degree waste time, as we arent doing it perfeclty quick.
You have 2 minutes to shuffle your deck after all, shouldnt allways take it to the maximum, but that gives you at least an idea that people can have a fairly high variance in how quick they can shuffle and theres room to do "useless" stuff aswell.
After sideboarding putting your lands in your deck like manaweaving has the problem that theres room to assume you dont shuffle properly, and especially against newbies, that will allmost be the case "guaranteed" , people cheat a lot more against bad players, as they know these newbies wont see or even think they get cheated (especially in lower levels of magic, like an FNM, people cheat because they "need" to win, not because of money, just because they need to win to feel better, some simply cant handle to lose, especially if they "think" they are superior to the other player, some players are simply unable to accept that magic has that luck factor that is part of the game, and thats the people that will most likely cheat at some point, and the only chance for a quick redemption is to identify them as cheaters quickly, tell them and make sure they wont do it again, simply out of fear to get a harsh punishment ; and still, it will happen again and again, as people will think nobody minds anymore ; so in the end, cheaters are allways a thing, doesnt matter if money is involved, some have a wrong idea of pride that requires them to cheat, its a sickness and only a strong mind can stand firm against that temptation to cheat, not everyone can do that).
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That said, mana weaving doesnt have any purpose that simply counting cards wont do the trick.
You can be quicker at both, even a pile shuffle will do (quick 6 piles, then shuffle your deck "properly", just to count the cards and quickly see if a card is damaged or you have a "wrong" card in your deck from the opponent etc.).
As i said before, WotC should really put some effort into education for shuffling. Do some basic shuffling tips & tricks cards, tell players something about the rules, tell them to do a pile shuffle only at the start, then shuffle properly afterwards ; stuff like that, WotC can do a lot of good if they spread the word on the cards they sell to us every time and then.
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I mean, having lands evenly distributed in a deck is the whole point of buidling a deck...
when I decide to shuffle my deck I would make four pile evenly distributed with 1 land 2 cards, 1 land 2 cards...these 2 cards being the same cards on each pile...then i'll put the 4 pile together and shuffle enought time to randomize the pile and allow my oponent to cut the pile if need be.... so that I get something random but have a sens of evenly distributed deck so that it represent whats i've built
But I don't play tournament anyway, no interest in that....just playing with friends
So anyway, more details would have been nice
No it isn't. The point is to have a sufficently randomised deck. Having clumps of lands and non lands is normal, as is the potential for mana screw/flood.
He was probably doing something very similar to what you were doing. Stacking your deck. Which regardless of levele is something that should be frowned upon.
As has been said several times above Mana weaving in any form is either utterly pointless as you are shuffling enough afterwards to remove any trace of your mana weave or if it is having an effect to reduce the chances of getting flooded/screwed you have cheated by stacking your deck.
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Therefor if you must not put all your lands together, then you must take into accounts how they are place before the shuffling...then my technique allows an evenly place deck before shuffling which allow a deck
representation... its simple math....and you may feel free to do so as well...and each players may shuffle their opponents deck as long as it is fairly done...no problem with that
But if you and those like you dont have a sens of logics, than it is your problem and you will just not sit at my table...
Well, assuming he did something similar, this is settle, I would have respect for the guy that got ban...as it isnt consider cheating in my book....
I mean, we live in a crazy world, they are all sorts of crazy people, even some making rules...lmao
Result: Randomized deck. Lands may be clumped together or they may not be, it's random. Not cheating. Why are you mana weaving if your deck is randomized in the end anyway? Not really a big problem, just wasting everyone's time.
Scenario 2: Mana weave before shuffling, shuffling occurs but not enough times that the deck is sufficiently randomized.
Result: Lands are less clumped together than a randomly shuffled deck, leading to smoother mana draws. This is cheating per the rules of Magic as I understand it.
Your form of "shuffling" is considered cheating and stacking a deck.
Its very simpel.
If you gain an advantage by your form of shuffling, its not ok.
A properly randomized deck will have equal chances for any possible distribution of cards and you cannot say that a card will be at any point after you are done shuffling (and that includes what you consider a "distribution" , its only properly randomized if you have no information of any distribution of the cards, its only random if all information is indeed random).
If you know a deck and place a single card in a different spot "randomly" , you would allready consider that deck randomized, which it is, but its still stacked allmost entirely, so for in context of the game, the deck is not properly randomized as you know the specic locations of cards.
Even if we cut this deck like 20 times, its not properly randomized, as some cards will still be together, never moved, and we have full controll of the cut (the bottom card will just be the bottom card if we cut the cards allways on top of each other) ; so while a lot of the deck got randomized, its not entirely random, so the deck is still not properly randomized.
----
In the end, you absolutely have to perform shuffling methods that result in a good randomisation result. Mash shuffling and riffle are the only reasonable choices.
Pile shuffling wont do it at all, and overhand shuffling is way too terrible in archiving a good randomisation , and to get a good result you still need a bunch of iterations of a riffle/mash , like 10+ will do the trick even if they arent perfectly performed, the result is as random as it will get (doing more shuffles after that point wont hurt, but wont make the deck "more" random, its random as it is).
For casual play, a serious shuffling is not important, especially big EDH / Commander decks are rarely really well shuffled, they are quite stacked. But people dont mind, as its all just for fun. While its "ok" here (still questionable) , its totally not ok in a tournament and the line between the lack of knowledge and intentional cheating with full knowledge of what you do is very very small (theres plenty of people that dont properly shuffle, simply because they have no idea they arent properly shuffling, they just "assume" its random, while its not).
Very good start is to stack a deck all lands , all spells ; then shuffle in a way of your choice. The result should be fairly random. An even look of an distribution will happen "often" but not necessary, random really means any order of cards is possible and nobody knows the position of any card, not even relative.
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You dont need a pattern.
Its enough if you know that card X and Y will be reasonable near each other, even after the shuffle.
It doesnt matter if they are "exactly" together and it doesnt matter at which spot in the deck they are, as long as you can say "they are reasonable close to each other", thats allready enough information you are not supposed to have.
A properly randomized deck will have no information, you simply dont know anything about any card position, any card could be anywhere and all the other cards could be anywhere just aswell. The deck could completly random end up perfectly stacked like a manaweave, thats a completly feasable result of a proper shuffle (not terrible likely, but still).
People somehow assume that a "random" deck will still have some form of distribution of lands and spells , but thats not the case. Proper deckbuilding will increase the chance that all the random patterns result in playable hands, but in the end, a properly randomized deck will have any possible order of cards as an option, the important part is, neither player should have any informations of card positions in the deck, thats the definition of a properly shuffled deck.
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That's just cheating. Anytime you are trying to make your deck more "evenly distributed" it is cheating. The deck is supposed to be random. It is supposed to have runs of lands or non-lands, that is just part of the game.
Funny story on that note: I had an opponent do what you described in a local draft inbetween games. Blatantly do the land-nonland-nonland 3 piles thing, then present after having just cut a few times, no real shuffles. I guess he expected me to just cut too...but instead I opted for a 3 pile shuffle. He had to mulligan that one.
Oh you totally are innocent , and judges dont DQ out of fun, you have a reason to do so and thats usually a very good one (as people dont really get a DQ until its pretty damn sure they did something seriously wrong and judges are pretty sure about it).
In this case here, it didnt happen just 1 time , it happened a lot, it was visible in his sideboarding and if you know the cheat, you see what he does and it matches.
Its not like a judge looks at your deck sees some "potentially" stacked cards in some super specific pattern and DQs you, thats not going to happen, decks can end up and look like stacked, but that doesnt happen game after game, and you have to do something explicitly shady to end with such a deck way above average (and average for such a stacked deck is very very small, like really small).
In the example here its pretty clear he did it intentional, as he did all of it knowing what he did, its not a newbie that you can believe that they really didnt know (and in low level events, a player will usually just be educated by a judge, ask why they do what they do after sideboarding etc. which will usually solve any missing knowledge and if they continue to do it, they know and do it intentional).
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The reason, is that I'm a human being and I recognize the fact that I'm not a perfect shuffling machine. I fully expect that, sometimes, some clumps of cards at the beginning will still be clumped together at the end. It's not what I aim for, but I recognize that it is bound to happen because I'm not a machine. People on this thread calls this cheating, but in my view they're being naive about their own imperfect ability to shuffle. I'm also very happy when my opponent carefully re-shuffle my deck.
I want randomization. I just fully expect that I may not 100% achieve it every time. Maybe I'm tired. Maybe I'm having a banter with my opponent and put my full attention to my shuffling. Maybe we're running out of time and trying to have enough time to get a full 3rd game. The reasons are not as important as the fact that it's impossible to always do everything right, 100% of the times.
(I've post in these kind of threads before, so cue in the "then improve you shuffling technique" apologists. It's not about the technique, it's about the normal, expected variation in performance. But what do I expect? Everyone here always hits the nail on the head when hammering, never stumble, is a perfect pitcher, etc.)
OTOH, I admit I may be wrong and that I may have, for all these years, been always sufficiently shuffling and that I've been unnecessarily wary. That my deck always has been perfectly randomized.
EDIT: Golden, I find funny that you accuse people of start by pile-shuffle of being, even if unintentionally, cheaters, but then admit, straight out, to have cheated. When you did that three pile shuffling instead of (best choice) calling a judge or (bad alternative) properly correctly shuffle, you cheated very explicitly. It's very clear in the rule, and you did it very intentionally. How ironic.
But the funny thing is always when someone gives you an argument that you can use against themselves
"Even if we cut this deck like 20 times, its not properly randomized, as some cards will still be together, never moved, and we have full controll of the cut"
You see it this way because you don't want the person to get the cards in a stack thinking its cheating while on the other end if I put all my lands together and my other cards together, by cutting the deck 20 times, I would still have those lands stack with each other....and therefor knowing that would increase the probability of having multiple lands in a row which is not random either...you're just more likely to prefer your opponent to deck misbehavior.... you should ask yourself why, is it the fear of lack of skills to build a deck
Therefor id rather have it my own way because it at least gives me a deck representation instead of some garbage 10 lands in a row non sens
The person who said that nobodys perfect at shuffling is saying it in a better way ....better than me punching the face of my opponent in front of everybody for tryin to weave or riffle shuffle my cards because of some garbage excuse....im not gonna tripple my sleeve for some nuts behavior
You may do as you wish, when playing casually with your friends. It is even better if your whole playgroup agrees on some behaviour. But as soon as you enter tournaments with the official rules, you are obliged to obey them. This whole shuffling / not shuffling is only relevant in a public / official setting. Privately just do w/e floats your boat. As you stated you are not entering tournaments you should only discuss this topic within your playgroup.
A common misconception about randomness is, that people think it implies some kind of even distribution of subsets of cards. This is NOT random. As others have stated before, a deck is sufficently randomised if every possible arrangement has in approximation the same likelihood of appearing. This means that by drawing a card you gain (close to) no additional knowledge about the next card in the deck. Therefore by drawing multiple lands /non-lands in a row you are not more likely to draw a card in the different subset (apart from the fact, that these drawn cards are no longer available).
The point about not being perfect in shuffling is also true, therefore you should aim to shuffle a little bit more than those quoted simulations suggest ( 7 riffles for 52 cards ). Additionaly if you leave cards untouched by riffling / mashing you should switch riffle and overhand up a little bit. Bear in mind that you need to shuffle more the more cards you are shuffling, so 60 cards need at least 8 riffles.
Just to summarize: you should always communicate your play behavior in your playgroup and agree on guidelines within the people you play with.
Still claiming that you are doing nothing wrong in accordance to the official rules of the game (what is a random deck) is simply not correct.
What the rules aim for is not true randomness since we as humans are not capable of achieving that. What we can achieve is sufficiently random, and this can be tested by a few mathematical tests. The consensus for sufficiently random is 7 good riffles for 52 cards.
Oh I know, I just didn't care given the event type and the nature of my "cheat". It was vigilante justice at its best. You can just call me Batman from now on.
Good speach but i'm curious what shuffling technique you would suggest so that none of the cards get bend regardless of their values.
Curiosity purpose
Second of all, it doesnt mean that because it is a rule, that it is right.... and personal opinion, it is a rule that cannot work
Furthurmore, by taking your pile after a game, regardless of how you arrange or not rearange them, you would still know how the cards were placed... that if you have the capacity of an AI, you could still predict the outcome.
It makes no sens either to take your pile of lands, pile in the graveyard and then the pile on the battlefield and stack them together.
Thefore i'd rather start with an evenly place deck and then create randomness arround this than start with a screw up setup and create randomness
Both of them will lean towards the medium where it is perfect randomness but it will never be in the middle....
Therefor it will eitheir lean toward a screw up setup medium or a even setup medium
Id rather have a even setup medium and id rather have my opponents have the same...as these are more representative of what we both build as a deck and this how I beleive it should be... actualy it should be, make your deck evenly distributed, put it in a machine that will shuffle for you for 5 minutes without bending your cards and that would be done but no such machine exist....that I know of
And you wanna know what this drama at GP feels like from an outsider perspective? It feels like what happenned to the New England Patriots... they got accused of spygate and blame for it and every team would bable about how wrong this is, later to discover that all 32 teams were doing it to a different extend.
So at least my way would offer the same bounderies for everybody instead of inquiring if the person looked at how the cards were place after a game before placing them with the rest of the pile for a new shuffle
I am going to base my remarks about sufficient randomisation mainly on this video. The author states, that by riffling your 52 cards seven times it achieves a state of sufficently random. This means that it passes various tests for random permutations.
This means when shuffling your deck you should either riffle shuffle your deck or aim for a shuffling method which emulates a riffle reasonably well. Usually the so called mash shuffling is close enough to a riffle. Just be careful that you
a) mash your whole deck
b) have no cards on either top or bottom which stay at top or bottom in every iteration of your shuffle
c) do not try to have the cards mash in each other that always one card of each pile goes between two cards of the other pile (in riffling this is called a perfect riffle or faro(?))
Since after seven riffle shuffles your deck is sufficiently random. In theorie this is still a deterministic way of rearranging your cards, since if you COULD track every card in each iteration you would still have perfect information about your deck.
Perfect information means in this case, that if you know the arrangements of the cards before the shuffle you would still know the arrangement.
Practically on the other hand it is reasonable to assume, that you can NOT track your cards in a riffle/mash shuffle and the randomisation comes from the assumption that usually between 1-3 cards of each pile goes between the cards of the other pile RANDOMLY.
Since you end with a random stack of cards it does not matter in which order you started. The model predicts that after seven riffles it simply does not matter if you stacked your cards in a certain manner beforehand. The result is (sufficently) random.
On your worries that people might not be able to shuffle perfectly:
This is a reason to increaes your shuffling iterations und switch up a little bit your shuffling methods.
I.E. primarily using mashes and some overhand shuffles in between.
Regarding the damages:
I assume you are playing with sleeved cards. Usually mash shuffling does not damage sleeved cards and are not that damaging to your sleeves either. I think some tutorial videos on how to mash properly are available on youtube. Mashing also does not bend your cards, if you are careful enough.
In Summary: you should learn to shuffle properly if you want to play with a random deck. If you do shuffle properly it practically does not matter in which state your deck is in when you start your iterations. To be on the safe side just shuffle a couple more times, since additional iterations do not unmake the random nature of your deck, if it was random it simply will stay random.
On a side note:
This is also the reason, that mill if not used as a primary win conditions, is practically useless and you should generally mill yourself if given the choice. Since all cards are random
I've asked a way not to bend the cards, you've proposed a way to bend the cards....but i must admit for half a second there he seemed to riffle shuffle gentely without bending them by puting the pile side by side on the table...
But like he says at the end of the video, there are still traces of the original shuffle no matter what. So id rather start with my 1 land 2 cards setup... and considering your previous comments saying that 7 riffle shuffle is enought, then you shouldnt have any problem with that....assuming I would allow genttle riffle shuffle no bend
The game of magic relies on the fundamental assumption that your deck is completely randomized, which means that any order of cards has the same likelyhood as any other order, or in other words, revealing a card in the deck gives absolutely no information on what the next card could be (apart from being the revealed one). After you have sufficiently shuffeled your deck, absolutely NO assumptions can be made about the pattern of the deck, otherwise you have cheated. If you do ANYTHING to your deck to increases or decreases the chance of a certain phenomenon to occur, then you have cheated. This is mathmatics, not personal opinion.
Bearing that in mind, mana weaving makes no sense. If it has any effect on your draws at all, you have cheated because you did not sufficiently randomize your deck after stacking it. If it does not have any effect at all then you have sufficiently randomized your deck and have not cheated, but then it was unnecessary to manaweave in the first place.
So please people, get used to proper shuffling and not to inproper deck stacking.
EDIT: If you cannot properly randomize your deck because you are afraid of damaging your cards, then you cannot play magic without cheating.
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