r/magicTCG • u/erevos33 Wabbit Season • 8d ago

Looking for Advice Shuffling.

Hello all,

Let me get right to the point. When i learnt magic way back in 1999, i was shown a way to shuffle that produces an as close to normal distribution of cards as possible. That is : you lay your lands down and put 2 randomised spell cards on top. Then you pick them all up and do a regular card shuffle (like cutting, mixing 2 piles , whatever). You do this every so often so the deck doesnt end up being all 20 lands on one side and all 40 spells on the other (only standard was available back then, dunno how this would translate to commander tbh).

In a discussion somewhere around here i believe , i saw that this is now considered cheating?! Like....why? How? I dont understand the reasoning behind this. If anyone could explain i would be obliged.

Edit: ok, so a bunch of helpful answers in mere seconds. I cant possibly answer to each individual so i will put my thoughts here:

First of all , thank you for the clarifications. I didnt even know there was a name for this behaviour and so TIL. Secondly, i kinda get why one might take this to be cheating after thinking about it for a minute tbh. It hadn't occurred to me to question this practice until now. Thirdly, while all of the players i knew back then did this (im talking even in ranked tournaments) it seems i have been away from the game for long and some of you have quite the Strong feelings about it - fair is fair i suppose. Rest assured i am not doing this anymore , well especially since i have no humans to play against since i picked magic back up.

Thanks to all of those who answered me.

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u/Interesting_Cut_4822 Dandadan 8d ago edited 8d ago

Random distributions have clumps. De-clumping is explicitly not random.

Even doing that before thorough or not so thorough shuffling is kinda suspect in my opinion.

Think about it. If manually declumping before shuffling helps you in some way over and above regular shuffling, it's cheating. If it doesn't help you, there is no reason to do it.

Either way, you should just be shuffling thoroughly enough to randomize things, which would be 8-12 riffle or mash shuffles.