Yeah, someone, who just happens to be one of the most respected, unbiased and knowledgeable veteran judges of the Pokemon TCG, nbd.
Quit stacking your deck and move on with your life.
I respectfully disagree. However, I am biased because his posts irk me. vaporeon's avatar will be discussed in further detail tomorrow in a separate thread.
Don't lose your cool now. Keep arguments logical and sentiments far from emotion.
***
Okay, so my two cents on this subject. For the most part, I mostly agree with Ness' initial argument. At the end of the day, there's really no legitimate argument to make claim for declumping your deck in any reasonable way. Why? Well, for a few reasons.
In a nutshell, declumping your deck is a modification of the inherent randomness from previous shuffles. Some players are better or worse shufflers than others, and that's a fact, yes, but declumping is the explicit movement of particular, precise cards to mitigate, in theory, 'poor shuffling'. The logic, of course, is that through the declumping of those cards you've mitigated what was either poor chance or poor shuffling. On either side, it's not a very good argument.
Regarding chanced clumps but good shuffling, you've essentially modified the outcome of the originally intended list setup. Shuffling or not, you've changed the fortunes with prior information. How, you may say? Because you've given yourself the game option to change the nature of the setup. Allow me to demonstrate.
Let's say I play Pokemon Collector, and find all my Candies together. Presuming that I had shuffled properly, this would be the unfortunate luck of the draw, and realistically in a game I should be playing a shuffle card or a draw card to mitigate the diminished return of my per-turn draw. The 'minimising dead draw' argument is not an effective argument because 'dead draws' are an inherent part of the game: setup is determined, but mitigated, through luck. That's an unfortunate fact.
Therefore, it relies on the competency of the individual player to minimise that luck factor to the best of his ability. This sounds callous and woefully naive, but for a player who is stuck in a dead-draw position should have to adapt, because at the end of the day, his opponent is at equal chance of getting hit by the same dead draw scenario.
So, with all my candies together, what happens if I choose to declump? Well, in a nutshell, I've altered the probability of the deck by making it naturally more favourable. How so? There are two viable scenarios: I declump and don't shuffle, which makes it by default in my favour, or I declump and it gets shuffled (either by myself or the opponent), and it makes it in my favour by the distribution of luck versus the minimum utility. In other words, the bad situation is that I'm clumped - even if the opponent shuffles, it
changes the distribution by default, meaning that the chances of the elimination of the dead draw is gone.
So, what does this mean? It means that even if my opponent shuffles my deck afterwards (or I do it), I've benefited because the chances of that initial dead-draw is no longer 100 percent. In this case, we're making an action under utility asymmetry: I've benefitted from the elimination of a possibly damaging draw at the expense of my opponent with no benefit to them. This, in essence, moves a naturally determined deck structure (4 clumped Candies) into a position that favours me (very good chance of no more 4 clumped Candies) without any sign of inherent competency or deserved skill on my part.
In other words, it takes a game of position based on relative gains - meaning your benefit becomes their loss - from an action that had nothing to do with the skill, decklist consistency, play strength or general ability of either players into account.
But what about poor shufflers? Should they get to declump? My argument, well, is no. You see, because there's no way to legitimately figure out if someone is a poor shuffler by nature and not by design, you're allowing for collective moral failure. In other words, stating that poor shufflers should get to declump will lead to the possibility of someone saying that they're naturally a 'bad shuffler' so they can say they get to declump: it puts the exchange at a status where the lowest common denominator is that the incentive to cheat becomes very, very high. And players may take advantage of that.
But how can they get a good randomization? Well, have the other player shuffle it, then. If the other player agrees to shuffle it, then at the least both players have agreed that the probability of whatever comes is the agreed upon result of sheer luck, and not of possible stacking. Likewise, if the other player decides not to shuffle it, then he's taken the risk associated with his opponent declumping. Does either scenario, therefore, mean that declumping is okay? No, not at all - whether you choose to shuffle or whether you choose not to, declumping is not okay because of two reasons:
A) Shuffling isn't exactly a difficult thing, and the argument of 'poor shuffling' is hardly a reasonable excuse for any sort of possible stacking - therefore, it is your responsibility as the player to shuffle properly
B) Declumping, as stated, provides no benefit to the opposite player, making it purely gains to the other player, and considering that this is a status without factoring in competency, decklist construction, etc., it's not fair just because someone is 'bad at shuffling'
The time argument isn't as compelling, which is why I 'mostly'. The act of declumping takes up just as much time as someone thinking through what they want from their deck. Time, in this case, can easily be measured and mitigated, unlike the intent and shuffling skill.
Likewise, time is not a massive loss in terms of relative gains - if the opponent shaved off two or three seconds because they're not sure what to get, it's not going to affect me. Reasonably, it should give me more time to figure out a viable counter plan to his setup / gameplan, so there's a benefit for me there.
Now, I'm not sure if it's
that big of a thing to warrant such furor. Perhaps if someone does it multiple times in a game, then yeah, I'll get worried. If the opponent does it once, and it's obvious they're a bit worried, I'll let it slide, because at the end of the day, it statistically won't break the bank.
But on a whole? I'm not in favour of declumping, mainly because it has far too many costs and little benefits.
