Card Basic Problem
- Thread starter pokfan
- Start date
Porii Sames
Active Member
Q. I play an Oracle, and search for two cards. While I am searching, I find that I have a HUGE energy pocket coming up. So I break it up and add some trainers in between them. I then shuffle and put 2 cards on top. Is that legal?
A. As long as you shuffle sufficiently afterwards. (Mar 25, 2004 PUI Rules Team)
May help, sorta similar. Kinda.
A. As long as you shuffle sufficiently afterwards. (Mar 25, 2004 PUI Rules Team)
May help, sorta similar. Kinda.
Rogue Archetype
Moderator <br> Contest Host
This is kind of a duplicate thread. But, it's been answered so I won't bother to close or merge with the other.
I used to...
Seperate all trainer/supporters
Seperate all pokemon & Energy
and THEN stack shuffle to ensure they were all clumped together.
It took more time and people thought that I was stacking, so I just went to stack shuffling 12 stacks instead .. lol
I used to...
Seperate all trainer/supporters
Seperate all pokemon & Energy
and THEN stack shuffle to ensure they were all clumped together.
It took more time and people thought that I was stacking, so I just went to stack shuffling 12 stacks instead .. lol
Kayle
Active Member
I actually shuffled once, drew seven cards, looked them over quickly, and then as my opponent was going "Wait, I'm supposed to cut", I put them back in my deck and explained that I was checking to see how randomized my deck was, to see how much more shuffling I needed to do before I was satisfied. I over/under shuffle most of my games and I have issues with starting hands for that reason.
No shuffling would have of course been out of the question at that point, but I shuffled it a couple times and gave it to him to cut, and that point even with me knowing a random selection of 7 cards, I'm pretty sure it's considered sufficiently randomized at that point.
If it's not I won't do that anymore >>'.
EDIT: Vaguely related, I know you're allowed to do this at game start, but can my opponent shuffle my deck mid-game instead of cutting it (I use Cyrus and then offer my deck to cut, he shuffles it up instead)? Overshuffling will give you poorer draws and I kind of wonder if he knew that, but I wasn't sure enough on this ruling to call him on it. Sucked because my topdecks got worse and worse as the game went on.
No shuffling would have of course been out of the question at that point, but I shuffled it a couple times and gave it to him to cut, and that point even with me knowing a random selection of 7 cards, I'm pretty sure it's considered sufficiently randomized at that point.
If it's not I won't do that anymore >>'.
EDIT: Vaguely related, I know you're allowed to do this at game start, but can my opponent shuffle my deck mid-game instead of cutting it (I use Cyrus and then offer my deck to cut, he shuffles it up instead)? Overshuffling will give you poorer draws and I kind of wonder if he knew that, but I wasn't sure enough on this ruling to call him on it. Sucked because my topdecks got worse and worse as the game went on.
Kayle
Active Member
That's the thing. It's not truly random.
Do you test on Redshark? I find that Redshark tends to give much worse hands than an actual deck does.
ShuckleLVX
Active Member
Your opponent has the option to do a quick shuffle instead of a cut, If he does, you get the option to cut afterwards.
You're lucky you didn't get a penalty for doing that.
If you were looking at the cards juts to check the randomization, you should have informed your opponent of that before drawing the cards.
Without informing him, your actions could only be interpreted by a judge as you not offering your opponent a cut, drawing a hand you didn't like, and shuffling it back in without proper reason.
Prize Penalty at least.
I've always noticed that I get complete crap hands in RS. I'll play 3 games in a row and get 3 horrible hands, then use my actual deck and play like 10 and never get near as bad of a hand as the 3 on RS...thought it was just me....
Kayle
Active Member
But if I say, "Hey, do you mind if I check to see if I've got cards clumped together" and draw a 7-card hand after getting his permission, showing it to him possibly for good measure, this is perfectly fine?
On the same token, shuffling my deck once or twice, then looking through it, then shuffling it more is also okay?
I've been fairly certain for a while now that there is a very serious difference between computerized randomization and human shuffling. There CAN'T be a way to actually randomize cards by hand short of throwing them around and having your toddler gather them up for you. You can get close, but the natural clumpage of cards is always going to be there, particularly if you bridge/riffle shuffle and don't do much else.
My hypothesis for this is that when you gather your cards up after a full game, there's a logical procession to your cards because of the way you gather them - Pokemon and Energy are put together, along with any trainers attached to them. Things in your discard pile are all close together, so your supporters, your searchers, etc are near the bottom, and your tactical trainers are further up. And so forth. These become clumps, which you can't realistically clear out of the deck by timely shuffling. Because of this, you tend to draw into more favorable hands when playing with a live deck because the clumpage puts useful cards together - no single card is useful (a Collector) but pairs of them might be (Collector + the Spiritomb your opponent knocked out after you used it), or triads (Dialga, Belt, Call that were all attached at the end of the last game). On the flip side, when you draw bad hands, they're disastrous, because you get UNfavorable groupings of cards: I kid you not when I say I drew into Turn Turn Turn Bronzong Crobat Aaron's Snowpoint one game.
Redshark, meanwhile, is perfectly random, and gives you a perfectly uniform distribution of card draws. That means the clumps are NEVER there, so you need to run a lot more consistency cards to make your deck function.
This is why I am such a stickler about Call Energy and other consistency cards in every deck when others debate their usefulness: I test almost exclusively on Redshark, where you're just as likely to draw Call Energy early as you are late. For others, because of the way their deck gets grouped after games, they may draw Call later on and it becomes dead weight - and they won't need it as often anyway. I know I certainly regretted running Call last weekend!
EDIT:
Toxictaipan said:
This test is a demonstration of the concept I just outlined - I hope to do a more comprehensive test later, maybe next week, and actually use some statistical analysis on the 7-card hands I draw. But TTP's little test is a nice example of what I'm talking about regardless: your cards tend to stick together in the deck no matter how much you shuffle.
That's actually untrue. Computers cannot easily randomize perfectly; computer randomization always has a distinct pattern and is not truly random at all. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generation
Kayle
Active Member
I'm a computer science major. I know. It's still a stupid slip on my part to say "perfectly random" but give me a break, I'm tired.
I don't mean that the computer's pattern is completely perfectly random, I mean the computer actually performs a random or psuedorandom routine to EACH card, placing it in some spot in the deck without regard to any other card or its previous state.
Hand shuffles don't do that, and for that reason there's a difference.
toxictaipan
New Member
Well, to be fair, that was just one test. I was halfway finished typing up a reply to the other topic where I was going to explain the results of another test (that still only makes two, many more should be performed, but I didn't want to destroy my Celebi sleeves :tongue
, but just had one of those "why even bother" moments and didn't worry about it.During the other test, I took the same clump of 6 cards and shuffled for 10 minutes, same as before. This time, the results were better. While I did not have any of the smaller clumps I had described before, I noticed that even though the copies of the card were separated, they were only separated at smaller, more consistent intervals. There were about 5-7 cards between each copy, all near the bottom of the deck, with just 1 copy near the top. I guess this is about as random as you can hope for when shuffling, but I'm not sure what other people consider an "accurate" shuffle.
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NoPoke
Active Member
kayle: I test my shuffles too. But I do it with the cards face up so that it is obvious that I'm not shuffling. Typically this will be pile shuffle, check, then shuffle so I don't know where any of the cards I glanced at are in the deck. The best time to do this is after the game has ended. So when you sit down and shuffle in front of your opponent there is nothing suspicious at all and you have confidence that your deck is not completely ugly as drawn from the deck box.