Chris Clay
[Stream commentor] Ascetic_HS: "Naw, it's broken for sure, I have never in my life gotten 8 lands in a row in paper like I have here." It's one of those things that I will address in [a future Forum] post. But if you have never done it, you either haven't played enough games, or you're not actually shuffling your deck properly. It'll happen.
Megan O'Malley
I mean, we, again, the Pro Tour coverage this weekend... There were instances of professional level, Competitive REL, where both mana screw and mana flood happened. Variance is a part of the game, it happens. And yeah, it might be improbable, but the shuffler is as close to true random as we can get it, which means sometimes incredibly, incredibly, incredibly improbable things are still technically possible.
Chris Clay
Yeah, thousands of games isn't even close to enough. And that's assuming that you truly are random shuffling it, which is harder to do than you would expect. People are bad at random in general. Doesn't mean that they're wrong, it doesn't mean that it doesn't feel like it shouldn't happen. But random is random. In fact, if you never saw eight lands in a row, then it couldn't actually be truly random. Though there are an ungodly number of combinations in a sixty card deck, a truly random system at some point in time will have all of the lands - it would take an infinitely long-
Megan O'Malley
Not an infinite!
Chris Clay
Not infinite, but a huge like, billions of years of playing nonstop to hit the case, but a true random system at some point is going to produce a case where all you draw is lands in your first thirty cards. If you have thirty lands - or twenty-four, whatever it is.
If you don't riffle your deck, you need to be shuffling for probably close to ten minutes, if you're doing like an overhand or a mush. You need at least seven riffles.
Megan O'Malley
Another fun fact is that 'pile shuffling' is not considered randomisation. If you ever do - again, Magic has two levels. Speaking to people who are familiar with playing at like their Friday Night Magics or at like PPTQs or Pro Tour level, 'pile shuffle' is not considered randomisation. That's another thing, where at Friday Night Magic, nobody is gonna be like - well, I shouldn't say 'nobody', but most people aren't gonna be like "No no, pile shuffling isn't good enough because it isn't considered 'true random' or 'random enough'."
But for better or worse, the shuffler is as close to true random as we can get it. "What do you mean 'as close'?" What is it, computer atrophy or something like that? It's like, technically, technically it's impossible for any computer system to hit 'true random'. You can tell this is something that we've both looked into.
Chris Clay
I've been dealing with random for my whole career, and the final thing I'll say on it at the moment is if a system ever feels 'correctly random', it means it's not. And it's that simple.
Megan O'Malley
A great example of this is like, any music shuffling system is not true random. If you're like 'Oh man, it always plays the songs I wanna hear, and like mixes in some other songs that I wanna hear less frequently', it's just like yeah, no a music shuffler isn't true random. It is specifically designed like 'Oh, this person listens to this song a lot? We need to make sure that at some point in this X amount of songs, that song comes up.' Which is perceived randomness.
Just speaking to the topic of randomness, another big topic be it on Twitter or Reddit or the Forums come up, it's usually like me and Lexie and another one of the Community Managers sitting in a room with Clay, it's like 'Okay, so are you suuuure it's random?' And Clay going like 'Yes, we have tested it a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times - it's random.' I'm like 'okay'.
Chris Clay
That's part of the reason it doesn't feel quite right - because it is truly random. And that opens up a whole 'nother line of debate of 'Well then, should Arena be truly random, or should we try to make what people expect random to be?' But then if we're mimicking what people expect random to be, does that then influence deck building in a way that isn't of the, it's uh, yeah.
Megan O'Malley
Or then if people were to transition into paper Magic, does it create like, feelbad situations there? If we do a 'perceived randomness' where it's not actually random, is that really Magic? Because again, variance is part of it. There's some of the top players in the world have a sixty to seventy percent win rate because sometimes, yeah, they get mana screwed too, or the get mana flooded too. Or just like their opponent happens to topdeck the card they needed to win.[/spoiler]
