Collectible Card Game Headquarters

So, something I've noticed while using Xmage is that the way the program shuffles libraries is really off. Compared to playing in paper, my decks run much less smoothly, if that makes sense. Some games are fine; others I get land screwed or land flooded, and it happens way more often than it ever would in paper Magic. It's one of the only reasons why my quit percentage is as high as it is(53% last I checked, most of that is from me quitting simply because my deck was unplayable with how badly the deck was shuffled.)
It feels like roughly one in every 4-5 rounds of normal 1v1(not entire matches) this oddity occurs.
If this can be fixed, me and others who notice this would be very thankful.

(PS: When are you adding Skullbriar, the Walking Grave(from the original Commander set) to the card database? I've been wanting to mess around with him to see if I want to put together a Skullbriar EDH deck in paper)

You might want to read a discussion on this from last year: viewtopic.php?t=16746

There isn't anything to fix. I've played other games where people "blame the shuffler" and it's never correct. For instance, with online poker you may appear to see more instances of unlikely runs of cards occur (runner runner straights, sets, etc). The reason it appears there's something unusual going on is because thanks to computers shuffling our cards and automating a lot of play, the speed of the game increases as well. In the end what this means is we see more "hands" (a metric in poker is "hands per hour") and we play more games in shorter spans of time which opens us up to more strings of events where we witness the "unlucky" side. In the long run over the course of hundreds of thousands of games you'll hit the actual statistical probability of given events occurring with your deck. Until then, you'll keep remembering the short term and forgetting all the instances where you were not screwed.

Then of course add on that since the shuffling is out of your control, when you get unlucky you can no longer possibly blame yourself for poor shuffling or your sleeves clumping up the cards more, and so on. Sometimes it's correct that could have been the problem (though I would argue its a poor conclusion to first jump to), but now that you have a computer randomizing it, that no longer can be the case.

Also this can give some additional information:
https://github.com/magefree/mage/issues/1428

Most players just don't realize how much (unintentional) cheating are they doing in paper magic while shuffling.
Imagine for example scenario, where you would have all lands together. Nobody starts to shuffle from this configuration, so we can assume, that for this to happen, there need to occur roughly 13 swaps, but honestly who shuffle so much for that to happen?
Another thing is pile shuffling - it is used for counting cards, but another effect it has, is maximizing he distance between any two cards from the original configuration.
After finishing a game, most players just scoop cards in play, graveyard and hand in one pile, which means you always start fro ma configuration, where you have similar types of cards together.
It is all jsut like the recent Anteri shuffle cheating - they caught him, because he didn't sufficiently randomize his deck after mana weaving. But just think about it - why would someone mana weave, if he is going to shuffle his deck anyway? The answer is simple - you never shuffle that much to eliminate impact of this original configuration.

TL;DR - You are cheating while shuffling in real life, XMage just doesn't have this problem. If your deck doesn't work, you have ot focus more on correct deckbuilding and shuffling, not on blaming the program.

The0retico wrote:Most players just don't realize how much (unintentional) cheating are they doing in paper magic while shuffling.
Imagine for example scenario, where you would have all lands together. Nobody starts to shuffle from this configuration, so we can assume, that for this to happen, there need to occur roughly 13 swaps, but honestly who shuffle so much for that to happen?
Another thing is pile shuffling - it is used for counting cards, but another effect it has, is maximizing he distance between any two cards from the original configuration.
After finishing a game, most players just scoop cards in play, graveyard and hand in one pile, which means you always start fro ma configuration, where you have similar types of cards together.
It is all jsut like the recent Anteri shuffle cheating - they caught him, because he didn't sufficiently randomize his deck after mana weaving. But just think about it - why would someone mana weave, if he is going to shuffle his deck anyway? The answer is simple - you never shuffle that much to eliminate impact of this original configuration.

TL;DR - You are cheating while shuffling in real life, XMage just doesn't have this problem. If your deck doesn't work, you have ot focus more on correct deckbuilding and shuffling, not on blaming the program.

Just want to clarify something as a judge. What you say they are doing is not cheating. Cheating requires knowledge that what you are doing is against the rules. But I agree with the point that most people are bad at statistics.