Hand Smoother

[GarbageCollector]

If Wizards thinks this ridiculous mechanic is such a good idea why is it hidden away and only explained if you dig deep instead of actively employed even in paper tournaments and championed for how genius it is? Is it maybe because sneaking it under the table as an underhanded, predatory business practice is more effective than being up front about it?

This game is a gacha. Change my mind.

[Andrei]

They should use the hand smoother in best of 3 too. In my last trad draft I played 15 lands and Utopia Sprawl in 40 cards. In 7 games played I had 2 opening hands with 5 lands, 2 with 1 land and 1 with 6 lands. I get 1 and 5 land opening hands about as often as I get 3 land ones. There's something just obviously wrong with the randomness algorithm of this game. The level of variance when it comes to lands is just absurd. There's no way this is a normal distribution.

I can't understand how there are people who go 3-0 more than 50% of the time in trad draft. To me almost every draft I get one game where I just get completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the lands. Like there's just no chance of winning even if my spells are good.

[GarbageCollector]

Originally posted by Andrei:

To me almost every draft I get one game where I just get completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the lands. Like there's just no chance of winning even if my spells are good.

This happens in paper too because of course it does. Odds are not really that slim of getting flooded or screwed if you don't have ways to dodge it and are just relying on regular distribution. Keeping a 3 land hand on the play in a 17 land deck gives you ~10% of missing your 4th land drop. It will happen. Same concept when people mulligan 1 or 2 landers. Eventually you're going to have a streak where you mull 3 times and still wind up with 1 land, if you play enough games.

It's not a problem with the randomness algorithm it's a fundamental problem with magic, having critical resources to play the game mixed in gives you the chance of basically not being able to play.

The thing I have a problem with is that Wizards knows this and tries to hide it under the rug by altering card odds via the hand smoother without really telling you what they're doing. And that skews advantages to people who know that it's a thing and build accordingly. It's why people can get away with 18 lands in 60 card aggro decks if they play Bo1.

In the old days you got around getting manascrewed by keeping your curve low as a tradeoff for the more powerful spells (less of a problem these days btw since they print entire novels on 2-drops that already have insane stat lines (looking at you Mosswood Dreadknight)) but on Arena you don't even need to do this if you know about the secret mechanic, and you're actively making your highroll worse if you build your Bo1 deck as if it was paper magic.

The game and cards should do what they say and say what they do. Not this smoke and mirrors trash that somehow simultaneously tries to get people hooked by falsely erasing bad luck and also disadvantages casuals/new players who have no idea it's happening vs redditors/tryhards that exploit it. Though bravo for finding a way to do both of these seemingly contradictory things at once, I wouldn't have thought that possible.

[DontMisunderstand]

Not only is it not in paper, it's explicitly and unambiguously a violation of the rules in paper. Doing it at a tournament might very well get you banned from organized play.

[Captain Sisko]

YES! YES! magic is a completly unproductive passtime, might as well find ways to not enjoy wasting your time XDXDXD

[BobbyRunout]

What is the problem with a hand smoother if it is known & applied equally to both players? Maybe you need to / can build a little differently with it in mind, but so what? Seems to me like they're just taking advantage of something that a digital implementation makes not only possible but practical to improve the experience for players.

[GarbageCollector]

Originally posted by wly_cdgr:

What is the problem with a hand smoother if it is known & applied equally to both players? Maybe you need to / can build a little differently with it in mind, but so what? Seems to me like they're just taking advantage of something that a digital implementation makes not only possible but practical to improve the experience for players.

Nothing, the problem is that it isn't known. You have to look around and find out that it exists. If I'm wrong and it says somewhere obvious I've overlooked that in Bo1 it's going to give you different odds than you'd naturally expect, I'll take everything back.

Also why is it hard to implement for paper? You could just draw 2 separate hands face down, pick one to keep, and shuffle the other. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why getting flooded or screwed sucks. Every time they've improved the mulligan system in the past it's been extremely welcome. I have nothing against making the game less of a coinflip, I just wish they'd tell us up front that's what they're doing. People should not have to google "is the shuffler in arena rigged?" to find out this is a mechanic.

[Captain Sisko]

Originally posted by GarbageCollector:

Originally posted by wly_cdgr:

What is the problem with a hand smoother if it is known & applied equally to both players? Maybe you need to / can build a little differently with it in mind, but so what? Seems to me like they're just taking advantage of something that a digital implementation makes not only possible but practical to improve the experience for players.

Nothing, the problem is that it isn't known. You have to look around and find out that it exists. If I'm wrong and it says somewhere obvious I've overlooked that in Bo1 it's going to give you different odds than you'd naturally expect, I'll take everything back.

Also why is it hard to implement for paper? You could just draw 2 separate hands face down, pick one to keep, and shuffle the other. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why getting flooded or screwed sucks. Every time they've improved the mulligan system in the past it's been extremely welcome. I have nothing against making the game less of a coinflip, I just wish they'd tell us up front that's what they're doing. People should not have to google "is the shuffler in arena rigged?" to find out this is a mechanic.

as someone who grew up before everything was digitized, after 4 or 5 matches it was painfully obvious the shuffling was not random. but who cares, its just a game.

[BobbyRunout]

Originally posted by GarbageCollector:

Originally posted by wly_cdgr:

What is the problem with a hand smoother if it is known & applied equally to both players? Maybe you need to / can build a little differently with it in mind, but so what? Seems to me like they're just taking advantage of something that a digital implementation makes not only possible but practical to improve the experience for players.

Nothing, the problem is that it isn't known. You have to look around and find out that it exists. If I'm wrong and it says somewhere obvious I've overlooked that in Bo1 it's going to give you different odds than you'd naturally expect, I'll take everything back.

Also why is it hard to implement for paper? You could just draw 2 separate hands face down, pick one to keep, and shuffle the other. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why getting flooded or screwed sucks. Every time they've improved the mulligan system in the past it's been extremely welcome. I have nothing against making the game less of a coinflip, I just wish they'd tell us up front that's what they're doing. People should not have to google "is the shuffler in arena rigged?" to find out this is a mechanic.

I also would prefer it if they were more up-front about it, but maybe their concern is that people would somehow perceive that as (even) more rigged. Not saying that would make sense, but it might be part of their reasoning (or just not wanting to confuse inexperienced/casual players).

Re: paper implementation, I don't think it would be hard so much as just more cumbersome -> less practical than doing it digitally, where you're slowing down the game much less if at all by doing it in fast code behind the scenes. That's a nice idea with drawing two hands though and seems worth a try....although I'm actually not sure that it's more forgiving than the current London mulligan system? Or at least not always, depending on your deck composition. As a (possibly wrong?) example:

Let's say you get land flooded with the first hand. If you mulligan, you have a much higher chance of getting flooded again than if you draw a 2nd hand from the remaining cards without first shuffling your first hand back in, but you also have a much lower chance of getting land starved. If you're running a land count that's at the bottom of the playable range, you're more likely to get land starved, so the chance of that being higher is more significant than the chance of getting flooded being higher with the mulligan, so the mulligan is more forgiving in that respect in this scenario.

Or am I wrong because there's not a "first" hand in quite the same sense with the 2-hands system, and the fact that either hand could be considered the "first" changes things? Honestly not sure. Need to take a proper combinatorics class.

[DontMisunderstand]

Originally posted by wly_cdgr:

What is the problem with a hand smoother if it is known & applied equally to both players? Maybe you need to / can build a little differently with it in mind, but so what? Seems to me like they're just taking advantage of something that a digital implementation makes not only possible but practical to improve the experience for players.

By the nature of the concept it cannot be applied equally to both players. It also cannot be properly accounted for by either player during deck construction unless they publicly release every single detail about the exact implementation of the system.

There's also the issue of it being easily abusable. For example, lets for sake of argument say that the implementation is with simple modified odds for the opening hand and nothing else; for specificity's sake, lets say it simply "draws" each card in the opener a second time if it's NOT a land, and keeps the 2nd regardless for redrawn cards. Very simple, no other changes. This changes deck construction in an extremely fundamental way, due to how mana works. The current roughly 40ish% land:nonland ratio optimum (rule of thumb, obviously not always the perfect optimal) is based on maximizing the odds of a good opening hand while minimizing the number of extra land draws that would be dead later in the game. This crucial fact shifts the optimum ratio in absurd ways that negatively impact the game, making luck of the draw a LARGER factor in the outcome than it otherwise would be. I haven't done the specific math for a hypothetical example, but an estimated optimum would be somewhere in the range of 20-25% instead of the usual 40% because of this extremely simple and minor change. This sounds like a good thing, if you don't look deeper at the consequences. There's already basically a 1 in 3 chance of losing the game to bad luck from card draws, with a perfect deck and perfect play. Now imagine there's a 50/50 chance of a bad opening hand anyway, and only a 14% chance of recovering from it before the game is over. That's a rough approximation of the reality of this hypothetical system.

Yes, there are other ways they could handle such a system. Some of them more negative than others. None of them affect the math of the game in a way that facilitates interactive gameplay. They all do exactly the opposite.

[GarbageCollector]

Originally posted by DontMisunderstand:

There's also the issue of it being easily abusable.

This is, I think, the crux of my issue.

The fact it's hidden, but if you know about it you can build around it to get an edge that nobody would expect if they're thinking in terms of normal shuffle distribution (and why wouldn't you?), is very bad.

In a game like this things should do what they say and say what they do, without having to worry about the man behind the curtain.