The power of shuffle.

[dahcmai]

There are plenty of people who would take the time to learn something like that if it actually gave them an advantage. that's most of the reason it's allowed to have the opponent shuffle the deck. I know a guy who can rifle shuffle a deck exactly 8 times and it will be perfectly in the same order it started in. It's a pretty amazing trick. I shuffle his deck obviously every time and count the exact number of shuffles too. It's a physics/numbers thing. It's the reason why you should always do that. Some people really can do impressive stuff like that easily.

[kiblast]

I always perform an Hot Shot Cut after shuffling. Does it count as cheating?

[dontbiteitholmes]

It doesn't necessarily do. You can stack your deck beforehand in many different ways to profit from pile shuffling. Pile shuffling isn't exactly randomizing. It's rather stacking your deck without knowing how the cards end up.

You realize that you aren't allowed to end on a pile shuffle right? When I play Enchantress my deck basically ends the game stacked since I've played about 25 permanents, kept them all in order on the battlefield, and when I scoop up my deck I have a big clump of land and a big clump of enchantments. So it would be really hard to break that all up but just shuffling the cards together. So instead I shuffle 3 times pile shuffle in 7 piles, then shuffle another 5 or so times after that. It doesn't get much more random than that. To get the same randomizing effect I'd have to shuffle my deck an insane number of times the traditional way. You can stack your deck without pile shuffling anyways and just do a janky shuffle before you present if you wanted to cheat, but pile shuffling can also be a tool to get your deck MORE random. I know for a fact that many people on this board use it to that same effect because I have played along side them before and almost everyone pile shuffles to break up clumps after games.

[Jonathan Alexander]

I had no idea I'm not allowed to end with pile shuffling. Between games I usually shuffle seven times, make a cut, shuffle seven times again, pile shuffle in five piles, shuffle seven times, make a cut again, then finally shuffle another seven times. Pile shuffling being used to break up clumps still doesn't change anything about it technically being stacking your deck, even though it doesn't benefit you in a controllable way when combined with other shuffling techniques. Of course pile shuffling is really useful when used like this, but you can do a lot of shit with it.

[Offler]

Well during play I sometimes use term "the deck is not shuffled well" to say that after last game the cards are coming in exactly same order, or if the deck was "deconstructed" and cards have been grouped by types due this and their order is still appearing from draw.

Currently it means I need 5-6 shuffles to archieve card order to be completely random. I want enjoy different games...

As a side effect it means usueally that if I "deconstruct" my deck i will most likely lose two or three games until deck is "well shuffled". This also happened during last saturday. But after that, in the win condition was Coralhelm commander - in 4 out 5 games. And he came into most of games. Sure that I was tutoring him, however it is strange to win with Aggro part of the deck when usually try to win on combo.

This is reasonable with deck with a lot of tutoring, but I have seen that on decks without any tutoring.

At all I try to play with tutors as I described. First I checked 3 cards on the top before I start to actually tutor. There really was impact on game. Since i know what was on top, if there was an combo card after shuffling (by my opponent) I stated that there is some percentual probability of getting that (or functionally similar) card. Since the probability of drawing an Island was much higher it affected my further strategy - drop a decoy/defender, try to fix mana bit longer instead of attempting start the combo.

[Oiolosse]

Its not a problem for me to let opponnent reshuffle the deck. Not at all.

Even when the shuffle is perfectly random, there are some theoretical probabilities what will be on the top. This is something i can count with after each shuffle. Combined with Senseis top - and you have just turned each tutor into Ponder...

What on earth are you talking about?