How To Shuffle MTG Cards Sleeved (And Catch Cheating!) 

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Long live wu-tang clan!

They exist!?

WU-BRG IS FOREVER!

Odb color

Could be paired with a "this mat ain't nothing to f with" playmat lol

Haha thanks!

I still play yugioh and I feel like a lot of these cheats work across any card game, so these have been helpful to learn to watch for cheating.

@@m.blotzkrieg1615 I could copy and paste a single Yu-Gi-Oh card and hit my essay word count, used to play but it is so beginner unfriendly

@@fishpodpizza544 unfortunately we don't have any one word effects like mtg. Instead of shroud or hexproof we have "this card cannot be targeted by card effects". The effects could be shorter if we had keyword effects for common effects.

i used to play magic. all my cards got stolen years ago and didnt feel like buying hundreds of dollars of cards again so never got back into it

Pretty this shuffle too, if you can handle it, but when it's too many cards just do it in steps: Cut the deck in half and put them side by side. Riffle shuffle the top half of both stacks and then the bottom halfs, just like he showed in the video. It's a bit lengthy, but in terms of randomization and card lifespan, you can't do much better.

Separate the deck into two separate piles. Shuffle each individual pile a couple of time. Then take half from each of those piles and shuffle them together a couple times. Shuffle the remaining halves together a few times. Then shuffle the two large piles into each other a few times. At this point your deck should be random. Hope that helps your “friend.”

@@Krunschy Ah so I've been doing it "right" this whole time. Like I literally just cut the deck, shuffle both halves and then do what you described. Makes life painful when you're playing basic land fetch cards every turn though.

Don't sleeve it :-P

I would love a video on edh deck shuffle :))

"Practice at home by yourself!"

😂

"Turn your head AWAY from the deck. Don't look at it."

Giggity

3:38 "This is a once, rare time where you can look at your opponents d**k your opponent can look at your d**k and it's not weird it's OK!" If this ain't the truth IDK

Yeah this is it. Anyone who says they stack their deck but then shuffle it is kidding themselves. It's either pointless or cheating.

Disagree. If at any time you separate your deck into lands and non-lands, simply placing 43 lands in a clump on top of 56 spells and then doing a few shuffles isn't going to reliably randomize the deck; there are still going to be potential clumps. Now, if someone wants to mana weave every time, obviously that's a problem, but especially when you first put a deck together a mana weave is just the right thing to do to get it ready for shuffling.

@@RENEG4DE4NGEL "and doing a few shuffles" is not considered sufficient shuffling. So again... Either you are sufficiently shuffling, in which case the weaving did nothing to the end result because the deck is as close to "randomized" as you can realistically make it.... OR you are not sufficiently shuffling, in which case weaving DID affect the end result, in which case you CHEATED.

@@RENEG4DE4NGEL I agree with this, I understand the whole loop but if you play a game where you have 15 lands out and then you scoop them all together, there is going to be a 15 card land clump. I at the bare minimum disperse my lands randomly throughout the deck after each game.

@@S0ftSurv I feel like it depends a lot on the situation you are in while doing so. If you are in a competitive evironment and start to mana weave I would agree with @WitchPHD. If you are sitting in a friendly game of casual commander and spread your lands out by a quick "lands right hand, spells left hand, shuffle in" pseudo weave after having a game with 32 lands on the table, I am fine with it. I would consider that a shuffling shortcut to get to another game faster instead of cheating.

Glad I could help!

I still don't see the problem with it....if it's being shuffled throughly, what does it matter what order it was placed in the first place?

@@duane_313 As nother comment points out. "There are two options. Either you don't shuffle enough afterwards and the mana weave affects your deck, in which case the mana weaving is cheating.... or you did shuffle enough afterwards and the deck is in a 'random order,' in which case the mana weaving was pointless. Either way, if your intent is to effect what you draw, then your intent is to cheat. "

@@IceTemple13 Which is why whenever I play any game with resources, the only time I "Manaweave" is right after building the deck to get a jumpstart on making sure stuff's all over the place. Never grabbing in exact amounts, just randomly grabbing from each pile to jumpstart the blend. After that, the deck never gets that treatment again till its dismantled and rebuilt.

@@IceTemple13 see, I disagree with this logic, because it fails to hold any water against cards that search the entirety of the deck for whatever you want. And most people that are playing any level of speed drops have most of their spells doing this very thing. Search for land, search for creature, scry, etc - all of these things allow you to place the desired items either directly into play, into your hand, or on the top (or bottom) of your library. This affects the way your draws are done. There are also cards that do the same to your opponent, effectively allowing you to stack their deck. Even cards that force your opponent to play with the top card of their library or even their hand revealed so you know every move they can make. As long as the shuffles are made afterward, and an opponent gets to shuffle/cut afterward, I see no issue with the practice. Also, if it was done prior to your match ever getting to the table, you couldn't even know that it had been done. But, if it is against the rules at an MTG hosted event, the that is the rule. Can't really argue against it when it is their rules. As I said in my own comment though, I really feel that it is more of a time thing (like pile shuffling, which according to another video and stated by a level 2 judge to be an acceptable thing once per match in the opening hand to count out your cards) - it just drags out the match to take that time. But again, if your match finishes to the point that others in the round are still going, it would be a better practice to do either PRIOR to starting the next match, so as to not waste time during the match.

@@IceTemple13 If it's pointless, then I can do it if I want to. Therefore it's not cheating.

I can barely hold a sleeved deck, mostly because I play commander and 99 sleeved cards are too big for my small hands

I have a really bad grip, mainly because of my medication, so I can relate to. I can barely hold my deck to begin with.

@@tiramin my uncle decided he will always toss the deck on the table and make large circular motions with his cards for this reason. The problem is straightening the deck

@@vincentcircharo8259 it has history

I don't mana weave, what I do to ensure my deck is more random is I shuffle my lands into library, and then make 6 stacks of 10, shuffle them back in, and then shuffle again. It's kept my deck from being stacked or mana weaved.

Mana weaving can screw you pretty hard if you shuffle wrong.

IE - Shuffle at all. It's still random.

I tend to just deal into stacks randomly then move them around then shuffle, then give for a cut.

I also have to work to not do a riffle shuffle.

that's why you shuffle their deck 20 times.

Probably why the rule is you are only allowed to pile shuffle once before the match.

Man, I quit going to my old LGS due to shit like this. The store owner didn't know anything about MTG and let the one judge there run everything. That judge won *every* event, and was blatantly cheating in every game. I originally chalked it up to him being really good. "He's a judge, duh". But once I got better at MTG, and started playing against him myself, it was super obvious. But he was the one and only judge, who can you complain to? The owner (who was cool no shade on him) was friends with him and didn't know shit about MTG. It would just look like salty nerds whining. The last straw for me was in a....... Theros prerelease I believe. He literally picked up my deck and looked through it just like you said happened to you. I just grabbed my shit and left. Never went back.

Have you tried Ultra Pro Eclipses? I've been very happy with the mattes. There for a while they felt too sticky for my tastes, but after hundreds of shuffles they started to really loosen up and are now a real pleasure to use. I've now shuffled the deck lord only knows how many times and have yet to split a sleeve!

the algorithm read your mind

@@NikachuMTG haa! 💯

I never heard of this. Just sounds like maybe some inner sleeves aren't compatible with outer sleeves.

Nooo... You're mistaken. They weren't "cheats:. They made no secret of it & advised that you do so yourself TO HELP YOU FFS !! How's that cheating ???

Except you offer the cut, if your opponent declines then you just gave him what he needs, lol.

Much appreciated!

When will you mortals learn that all other sleeves are equally inferior to Matte Pink Dragon Shields?

Thanks!

You're welcome!

What is DRC?

@@TheLuminousCleric dragon's rage chaneller

You are so welcome!

ya nothing wrong with weaving mana in properly as long as you shuffle the deck afterwards, and especially if you let your opponent shuffle/cut it to end. Just to help prevent clumping and foster better gameplay for all. I mean I know its the mentality now a days to drool over such situations but for people actually have a competitive spirit not much fun in winning cos opponent's mana was clumped together obviously.

@@kenmax8615 You know, weaving is effective if and only if you ineffectively shuffle your deck. Hence it’s considered as cheating.

This is going under the assumption that every single card group is the exact same size when shuffled in, etc. It's not as simple as: just math.

@@nathreetimesnineequalstwen7172 I tried to keep it as simple as possible just to say that the magic 7 is not so accurate as anyone thinks. Because you can't introduce things as Mahalanobis distance (used in a paper on this topic as the similarity measure) in a YT video about magic pretending other people know what it is

@@elhoim_3 fair enough, I'd just always expect in irl to up the count by at least 2-3 due to multiple additional variables that I touched on previously. Helps neuter the variation.*

by definition a 'shuffled' deck is one where it has been randomised enough that you can't know the order of the cards. That's it. It doesn't require the deck to be actually fully randomised (that would take more than 8 shuffles). You're correct that mash shuffling or riffle shuffling 8 times would prevent you from knowing the order, but you're not addressing card distribution. Let's imagine you have a deck entirely in playsets, with everything grouped together. The deck starts with a specific structure. you riffle eight times and are no longer able to know the order of the deck - it's now technically shuffled according to the rules. However, there would still be low dispersion within the deck, and remnants of that initial structure would present themselves (for instance, the playsets of cards might be poorly distributed and 'near' each other in the deck). - shuffling is a manual dexterity skill and as such you'd expect most people to shuffle imperfectly, so the mathematical minimum number of shuffles is kind of irrelevant here. Certainly i've seen some awful shuffling technique and most people i've played against just kind of mash their cards together awkwardly and haven't specifically practiced it as a skill. the aim for a game like Magic, in terms of avoiding distribution issues in your decks, is to go further than the absolute minimum of just 'not knowing the order' and shuffle enough times that any initial structure in the deck of cards is dispersed and randomised. 8 imperfect shuffles by a human is not enough for that.

What he says is actually way more wrong. 7 *riffle* shuffles randomise a 52 card deck (and as you say, a couple more for a 60 card deck). But the shuffle being demonstrated is an overhand shuffle not a riffle shuffle, which according to the guy in this Numberphile video requires 10,000s of shuffle to randomise the deck ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AxJubaijQbI.html

You’re welcome!

By the rules you CAN do it just before each match to prove the card count, but you need to properly shuffle later

I pile shuffle in piles that ARE NOT divisible by the amount of card. If that is a 60 card deck that 3-6 piles are out but 7 breaks up clumps. Then the shuffle he demonstrated. I even go a bit further, (though I don't know the math and probabilities but it sees like it should work) I put half of the amount I pulled for the shuffle in front and half in back. Then I do just a middle. I alternate between the half in front and back then all in the middle.

Found the cheater

​@clarkkent4385 it's not cheating its litterly a rule where you can weave once per round if you shuffle afterwards.

Yep. Have a think about it. Does doing it influence the randomness of the deck at all (as you said so they aren’t clumped)? If yes, then it’s cheating. If no, then why bother

This

If you think it helps your draws, then yes it's cheating. If you shuffle enough (and it has to be a lot) that you are certain you have undone your mana weaving, then it's fine. But at that point there was no point to your mana weaving in the first place.

@@NikachuMTG but if I pile all my lands, and then do the shuffling, and know they are probably all together, then is not suicide cheating?

If you properly shuffled your deck, then it doesn't matter whether it was mana-weaved to start with. If you think it does, then that means that it either makes you feel better and is all in your head (which is fine) or that you aren't shuffling enough.

one day your deck will be better

You just made my day.

Thanks!

I need to create my 3rd channel for this

If you think it helps you (reducing clumps), then it's cheating. If it doesn't help you, why do it?

at best, mana weaving is a waste of time if you just shuffle normally afterwards. just skip the mana weaving step and shuffle.

Ive had inconsistent sized sleeves all in the same box. Really grinds my gears. Still love them, tho.

You’re welcome!

It's normal for cards to clump up, trying to remove or reduce clumps is basically mana weaving; hence cheating. You're not alone and I can tell based on this comment section that I'll have to make a follow up video specifically on mana weaving.

@@NikachuMTG ??? If you do a random pile shuffle, it will statistically cause as many clumps as it breaks. It however breaks artificial clumps that can be most easily seen in greed decks that can pull most lands out of the deck.

you're welcome!

You’re welcome!

You’re welcome!

I'll work on it because I've been playing more and more commander and I do double sleeve that deck.

I'll add to this thought. A really good cheater doesn't really need to be good at the game at all. I spent half of this video expecting a reveal at the end where his deck is in alphabetical order or something, just because I know it's possible.