How to Stop Cheaters in MTG - Mana Weaving! 

I never expected this video to be one of my most controversial, not gonna lie!

It's...not really part of the game. The "every X cards, add Y mana" is to prevent both manascrewing and flooding. In theory, they're still posssible to happen, but very unlikely if you shuffle your deck *actually randomly* . So weaving mana, of all things, is a silly issue to bitch about since odds are, if your opponent is an efficient shuffler, the end result will be same or very alike. I barely play magic, but this seems like a non-issue people like to bitch and moan.

"quit bitching" is a pretty common excuse for cheaters, but it's clear that we're really not saying the same thing. You think it should be a part of the game, but it isn't. Sorry. There is no other point to be made. Of course you want to win at the game, and that's okay, but modifying your deck to provide better odds for you is cheating. Arguing that it's "no big deal" or that "it sucks to get mana flooded" is a different conversation. Is it cheating? Yes. Is cheating against the rules? Yes. That is the entire conversation. It IS a part of the game. Play a different game if you don't like the rules. I know that sounds elitist as fuck, but these are the facts.

It's cheating because you're not shuffling randomly. But if your opponent is a good shuffler, or a judge shuffles (assuming judges are good shufflers) the end result is the exact same, that's random chance. But yes, it's cheating by the definition in the book. Also, if you're playing casual or with a friend, who really cares? If neither of players gets manaflooded/screwed, that's definetly a more fun battle, assuming, again, you're playing as *casual* and/or *with a friend* with previously agreed upon statement that "weaving is K in that game".

Wingus Dingus I have an all wolf token deck that pullz every land in it if the deck goes off. Is it cheating to mana weave then shuffle several times ?

Well, even if the game played out, you would not be "playing a game" anyway. You are playing a clown fiesta with a dishonest assclown.

top1 Then, any good judge will know what the intention was, wave you on, and you keep going. Less forgiving judges would give you a time penalty. Few would actually dq you for it as most get into judging for the exact reason that they hate cheaters and know the value in being careful.

If you think their deck is mana weaved. Just give their deck a good random shuffling, and play the game. Problem solved.

the problem is that as the presenter said, it requires about 20 good shufflings to get random again. doing shuffles for that long is enough to get you a penalty for wasting time or worse.

Any deck with >52 cards can be mathematically randomized with between 7 and 10 riffle shuffles. Hand over hand or board shuffles take thousands of shuffles. Not sure why so many land on 20 as a number nessecary for randomization.

just shuffle right side up for us

kids did it boi

lol, 'didn't know it was cheating' my ass

@@Chris-ci8vs yep hindsight it was pretty dumb of me but when you start out playing in highschool, everyone weaves, half the guys thought nobody noticed when they drew 2 cards instead of one or "forgot" some triggered ability that would have cost them the game, but now im into the game so much I could probably judge (casually) thanks to how well I learned the stack and so on

Yeh I agree. I do it after I’ve just built a new deck since I have all my creatures and spells in a stack and all my lands in a stack but I’ll weave it then shuffle it for a couple minutes so it feels like a decent way of getting everything mixed up. And I don’t have any motives of cheating. I just want to make sure I don’t have a pile of lands and a pile of spells and never be able to draw a good hand.

@@zd5587 yep thats about were i am now too although some other comments here saying "mana flooded/ drought is part of the game git gud ect i play casual and we all love not being able to play because we don't have mana" and so on and i just want to tell everyone of them that no! they don't play casual, they play tournament level at home. casual isn't playing magic at home its playing magic with lower tier decks and/or RELAXED RULES ie running nephalim/non legendary commanders alowing urza's head and other silver border ect and the group realizing that the ezuri token deck is stuck at 2 lands maybe let him pull one or two to hand so he isn't out of the game and hey we only have time for 3 games or 1 if the blue player hits his first 7 land drops and everyone else didn't so lets weave and lightly shuffle also try teaching a new player how to play when half the time they are boxed out cause bad draws

@@thatoneguy2886 yep causal players can have bad ass decks but it’s the mentality and the social contracts that seperate them. For example a few of the guys I play with like to draw 10 to start with and if they mulligan they just draw another 10 until they can find 7 that they can have a good start with and put 3 back on the bottom. Then if one of us gets down to only like 3 life and they want to keep the game going they will see if there’s a way to let him get his lifeline in real quick to bump him back up. It’s like a semi competitive/semi let’s hang out and make this last a while and when we get ready to go then we will all go hard for a turn or 2 and see who wins. I don’t mind it at all.

+Arkalius80 This should be rated higher.

It's a general algebraic problem, that is easily solvable for any number that is a divisor of 60.

*_*generality intensifies*_*

yup just repile shuffle his deck. then all his mana get stuck at the top or bottom, and you can bet your opponent won't mana weave again game 2

You may only pile shuffle once at the beginning of a game. If you take this tactic, you are slow-playing.

this will only be possible on the first match, cause after a match you will have a mixed graveyard, a mixed field, a mixed hand and a mixed grimoire to deal with

@@lukaspequenomatos1681 maybe not because if you play similar each time, an example I have is a kid with sliver deck would play the same couple of cards mana weaved which they'd have indestructible and shroud by I think turn 5 so it would be about the same and then he'd put the cards on the field the same way and then double nickle and get the same result every time if not off by only one or two cards

Lukas Pequeno Matos weave what was played place on bottom you should have enough duplicity to have the same deck you started with statistically speaking

Ive never been to a tourney before. Couldn’t you just redo the mana weave between each new match before they start? Or do you start a new match like immediately

What if they mulligan?

@@natalie6811 Then it's you who is being the cheater and gaining an unfair advantage over your opponent by handing them a deck that you shuffled in a way that forced them to mulligan.

SIES_ssbm Why are you calling me out?

@@natalie6811 Simply answering your question truthfully.

SIES_ssbm oh whoops, somehow only read the first half of the sentence, sorry

Thank you this guy is full of salt for losing matches so he came up with a formula to validate he was "cheated"

I think what this is specifically pointing out is pile shuffle then hand to your opponent. A lot of newer players wouldn't know the rules in place stating that a pile shuffle cannot be your final shuffle due to it not randomizing the cards in any way. It happened to me around 6 years ago where the guy seemed to have the perfect hand twice. He had prestacked his deck like this and was called out his next match and DQ'd.

@broran If you do it during a match then you can get a warning for slow play.

@@VirtualGnome This video massively oversimplifies. As he said himself, theoretically it would take 20 shuffles to fully randomise a weaved deck. So any player trying to cheat will weave, then shuffle 2 or 3 times. Completely undetectable and unprovable, as the deck will be pseudorandomised, yet still guarantees a better distribution. If you're playing competitively, always shuffle your opponent's deck as much as possible. If your game isn't serious enough to be worth 20 shuffles, the a deck with land just added to the top will not be shuffled sufficiently. You end up cheating yourself through mana flooding or screw.

@@adamrobinson6951 I'm not sure what kind of shuffles he's talking about, but a well performed poker shuffle can randomize a deck in 7 shuffles. If you're well practiced this can be done extremely quickly.

You smart

Haha, that's good.

What's the name of these judges, and this place you play at?

#moneyweave

vjm3 oh lol silent voice be like

I'll make a little effort in continuing the series for ya, Nathan :)

+Andras Petersen yes, and that is a infraction for not shuffling a deck if someone tries to hand it off to you.

+Andras Petersen Yeah, I always pile shuffle six piles to double check confirm 60 card count, then overhand shuffle and cut at least 3 or 4 times each after.

+Andras Petersen i pile shuffle but i do it at random. so the piles get made in a random order each cycle and nearly always end up with substantial differences in numbers. if i have 5 piles i put cards down in this kinda order (at randome) 2314533242152342435534223253

+Andras Petersen As someone who does some slight of hand card tricks, I can tell you that you can do a LOT of different shuffling techniques in this situation...without ACTUALLY shuffling at all. In this case...if someone has a pile of lands and a pile of spells? Well, I can split each of these piles in two, riffle and/or bridge shuffle them half a dozen time each, making an act of switching up the various piles (when I actually didn't), and other actions that LOOK like they do something when they actually don't. Then, I could put them back together before stacking the on top of each other and going to do a pile shuffle. It will LOOK like I just shuffled the hell out of them...because people looking won't know that I started with my deck completely divided up between lands and spells. The are numerous ways to make it LOOK like things have been randomized without actually changing anything. As long as someone can end with a pile shuffle without raising suspicion, then the technique can still work. Even if the rules say a non-pile shuffle has to be done after a pile shuffle, it can be incredibly easy to be disarmed just by the process. Which is to say nothing for slight of hand tricks that can simulate shuffles without actually doing them.

+John Keller There are ways to make your opponent do this to himself too, and yeah, there's nothing people can do about cheaters in this system, even allowing the judges to do all the shuffling isn't a good countermeasure for card cheats.

+Adam Mercier I've wondered this many times, I would love a video like that.

+Adam Mercier I've heard if you mash shuffle your deck 7 times, it is sufficient for it to be called "random". Usually after fetching or tutoring I mash shuffle 5-7 times, but before a new game I'll mash shuffle around 10 or more. As for cleaning up your lands, what I usually do is just scoop up the boardstate and mash it into my library instead of putting them on top and then shuffling.

+Adam Mercier what i personally do is kinda make sure i ain't got more than 2 lands/3spells togehter, then give a good 5-10 shuffles gets random enough

+Adam Mercier Easiest way to clean up after a game: shuffle all the used cards together well then mash that into the library and shuffle everything.

+Adam Mercier "I don't know how to best randomize" You just shuffle a lot. I see some people suggesting to mash the lands in the library instead of putting it on top, but that should not matter. If you think it might matter, then you should shuffle more. Because that's the point of shuffling, the initial order should have no incidence on the final random result. Also, a random deck doesn't guarantee even distribution of lands, quite the contrary. It's not like when you mix you pasta with sauce and it get homogeneous. Random distribution have a very high chance of creating clumps when you consider 7 cards out of 60. Check this, a serie of random 1 and 0. Notice how many consecutive 1 and 0 there are. www.random.org/integers/?num=60&min=0&max=1&col=1&base=10&format=html&rnd=new

Why not? What do you think judges should do with their time? Roll their thumbs? Aren't judges supposed to judge? If you think somebody is cheating, call a judge over and let the judge do their job - to judge. If you think somebody is cheating, shouldn't you be allowed to explain _why_ you think so, so that the judge can actually _judge_ ? So what if it takes time? Judges frequently make *time extensions* . I see no problem here.

@@Pineapple_Thief the only problem here is that the OP is a fuckin moron lmfaooo

@@Pineapple_Thief Large sanctioned events will have a few dozen of pairs of players in the first couple of rounds, so the attending judge(s) has to be accurate and brief with their supervision in order to attend to so many players.

Why not just shuffle it when they hand it to you?? Also when you are deck building most people sort their cards then “weave them” together before shuffling.

Go ahead, riffle at a tournament and see how badly you get your ass beat.

You want little shits DQed

How to get stabbed grab a strangers cards with no context.

yeah, when he said "about 20 times" i just knew he was full of crap

Just out of curiosity: What counts as a single shuffle?

Take a deck, divide it in roughly half, mash it together. Thats a shuffle(well, these calculations usually rely on it being a riffle, but still)

I figured it would be that easy, but nothing wrong with asking :P

Eduardo Seifert The "mash shuffle" is directly equivalent to a riffle. The result is not different in terms of the mathematics.

"It's only cheating if you get caught"

"D - A - R - B - Y. Apostrophe after the D."

@@indi1769 Your turn, Mr. JOeStiRR

Honestly I would let my opponent cheat if he could do some acrobatic card trick cheat

The heart of the cards.

I agree a video on how to shuffle the deck properly would be great, especially when you have over ten lands that were previously in play

Try out Keyforge! It has a cool "mana" system.

@@mrvfino I love keyforge! I still see the appeal of mtg as it has a wide range of cards, large following, and deck building... but keyforge has a much better game system. The house mechanic is brilliant

It’s good at separating things after a game where you have a bunch of lands in play. Is it mana weaving? No.

Every one is taught this if you say you were not you are a fucking liar

I remember I tried this in my first draft when I was like 12. Sorting the cards right in front of my opponent. That did not go over well.

@@niccosaur7778 actually, i wasn't when i heard the term "mana weaving" just today, i had to click the video just to find out what it was. BUT i do feel like i would have had a more fun time playing casually with friends if we did try this (my friend who played the most had the best deck so obviously we all gang up on him alot) if we did mana weaving it might have been a more fair and FUN time against him

yeh i had no idea this would be illegal. if there arent clumps of mana that would mean it IS well shuffled

@Alexander Nock exactly. If you don't do this after a game, it is unfair in the other direction. Huge clumps of mana. That would not be random at all.

I was taught to do the same, and no I don't think our manner of "manaweaving" is cheating, bc we still ultimately shuffle up/randomize the deck ourselves, and then hand it to the opponent for them to do with it what they choose. I don't see how that can be considered cheating if both we ourselves AND out opponents both end up shuffling the deck, ya know?

It depends on what manner you use to shuffle your deck afterwards. The vast majority of players either use an ineffective method of shuffling or don't repeat enough times for it to be truly randomized. The very most effective method is riffle shuffling, because you *only* need to do it *seven* times to achieve randomness in your deck.

Lol based on the answers here, I can gather that the only people who think this is cheating are the people who take the game too seriously to have fun. Got it 🤣😂

In our casual games a 8-10 pile manaweave was required before every deck's first match. A win due to mana flood/ mana drought is not a real win, all it does is get people pissed off and possibly ruin the night.

thats totally cheating, but setting up your mana randomly and just spaced out, then giving it a shuffle, isnt cheating. But if you do it in a way where you can predict which cards are coming up or their association with other cards, thats clearly cheating. Stacking your deck vs spreading the cards out.

And after you play a long game, say with Eldrazi, you're pretty full up on all your lands on your field, so when you go to put your cards up to play another game you have a good 6-18 lands in one spot in your deck, so I would mana weave to re-distribute my lands throughout my deck, and then shuffle them normally for as long as the other person would carry on a conversation for. I played in a Card Club though, nothing competitive.

+Uden One-Eye Not every deck is as susceptible to mana-flood/mana-starve, that's why it creates an unfair disadvantage. And no, it is not acceptable by the rules. Mana weaving is not a shuffle.

Mana weaving is an insufficient shuffle, what is your point? Also, why did you just outright ignore the first part of my comment?

+Code Provider you play mtg i see you one price videos

+Code Provider I agree. Personally, I wish MTG would follow some other games solutions. The game Force of Will keeps the mana deck and spells deck completely separate. Then your leader can put the top card of your mana deck into play as a mana for turn. I don't really care for FoW, but I do wish MtG implemented something similar to this.

+Code Provider The thing is that a cost system is one of the core reasons Magic ends up being the great game it is. Look at Yugioh: There's no cost system for anything (paying life or sacrificing doesn't count IMO), and instead of a cost system, they just limit your plays. Magic has no limits to the number of creatures on the field or spells you can cast, the only limit is how much mana you have to pay for all that. I'm not saying lands are perfect, far from it, but I'm saying that having this as a cost system is better than not having a cost system at all.

+cocoachrispies no... that would be horible

+cocoachrispies you do realize, the reason other CCG's do not have the exact same rules as magic or any other ccg is it would be a blatant copyright infringement. There are different ccg's to appeal to a wide variety of different people. if you really hate the land cost system of Magic the Gathering, there are a ton of ccg's that do not have it you can play instead. But to basically say MTG is the best ccg game because of its complexity or whatever but you want to land cost system removed instead of playing a different ccg then you do not realize a huge part of magic is that land cost system, sure sometimes everyone gets unlucky, and if you are getting land screwed or flooded the majority of your games you are building decks wrong or not shuffling well to begin with, or refuse to mulligan. I honestly can not think of every getting land screwed or flooded more then 5% of my games, and most of the LGS I go to tourny's I do not get either one once in the 4 or 5 rounds, all it takes is putting in the proper ratio of land to non lands and a decent curve of low mid and high cost spells, and sufficient shuffling, think what you see on twitch during gp's and pro tours, riffle or mash shuffling a lot not the 5-10 times many feel is enough at fnm and such. 20+ times should completely randomize your deck from your previous match no matter how deep you got. no its not slow play its sufficiently randomizing your deck. do this I would be willing to bet you rarely get land screwed or flooded, learn to properly mulligan and it will happen even less. Wanting MTG to implement FOW rules to change the game from its land system is basically making MTG FOW, which if as you said you do not really care for FOW if MTG had very similar rules it would have very similar game play to a game you do not care for, why would you want that? If you truly hate the land system of MTG play one of the many games without it, FOW, Hearthstone, Yu-gi-oh etc etc...

+Jakharr Vinta someone that wants to make a video to help solve an "imaginary problem". my biggest problem with this video is that all those "new" players he says he wants to help by showing this stuff are going to be the guys accusing others of stacking their deck in between rounds bc they saw someone mana weave after a 20 turn long game where they played 15 lands. MANA WEAVING is only cheating as a final form of shuffling. The only rule this dude needs to teach kids is 3.9 about only accepting properly shuffled decks in the first place.

+Jakharr Vinta I'm curious to know why the guy who posted the video never responded to your question. That's the first thing I wondered also: Half and half!? He doesn't even address this in the video, not even for a brief second. The ratio will never be 1:1. Lands take up anywhere from 17 to 27 slots in a 60 card deck, and those are the extreme ends of the spectrum. No deck has 30 lands, which completely messes up the entire premise that the video maker gave us. I think this is very disingenuous on his part and I find it suspicious that he never answered you.

+juicykarkass decks only contain spells and lands. he is not referring to an actual 50% 50%. rather one stack all spells the other all lands

+youdamnoob ummm, no, watch the video again. he's suggesting that a deck is 50% spells and 50% land. which is never the case.

He obviously plays, and even comments that the deck he is using as an example is light on lands. I think you're just nit picking. Anyone who understands what he is saying and plays magic would know no one plays 5050

That’s also cheating

That's great, haha.

I prefer to call it the "Nirvana" because people that do it should put a gun in their mouth.

How did this not get more traction!?

Dude that’s honestly great

MiniRegamono perfect!

That would be too much work and why play a game you might lose when you can guarantee your win via DQ. The solution I would argue isnt to DQ and suspend stack shuffling, but maybe a judge shuffle or three and then play... No free win and No stacked deck

@@jz5980 If I were a judge and a player called me over to watch him deconstruct his opponent's deck over 5-10 minutes, and at the end of that the deck had no easily discernable pattern, I'd give the player that called me over a loss for wasting mine and his opponent's time. Maybe it's a good thing I'm not a judge.

It does sound cool

How are they going to do that with sleeves on?

People will _not_ put their cards in that, too dangerous.

or people could just shuffle reasonably

@@untitled6087 wotc/dci could compel you to do so under threat of permanent suspension. If the choice is between doing as told or not playing, 99% of players will listen to the authority.

If it is legacy or vintage no they wouldn't. Are the tournament organizers or Wizards going to have an insurance policy in the event their machine malfunctions and destroys $20k?

The point isn't getting people DQ's because you don't want to play, it's to get the cheaters out so they don't ruin it for anyone else.

If someone actually is cheating then that is one thing but mana weaving in itself isn't cheating as long as the person shuffles after doing so. Now if someone is trying to get specific cards together like trying to put a swap beside a dark rit that's a different story

@@joshuahurdle239 this video is literally taking about people who do just that

NitrousDragon 3 mass shuffles is not enough. Pile shuffling is not a shuffle. You are cheating.

@@bezzo8848 (just wanna say in the few days since commenting, I've added more shuffles and am taking more steps to make it more random) "at least 3", usually it's a casual game anyway, and they have been ready and waiting for me for about four minutes. Sometimes I'll lose count of how many times I've actually shuffled so I'll do 3-4 on top of what I forgot (I'd guess around 7-10 in total since I took out my deck to play), also remember I've done at least 6 different since I last adjusted my deck. I still have to take Mulligans, and will take risks on hands that don't look very good, that I hope pan out, sometimes they do, but I never know. But you know what, let's say you're right, my win rate is only like 55-60% of the time, which makes me a pretty bad "cheater".

NitrousDragon You are stacking your deck to gain an advantage. That is cheating.

No one is going to let you rifle shuffle their deck without flipping the table on you. Most people have hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars invested in their decks. No sane player would even consider doing that to someone elses deck let alone allowing someone to do it to theirs.

@@jamham69 Lol loser

I believe the author of that paper later stated that the number was significantly higher if you shuffled the way most humans do. The original shuffle required that you make two randomly sized piles, and rifle shuffle without maintaining a constant rate. Most humans will use two nearly even piles (How would you pick a randomly sized pile anyway?), and the rates that you allow each pile to enter the combined pile will vary, but probably not very much. I think controlling for how a typical human shuffles made the number quite a bit higher. There is a Numberphile video on it. However, you then also have to realize rifle shuffling can get...expensive in some formats.

@@jeffdawson7841 What's the matter, scrub? your desperate lack of pimp tech got you down?

+Suniermo Gomez Hey, glad you're enjoying them! :D

+MTG Degree I to would like to thank you, a person I play with shuffles this way...

Ignore this video. It isnt cheating if you follow weaving with randomized shuffling

You don't need to mana weave after deck assembly, after 15 mash shuffles the deck is randomized no matter what order it was in when you started.

Not enough to counter a Mana weave.

That is not the case here. Because the deck is not random or simply ordered, but put into a pattern of distribution you have to shuffle until you have sufficiently undone the distribution pattern which would actually require far more shuffles than usual.

it's math. a brand new deck of playing cards will be completely randomized after 7 bridges.

Crimson Vulpes This is a 60 card deck, not a 52 card deck. While the difference seems small, mathematically it is enormous.

DuSundavarFreohr alright then, i just tested it. WOW! i got mana screwed. Sufficient randomization in just 7 bridges! BOOM! argument destroyed!

MrTetris88 what?

I know it's not the same thing, but have you seen the new Bakugan TCG? Any card you draw can be used as mana, and there isn't color specific mana nor cards that are specifically mana only cards.

This! My friend and i tried seperate libraries, one spells and the other land. we had some great games

Comrade Duel Masters used to have any card be able to be a resource i believe but there were colors

This reminds me of a smaller and less popular TCG called Force of Will. You have two decks, one with your spells, and another that are spell stones. You get one spell stone per turn, and thus slowly build up your mana. It does follow the five colors, though some decks work around this. The game itself is fun, and some of my friends and I have theorized whether or not it'd be viable in MtG.

Better him than a cheater. That seems painfully obvious

This is for Riffle Shuffles. But you don't riffle shuffle an expensive deck.

Haha clown

For rifle shuffles with particular mathematical qualities. If you are a human, the estimate is quite a bit higher. If you don't rifle, probably higher, though I am not sure. 60 cards instead of 52, probably also higher.

If you’re all aware of it, it’s fine. (And not competitive)

+Theo Warlok You have to shuffle very thoroughly after piling, to make your deck random once again.

+Theo Warlok I often shuffle with the first method when making a new deck so I don't have to count my lands, but you always have to remember to shuffle well before playing.

MTG Degree thanks!

+Theo Warlok Here is an official statement on some of this, including mana weaving which is perfectly fine as long as you shuffle sufficiently afterwards. archive.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=judge/article/20060707a

Dustin Wiseman thanks.

LOL, that's just so insane that it'd work!

Except when your opponent doesn't really care and your screwed lol

Until they don’t care or don’t spot it. Then you’re just screwed.

it sounds like you just want everyone to have a hand they must mulli or a hand that will start the game in your favor. just mash shuffle or Use your own form of shuffling.

+Richard R Late reply but whatever: Mana weaving like you describe is not cheating. As you and your opponent properly shuffle the deck afterwards. In this presentation, it's stated that the cheaters would only pile shuffle or only shuffle in a controlled manner to maintain the pattern- which is against the rules.

+BlackTearDrop It seems I didn't stress that enough, there's a lot of confusion in the comments :p

If you did that in a casual game, I would probably stop the game right there. If you did that in an official game, I would call the judge since that's potentially damaging the card and downright disrespectful.

I’m genuinely curious how you didn’t know that?

It is either useless or cheating.

"Pile shuffling does not increase randomness. It simply changes the order of the cards" Any judge worth his salt knows that. If your opponent is able to sort your cards out into perfect piles of lands and spells through one or two pile shuffles. Thats a DQ from Me. Not just from having decent mana every turn. But also the chances that the entire deck is stacked so that you have your 1st turn, 2nd, 3rd and so forth set up perfectly. Newer players definitely need to be on the lookout. Cheaters able to pull this off are ~1/300 so every high player count tournament will have a handful of cheaters to deal with. They know how to spot newer players and know what to get away with. When the offender is pulling excuses out of his ass and arguing with a judge, thats all the clarification I need.

Maybe it isn't weaving, I just put the lands on top and everything on bottom and pile shuffle 2 times with 5 piles. This is only once at home.

+Peril Ailj That's weird, me and my friends have always had a tacit agreement that you mana weave each time, then shuffle a lot. We never considered it cheating.

every deck has been mana weawed at least once during each deckbuilding and testing, just To see the mana curve and similars, but that's irrelevant, since It only makes your draws better if you pile shuffle few times: if you normal shuffle It won't make any reasonable difference

+giroppa99 you'll get mana clumps if you just shuffle without spreading the lands out. That's how I've always felt. It's why I normally distribute my deck after any game where I fetched lands more the 3 times. Even if you shuffle "enough" you can still get problems.

chronic291 never happened to me, but maybe i shuffle a bit to much and in various ways

+Trevor Daniels Then you've probably gone to time in the round without drawing an opening hand :)

Then you draw Exodia and win.

literally watch the video and he describes that it takes 20 separate shuffles for the deck to be random again... mana weaving is still cheating, no matter how you look at it, getting an advantage over the enemy by making a randomized strategy game non-random is still cheating.

@@vwl5986 It is only cheating if the rules say its cheating. The MTG website says that Mana weaving by itself is cheating, but further shuffling is not.

Its not cheating. I really am sorry you cant comprehend the rules, but I am a dci Judge. Unless I see you 1 land 2 spell 1 land 3 spell 1 land 2 spell etc and then present the deck. Or see you double nickel and present Or your opponent calls me over and has me watch them reverse nickel and it works. Then I have never issued a match loss for mana weave. But I would seriously suggest not wasting your judges time. I personally tend to ignore the guy that calls me over every game trying to get his opponent dqed for nonsense. I think the biggest take away here is how to deal with it yourself. Yes if your oppenent hands you a double nickeled deck, then call a judge and reverse nickel it. If they shuffeled several times afterwards, then you shuffle it some more, and hand it back. 20 times? Sure if you are a fast shuffler. 15 times? Alright yeah, there may be a few pockets of mana weave left. 5 times? No probably not enough to achieve randomness, which is what the rules stipulate. Could a judge tell? I couldnt at 5.

Just to reiterate As per rule 103.1 "103.1. At the start of a game, each player shuffles their deck so that the cards are in a random order. Each player may then shuffle or cut their opponents’ decks. The players’ decks become their libraries." That is the rule, IDGAF what you do your deck, as long as it has a random order. You could literally put 2 spells 2 creatures and 3 lands in 8 piles and then procede to shuffle. You can stack your deck exactly how you would like it and then shuffle. You can pile shuffle in as many piles or as few piles as you like, and I encorage you do so as any non odd amount of piles, and and any amount of piles ending in 5 or 0 will allow you to count your deck to ensure it has the correct amount of cards, as long as you use a legitmate shuffling technique afterwards to randomize it. Legitmate shuffling techniques that introduce randomization include, side shuffling, mash shuffling, riffle shuffling, and bridge shuffling. Some people may have others. Pile shuffling is not a randomization shuffle.

If you mana weave your deck is not in a random order and you are cheating. If you shuffle afterwards but not enough to undo the weaving, the deck is not in a random order and you are cheating. If you shuffle enough to get the deck in a random order, then you are wasting everyone's time by weaving first.

Which is a trash idea I see people do that and get nothing butt mana and mulligan until they have 3 card start and get rolled over.

gentlevader that simple

No, because all that will happen is he will mulligan and possibly only lose the first game in the match. If you are able to expose a cheater, then he won't be able to play at whatever location you are at whatsoever. That, to me, is a much better outcome than only making him have to shuffle his deck legitimately. Why would you want to play with a cheater?

@@TheschwartzB Because by shuffling the deck legitimately, you're not facing a cheater anymore. And you can actually play the game and have fun. Isn't that what it is all about?

Then the cheater is not punished, will continue to use the same method, and then in future games they will win over people who do not know about this method because they were cheating.

@@deffteapot if someone is trying to cheat, they are not trying to play the game to have fun. While I get it, I'd much rather play against people who don't try to cheat.

+Nathan Redmond Glad you liked it :D

+Nathan Redmond I remember when I started playing magic and I used didn't know that this was cheating someone pointed it out to me and I felt super bad. In long games I would have like 10+ lands out and I was never the best shuffler so I would try and make it to my lands weren't clumped.

+Zachary Cooper hey I mean as long as you aren't intentionally cheating I guess it's okay. At the time you obviously weren't aware that it was a big deal, but that's okay it's just a card game. It just becomes a big deal when people start intentionally cheating and stacking their decks at higher more competitive levels.

He even mentions in the video how that doesn't randomize a Mana weaved deck sufficiently.

@@bradensorensen966 Of course it does, shuffle like 10 times and its randomized, there's no statistical explanation to why shuffling a lot wouldn't randomize any sort of pattern. Also doing what he suggests in the video is not a fix, it is cheating, as you know you are putting all your opponent's lands in the bottom of his deck, does it intentionally and gain an advantage you shouldn't have.

@@DakonBlackblade2 it's not cheating whatsoever. You're not making their deck any more or less random than it already was. As for why shuffling wouldn't randomize any sort of pattern, it's because shuffling isn't just taking each card and assigning it a new random spot in the deck. That's not really something you can do unless you fully deconstruct their deck and then randomly re-stack it. Any actually usable shuffling method is going to be working with the deck already presented to you. It does a good enough job of making sure you've got different cards at the top and specific cards don't come in the exact same order. But if your opponent cares about the types of cards being in a given pattern or distribution, each shuffle will only disrupt that by a little, just due to the physicality of how shuffling works. You could just shuffle their deck over and over again, but then if they're not cheating you've wasted a lot of time and if they are cheating then you get a fair game. Whereas doing this if they're not cheating you've wasted a lot of time but if they *are* cheating then you get them disqualified. Much better RoI.

@@android19willpwn You are knowingly taking an unfair advantage, how is it not cheating it is the definition of cheating. Its only very hard to prove you knew what you were doing, which makes it a very good cheat, but if any judge ever proves you knew you left your opponent with no lands you get a DQ. Just because it is a "counter cheat" does not make it any less of a severe rules offense. What you should do in this situation is call a judge and have him make your opponent properly randomize his deck, give him a warning, a match loss, a DQ or whatever. What you definitely should not do is use the situation to get an advantage yourself (aka cheat). Also shuffling does unmake patterns, if you get a fully unshuffled deck of playing cards (in perfect sequential and suit order) and shuffle it 7 times (I might be wrong in the number but there is one) its properly randomized. It makes 0 sense saying that shuffling does not unmake patterns, that's exactly what it does. The only way it doesn't is if you shuffle by picking huge chunks of cards and just moving it side to side instead of properly shuffling.

@@DakonBlackblade2 The definition of cheating is doing something that's against the rules. This manner of shuffling your opponent's deck is not against the rules, as it results in no unfair advantage in a rule-following deck and thus is a sanctioned action in a tournament setting. The only reason an unfair advantage is created is because the deck was already outside of the rules. You're making the claim that people who are cheating should get special protection by the rules, and that certain actions which are normally legal should be made illegal when you opponent is cheating in order to protect the efficacy of their cheat. That's simply absurd from a proscriptive standpoint and inaccurate from a descriptive one. Additionally, this video is explicitly suggesting that you do this for the purposes of making the cheat obvious to a called judge. It's not suggesting that you simply hand them back their deck once it's completely unbalanced. It would be totally within your rights to do that as you had done nothing against the rules to cause it, but it's not the recommended course of action. As for shuffling, is does unmake patterns. Absolutely. Eventually. It's simply a question of how long it takes for sufficient randomness to be introduced to sufficiently unmake a given pattern. Seven is the standard for not having any significant advantage at guessing the next specific card in a standard 52-card deck, but we're not talking about specific cards here. For manaweaving, there are really only two kinds of card in the deck, and there are a lot of copies of each. The purpose is to manipulate how evenly those two card types are spread out, so the margin for error is much larger.

Why are you doing it if it is useless?

@@bezzo8848 when you sideboard 5 cards I assume you just lie them on top of the deck? Most, if not all players pop them in one by one throughout the deck then shuffle. If thats not weaving why are they doing it?

startup-junkie I have done that in the past, but am trying to eliminate it as it is a placebo and useless.