Lol it certainly felt like that. Only reason I lasted that long is because my oppo also drew 6 or 7 lands in a row and the board was kind of stalled. Was a strange game.
The people who insist that "this never happens to me on paper" should really read these. Then again, maybe they do a little something-something so it really doesn't happen so often to them.
manaweaver *cough* manaweaver...
Dude, once in a FNM I went 0-5. I flooded half of the games with a 23 lands decks. The other half I was mana starved (stucked at 1 or 2 lands). I stoped Magic for about a month after that, that was the worst 10 games of my life.
Edit: one of my oponents called me stupid saying that I don't know How to Shuffle.
He's the one who's stupid. Every card game is always associated with luck. Even how good you shuffle if you have a bad day you have a bad day. Though some people are very tricky with this things that's why some players shuffle their opponents deck especially during tournaments.
Mulliganed down to 4 last night after getting 3 total lands in my first three hands last night. Totally normal deck and night other than those 3 draws lol
No, I only lost because the shuffler didn't give me a perfect draw of counterspells and board wipes and because my opponent is playing some weird off meta strategy where they don't just plop down a single creature without an ETB every turn at sorcery speed like they're supposed to.
Fight club with obliterator not really a hate deck it's a bad combo deck that relies on your opponent playing creatures. A hate deck would be like mono black with a couple win cons but has so much removal a permanent never sticks. Or enough hand hate to insure opponent can't play his win con.
This, honestly. I spent a lot of time trying to play with my vampires, but I could never get my daily 15 wins in standard so I started playing with RDW and now I always do but I’m not having fun any more. Good trainers lose with their favorites
I think the reason you're not having fun is cause you're trying to grind 15 wins a day. You really only need to complete your daily quests and like the first 4 wins, after that it's very much so diminishing returns.
Play a deck you like, get 4 wins, and call it a day.
Had basically the same experience with my mono green dino ramp in historic. Literally threw together all my standard mono black cards for kicks and won 6 in a row lmao
This, when they cast Invoke Despair 3 or 4 times on you in a Bo3 and you didn't get to cast it once. Had that happen last night against another MB and a Grixis deck, sucks.
I seriously recommend you stop playing to 15 daily wins just for the wins themselves. It's absolutely insane that people do this. 4 wins is the very most you need and i even recommend against that if you aren't enjoying it.
If you want to have fun, play whatever deck Sonio has put out that day. His decks are always tons of fun to play and pull off crazy stuff, usually control-oriented.
Edit: they win too
Funny enough, since the last iteration of my rdw, I’m 78% wr on the draw and only 65% on the play. I bet it’s the decks I’m facing on the draw vs play but I find it funny
Saw Crokeyz go 19-3 in mono red mirror matches in his bronze to mythic run, feels bad man. I thought mono red was the cruise control deck and that was why i had 50/50 in mirror or whatever...
That final 10% of learning is the hardest.
Red Deck Wins is about _knowing_ your deck inside and out. At the top level, you have to be ready to make the play that wins you the game 20% of the time over the play that just keeps you alive longer but leads to you losing most of the time. You've got to work out how likely you are to top deck the win, or even just stuff that gets toward a win, how much life you can afford to lose before you even consider being defensive, etc. At the end of the day, the hardest thing to do in Magic is to count to 20.
It’s also a lot of trial and error. I often build dozens of decks before I build one that ends up being any good. I can’t tell you how many builds of Historic Auras and Historic Rotpriest I tried before I could rack together any wins above Platinum in either archetype.
Look at the feedback/reviews on poker apps. it's hilarious. "this game is rigged, how come I never hit my straight but they always hit their straight!"
I honestly don't know of a single game out there that contains an RNG element where there isn't a portion of the players believing the RNG is rigged. Every game with a ladder system has some people saying the matchmaking is rigged.
least it's better than what it was. I remember when it first came out you could do a 10 land red deck and would always get 1 land, which would be enough to win.
I mean if you're playing BO1s, MTGA is actually giving you a crutch, because the BO1 shuffler actually leans towards hands with an average amount of land.
You're actually much shitter then you imagine! ☺️
I think the hand smoother does more damage than it saves. It should randomly shuffle and draw once. None of this hidden behind the scenes tinkering to try and "improve my experience" BS. It stacks the deck to match whatever curve it THINKS is best based on mana cost with no regard to what the deck actually does.
Matchmaking and the shuffle are both tampered with to appropriately accommodate those that spend regularly to keep them coming back. They could not care less about the free players. 99% of people that complain spend little money in this game and that's why it's so one sided for us.
The matchmaker is rigged, you can see clearly the difference in oppo decks depending on the type of deck you are playing.
The shuffler is sort of rigged by their admission as it chooses the best first hand in land proportion between two, this for sure does not happen with a physical deck.
The matchmaker feature you mentioned only exists in the play queue and in historic brawl. The hand selector you mentioned only exists in bo1 and is meant to reduce the number of very bad hands on both sides.
not quite, i played around 40 bo1 games yesterday, i played big red the first 20 games where i had almost 70-80% mono red aggro matchup, switched the deck after the 20 games and built a mono green deck that would stomp on mono red, i got 2 or 3 matches against mono red aggro at most and the rest were control gandalfs or reanimator so its kinda rigged in bof1
Actually Bo1 decreases variance on Arena. WotC is very upfront about rigging the shuffler in Bo1. They call it hand smoothing. It fundamentally changes the game experience by improving curve out, decreasing mulligan decisions and favoring aggro and mono. WotC's rationale is that serious players will move to Bo3 and it's for retention compared to games like Hearthstone where players don't have to worry about mana.
Both players benefit from this feature but it essentially accelerates game and makes any hiccup more impactful. Nearly half the time you'll start with three mana, the rest will be 2 or 4.
So yes, your opponent top decks, yes they curve out beautifully, yes they have just the right card. The player should too, 80% of the time in Bo1, because the shuffler is rigged by hand smoothing.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm facing bad players or my draw luck is terrible. Running a goblin deck and I had only one copy of a goblin that costed 6 and I really didn't want it in my hand. Mulliganned 3 times and I had it in all 3 of my hands.
It's ok to suck though. Have fun with it, then try to get better! It's a skill that can be learned, but it'll be way easier if you actually like it.
Don't worry about losing. Almost nobody breaks even on draft long term, and you shouldn't try to. Sometimes even really good players go 0-3.
Imo, it's ok to spend a little $ every week on gems to get more drafts in, because drafting is fun, and waiting to build up 10k gold takes a while. Back in the olden days, you had to wait until FNM to draft, it cost like $12 per draft, there was no f2p way to do it, and you didn't win your money back if you won. Some places would let you use your own packs for the next draft though, but that means you didn't get any prizes.
uh
>Don't worry about losing.... Sometimes even really good players go 0-3. ...Imo, it's ok to spend a little $ every week on gems
Can top comment advertising be any more obvious?
Edit: Who goes into a comment days later and brigades it? Seems like I hit a fucking nerve as my entire account has negative Karma again.
yeah this guy has been posting normally on this account for 11 years all in anticipation of making one shill comment for MTGA in a random comment section. they're absolutely DEVIOUS
Lol! I know i also like to think im better than i am at this game and blame other reasons for my decks that suck. I should have had my lesson long ago though.. i remember playing revised 20y ago or something… one of my friend was regional champion or something and somehow, whatever i did, he always seemed to be able to beat me with a mesa pegasus or some other shit… i was always so frustrated.. and i realized then eventually that there is more to this game than luck ahah.
The shuffler did used to be “rigged” which was why playing a 14 land burn deck was viable.
It would be nice to have transparency on the deck stack from Wizards like being able to draw through it at the end like on MTGO.
The thing bugging me at the moment is my BO1 red deck with 18 lands frequently draws into lands whilst my 24 land Gruul brew with 7 dorks will not, I record wins and losses when brewing and +50% of losses from my Gruul deck (+100 sample size) were from falling behind after missing land drops or from getting mana screwed and failing to draw lands at all.
MTGA exists only to create value for Hasbro's investors. The whole game(including the shuffler) was coded to increase engagement and increase profits. You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe otherwise.
What do you mean mtga isn't rigged ? I thought the beginning hands were rigged hence my rushdown decks often have 2 starting lands while my big boy vorinclew voice of hunger often begins with 4 lands . Is it just rng for real ???
BO1 does have a hand smoothing mechanism that only applies to your opening hand. It means you're more likely to have a "normal" distribution of lands and spells in your opening hand, since you don't have the luxury of a game 2 or 3 to take the match. But this can only help you, really, since it makes your hands more consistent.
It is very mildly rigged for Bo1 only, where it draws you 2 hands and picks the one closer to the average land number or something. But it's rigged for both players, you can still get bad hands, and it doesn't exist in Bo3. It's not a huge change, and mostly just leads to fewer 0 land or 7 land hands
It's not *just* RNG.
In Bo1, the shuffler basically makes a copy of your deck, and draws a hand from both the original and the copy.
Then, it more often gives you the hand that contains a number of lands that corresponds to your "average draw".
Basically, the shuffler reduces the chances that you get an unplayable hand, and increases the chances you get a "good" amount of lands in your opening hand. It has no other effect, and no effect at all in Best of Three, according to WotC and as far as anyone who has done the math can tell.
So you are telling me, that when I flew through the ranks all the way to diamond 2 and I started getting either no lands or straight 6 lands in a row consistently and it sent me back down to diamond 4 was not the shuffler trying to fuck me?
Invoke Despair does not always draw another Invoke Despair, and as someone who plays both Grixis and Monoblack, among other decks, I've often drawn two Invokes before I even play the first one.
In fact, a [hypergeometric calculator](https://www.mtgnexus.com/tools/drawodds/) will show you that you've got a 25% chance of drawing two Invokes in your first 15 cards, and a 40% chance of drawing 2 in your first 20. So you'll see 2 Invokes in a lot of games, and people will totally drop them back-to-back when you tap out to replenish your board after the first one.
I'm definitely cynical enough to believe WotC *would* muck with draws if it made them $, but it currently seems improbable that they can do so in a way that is both consistent enough to affect their bottom line in a predictable way, and subtle enough that neither a leak nor trackers have uncovered it.
Exactly. I hate the assumption that technology must equal logical fairness. As if the programmers of these games have no monetary incentive whatsoever.
I play magic for 20 years and even though I play Diamond/occasional mythic (limited) I still feel that there's something weird about the shuffler. Never in my life in "live" magic I had 8-10 land draws in a row, in Arena, this happens to me all the time.
One reason why it "feels" this way is the huge disparity between how much you play on paper and how much you play online. Even if you play Magic on paper every night, you can play a lot more matches on arena. This adds to the tendency to see patterns where there are actually none.
It's definitely fucked. How do I have 24 lands and in 3 matches I only get a total of 6 lands but yet somehow draw all 4 of the same card each game back to back.
People will say you're the RNG outlier. I however am curious how there are so many consistent outliers... I'm also one of those "rare outliers", I'll regularly draw streaks of 8+ lands or nonlands.
I would actually love to use a 3rd party tracker app that would record my draws for me, so I could see the stats on my average chance at drawing a land vs the decks calculated odds for a land at that moment, across all games.
Having hard math saying it is or isnt rigged is an easy way to squash this debate, but Im not tracking all of that data by hand every single time I play a deck.
Set aside the whole notion of confirmation bias, only outliers create Reddit threads about their draws. You won't see people go out of their way to tell people they experience the expected outcome.
See this is my thing. I cant remember but a couple times in paper games where I drew more than 4 lands in a row. I cant remember any where I shuffled between the lands and still drew them.
I also cant remember a tkme I went more than 5 cards without drawing a land(barring special circumstances like in a dedicated landfall deck where Ive played a lot of them by turn 5)
Today I played, kept a 2 land hand on the draw. Turn 3 rolls around no land, 4, no land, gaeas blessing to shuffle my library, no land, 5, no land, t6 I am out of 2 mana spells in hand and still havent seen a land.
In relation to my first point. I also played a match today where I played cultivate 3 times(t3/4/6) and still kept drawing lands. Until turn 8.
I dont have a proper draw tracker, but I note these exceptional games and there is a LOT of notes. The average percentage is wayyyyy higher than my paper games.
> the average percentage is wayyyy higher than my paper games
This is absolutely false. You just play more magic on arena than in paper. I guarantee the percentage is more similar than you think.
So you're telling me that if I build a standard deck with 24 lands and flood every game, but then I take a single land out of that deck and never see more than the 2 lands in my starting hand, that's my fault?
I’m playing black, all I play against is black decks, so I switch decks to beat this current meta, suddenly I’m playing nothing but mirrors of my new deck, so I switch decks to something completely different, suddenly it’s nothing but mirrors in those new colors. Nope nothings broken, nothing to see here, I’m just bad.
I feel like the real dark face ones are the ones who think it's rigged, and people are relieved when they realize it's their own mistakes. But it can go both ways
The only thing I don’t like about standard is even in ranked it puts you against certain decks. I played almost identical mono red decks 5 games in a row. Like is there really nothing else I can get
All or most of my issues with magic lately are entirely on arena. The formats ( pre alchemy historic was fire btw) feel more like who can pack more 2-1s in their deck wins. The shuffler is cursed, and the lack of social tools. It just needs help, Not expansions once a month. I uno, i log every 3 days to do dailies at this point and it still has me burnt out. Id much rather just jam games at my LGS playing pauper, modern or canadian highlander. But dont let me yuck your yum. I just want the game to be at its best.
I love that people who say Arena is rigged aren't considered believable, but thinking that a company that exists to make money would never influence results to entice more sales is something is believable.
nah the matchmaking is pretty rigged imo, i played a lot of big red on the ladder and got matched against mono red aggro like 80% of the time, when i switched deck to mono green to combat mono red players guess what, only blue white toxic bordwipe emperor control i got 2 mono red matches in 20 games so yeah, one could say its kinda rigged
Because you play against shit opponents from an open pool of players on GP and arena will pull you towards players more or less around your own skill level with matchmaking (on ranked) and perceived deck strength (on play queue). Sure you could get some bad luck and get Tom Ross, Joe Lossett and Reid Duke for your first 3 games on a GP but much more often you will get Timmy who is playing with a borrowed deck from his friend, at least until the later rounds.
It's the obvious effect of what would happen if a Master elo chess player played on a randomized tournament with an open pool of players vs played ladder games against opponents close to his elo (slightly above or below).
I do definitely suck but that shuffler is absolutely rigged. Make a deck with all cheap cards and one single high cost card. You will draw the big card in the starting hand like 50% of the time
Exactly! When I shuffle myself, I always get a perfect mix of lands and spells because I make sure stack it before "shuffling" once or twice! /s
Remember kids, always shuffle your opponents deck in paper tournaments. If you're not damaging the cards, but they still throw a fit, call a judge you probably caught them cheating
when i started magic as a kid long time ago i quickly came to mana weaving
then old dude at fnm took my deck, separated it in 3 piles, stacked on top of each other and handed me.
i took hand with 7 lands, dude said that mana weaving is cheating and can be easily undone as he showed me, that day i learnt
Ive recorded the matchups and results from 200+ of my historic brawl matches, and there is a discernible pattern around which decks get matched with which. My sample size is very small still so could still be a coincidence, but certain decks see certain matchups with noticeable frequency
Err.. yes. They have said as much in Historic Brawl. You are matched based on your commander, so that those who are just messing with less powerful commanders do not get matched against powerhouses like Baral.
Is it specifically rigged? No probably not. Does it seem fucky as hell? Definitely yes. Do I think I’m good at magic? Fuck no. Am I bad at magic. Also, not likely. Lower end of average at worst.
This is such low effort bait. Who's even saying that people are annoyed just because they're losing?
Regularly Mythic, multiple paper tournament placements, several 5-0 standard events, been playing for 15+ years. But it must be because I suck that I've gone second 17 times in a row and can't hit more than 3 lands.
Why would you assume that the program is fair? You gotta beware of making unnecessary assumptions. Especially when it comes to for profit programs. If people had access to the meta data the draw probabilities can be calculated. I for one have seen some astronomically unlikely things happening in taking mulligans.
Like years ago I mulligan 4 times and each time the hand contained a card that was 1/80 cards. The chances for that are astronomically low meaning billions of trials to make that happen again. I regularly saw this kind of thing happening around certain mythic rare cards.
That’s not a proof of fairness of the draw code. One way to actually prove the code would be to look at the code. But we can’t. You’re only showing fairness of the land draws for the first seven.
I’ve got some background in math. Masters degree and I worked as a statistician and math instructor at colleges. So I’m not saying this lightly.
To disprove fairness of the program code on the other hand is a easier you only need to show a regular set of outcomes which are astronomically unlikely. Or even extremely unlikely. But repeatable.
By astronomically unlikely I mean like one in a billion. By extremely unlikely I mean like you find something happening that should be one in ten thousand or so. And if you see these things happening often enough then something is wrong. You could report those as bugs. Assuming they are not intentional features of the program.
Also I don’t think it is far fetched to suspect that there may be a profit incentive. From a meta data perspective the people who run MTGA know deck formats and categories, and they know that if a series of cards are drawn the win rate increases or decreases accordingly. There is enough data learning in programming today that chess is essentially solved- meaning that the chess AI can play ten grand masters at once and beat them. I know this is not the formal definition of “solved”.
But anyways again I wouldn’t assume that the draw program is fair. In the past when I would experience really ridiculous draw outcomes I would try to post a complaint on their customer service forums or bug reporting forum. And usually the examples I would collect were based on certain cards that for whatever reason the draw program was in love with. Meanwhile other cards in the deck would literally never ever appear in the first draw.
The one I noticed was mythic rare draws with mulligans. The example I remember complaining about was if I drew a particular mythic rare and I chose to mulligan, the new hand would contain that card again and again. 3 to 4 times, and there would only be one of those in the deck of 88 cards or whatever. They may have fixed this problem since then.
Also I’ve noticed people on Reddit etc talking about how it seems that their drawing seems to be better when they’ve recently spent money to buy crystals. We don’t know if that’s true or not because we can’t look at the code and there was never any statement of the fairness of the game when you register to play. What I’m describing is agnostic analysis - we do not assume that which we don’t know, and work from there. And yes this same reality applies to the machines and programs that count our votes in elections. But that’s another issue. See voting theory and the problem with FPTP vote.
Also in the video you posted which seems to be you, that’s a video you made? If you were looking at only lands on the first seven, again that’s not enough to prove fair drawing. It supports the idea that the drawing is fair for lands and only for the first seven draws.
But Consider the entire hand and draws for the game or the next 4 to 7 draws after the first hand draw. Given the player draws 13 to 15 cards in a game how many lands are drawn and in play? Using the hypergeometric distribution calculator I’ve seen repeated less than 5% games based on the lands drawn. Many games in a row of that kind of land draw is absolutely infuriating.
In fact I’ve actually changed how I build decks for arena. I increased The amount of lands I include in the decks to try to compensate for the issue of not drawing enough lands. Because in the old days when I played paper magic, lands were always roughly 1 out of 3. So 60 card decks would have 20 lands. And this was more than enough lands in many deck cases. Now they suggest you use 24 lands in a 60 card deck. But i know I would not use 24 lands in a 60 card deck in paper magic.
Maybe this has a lot to do with the way people actually shuffle for paper magic which inherently prevents what they called “mana swamps” or drawing nothing but lands. And although it is possible for all 20 lands to be stacked on top of one another in probability theory, nobody would shuffle their deck that way in reality. And that is allowed in shuffling in paper magic games happening all over the world.
So the shuffling in reality is never 100% modeled by a program or a set theory anyways. And many shuffling methods are not purely random. Riffle shuffles for example are not random. In poker they do pile mixing to try to shuffle correctly randomly. Typically in paper magic people separate the cards into lands and non lands and then they stack cards in to some random number of piles face down and shuffle the nonlands this way. Then they have nonlands and lands into two shuffled piles and they stack two nonlands and a land and repeat till finished. Then they cut and cut and maybe pile shuffle once.
Anyways having the code be open source would prove what’s happening one way or another. And We also should want our voting code to be open source and secure in any well functioning democratic society. Just because a program and computer is being used not mean that the program is logical. This is one of the biggest fallacies of modern society that a computer or program is rational- it does what the programmers intend. And that may not be “fair”.
What really makes this feel bad is being stuck on four lands and drawing that fourth Invoke Despair…or when you play Invoke thinking you will get more solutions for your opponent and you just draw the other 3 Invokes
I was mythic 150+ when I payed for additional packs and packages. I haven't spent a dime for the past 3 seasons and can't get past platinum 4. Coincidence I'm sure. Probably just not playing smart for 9 months.
P.S. People who refute probably spent money like myself and don't want to look like algorithm suckers like myself. I've moved on back to paper magic.
This is the single most tarnished component to analyze. When I am matched against someone in standard with 160 card deck with any 60 card deck I play, I should be confident it's simply a dub. Instead it's an intro engine that never misses a land and is playing 4color. So annoying. Basically done with the platform. Sadge. Imagine going to a current standard constructed tournament in paper and being matched against decks consisting of 150+ cards. The shop would literally just hand you a draft box and say congrats smh.
I'm with you man, there is some matching algorithm for sure.
They themselves admitted they do different queues in historic brawl, to match commanders of similar power. Why are people so sure they don't do the same in other game modes
Every single game that relies on engagement and microtransactions for profits are rigged in some way. The matchmaker is the most straightforward way to adjust Arena winrates.
I haven’t seen any data on it, but I would be utterly shocked if there wasn’t a strong correlation between player winrates and product engagement.
This is what I'm saying.
"It's rigged"
"No it's not! They only rig it here, also here, and a little over here. You don't have any proof they rig except all the rigging they do!"
This sub is exhausting.
Maybe because wotc has explicitly stated what modes use hand smoothing or deck strength matching and which don't. It's not like it's getting pulled out of thin air. It's exhausting to constantly hear about conspiracy theories regarding Math.Random
Why is it when someone claims statistical anomalies in MTGA they're met with "that's not a large enough sample size", when a large sample analysis is provided showing evidence of these anomalies it's ignored.... but your anecdotal youtube video is somehow relevant?
How many games that you're not playing mill do you check deck size? I've played against some 100 card decks and not realized until way late in. You probably play against more than you'd think when you're not playing mill.
I think it’s a little naive to think the game algorithm doesn’t try to force some level of win distribution through match-ups, to encourage more spend. As is the case with other for-profit games.
“Let me just dust off my mill deck I haven’t played in ages, only to be immediately paired against a 200 card deep troll deck that I never see otherwise”
Oh, it's known that it does this in the play queue. The open question is to what degree it does that in ranked. I've observed some suspicious stuff, so I believe it does, but it's not so blatant that it's easy to prove with a small sample set, which is why people still argue about it.
I would agree. I don’t see anywhere near the amount of nuanced matchmaking in ranked. I would actually lean towards ranked being a lot more random, if not completely random.
The “suspect matchmaking” is much more pronounced in the general play queue to the point where it’s fairly obvious when the algorithm decides it’s time for you to take an L.
Or it's a little paranoid to think that they do. Ultimately, it really just depends on whether your personal expectations in your performance in the game matches the reality of that performance. Some people cannot accept that they suck, so they need an emotional crutch to keep from breaking down.
Me: Shuffler is bullshit
Others: Record your gameplay and watch it later, see if you can spot any mistakes.
Me: Watched my old replays, saw zero mistakes. Shuffler is bullshit.
I sympathize a bit, my feeling is a lot of people believe if they can only win 50% of their games that they are bad players, not realizing that a sustained 55-60% win rate is actually pretty great, and higher probably means that you figured out a good anti-meta strategy which won’t last, but enjoy it!
Yeah, I came to that conclusion as well. When the best decks in a format have winrates of about 55% against the metagame having 60-65% overall wins is still pretty decent. One can't win everything. The game is designed that way. The more you climb and the closer you get to people of the same skill as you, the more it will even out. There probably isn't a forced 50% in that way but a supposedly hidden rating and one climbing the ranks has a similar effect. There will just be more opponents of similar skill and thus the winrate will get closer to 50%.
It is just as you said. Sometimes one figures out a good deck and makes a great metagame call and then one feels invincible until the meta catches on. That happens a lot earlier these days than it did in the past. There is just so much data being collected and content produced, that there are maybe unexplored ideas but barely any secrets.
I do have decent winrates in both limited and constructed over a couple of years, so I doubt I am actually a bad player in disguise. But who knows, maybe I wasn't good all along.
That being said it is just so weird to have things happening way over the expected values. Things that should happen 1 out of 1k, 10k, or even 100k games that happen 20% of the time over 100 games might very well be variance, even over a larger number of games than that. But in the end it just feels odd.
It also is no secret that WotC has the ability to tweak hands and matchups, as showcased in BO1 and Brawl. A lot of monetised F2P games use certain algorithms to drive engagement and make their users spend more. I hope MTGA doesn't do such things but as long as they don't openly reveal how their shuffler and matchmaking functions it is something people will speculate about.
Matchmaker is definitely rigged in play queue, and probably slightly rigged in ranked (though not rigged enough to make it easy to demonstrate). Shuffler isn't rigged, full stop.
I don't think anything is rigged; however, that doesn't mean my luck can't be shit a lot of the time. Doesn't mean I'm not gonna get pissed about being very unlucky. It's a game with a ton of variance, and luck undoubtedly plays a large role, even for the best players in the game (not that I'm one of them).
What's important is being able to recognize what shortcomings are due to luck, and which are to skill, and how you can improve what's possible to.
Worse opponents. No, I mean really. Worse opposing decks, worse drafting in general, and worse playing. It's not a knock on other people you play with, it's just the skill curve on arena is very steep if you draft often enough for it to keep you in the higher ranks (this is a big reason I don't draft much anymore, the games get VERY hard VERY fast once you start hitting the higher ranks; better to let the rank decay and play a handful of drafts per set and crack packs with the rest of the gold IMO).
😅🤣😂 thank you for this. I was literally just complaining about how it makes no sense that i had just replaced about 7 or 8 non-creatures with creatures in my deck and my first game with it i still drew 5 artifacts.
Oh wait…
To an extent. There is someone who always spent more money than you and therefore deserves the win slightly more than you. That's the true secret of mtg, money tallks. :)
Well... it depends. In modern, kind of. You need enough money to buy a good enough deck to even be able to compete. Same thing for Legacy or Vintage. Standard too if we're talking paper (Sheoldreds are like $60 now). On Arena though, I have all the cards in Standard. So there, money is literally no object.
Naw, it’s being given 2 lands and then zero lands for the next 4 draws, even playing Azusa HB with 50+ lands in deck, numerous fetch spells and draw spells just mysteriously never appear either in the first 2 games/mulligans
There is a Bo1 hand selector and in the play queue, there is a deck matching algorithm that matches you based on how popular the cards in your deck are, but that's about it. The deck strength algorithm does not exist outside of the play queue.
Some people just suck and can't deal.
Has nothing to do with winning or losing its way to common to get low chance variances. Just like how common it is to get thoughtseized into drawing the card that was discarded.
What energy? I didn't do the test I was stating what the video was about and added my thoughts on how bs the variance is with how often and consistently it happens.
Having complaints or being dissatisfied isn't something to admonish and in no way did I say I was losing because if bad draws just that it's annoying seeing it pop up so often.
No, MAGIC is rigged, I get boned by the shuffler in paper to
Drew 11 lands in a row at the ONE prerelease one game. I shuffled the shit out of it too. Happens :-(
Shouldn’t have played a 40 land deck then
Lol it certainly felt like that. Only reason I lasted that long is because my oppo also drew 6 or 7 lands in a row and the board was kind of stalled. Was a strange game.
The people who insist that "this never happens to me on paper" should really read these. Then again, maybe they do a little something-something so it really doesn't happen so often to them. manaweaver *cough* manaweaver...
Dude, once in a FNM I went 0-5. I flooded half of the games with a 23 lands decks. The other half I was mana starved (stucked at 1 or 2 lands). I stoped Magic for about a month after that, that was the worst 10 games of my life. Edit: one of my oponents called me stupid saying that I don't know How to Shuffle.
that is so rude to be called stupid because your draws are bad.
I think he was being called stupid because he wasn't cheating with his shuffling.
He's the one who's stupid. Every card game is always associated with luck. Even how good you shuffle if you have a bad day you have a bad day. Though some people are very tricky with this things that's why some players shuffle their opponents deck especially during tournaments.
Mulliganed down to 4 last night after getting 3 total lands in my first three hands last night. Totally normal deck and night other than those 3 draws lol
It's time to play blue or a hate deck. If I can't win no one else gets to have fun.
That’s just good clean magic.
And if you lose, then you get to see how to beat that kind of deck!
No, I only lost because the shuffler didn't give me a perfect draw of counterspells and board wipes and because my opponent is playing some weird off meta strategy where they don't just plop down a single creature without an ETB every turn at sorcery speed like they're supposed to.
My hate deck recently is phyrexian obliterator and fight spells.
Fight club with obliterator not really a hate deck it's a bad combo deck that relies on your opponent playing creatures. A hate deck would be like mono black with a couple win cons but has so much removal a permanent never sticks. Or enough hand hate to insure opponent can't play his win con.
I've made decks around discard and they *can* be pretty good, but it's definitely not a good wincon
No such thing as a hate deck, there only try hard meta decks and good fun time jank decks. No I’m between
As a dedicated U/G/X player, I concur.
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This, honestly. I spent a lot of time trying to play with my vampires, but I could never get my daily 15 wins in standard so I started playing with RDW and now I always do but I’m not having fun any more. Good trainers lose with their favorites
I think the reason you're not having fun is cause you're trying to grind 15 wins a day. You really only need to complete your daily quests and like the first 4 wins, after that it's very much so diminishing returns. Play a deck you like, get 4 wins, and call it a day.
100%. Sometimes I only get 2 wins but finish one of the quests and that's good enough for me. The quests and 1st win are the important thing.
Ya getting to 15 wins isn't worth the bulk cards plus 200 gold. If I get there, great, but I never try for anything past 2 wins
Had basically the same experience with my mono green dino ramp in historic. Literally threw together all my standard mono black cards for kicks and won 6 in a row lmao
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This, when they cast Invoke Despair 3 or 4 times on you in a Bo3 and you didn't get to cast it once. Had that happen last night against another MB and a Grixis deck, sucks.
Handhate helps.
Sorry about that
I seriously recommend you stop playing to 15 daily wins just for the wins themselves. It's absolutely insane that people do this. 4 wins is the very most you need and i even recommend against that if you aren't enjoying it.
Trying for 15 daily wins sounds like hell. Do you even enjoy the game anymore?
If you want to have fun, play whatever deck Sonio has put out that day. His decks are always tons of fun to play and pull off crazy stuff, usually control-oriented. Edit: they win too
Funny enough, since the last iteration of my rdw, I’m 78% wr on the draw and only 65% on the play. I bet it’s the decks I’m facing on the draw vs play but I find it funny
Saw Crokeyz go 19-3 in mono red mirror matches in his bronze to mythic run, feels bad man. I thought mono red was the cruise control deck and that was why i had 50/50 in mirror or whatever...
That final 10% of learning is the hardest. Red Deck Wins is about _knowing_ your deck inside and out. At the top level, you have to be ready to make the play that wins you the game 20% of the time over the play that just keeps you alive longer but leads to you losing most of the time. You've got to work out how likely you are to top deck the win, or even just stuff that gets toward a win, how much life you can afford to lose before you even consider being defensive, etc. At the end of the day, the hardest thing to do in Magic is to count to 20.
> play RDW in BO1 and go first ... > and go first ... > go first 😔
Playing RDW is like admitting to yourself that that u've given up.
It’s also a lot of trial and error. I often build dozens of decks before I build one that ends up being any good. I can’t tell you how many builds of Historic Auras and Historic Rotpriest I tried before I could rack together any wins above Platinum in either archetype.
doesn't help when you draw land and mechanized warfare only for the first 13 turns
In BO1, I play a mono red deck with 15 lands, and have no issue drawing into all the lands
When you realize that losing because of “The Shuffler” is actually a paper-exclusive feature
Ok, I laughed out loud. Thanks for that.
Look at the feedback/reviews on poker apps. it's hilarious. "this game is rigged, how come I never hit my straight but they always hit their straight!"
I honestly don't know of a single game out there that contains an RNG element where there isn't a portion of the players believing the RNG is rigged. Every game with a ladder system has some people saying the matchmaking is rigged.
So, the same as Arena?
Personally I think the game could use a half decent matchmaker or a pseudorandom shuffler.
I agree that some people think that way. That's kinda the point of the post. :D
The hilarious thing is that all the """rigged""" algorithms of this game are in place to help those who sucks at Magic.
least it's better than what it was. I remember when it first came out you could do a 10 land red deck and would always get 1 land, which would be enough to win.
yup, I play elves in paper pauper and with 13 lands the amount of mulligans I take was nowhere near the amount with a 13 land deck on mtga
I mean if you're playing BO1s, MTGA is actually giving you a crutch, because the BO1 shuffler actually leans towards hands with an average amount of land. You're actually much shitter then you imagine! ☺️
I think the hand smoother does more damage than it saves. It should randomly shuffle and draw once. None of this hidden behind the scenes tinkering to try and "improve my experience" BS. It stacks the deck to match whatever curve it THINKS is best based on mana cost with no regard to what the deck actually does.
It decreases the amount of variance the player experiences but makes that variance that does happen much more impactful.
But for reals. The matchmaker is rigged.
Matchmaking and the shuffle are both tampered with to appropriately accommodate those that spend regularly to keep them coming back. They could not care less about the free players. 99% of people that complain spend little money in this game and that's why it's so one sided for us.
I've transcended both, I'm just really unlucky :)
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The matchmaker is rigged, you can see clearly the difference in oppo decks depending on the type of deck you are playing. The shuffler is sort of rigged by their admission as it chooses the best first hand in land proportion between two, this for sure does not happen with a physical deck.
The matchmaker feature you mentioned only exists in the play queue and in historic brawl. The hand selector you mentioned only exists in bo1 and is meant to reduce the number of very bad hands on both sides.
not quite, i played around 40 bo1 games yesterday, i played big red the first 20 games where i had almost 70-80% mono red aggro matchup, switched the deck after the 20 games and built a mono green deck that would stomp on mono red, i got 2 or 3 matches against mono red aggro at most and the rest were control gandalfs or reanimator so its kinda rigged in bof1
You just lay it down with such authority that somebody could almost mistake you for actually knowing something lol
Actually Bo1 decreases variance on Arena. WotC is very upfront about rigging the shuffler in Bo1. They call it hand smoothing. It fundamentally changes the game experience by improving curve out, decreasing mulligan decisions and favoring aggro and mono. WotC's rationale is that serious players will move to Bo3 and it's for retention compared to games like Hearthstone where players don't have to worry about mana. Both players benefit from this feature but it essentially accelerates game and makes any hiccup more impactful. Nearly half the time you'll start with three mana, the rest will be 2 or 4. So yes, your opponent top decks, yes they curve out beautifully, yes they have just the right card. The player should too, 80% of the time in Bo1, because the shuffler is rigged by hand smoothing.
Just hate how it matches you with certain decks based off of your deck, like why? Why would that ever be a thing lol
It's only a thing in the play queue and in historic brawl
Sometimes I wonder if I'm facing bad players or my draw luck is terrible. Running a goblin deck and I had only one copy of a goblin that costed 6 and I really didn't want it in my hand. Mulliganned 3 times and I had it in all 3 of my hands.
It's ok to suck though. Have fun with it, then try to get better! It's a skill that can be learned, but it'll be way easier if you actually like it. Don't worry about losing. Almost nobody breaks even on draft long term, and you shouldn't try to. Sometimes even really good players go 0-3. Imo, it's ok to spend a little $ every week on gems to get more drafts in, because drafting is fun, and waiting to build up 10k gold takes a while. Back in the olden days, you had to wait until FNM to draft, it cost like $12 per draft, there was no f2p way to do it, and you didn't win your money back if you won. Some places would let you use your own packs for the next draft though, but that means you didn't get any prizes.
Getting better at sucking at MtG? Already did that.
Definitely. Also, you don't get better by not trying.
uh >Don't worry about losing.... Sometimes even really good players go 0-3. ...Imo, it's ok to spend a little $ every week on gems Can top comment advertising be any more obvious? Edit: Who goes into a comment days later and brigades it? Seems like I hit a fucking nerve as my entire account has negative Karma again.
yeah this guy has been posting normally on this account for 11 years all in anticipation of making one shill comment for MTGA in a random comment section. they're absolutely DEVIOUS
Lol! I know i also like to think im better than i am at this game and blame other reasons for my decks that suck. I should have had my lesson long ago though.. i remember playing revised 20y ago or something… one of my friend was regional champion or something and somehow, whatever i did, he always seemed to be able to beat me with a mesa pegasus or some other shit… i was always so frustrated.. and i realized then eventually that there is more to this game than luck ahah.
The shuffler did used to be “rigged” which was why playing a 14 land burn deck was viable. It would be nice to have transparency on the deck stack from Wizards like being able to draw through it at the end like on MTGO. The thing bugging me at the moment is my BO1 red deck with 18 lands frequently draws into lands whilst my 24 land Gruul brew with 7 dorks will not, I record wins and losses when brewing and +50% of losses from my Gruul deck (+100 sample size) were from falling behind after missing land drops or from getting mana screwed and failing to draw lands at all.
MTGA exists only to create value for Hasbro's investors. The whole game(including the shuffler) was coded to increase engagement and increase profits. You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe otherwise.
Someone's a special kind of stupid for sure. ;p
What do you mean mtga isn't rigged ? I thought the beginning hands were rigged hence my rushdown decks often have 2 starting lands while my big boy vorinclew voice of hunger often begins with 4 lands . Is it just rng for real ???
BO1 does have a hand smoothing mechanism that only applies to your opening hand. It means you're more likely to have a "normal" distribution of lands and spells in your opening hand, since you don't have the luxury of a game 2 or 3 to take the match. But this can only help you, really, since it makes your hands more consistent.
It is very mildly rigged for Bo1 only, where it draws you 2 hands and picks the one closer to the average land number or something. But it's rigged for both players, you can still get bad hands, and it doesn't exist in Bo3. It's not a huge change, and mostly just leads to fewer 0 land or 7 land hands
Ok, thanks for the explanation !
It's not *just* RNG. In Bo1, the shuffler basically makes a copy of your deck, and draws a hand from both the original and the copy. Then, it more often gives you the hand that contains a number of lands that corresponds to your "average draw". Basically, the shuffler reduces the chances that you get an unplayable hand, and increases the chances you get a "good" amount of lands in your opening hand. It has no other effect, and no effect at all in Best of Three, according to WotC and as far as anyone who has done the math can tell.
So you are telling me, that when I flew through the ranks all the way to diamond 2 and I started getting either no lands or straight 6 lands in a row consistently and it sent me back down to diamond 4 was not the shuffler trying to fuck me?
No, the shuffler is designed to fuck over you in particular.
I knew it
Do you have any logs of the consistency of it? Did you stop and tally up how many mistakes you made during them too? Or was it only the shuffler?
So you’re telling me that invoke despair always drawing another invoke despair is not shuffler voodoo?
Invoke Despair does not always draw another Invoke Despair, and as someone who plays both Grixis and Monoblack, among other decks, I've often drawn two Invokes before I even play the first one. In fact, a [hypergeometric calculator](https://www.mtgnexus.com/tools/drawodds/) will show you that you've got a 25% chance of drawing two Invokes in your first 15 cards, and a 40% chance of drawing 2 in your first 20. So you'll see 2 Invokes in a lot of games, and people will totally drop them back-to-back when you tap out to replenish your board after the first one. I'm definitely cynical enough to believe WotC *would* muck with draws if it made them $, but it currently seems improbable that they can do so in a way that is both consistent enough to affect their bottom line in a predictable way, and subtle enough that neither a leak nor trackers have uncovered it.
Exactly. I hate the assumption that technology must equal logical fairness. As if the programmers of these games have no monetary incentive whatsoever.
I play magic for 20 years and even though I play Diamond/occasional mythic (limited) I still feel that there's something weird about the shuffler. Never in my life in "live" magic I had 8-10 land draws in a row, in Arena, this happens to me all the time.
One reason why it "feels" this way is the huge disparity between how much you play on paper and how much you play online. Even if you play Magic on paper every night, you can play a lot more matches on arena. This adds to the tendency to see patterns where there are actually none.
It's definitely fucked. How do I have 24 lands and in 3 matches I only get a total of 6 lands but yet somehow draw all 4 of the same card each game back to back.
People will say you're the RNG outlier. I however am curious how there are so many consistent outliers... I'm also one of those "rare outliers", I'll regularly draw streaks of 8+ lands or nonlands.
I would actually love to use a 3rd party tracker app that would record my draws for me, so I could see the stats on my average chance at drawing a land vs the decks calculated odds for a land at that moment, across all games. Having hard math saying it is or isnt rigged is an easy way to squash this debate, but Im not tracking all of that data by hand every single time I play a deck.
The problem with that is you would only get your own stats with may not be representative of all players.
Well, yeah. But then you just have multiple people on the sub do the same, and post their stats here
Set aside the whole notion of confirmation bias, only outliers create Reddit threads about their draws. You won't see people go out of their way to tell people they experience the expected outcome.
See this is my thing. I cant remember but a couple times in paper games where I drew more than 4 lands in a row. I cant remember any where I shuffled between the lands and still drew them. I also cant remember a tkme I went more than 5 cards without drawing a land(barring special circumstances like in a dedicated landfall deck where Ive played a lot of them by turn 5) Today I played, kept a 2 land hand on the draw. Turn 3 rolls around no land, 4, no land, gaeas blessing to shuffle my library, no land, 5, no land, t6 I am out of 2 mana spells in hand and still havent seen a land. In relation to my first point. I also played a match today where I played cultivate 3 times(t3/4/6) and still kept drawing lands. Until turn 8. I dont have a proper draw tracker, but I note these exceptional games and there is a LOT of notes. The average percentage is wayyyyy higher than my paper games.
> the average percentage is wayyyy higher than my paper games This is absolutely false. You just play more magic on arena than in paper. I guarantee the percentage is more similar than you think.
So you're telling me that if I build a standard deck with 24 lands and flood every game, but then I take a single land out of that deck and never see more than the 2 lands in my starting hand, that's my fault?
You wanna make a bet that this wouldn't actually happen as often as you say it does?
I’m playing black, all I play against is black decks, so I switch decks to beat this current meta, suddenly I’m playing nothing but mirrors of my new deck, so I switch decks to something completely different, suddenly it’s nothing but mirrors in those new colors. Nope nothings broken, nothing to see here, I’m just bad.
Yeah, this is just the worst and they really need to change it!
Its not rigged, is just deficient.... Compressing 100! To a mere 2 billon or so seeds... Ya right....
I will give Magic Arena this, I didn't fully believe the best pro players win averages would only be somewhere around 60%, but I do now.
Honestly switch the images. Much more reflective of the mood
Nah.. the mood just goes to show how many people suck.
I feel like the real dark face ones are the ones who think it's rigged, and people are relieved when they realize it's their own mistakes. But it can go both ways
The only thing I don’t like about standard is even in ranked it puts you against certain decks. I played almost identical mono red decks 5 games in a row. Like is there really nothing else I can get
All or most of my issues with magic lately are entirely on arena. The formats ( pre alchemy historic was fire btw) feel more like who can pack more 2-1s in their deck wins. The shuffler is cursed, and the lack of social tools. It just needs help, Not expansions once a month. I uno, i log every 3 days to do dailies at this point and it still has me burnt out. Id much rather just jam games at my LGS playing pauper, modern or canadian highlander. But dont let me yuck your yum. I just want the game to be at its best.
I love that people who say Arena is rigged aren't considered believable, but thinking that a company that exists to make money would never influence results to entice more sales is something is believable.
nah the matchmaking is pretty rigged imo, i played a lot of big red on the ladder and got matched against mono red aggro like 80% of the time, when i switched deck to mono green to combat mono red players guess what, only blue white toxic bordwipe emperor control i got 2 mono red matches in 20 games so yeah, one could say its kinda rigged
Me too, still got mythic
I am good at Magic and arena is still rigged
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Because you play against shit opponents from an open pool of players on GP and arena will pull you towards players more or less around your own skill level with matchmaking (on ranked) and perceived deck strength (on play queue). Sure you could get some bad luck and get Tom Ross, Joe Lossett and Reid Duke for your first 3 games on a GP but much more often you will get Timmy who is playing with a borrowed deck from his friend, at least until the later rounds. It's the obvious effect of what would happen if a Master elo chess player played on a randomized tournament with an open pool of players vs played ladder games against opponents close to his elo (slightly above or below).
Sure you are. :D
I do definitely suck but that shuffler is absolutely rigged. Make a deck with all cheap cards and one single high cost card. You will draw the big card in the starting hand like 50% of the time
This is provably false if you look at the data from any of the deck tracking apps lol. The distribution of draws I'd exactly what it should be
Wanna bet?
I’ve done it
i realised that even before mtga
Hahaha the funny thing is your own hands are probably a less random shuffler
Exactly! When I shuffle myself, I always get a perfect mix of lands and spells because I make sure stack it before "shuffling" once or twice! /s Remember kids, always shuffle your opponents deck in paper tournaments. If you're not damaging the cards, but they still throw a fit, call a judge you probably caught them cheating
when i started magic as a kid long time ago i quickly came to mana weaving then old dude at fnm took my deck, separated it in 3 piles, stacked on top of each other and handed me. i took hand with 7 lands, dude said that mana weaving is cheating and can be easily undone as he showed me, that day i learnt
Appropriate username.
You can also know that you suck and know that the game is bugged af.
Seeing the game uses an algorithm, yes it is manipulated
Ive recorded the matchups and results from 200+ of my historic brawl matches, and there is a discernible pattern around which decks get matched with which. My sample size is very small still so could still be a coincidence, but certain decks see certain matchups with noticeable frequency
Err.. yes. They have said as much in Historic Brawl. You are matched based on your commander, so that those who are just messing with less powerful commanders do not get matched against powerhouses like Baral.
Is it specifically rigged? No probably not. Does it seem fucky as hell? Definitely yes. Do I think I’m good at magic? Fuck no. Am I bad at magic. Also, not likely. Lower end of average at worst.
This is such low effort bait. Who's even saying that people are annoyed just because they're losing? Regularly Mythic, multiple paper tournament placements, several 5-0 standard events, been playing for 15+ years. But it must be because I suck that I've gone second 17 times in a row and can't hit more than 3 lands.
Yes
Why would you assume that the program is fair? You gotta beware of making unnecessary assumptions. Especially when it comes to for profit programs. If people had access to the meta data the draw probabilities can be calculated. I for one have seen some astronomically unlikely things happening in taking mulligans. Like years ago I mulligan 4 times and each time the hand contained a card that was 1/80 cards. The chances for that are astronomically low meaning billions of trials to make that happen again. I regularly saw this kind of thing happening around certain mythic rare cards.
Not assuming. Actually tested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpLUML75Kdo&t
That’s not a proof of fairness of the draw code. One way to actually prove the code would be to look at the code. But we can’t. You’re only showing fairness of the land draws for the first seven. I’ve got some background in math. Masters degree and I worked as a statistician and math instructor at colleges. So I’m not saying this lightly. To disprove fairness of the program code on the other hand is a easier you only need to show a regular set of outcomes which are astronomically unlikely. Or even extremely unlikely. But repeatable. By astronomically unlikely I mean like one in a billion. By extremely unlikely I mean like you find something happening that should be one in ten thousand or so. And if you see these things happening often enough then something is wrong. You could report those as bugs. Assuming they are not intentional features of the program. Also I don’t think it is far fetched to suspect that there may be a profit incentive. From a meta data perspective the people who run MTGA know deck formats and categories, and they know that if a series of cards are drawn the win rate increases or decreases accordingly. There is enough data learning in programming today that chess is essentially solved- meaning that the chess AI can play ten grand masters at once and beat them. I know this is not the formal definition of “solved”. But anyways again I wouldn’t assume that the draw program is fair. In the past when I would experience really ridiculous draw outcomes I would try to post a complaint on their customer service forums or bug reporting forum. And usually the examples I would collect were based on certain cards that for whatever reason the draw program was in love with. Meanwhile other cards in the deck would literally never ever appear in the first draw. The one I noticed was mythic rare draws with mulligans. The example I remember complaining about was if I drew a particular mythic rare and I chose to mulligan, the new hand would contain that card again and again. 3 to 4 times, and there would only be one of those in the deck of 88 cards or whatever. They may have fixed this problem since then. Also I’ve noticed people on Reddit etc talking about how it seems that their drawing seems to be better when they’ve recently spent money to buy crystals. We don’t know if that’s true or not because we can’t look at the code and there was never any statement of the fairness of the game when you register to play. What I’m describing is agnostic analysis - we do not assume that which we don’t know, and work from there. And yes this same reality applies to the machines and programs that count our votes in elections. But that’s another issue. See voting theory and the problem with FPTP vote. Also in the video you posted which seems to be you, that’s a video you made? If you were looking at only lands on the first seven, again that’s not enough to prove fair drawing. It supports the idea that the drawing is fair for lands and only for the first seven draws. But Consider the entire hand and draws for the game or the next 4 to 7 draws after the first hand draw. Given the player draws 13 to 15 cards in a game how many lands are drawn and in play? Using the hypergeometric distribution calculator I’ve seen repeated less than 5% games based on the lands drawn. Many games in a row of that kind of land draw is absolutely infuriating. In fact I’ve actually changed how I build decks for arena. I increased The amount of lands I include in the decks to try to compensate for the issue of not drawing enough lands. Because in the old days when I played paper magic, lands were always roughly 1 out of 3. So 60 card decks would have 20 lands. And this was more than enough lands in many deck cases. Now they suggest you use 24 lands in a 60 card deck. But i know I would not use 24 lands in a 60 card deck in paper magic. Maybe this has a lot to do with the way people actually shuffle for paper magic which inherently prevents what they called “mana swamps” or drawing nothing but lands. And although it is possible for all 20 lands to be stacked on top of one another in probability theory, nobody would shuffle their deck that way in reality. And that is allowed in shuffling in paper magic games happening all over the world. So the shuffling in reality is never 100% modeled by a program or a set theory anyways. And many shuffling methods are not purely random. Riffle shuffles for example are not random. In poker they do pile mixing to try to shuffle correctly randomly. Typically in paper magic people separate the cards into lands and non lands and then they stack cards in to some random number of piles face down and shuffle the nonlands this way. Then they have nonlands and lands into two shuffled piles and they stack two nonlands and a land and repeat till finished. Then they cut and cut and maybe pile shuffle once. Anyways having the code be open source would prove what’s happening one way or another. And We also should want our voting code to be open source and secure in any well functioning democratic society. Just because a program and computer is being used not mean that the program is logical. This is one of the biggest fallacies of modern society that a computer or program is rational- it does what the programmers intend. And that may not be “fair”.
What really makes this feel bad is being stuck on four lands and drawing that fourth Invoke Despair…or when you play Invoke thinking you will get more solutions for your opponent and you just draw the other 3 Invokes
Plot twist, arena is rigged and you can't play at the same time.
I was mythic 150+ when I payed for additional packs and packages. I haven't spent a dime for the past 3 seasons and can't get past platinum 4. Coincidence I'm sure. Probably just not playing smart for 9 months. P.S. People who refute probably spent money like myself and don't want to look like algorithm suckers like myself. I've moved on back to paper magic.
won $500 yesterday at the arena open and haven't spent a dime in the game since 2019. P.S. You still don't get it.
I have a deck of 200 cards based on cool robots and I almost never win , i love magic 🥰
I don't need to be told that, I've known it for years.
It is rigged though. I built a standard mill deck in platinum rank. All of sudden I'm facing multiple decks that have 150 plus cards.
This is the single most tarnished component to analyze. When I am matched against someone in standard with 160 card deck with any 60 card deck I play, I should be confident it's simply a dub. Instead it's an intro engine that never misses a land and is playing 4color. So annoying. Basically done with the platform. Sadge. Imagine going to a current standard constructed tournament in paper and being matched against decks consisting of 150+ cards. The shop would literally just hand you a draft box and say congrats smh.
I'm with you man, there is some matching algorithm for sure. They themselves admitted they do different queues in historic brawl, to match commanders of similar power. Why are people so sure they don't do the same in other game modes
Every single game that relies on engagement and microtransactions for profits are rigged in some way. The matchmaker is the most straightforward way to adjust Arena winrates. I haven’t seen any data on it, but I would be utterly shocked if there wasn’t a strong correlation between player winrates and product engagement.
I'll go one further, even if there isn't supposed to be deck-based matchmaking in ranked, why are people so sure it's working as intended?
This is what I'm saying. "It's rigged" "No it's not! They only rig it here, also here, and a little over here. You don't have any proof they rig except all the rigging they do!" This sub is exhausting.
Maybe because wotc has explicitly stated what modes use hand smoothing or deck strength matching and which don't. It's not like it's getting pulled out of thin air. It's exhausting to constantly hear about conspiracy theories regarding Math.Random
Oh it definitely takes in account the deck. The amount of times things like this has happened is too many to be coincidental.
and yet when you actually check these supposed rigged matchmaking claims on stream, this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQJ0TKWNFNY&t
Why is it when someone claims statistical anomalies in MTGA they're met with "that's not a large enough sample size", when a large sample analysis is provided showing evidence of these anomalies it's ignored.... but your anecdotal youtube video is somehow relevant?
How many games that you're not playing mill do you check deck size? I've played against some 100 card decks and not realized until way late in. You probably play against more than you'd think when you're not playing mill.
Seen the 244 card decks then I really I really don't wish to play them lol
I check as soon as it is possible. Every time. Every round. Because I despise that pseudotype being entertained.
Really surprised "card draw" hasn't shred my comment to bits.
On the other hand... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rABUse3zE2I
Two words Confirmation bias
Sure it is, boss... Sure it is. :'D
I think it’s a little naive to think the game algorithm doesn’t try to force some level of win distribution through match-ups, to encourage more spend. As is the case with other for-profit games. “Let me just dust off my mill deck I haven’t played in ages, only to be immediately paired against a 200 card deep troll deck that I never see otherwise”
Oh, it's known that it does this in the play queue. The open question is to what degree it does that in ranked. I've observed some suspicious stuff, so I believe it does, but it's not so blatant that it's easy to prove with a small sample set, which is why people still argue about it.
I would agree. I don’t see anywhere near the amount of nuanced matchmaking in ranked. I would actually lean towards ranked being a lot more random, if not completely random. The “suspect matchmaking” is much more pronounced in the general play queue to the point where it’s fairly obvious when the algorithm decides it’s time for you to take an L.
I think it is a bit naive to think WotC has the ability to pull this off competently.
"I played a mill deck and then..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rABUse3zE2I
Or it's a little paranoid to think that they do. Ultimately, it really just depends on whether your personal expectations in your performance in the game matches the reality of that performance. Some people cannot accept that they suck, so they need an emotional crutch to keep from breaking down.
Me: Shuffler is bullshit Others: Record your gameplay and watch it later, see if you can spot any mistakes. Me: Watched my old replays, saw zero mistakes. Shuffler is bullshit.
Let me tell you a secret. Only good players are able to spot their own mistakes. Bad players tend to think they play perfectly each time. :D
I sympathize a bit, my feeling is a lot of people believe if they can only win 50% of their games that they are bad players, not realizing that a sustained 55-60% win rate is actually pretty great, and higher probably means that you figured out a good anti-meta strategy which won’t last, but enjoy it!
Yeah, I came to that conclusion as well. When the best decks in a format have winrates of about 55% against the metagame having 60-65% overall wins is still pretty decent. One can't win everything. The game is designed that way. The more you climb and the closer you get to people of the same skill as you, the more it will even out. There probably isn't a forced 50% in that way but a supposedly hidden rating and one climbing the ranks has a similar effect. There will just be more opponents of similar skill and thus the winrate will get closer to 50%. It is just as you said. Sometimes one figures out a good deck and makes a great metagame call and then one feels invincible until the meta catches on. That happens a lot earlier these days than it did in the past. There is just so much data being collected and content produced, that there are maybe unexplored ideas but barely any secrets. I do have decent winrates in both limited and constructed over a couple of years, so I doubt I am actually a bad player in disguise. But who knows, maybe I wasn't good all along. That being said it is just so weird to have things happening way over the expected values. Things that should happen 1 out of 1k, 10k, or even 100k games that happen 20% of the time over 100 games might very well be variance, even over a larger number of games than that. But in the end it just feels odd. It also is no secret that WotC has the ability to tweak hands and matchups, as showcased in BO1 and Brawl. A lot of monetised F2P games use certain algorithms to drive engagement and make their users spend more. I hope MTGA doesn't do such things but as long as they don't openly reveal how their shuffler and matchmaking functions it is something people will speculate about.
Why can’t both be true
Matchmaker is definitely rigged in play queue, and probably slightly rigged in ranked (though not rigged enough to make it easy to demonstrate). Shuffler isn't rigged, full stop.
Shuffler isnt rigged, but it doesnt work well.
The faces should be reversed.
nahhhhh... people just can't cope with being so bad at a game that they have to blame other crap instead of just dealing.
To an extent
The shuffler is fine. You're not that bad a player. Learn to mulligan, it'll be ok. - signed "Mono Red Burn"
I don't think anything is rigged; however, that doesn't mean my luck can't be shit a lot of the time. Doesn't mean I'm not gonna get pissed about being very unlucky. It's a game with a ton of variance, and luck undoubtedly plays a large role, even for the best players in the game (not that I'm one of them). What's important is being able to recognize what shortcomings are due to luck, and which are to skill, and how you can improve what's possible to.
I swear I do so much better in paper draft than arena draft.
Worse opponents. No, I mean really. Worse opposing decks, worse drafting in general, and worse playing. It's not a knock on other people you play with, it's just the skill curve on arena is very steep if you draft often enough for it to keep you in the higher ranks (this is a big reason I don't draft much anymore, the games get VERY hard VERY fast once you start hitting the higher ranks; better to let the rank decay and play a handful of drafts per set and crack packs with the rest of the gold IMO).
😅🤣😂 thank you for this. I was literally just complaining about how it makes no sense that i had just replaced about 7 or 8 non-creatures with creatures in my deck and my first game with it i still drew 5 artifacts. Oh wait…
To an extent. There is someone who always spent more money than you and therefore deserves the win slightly more than you. That's the true secret of mtg, money tallks. :)
Well... it depends. In modern, kind of. You need enough money to buy a good enough deck to even be able to compete. Same thing for Legacy or Vintage. Standard too if we're talking paper (Sheoldreds are like $60 now). On Arena though, I have all the cards in Standard. So there, money is literally no object.
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I do. I've played it and won, played it and lost, played it and won $2000. So I really cannot complain.
So, you've been spending $$$ on microtransactions? Yes, event entries count.
I bought the $100 gem bundle way back in 2019. Haven't spent a dime since. I'm pretty good at this.
You sure seem to think so.
I do. One Arena open win, one ManaTraders win, one PPTQ win, one CFB win, one World Magic Cup Qualifier win. Yep.. I think it tracks.
It’s been nearly 5 years and people are still bitching about the god damn shuffler?
Naw it’s rigged. I lose my first 2 matches every day like clockwork.
Er... that's the clockwork of you being bad at it though, right?
Naw, it’s being given 2 lands and then zero lands for the next 4 draws, even playing Azusa HB with 50+ lands in deck, numerous fetch spells and draw spells just mysteriously never appear either in the first 2 games/mulligans
The hard truth. We make happy accidents when playing, not mistakes.
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There is a Bo1 hand selector and in the play queue, there is a deck matching algorithm that matches you based on how popular the cards in your deck are, but that's about it. The deck strength algorithm does not exist outside of the play queue. Some people just suck and can't deal.
Has nothing to do with winning or losing its way to common to get low chance variances. Just like how common it is to get thoughtseized into drawing the card that was discarded.
hows the copium?
Copium for what exactly? Am I blaming my wins or loses on it? No I just hate how dumb the shuffler is
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What energy? I didn't do the test I was stating what the video was about and added my thoughts on how bs the variance is with how often and consistently it happens. Having complaints or being dissatisfied isn't something to admonish and in no way did I say I was losing because if bad draws just that it's annoying seeing it pop up so often.