1) The Snarespinner Riot interaction sounds like a bug. Bugs happen. Report it and move on.
Given the general ignorance of Henrick's complaints, a blightbeetle or something similar on the battlefield that he did not consider seems more likely than an actual bug...
As someone who plays a mono-black deck that uses both Arealist and Beetle, this is an incredibly common interaction for green players. You can see their confusion as they attempt to figure out why riot isn't working or why Pelt Collector isn't incrementing. Then they'll swish around with their mouse reading cards until they get to the Beetle. Then they do whatever they can to try and kill it.
This is despite the fact that Beetle flashes with a green aurora whenever it stops counters from being added to creatures.
My last post was botched so i just straight up deleted it. Not sure what happened there. So here is my attempt at a response.
I think we should have seen a massive red flag very early on when the idea of 13-land decks were tossed around for Arena. Specifically 13-land Red Aggro. I think a 13-land Blue Mono exists as well. 1 land in your opening hand is 83.7%. Two in opening hand is 47.6% and three drops down 16.6%
Conversely, <DELETED>
Personally, I find it absurd that things have gone so far as to make 13-land Red a very nearly viable deck.
I removed the individual's name and deck because I cannot tolerate her tirades any more. Her insistence on using Magic as a political platform should never be allowed WotC.
As an aside, is anyone cracking Ravnica Allegiance packs? I just noticed that I have a nearly full set of Guilds of Ravnica Guildgates but not a single Allegience guildgate.
The 8 card packs of arena have no land slot, so you don't get any guildgates from packs. New accounts come with a playset of all the guildgates, but since your's existed befor RNA release (I suppose), you only got the GRN ones.
It's not a problem if you draft a bit, but otherwise you might have to spend wildcards on them.
I signed up as soon as it went into open beta. Dominaria I think? It was definitely before GRN.
To be clear. I only played for about two or so hours. I went to bed around 3AM or so. So it could simply be an artifact that no one was awake my side of the world.
Yeah, I had forgotten about the bullocks matching system when you import deck lists. That would explain the power level disparity I saw.
I'm not entirely against the power level disparity. What I am against is the idea that WotC very clearly pushes the, "new player experience," and how this matching system appears to fly completely in the face of that goal.
As an aside, is anyone cracking Ravnica Allegiance packs? I just noticed that I have a nearly full set of Guilds of Ravnica Guildgates but not a single Allegience guildgate.
Alright. So I wrote a small scrip to grab the exported list. Interweave the lands with the spells using a crude randomizer to shuffle the lists before interweaving. Then copy that new list and import it.
It's late and I only had a chance to play a handful of games.
So far, the games do feel different but not in a good way. The 4-of clumps are gone but the card draw still feels a little "off". I can't quite put my finger on it however. I noticed that I get color screwed, ALOT. Way more than I was getting screwed before. This color screw is a direct cause of losing nearly all of my games.
I wanted to use a standardized deck so I used Eternal Thirst. I noticed the lands do tend to "clump" on this list so I intend to modify the script to better interweave the land mix then re-upload.
What's interesting is my script output isn't ruining the formating and Arena seems to accept it just find, no exclamation mark I was having problems with before.
Also of note, the power level of my opponents for this deck seems to be higher than what the normal, unaltered, deck encounters. I rarely encounter Planeswalkers but two decks tonight had them. I also encountered a Merfolk deck. A nasty all black deck that dismantled my hand. A Gates deck. And, surprisingly, two mirror matches.
Wait a minute. Did you say that when you export this modified list that the order you imported them is preserved?! It's not merging the duplicate entries??
Now that I think about it, I can see how it makes sense if they're tracking cards in a collection and simply increment the card count rather than adding a new entry. When you break apart those entries line by line, you're probably creating new elements in the array or collection rather than incrementing that specific element count.
Good grief... I can see many places where the problems can come in.
What I did was put all the land in "Order" Mountain, Forest, Stomping Ground, Mountain, Forest, Rootbound Crag et. Then I would take my spells, basically "randomly" and stick one in between each land. Then went back with the extra's and stuck them in between again. The order is not exact anymore, I didn't want it to be TOO perfect, lest I run back into the same "Remainder problem" if that's what it is.
If you REALLY wanted to test it out, I would make an all-land deck with equal numbers of basic lands. Though of course you'd end up losing rather quickly, you'd stay alive long enough to see the difference. Just make one deck where every land is clumped together, then another where they are exactly spaced out and in order. You will quickly see it then.
I am now at 11:6 win:loss ratio for my "new" list, as compared to the past 51:50 games of basically the same list. It is SO obvious if you have been keeping track of your mana/spell ratio during your games for a while. I just keep hitting my normal amount of lands. I occasionally see duplicates of cards, but usually only once a game. This is what I was used to when playing paper Magic for 6+ years.
Thanks to everyone putting in their feedback and suggestions to make this solution happen. I was literally switching over to bo3 so at least the hand fixer wasn't messing with stuff. Now I'm back to bo1 and doing great.
I tried this but I must be messing something up. When I import my list, it causes the red exclamation to appear. Selecting the deck to edit causes Arena to hang. I have to force close.
It might be cause I initially exported it into a spreadsheet to help speed up the splitting and sorting and something was modified in the translation. I'll try again today after work using just Notepad or SciTE and do the arranging by hand.
If this pans out, it's completely mind blowing as this effectively amounts to weaving the deck. I have to wonder if this is already a well known secret with some players? Especially those opponents that have the unnatural capacity to always hit their curve dead on. If not, it's well known now.
EDIT!!!! Wait a second now!!! The deck builder automatically sorts everything right back into the usual order as soon as you click done, then reopen the list. That means it's IMPOSSIBLE to try and see if the order of the deck in the deck builder's list has an influence on the randomization factor of the shuffler.
It may sort things back into order in the deck building interface, but if you export the decklist to a text file it will be in "cards added" order.
Okay, I would love to "randomize" my deck order before it goes into play to see if that affects what the shuffler brings up. What I did was Export my current decklist, opened notepad, mixed up the lands and the cmc a bit, then imported my newly made "Random" list on Arena. All the cards were in the exact same order as they usually are. It seems impossible to make the deck builder deviate from the usual list of lowest cmc to highest cmc. Sure, you can save a list that's "Random" by clicking done, but it just puts them back in order when you do so.
Can you clarify how to arrange your own decklist order the way you want it? I would love to do so if possible. I anecdotally noticed that not only do certain cards "clump together" they also seem to be slightly organized by cmc as well. Like "Oh here's the 2 cmc section with a bit of 3s. Here's the 3 cmc section with a bit of 4s, Here the 4 cmc section with even more land.
I would love to be able to mix up my cmc and lands before it goes into the evil shuffler! Please explain to me how it's done. I'm sure other people here are curious as well.
I do not think the display will ever not sort them no matter what you do with that list. If you want to see if Arena preserves the list, then export the list for the deck you imported. If the card order is preserved then... well... we know that it's preserved. Unfortunately, if the re-exported list is sorted, it doesn't actually prove anything conclusive.
Okay, so I exported the "Random" list to notepad and they WERE still in the "Random" order. That does improve my confidence. You're saying, Arena will take the list order found under "Export" and not the usual display order under the deck builder feature? Do you know that conclusively? Or just guessing from a programming standpoint? Did Wizards explicitly state it?
Thanks for the tip!
Just guessing from a programming standpoint. Since decks can, and do, change, it doesn't really make sense to sort the list internally when storing it since the only time you're going to want it sorted is during deck building. It's all just a bunch of pointers (references) anyways. It's probably not even a array proper but probably some indexed collection. They might even go so far as a full fledged database back end but that might be a bit much for the client. Whether they choose an array, collection, or a database, it wouldn't really be worthwhile to bother sorting it before storing it. You're going to do all sorts of sorting and shuffling anyways.
Come to think of it, I'm not actually sure if Unity Engine really has a proper array or just masks the collection to make it look like an array.
For those that don't know.
An array is a literal list. Each card has a reference on this list. So if you want to find any particular card, you have to run through the list from top to bottom until you check them all. If you could somehow look directly at RAM, you can easily go from element to element.
A collection behaves more like a bucket or buckets (not exactly but let's keep it simple eh?). The software can just reach in and arbiltrarilly grab X number of references, or sort them any way it wants, of whatever. Notably, many languages can treat collections as arrays but the reverse is usually not true without a lot of extra code. In addition, the element position in RAM isn't always relevant or even matters.
A database is Voodoo Magic, chicken blood and goat sacrifices. It used to involve virgin sacrifices at a volcano but labor laws prevent that now. But I guess for the sake of berevity, we can treat it as a bucket with a special query language that let's us do all sorts of cool things with the data. Some combinations of query engine and storage are better than others.
EDIT!!!! Wait a second now!!! The deck builder automatically sorts everything right back into the usual order as soon as you click done, then reopen the list. That means it's IMPOSSIBLE to try and see if the order of the deck in the deck builder's list has an influence on the randomization factor of the shuffler.
It may sort things back into order in the deck building interface, but if you export the decklist to a text file it will be in "cards added" order.
Okay, I would love to "randomize" my deck order before it goes into play to see if that affects what the shuffler brings up. What I did was Export my current decklist, opened notepad, mixed up the lands and the cmc a bit, then imported my newly made "Random" list on Arena. All the cards were in the exact same order as they usually are. It seems impossible to make the deck builder deviate from the usual list of lowest cmc to highest cmc. Sure, you can save a list that's "Random" by clicking done, but it just puts them back in order when you do so.
Can you clarify how to arrange your own decklist order the way you want it? I would love to do so if possible. I anecdotally noticed that not only do certain cards "clump together" they also seem to be slightly organized by cmc as well. Like "Oh here's the 2 cmc section with a bit of 3s. Here's the 3 cmc section with a bit of 4s, Here the 4 cmc section with even more land.
I would love to be able to mix up my cmc and lands before it goes into the evil shuffler! Please explain to me how it's done. I'm sure other people here are curious as well.
I do not think the display will ever not sort them no matter what you do with that list. If you want to see if Arena preserves the list, then export the list for the deck you imported. If the card order is preserved then... well... we know that it's preserved. Unfortunately, if the re-exported list is sorted, it doesn't actually prove anything conclusive.
I decided to always mulligan at least once in every game, even if I had a good hand. I still had the default RW deck in my library (I forget the name) and my daily was to play a bunch of RW spells so....
I won 5 out of 7 games. The only losses were against a red Goblin Legion Warboss/Needletooth Raptor deck where I was just overwhelmed with creatures and a Golgari deck that eventually Ultimated.
Notably, except for my Golgari match and a weird Induced Amnesia deck, all of the games felt more normal drawing lands and spells in general. It didn't matter if I kept a difficult 3 mountain hand or a single Plains hand, I drew into my lands roughly when I expected to for that deck.
Pretty close.
A Fisher-Yates shuffle can randomize a list in place.
Say we have a deck (list) of 4 cards (slots) numbered 0 - 3.
- starting at slot 0
- select a random slot of 0,1,2 or 3 and swap them with slot 0.
- move to slot 1
- select a random slot of 1,2, or 3 and swap it with slot 1.
- move to slot 2
- select a random slot of 2 or 3 and swap it with slot 2.
- ignore slot 3
The method as you describe creates additional work since the algorithm has to do a lot of shifting around with the source list. The Fisher-Yates shuffle takes advantage (in part) of the fast pointer functions of many CPU's. It's also nice and efficient with low RAM requirements.
I have not read the entire Reddit post yet. It's not a revelation to me since I had long suspected these things just with my very small sampling size (my own games). The scale of the data set is a lot to digest.
--By all accounts this appears to be a common mistake in implementing the shuffler algorithm in which the deck is randomized, but not randomized enough. This is why taking a mulligan fixes it. This is an act of incompetence moreso than malfeasance.
Interestingly, the Unity document is using the wrong algorithm. WotC was called out on some time ago for using this bad shuffle algorithm on MTGO back in 2014. If we look past the fact that WotC shouldn't be using this algorithm at all, even if it's just the sample hand feature in question, then I would like to believe that WotC knows better. And this understanding of shuffling algorithms carried over into Arena.
If anything, I suspect the hand shaping is the root of the problem. Which would be why mulliganing "fixes" the problem. No hand shaping is occurring thusly no weighting cards to get those artificial hands.
Of course, without looking at the source code, I could be fantastically and gloriously wrong here.
Edit:
Maybe I misunderstood your post. I just had a thought that there is the possibility that the Devs intentionally did not use Fisher-Yates in order to get the hand shaping they're looking for. In other words, they could be using an algorithm that has a known tendency to clump cards in order to reduce, what they consider, bad hands. Mulliganing doesn't do a poor shuffle on an already poorly shuffled deck but literally uses the correct algorithm. If for no other reason that they are not doing the hand shaping so there's no reason to use the garbage shuffled. This could explain the anecdotal evidence that Arena also tends to grab particular 4-ofs early on. The same algorithm that "pulls" lands towards the top also pulls the 4-ofs.
As someone who plays a mono-black deck that uses both Arealist and Beetle, this is an incredibly common interaction for green players. You can see their confusion as they attempt to figure out why riot isn't working or why Pelt Collector isn't incrementing. Then they'll swish around with their mouse reading cards until they get to the Beetle. Then they do whatever they can to try and kill it.
This is despite the fact that Beetle flashes with a green aurora whenever it stops counters from being added to creatures.
I think we should have seen a massive red flag very early on when the idea of 13-land decks were tossed around for Arena. Specifically 13-land Red Aggro. I think a 13-land Blue Mono exists as well. 1 land in your opening hand is 83.7%. Two in opening hand is 47.6% and three drops down 16.6%
Conversely, <DELETED>
Personally, I find it absurd that things have gone so far as to make 13-land Red a very nearly viable deck.
I removed the individual's name and deck because I cannot tolerate her tirades any more. Her insistence on using Magic as a political platform should never be allowed WotC.
It's been six months? Huh... feels a lot longer than that. So yeah, I guess I do have the GRN lands that way.
I signed up as soon as it went into open beta. Dominaria I think? It was definitely before GRN.
Yeah, I had forgotten about the bullocks matching system when you import deck lists. That would explain the power level disparity I saw.
I'm not entirely against the power level disparity. What I am against is the idea that WotC very clearly pushes the, "new player experience," and how this matching system appears to fly completely in the face of that goal.
As an aside, is anyone cracking Ravnica Allegiance packs? I just noticed that I have a nearly full set of Guilds of Ravnica Guildgates but not a single Allegience guildgate.
It's late and I only had a chance to play a handful of games.
So far, the games do feel different but not in a good way. The 4-of clumps are gone but the card draw still feels a little "off". I can't quite put my finger on it however. I noticed that I get color screwed, ALOT. Way more than I was getting screwed before. This color screw is a direct cause of losing nearly all of my games.
I wanted to use a standardized deck so I used Eternal Thirst. I noticed the lands do tend to "clump" on this list so I intend to modify the script to better interweave the land mix then re-upload.
1 Legion Lieutenant (RIX) 163
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Vampire Sovereign (M19) 125
1 Call to the Feast (XLN) 219
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Call to the Feast (XLN) 219
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Ajani's Pridemate (M19) 5
1 Isolated Chapel (DAR) 241
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Bishop's Soldier (XLN) 6
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Murder (M19) 110
1 Champion of Dusk (RIX) 64
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Herald of Faith (M19) 13
1 Forsaken Sanctuary (M19) 250
1 Murder (M19) 110
1 Moment of Triumph (RIX) 15
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Paladin of Atonement (RIX) 16
1 Forsaken Sanctuary (M19) 250
1 Ajani's Welcome (M19) 6
1 Inspiring Cleric (XLN) 16
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Bishop's Soldier (XLN) 6
1 Forsaken Sanctuary (M19) 250
1 Nightmare's Thirst (M19) 111
1 Inspiring Cleric (XLN) 16
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Leonin Warleader (M19) 23
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Epicure of Blood (M19) 95
1 Sanctum Seeker (XLN) 120
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Ajani's Pridemate (M19) 5
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Ajani's Welcome (M19) 6
1 Murder (M19) 110
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Resplendent Angel (M19) 34
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Legion Lieutenant (RIX) 163
1 Vraska's Contempt (XLN) 129
1 Swamp (M19) 269
1 Ajani's Pridemate (M19) 5
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Bishop's Soldier (XLN) 6
1 Skymarch Bloodletter (XLN) 124
1 Forsaken Sanctuary (M19) 250
1 Call to the Feast (XLN) 219
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Moment of Triumph (RIX) 15
1 Skymarch Bloodletter (XLN) 124
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Nightmare's Thirst (M19) 111
1 Plains (M19) 261
1 Epicure of Blood (M19) 95
1 Skymarch Bloodletter (XLN) 124
What's interesting is my script output isn't ruining the formating and Arena seems to accept it just find, no exclamation mark I was having problems with before.
Also of note, the power level of my opponents for this deck seems to be higher than what the normal, unaltered, deck encounters. I rarely encounter Planeswalkers but two decks tonight had them. I also encountered a Merfolk deck. A nasty all black deck that dismantled my hand. A Gates deck. And, surprisingly, two mirror matches.
Wait a minute. Did you say that when you export this modified list that the order you imported them is preserved?! It's not merging the duplicate entries??
Now that I think about it, I can see how it makes sense if they're tracking cards in a collection and simply increment the card count rather than adding a new entry. When you break apart those entries line by line, you're probably creating new elements in the array or collection rather than incrementing that specific element count.
Good grief... I can see many places where the problems can come in.
I tried this but I must be messing something up. When I import my list, it causes the red exclamation to appear. Selecting the deck to edit causes Arena to hang. I have to force close.
It might be cause I initially exported it into a spreadsheet to help speed up the splitting and sorting and something was modified in the translation. I'll try again today after work using just Notepad or SciTE and do the arranging by hand.
If this pans out, it's completely mind blowing as this effectively amounts to weaving the deck. I have to wonder if this is already a well known secret with some players? Especially those opponents that have the unnatural capacity to always hit their curve dead on. If not, it's well known now.
Just guessing from a programming standpoint. Since decks can, and do, change, it doesn't really make sense to sort the list internally when storing it since the only time you're going to want it sorted is during deck building. It's all just a bunch of pointers (references) anyways. It's probably not even a array proper but probably some indexed collection. They might even go so far as a full fledged database back end but that might be a bit much for the client. Whether they choose an array, collection, or a database, it wouldn't really be worthwhile to bother sorting it before storing it. You're going to do all sorts of sorting and shuffling anyways.
Come to think of it, I'm not actually sure if Unity Engine really has a proper array or just masks the collection to make it look like an array.
For those that don't know.
An array is a literal list. Each card has a reference on this list. So if you want to find any particular card, you have to run through the list from top to bottom until you check them all. If you could somehow look directly at RAM, you can easily go from element to element.
A collection behaves more like a bucket or buckets (not exactly but let's keep it simple eh?). The software can just reach in and arbiltrarilly grab X number of references, or sort them any way it wants, of whatever. Notably, many languages can treat collections as arrays but the reverse is usually not true without a lot of extra code. In addition, the element position in RAM isn't always relevant or even matters.
A database is Voodoo Magic, chicken blood and goat sacrifices. It used to involve virgin sacrifices at a volcano but labor laws prevent that now. But I guess for the sake of berevity, we can treat it as a bucket with a special query language that let's us do all sorts of cool things with the data. Some combinations of query engine and storage are better than others.
I do not think the display will ever not sort them no matter what you do with that list. If you want to see if Arena preserves the list, then export the list for the deck you imported. If the card order is preserved then... well... we know that it's preserved. Unfortunately, if the re-exported list is sorted, it doesn't actually prove anything conclusive.
I decided to always mulligan at least once in every game, even if I had a good hand. I still had the default RW deck in my library (I forget the name) and my daily was to play a bunch of RW spells so....
I won 5 out of 7 games. The only losses were against a red Goblin Legion Warboss/Needletooth Raptor deck where I was just overwhelmed with creatures and a Golgari deck that eventually Ultimated.
Notably, except for my Golgari match and a weird Induced Amnesia deck, all of the games felt more normal drawing lands and spells in general. It didn't matter if I kept a difficult 3 mountain hand or a single Plains hand, I drew into my lands roughly when I expected to for that deck.
A Fisher-Yates shuffle can randomize a list in place.
Say we have a deck (list) of 4 cards (slots) numbered 0 - 3.
- starting at slot 0
- select a random slot of 0,1,2 or 3 and swap them with slot 0.
- move to slot 1
- select a random slot of 1,2, or 3 and swap it with slot 1.
- move to slot 2
- select a random slot of 2 or 3 and swap it with slot 2.
- ignore slot 3
The method as you describe creates additional work since the algorithm has to do a lot of shifting around with the source list. The Fisher-Yates shuffle takes advantage (in part) of the fast pointer functions of many CPU's. It's also nice and efficient with low RAM requirements.
Interestingly, the Unity document is using the wrong algorithm. WotC was called out on some time ago for using this bad shuffle algorithm on MTGO back in 2014. If we look past the fact that WotC shouldn't be using this algorithm at all, even if it's just the sample hand feature in question, then I would like to believe that WotC knows better. And this understanding of shuffling algorithms carried over into Arena.
If anything, I suspect the hand shaping is the root of the problem. Which would be why mulliganing "fixes" the problem. No hand shaping is occurring thusly no weighting cards to get those artificial hands.
Of course, without looking at the source code, I could be fantastically and gloriously wrong here.
Edit:
Maybe I misunderstood your post. I just had a thought that there is the possibility that the Devs intentionally did not use Fisher-Yates in order to get the hand shaping they're looking for. In other words, they could be using an algorithm that has a known tendency to clump cards in order to reduce, what they consider, bad hands. Mulliganing doesn't do a poor shuffle on an already poorly shuffled deck but literally uses the correct algorithm. If for no other reason that they are not doing the hand shaping so there's no reason to use the garbage shuffled. This could explain the anecdotal evidence that Arena also tends to grab particular 4-ofs early on. The same algorithm that "pulls" lands towards the top also pulls the 4-ofs.