If there's really a hand smoothing system. Then that should be entirely removed and we should deal with real RNG.MTGA should resemble MTG IRL and you can get bad hands IRL, draw lands all game, etc.

The real problem is that MTG card design has been undergoing consistent powercreep at least since the original Zendikar and WotC keeps designing blocks that are too fast. This current block is especially bad given how much it favors aggro and how many easily exploitable combos there are.

Aggro and creature-based decks can win consistently and have answers for everything like Caves of Lore stopping counter spells, all these abilities on creatures that do things you used to have to run other cards for, creatures having too many abilities, etc. Whereas if you're not playing one of those, you get screwed over if you can't draw the cards you need.

Tagging in here, I started building decks with 26+ lands in order to stop the mana ***** of the hand smoother, and I STILL open with and mulligan to 2 land hands a surprising number of times. I should be experiencing 3-5 land hands on the regular but I don't. In real life 23 lands is usually sufficient for the midrange piles I like to build, but on arena it makes the deck completely unplayable.

On the other hand, my limited experience is different. In regular drafts my mana generally is fine. There's more mana *****/flood games than I'd like, but it's not too far off of an expectation for a random sample and I almost always get 4-7 wins, usually 5+. In quick draft though? I routinely get shafted on lands- either I draw all of one color with only spells of the other color, or I never see a third land. I almost never win more than 1 game in a quick draw match, and it is definitely not a skill issue. It is maddening.

I have a deck with 18 lands. It constantly draws 4 by turn 4 or half my draws will be lands. Imagine having 7 lands by turn 7 with an average mana cost of 1.3.
Needless to say in a game that is both competetive and gambling by nature rigging the game in a manor that favors one player over another is illegal and this algorithm diacriminates against certain play styles whether or not that was the intention is irrelevent to the consumer.

Here is something the smoothing defenders rarely consider:

They will say that it's just the difference between IRL shuffling RNG and in-game shuffling RNG. They will say that it only affects your starting hand, but not your draws.

The former is true, but the latter is not. In fact, the latter is mathematically impossible. Magic drawing is drawing without replacement. This means that every card you take out of the deck, like ones for the starting hand, are not replaced within the deck. Thusly, the probabilities change for the cards within the deck.

To me, this is what makes Arena akin to gambling in a casino. They will say that the purpose is to help with player satisfaction, but in all likelihood these slight changes provide a slight advantage to "the house," or Hasbro/Wizards by creating scenarios that would otherwise not happen as often, like mana screwing/flooding.

Also, you don't actually play with individuals within your draft pool. While this is done to some extent to ensure there is continuous play, it means that you are paired up with combinations of cards from card pools that otherwise wouldn't exist.

To me, this is strong evidence that Arena is rigged in the favor of Wizards, and with the money spent on playing, it makes it very much like gambling. I believe the should make the game's coding open source so people can see how much rigging actually goes on.

If hand smoothing is supposed to stop mana flood/***** why is it almost every game has been either usually 2 games flooded followed by 1 game no mana. So I am just curious as to what it exactly does do? It seems like it really does nothing other then give mono colored decks an advantage over multicolored decks, but that couldn't be because that would make your ToS null and void and open the company to law suits and class actions. So please explain why it's either 10+ lands in a row or only 4 lands by turn 12/13. Please do not tell me you have done extensive testing because I can tell you haven't because it fails way to often for that and unless you are matching lands to card color in hand basic logic dictates a mono colored deck will have an advantage , Having been playing this game since beta standard deck construction mono colored decks go lean on mana to make up for castable cards to gain a speed and presence advantage... the control and balancing aspect is slow mana , they can cast often just not enmasse except with hand smoothing because it removes the balancing of the deck. You guys can see the basic stats , look at how many players are exploiting your hand smoothing by running mono colored decks.

I agree 100 percent i feel like its not real mtg with this bs shuffler