I was playing Arena today, I play and enjoy the game A LOT. I mean no disrespect by this post I just would like an explanation.

So I usually just play historic casual matches. But lately (past week or two) Ive been getting into games where the opponent concedes immediately, or they are AFK and the timer forces them to concede. Like 9/10 they would concede before the first card is even played.

So I decided to try ranked, to see if there was less of that going on.

(I play life gain mainly. Its a 60 card custom deck with 24 lands and 36 creatures/artifacts/enchantments)

We start no problems, by mid game we were both at or above 20 life. My opponent plays a “destroy all creatures” sorcery. At this point im thinking “oh well, we both start at 0 again”

Its my turn now and I draw a 1 mana drop creature. Fine. I play it. Mind you there are only 5 plains under my control. (My highest casting card is 3 mana) I pass turn and my opponent draws a bigger creature (4/4 with a bunch of abilities/triggered abilities) fine. Luck of the draw I guess.

Its my turn again and I draw a land. I play it.

Its his turn again and he draws another big creature. Fine. Luck of the draw.

Except. I drew. And im not exaggerating here. 10 consecutive. Back to back lands.

I ended up losing because I couldn’t get any creatures out if my 30 total creatures in the deck. And thats fine, cannot win them all, oh well.

BUT i crunched some numbers and double and triple checked my math. (Even used AI to calculate the same number)

So in a 60 card deck. Containing 24 lands and 36 “other” cards. The probability of me drawing 10 CONSECUTIVE lands is this

0.0000022%.

Gemini (Googles AI) said and I quote “this is an extremely low probability and can almost be categorized as impossible.”

Ive run into this issue multiple times. As have many of you in sure. I know my friends have.

You build a deck. with an outstanding land to creature ratio. And you either end up drawing too much land. Or too many creatures.

And the funny thing is, it usually happens after about 5-6 back to back wins. Its like the more you win, the higher likelihood of your deck being stacked against you.

I did some digging and tried to see if WOTC had made an announcement regarding their random shuffler and how it determines what you draw. And as you could imagine, theres nothing. I understand why, I was just hoping for at least a “yes, our card shuffler is 100% randomized by a RNG.” Or something along those lines from WOTC. But theres nothing. It almost feels like its one of those “ plausible deniability” situations. Like oh, we never said it was random so no harm done.

But its people like me, and possibly people like you who are getting screwed by this. Ive been playing Magic a long time. Tabletop and digital. I know how to optimize decks. In table top. I have a life gain deck (similar to my digital deck) that is almost a 90% win chance. Because I have 4 of each creature/enchantment/artifacts that gain life constantly and consistently. I never have this issue.

I winder if they have a line of code somewhere that stacks the deck against people on a win streak. To keep the other people who may have been losing a bunch, happy.

Which is a very bad way of going about it IMO. People need to learn from why they are losing instead of just giving up. So encourage that! Stop being so stingy with wildcards? Would that help? Let people not have to grind so dang much for a single rare wildcard? To get a card that will improve their experience 10 fold.

This “random shuffler” doesn't seem to be random. Im going to take more data and use a very. Very. Large sample size. Its going to take some time but im willing to put in the work.

Just to be absolutely 100% clear here.

I will be taking notes and taking data in new notebooks and will IN NO WAY use any scripts or code on my computer. Ive read the terms of services and I know thats a big ol no no. So Ill do it on paper and save the data. Im actually looking forward to this because I like investigating things of this nature. More to come.