Took me 4 months to realize I was shuffling my deck wrong

I've been playing deck builders for years, mostly at my buddy Mike's place in Akron, and I always thought a good riffle shuffle was all you needed. But last spring I started noticing my games felt samey, like I kept drawing the same clusters of cards every single time. After about 4 months of frustration, I finally watched a video about mash shuffling with sleeves and realized my riffle was just moving the top and bottom thirds around, not really mixing the middle. The trick was splitting the deck into smaller piles, like 7 or 8 stacks, and then randomly reassembling them before doing any shuffle at all. It took me maybe 20 minutes of practice to get the hang of it, and now my games of Dominion and Star Realms actually feel random. Has anyone else had that moment where you figured out your shuffling was the real problem all along, or do you have a specific method that works better for your favorite deck builder?

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jordan65314d ago

Did you check if your old method was actually predictable in a specific way, like always putting the same card back on top after a few shuffles? I ask because I had a similar thing with my Scythe deck where I swore I was randomizing but every game the first hand had at least one of the same three cards. What exactly made you finally say, "okay, this is broken" and go looking for a fix, was it a specific draw order or just a gut feeling?