Welp, people broke the arena shuffler. Or, found exploit, at any rate.

13 land RDW is a legit thing you can do.



I noticed similar things in Duels. I never tested something as ridiculous as 13 lands, but I had a 19 land Rakdos aggro deck that didn't have as much mana issues as it should have. In paper, I would have needed 3-4 more with the same deck. I also suspect Duels favors odd number of lands to even, but it's harder to determine than something super obvious like a 13 land deck working as well or better than a 20+ version.

Duels had a cap on the number of lands I believe (if I remember correctly, you could not run less than 18 and not more than half of your deck size in lands)

That said, if a mollifying algorithm is in place, some 'exploit' like the one listed will be found.

BO1 is experimenting with this things... it was only a matter of time before someone exploited it.
Huey Jensen was up for the challamge and this will have repercussions.

The thing is that this 13 land abomination does not work without LUTS so they may end up just banning that card in BO1.

I don’t think any other deck can work with 13 lands.

I think 13 is the lowest you can go. With 12 it wasn't good

Words cannot adequately describe the mix of rage and relief I am feeling right now.

On the one hand, this is an absolute abomination. They've **** up their game completely.

On the other hand, I've stopped giving WOTC my money already so I don't have to do any soul searching this time around.

?

What does this have to do with the shuffler?

In BO1, the game draws 2 7card hands, and gives you the one with the best distribution. So you basicly have 2 chances to get at least 1 land.

The entire deck tops out @ 3-manacost tops, with multiple other ways to reduce cost or generate mana with the critter. It's designed to only need 1-3 lands through a whole game, to be able to win. And the BO1 method of giving you the best out of 2 hands, makes that possible.

But alright. Sure, let's blame the "shuffler".

In fact, since it's so broken, go make a bunch of decks that curves out with some 5-6 mana drops on top, and run 13 lands in those. See if the "broken" shuffler saves you.

It's an exploit of the shuffler system. That deck literally isn’t playable in paper magic. It's not just opening hands - you can see in CGBs video that his total land draws throughout the games were comperable to a 20 land aggro deck. It was hilarious to see him ending some games with more lands on the field than his opponents with their standard mana bases.

I don't think you can build any old deck that works that well in Arena (RDW right now has a perfect storm of cheap burn spells, cheap card draw, and hastey 1 drops) - but the fact you can build any competive 13 land deck is notable. Maybe doable/passable with WW, mono green with mana dorks, and mono blue - but now that this info is out there, we'll see just how many viable decks people can build thanks to this exploit.

I'm not taking the same ‘arena is fuct’ approach to this as mjack, but this is notable info. Don't believe it's a big fat nothing burger.

One thing I don't understand though: if he's drawing lands, then he's not drawing spells. So the extra spells he got to add to his deck by having 13 lands simply aren't showing up anyway. Is it an advantage to be able to play 13 lands then?

Sometimes you do draw the spells you want. I tested 14 lands with a low curve and it was really running well. Except that mono red isn't that good to be honest. At least not against esper.

Gotta be honest, think i'm #TeamMwuanno here, I think that while the deck is surprisingly good and probably not viable in paper, it's not the most optimum list of RDW it's more just for the novelty of being able to get away with a 13 land deck, and if you lost to this there's about a 95% chance you would've lost to a 18-20 land version that gets to play cards like frenzy, risk factor ect anyway.

BO1 was always gonna run into the problem of linear decks being tier 0 with no sideboard hate, this is just another example of one, if you don't like it BO3 has a "normal" shuffler, and there's lots of ways to play it now, and if you don't like BO3 you don't exactly run into this every game (i play pretty much exclusively the free play option and red is just common, not everywhere)

TL;DR no the sky is not falling.

Oh hey look, people are blaming the shuffler

Arena was **** long before they started messing with statistics.

I am just mad at the fact that a 13 land deck works in standard. AT ALL. I've spent 13 years trying to teach people to play Magic. I'm allowed to be annoyed at **** mana bases by now. It's hard enough to debunk stupid conspiracy **** as is.

We should bunk up

I believe its not just the two seven cards draw -I heard they are up to 3 already- I heard also on LR that the shuffler is also preventing lands pockets or mana starvation by distributing lands
The new mulligan rule seems a good way to prevent non games.

On a side note mjack sounds like the worse teacher ever.

That last post would have made Hakeem happy

I think it's safe to drop the "probably" here. We're not talking about eternal formats where you can pull off manaless dredge or belcher decks - this is a standard legal aggro deck with 13 lands.



I agree with this. But it's hella funny that it's a thing we can do

Well, I've already experienced both land pockets and mana screw that I lost games to. So... conondrum.

Amusingly, if the algorithm gives you a fixed ratio of land to nonland, playing a 44 lands deck could give you a pseudo 36-40 cards deck due to the game drawing lands and nonlands like there were 24 lands in the deck, but qith only 16 possible nonland draws

I remember some suicide black paper decks ran 16 lands and worked (still not 13 though).
The changes made to the muligans and land distribution smoothing are only in non-ranked free play.
CGB put that 13 land deck in an event. So it was playing with the standard 2 hand system. I'd say he just got lucky on that run. He could try again and get terrible draws.

I've said it before, the problem with the shuffler is clumping. With 13 lands the clumps should be smaller and further apart, which is about as far as exploit goes.
Drawing too many lands wouldn't be so annoying if they weren't usually all in a row.