THe ideal cost of land destruction is 2.5 mana. This presents problems.

Not in Un-land!

nah, the problem isn't fractional mana. the problem is that the ideal cost for the value and the ideal turn at which that effect should become available aren't aligned. sinkhole is about what the effect should cost, but it presents problems because, despite being a two-mana effect, it's dangerous if you can do it on turn 2. good LD design would be more expensive but with added value that made the cost worthwhile, so you couldn't spam it but you were still getting your mana's worth. the problem is they're viewing it as a 3-4 mana effect because that's the cheapest they want it unfettered, so they aren't adding enough actual juice to make any of it playable.

- I spent an entire FNM season playing my Big Red deck with Chandra, Pyromaster and Pyromancer's Gauntlet, so that I could achieve my lifelong goal of making a Searing Blaze machine. Every time I managed to assemble the combo, I would shout out "LIVING THE DREAM!" and clap my hands like an idiot.

I have never been happier.

- Chet Lemon's baseball card from the 1985 Fleer set is the best token ever made. This is not an opinion. This is an empirically-demonstrable fact.

- If playing Soul Sisters in modern is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

- I think that mana-fixing is way too good, and it hurts the game. I understand the desire to let people play the cards that they want to play, and I understand that color screw is a bad experience, and that it turns people off from the game. But, in competitive play, I honestly believe that the cost for playing anything more than two colors should be significant. And, from a metagame standpoint, I feel like the ease of running three or more color decks has actually reduced the significance of what it once meant to associate certain characters or narrative themes with particular colors, because, if I as a player can just cram whatever Good Stuff I want into my 60, I think that thinking inevitably bleeds over into how I think about color identity.

- I think it's kinda rude to shuffle your opponent's deck at FNM. It's an FNM, for goodness sake -- just cut. If you really think that people are cheating at your FNM, then I would find a different place to play, because those people sound horrible.

I shuffle at FNM, but never because I think my opponents are cheating. If I thought that, I'd call a judge...well, one of the other judges...and investigate. I certainly wouldn't shuffle and thereby destroy any possible evidence of their cheating.

Firstly, I do it because shuffling is a habit I don't want to lose--if I stop shuffling at FNM, I'm going to forget to do it elsewhere when the stakes are higher and it's far more likely to matter.

Secondly, I do it because sometimes my opponents mana weave or pile "shuffle". It's FNM, it happens, and the deck should really be shuffled properly afterwards. Doing it myself means I don't have to sit there and argue with my opponent for ten minutes about how pile counting isn't really shuffling and no, mana weaving is not okay "because it's not stacking the deck, it just stops mana flood" in order to get a properly shuffled deck across the table. I can educate later--right now, I want to play!

Thirdly, I do it because if I don't always shuffle, then in the aforementioned cases of weaving/piling where I should shuffle, doing so both looks and feels like I'm accusing my opponent of something, whereas if I always shuffle regardless, it's just the way I do things, much the same way I'll always go for evens/odds dice rolls to decide who goes first rather than high-number.

I managed to do something similar with Ajani Goldmane and the soul trio.
Popped the walker for the avatar, cast soul's might followed by soul's grace. Ended the match with a titanic soul's fire instead of swinging.

@shuffling: if you riffle shuffle my deck, I will break your fingers.
Mana weaving is fair so long as you shuffle well afterwards. It's not something you should do after every game though.

It's not something you should ever do. If you mana weave, you are either intentionally cheating, or wasting time. It doesn't create a random distribution, it's not a proper shuffling method.
If your casual group really hates mana screws/floods and agrees to mana weave, fine. But it's still cheating, because you are intentionally trying to manipulate your deck.

What exactly counts as mana weaving? I'm always paranoid I'm going to have an opponent call me out on it even though the way I shuffle my cards back together is: 1) gather up all lands, separate into piles of like-lands (basic Swamps, basic Forests, and nonbasics, for example), 2) shuffle those lands together followed by two more shuffles of the entire pile, 3) gather up all nonland cards played that game (in no particular order, though typically I pick up the cards closest to me first) and shuffle into the lands I previously shuffled, then shuffle that pile two more times, 4) shuffle that group of cards into what's left of my deck, repeating shuffle a minimum of three times.

The process sounds long, but it really takes me less than 2 minutes to do.

Also, "pile shuffling" happens a lot at my LGS, but everybody does regular shuffles after that before presenting. Would that still be irksome to you, Grifter? (just curious)

Anything you do to your deck is fair if you shuffle well afterwards. Any true shuffling process will result in a deck whose ending position is not affected in any way by its starting position. If the method someone uses for arranging their deck actually did have an effect on the final state of their library, they'd be guilty of stacking their deck and not shuffling properly.

...why?

After you've played your deck, there is no such thing as a random distribution. Whatever you used will end up in an order you can estimate if you don't shuffle well.

The argument goes:

Mana Weaving works: You cheated
Mana Weaving doesn't work: You wasted time

ergo, don't Mana Weave. Yes, your deck is also non-random after a game, but that is the point of shuffling. Mana Weaving then shuffling just adds another two minutes to the process for absolutely no reason.


Opponents pile shuffling at any level of play is my number one pet peeve. Mostly because it is a war I will never, ever, win, so I've given up trying.

Yes, and? I'm lost on what to take from your statement.

I thought pros did that to count their deck.

Here's the thing. I didn't say do it after every game. I specifically said don't.
But at the start of the night? Yeah, do it and then shuffle well.

Because I don't leave my decks shuffled at the end of the night. If I'm going to work on my deck, I'm not going to want to dig through a shuffled deck.

But if you shuffle well, it doesn't matter whether or not you did it.

If you did it, you did it because you knew you weren't going to shuffle well enough (which is why most people who do it actually do it - they recognize that their shuffles aren't very good at randomization and they'd rather their undershuffled decks err on the side of artificially-distributed than artificially-streaky). Because if you were planning to shuffle well enough, you knew there was no point in doing it.



I'm surprised people here are making a distinction between pile shuffling and mana weaving. They're effectively the same thing. If you pile shuffle from a streaky deck state, you're weaving your streaks across the piles. The eight lands that were bunched together are now in eight separate piles on top of eight nonlands. That's a weave.

It's still a faster way to shuffle than having to shuffle thirty times because I've put all my land in the bottom of the deck after putting it away last time. A giant clump of land being shuffled in such a way is still, theoretically, manipulating the deck. It's just not to an advantage.

No matter how you slice it, a well shuffled deck after mana weaving is going to be better shuffled than a well shuffled deck that had all the lands removed before.

*For erroneous definitions of "well shuffled".

Then maybe I should rephrase that.
It will take less shuffling to get it to be properly random than it would otherwise, therefore... Not wasting time having to shuffle it more to get rid of the artificial distribution of lands.

But no, it won't. It will take you less shuffling to get to a state that you can pass off as plausibly random but actually has the lands more artificially distributed than they should be (which is exactly what you want).

And shuffling all the lands from the bottom won't be artificially distributed?
Yeah, as your opponent, I can see where you'd want that to be equally true.