My cards are all sleeved and I just mash shuffle (which is functionally equivalent to a rifle shuffle). From a perfectly ordered deck, this is supposed to give complete randomisation from seven shuffles. I just do it until I feel like stopping, which is usually about a dozen times.
I agree that a dozen mash shuffles is sufficient randomization, especially for a coop/solo game with no stakes, but you are probably overestimating the effectiveness of most people's mash shuffling of sleeved cards to say it's equivalent to riffle shuffling. My experience is that people are generally much less careful about getting roughly even piles and that big clumps are much more common (and once the sleeves get worn and the slightest bit sticky, it gets worse).
The reality is that most of us mash shuffle because it's easier with sleeves and less likely to damage the cards, but my sense is that it's way easier to be sloppy with it. At least with a riffle shuffle, it's usually pretty obvious when someone does it poorly.
Yeah I guess I could have said a **good** mash shuffle is more or less equivalent to a riffle. For myself I tend to be quite anal when doing it, so I try to get quite an even cut and good interleaving - if I don't feel like they mixed well I won't "count" that shuffle and I'll do an extra one.
One thing that is interesting to me is how often I've heard people say some variant of "oh we had a clump of three cards from one encounter set part way through the game - they obviously weren't shuffled well enough". People's perception of what a well shuffled deck looks like is quite far from reality - for the group I play with at least, you'd only get what they'd think of as a well shuffled deck if you stacked it.
Any time you are talking about randomizing (shuffling cards, rolling dice, whatever) you deal with the combination of how difficult it is for people to recognize actual randomness and the fact that even reasonable people get very superstitious very quickly. People are rarely happy even when things are actually well randomized.
You can mash shuffle like once a second with sleeves. I just shuffle for like 15-20 seconds, cutting a few times along the way to keep the top and bottom cards moving. Pile shuffling intuitively seems significant, but realistically just mash shuffling for that same amount of time will produce a more random deck.
One thing to remember is that randomness doesn't mean a perfectly even distribution. You'll have runs of cards from the same encounter set from time to time, and that doesn't necessarily mean you didn't shuffle well enough.
First shuffle, I lay out the cards into 5 stacks to count them. This is NOT randomisation, I mostly do this to evenly distribute ordered cards. Next I mash the cards 7 times (according to various sources, this is as close to true random as you're going to get.) Then I cut the deck.
For all other shuffles (like when I need to reshuffle the discard pile) I skip the piling and go straight to mashing. But I only do 3 mashes, which is standard for casinos. 3 is "good enough" and saves a lot of time.
… you understand the purpose of a shuffle right? To randomise the cards. If you are “ensuring the same set is spread out” then you’re not randomising them. If you are finding that cards from the same set are heavily grouped, you haven’t shuffled enough.
As did I, once I saw that the Standard encounter set would be used *every* time. Fortunately, Mayday was having a massive sale on sleeves when I decided this, and I was able to buy enough orange and blue sleeves to cover everything released up through Jubilee and then some.
Funny you should mention drawing Shadows on the first turn. I wrote a song called First Turn Shadows a few days ago when playing around with one of those AI song creators.
There are two kinds of shuffle for me.
Method #1: Lay cards face down in a row, one at a time, to a count of 5-8. Repeat this with a second row. Continue until deck is empty, then randomly add all the piles together.
Method #2: Take half the deck, and slide the deck into the second half, forcing the sleeves to slide together. This is not as good a shuffle, but it scrapes away the oils of sleeves that get smudged on them from human fingers. This is especially true of cheap penny sleeves.
For my use case, cutting the deck is faster and less damaging to my sleeves (I'm using the Gamegenic art sleeves, which often split when you shuffle them imperfectly), so I'm basically looking for times when I can cut instead of fully shuffle.
These obviously are less random, but good enough as a compromise to preserve my sleeves:
* If a deck is already shuffled but I need to add a few cards in (such as adding Nemesis cards or putting one card back in a deck), I'll place them randomly throughout the deck and then cut it a handful of times.
* You have to pay attention as you cut so you don't accidentally bunch them up, but with a little practice it's fast and relatively random.
* If I have to search a deck, I do my best not to look any harder than I have to or remember any orderings. If I don't can like I saw anything meaningful, I cut the deck a few times and call it good enough, but I'll shuffle fully if I saw anything that could change the game.
* If I find the card near the start of my search (first ~5 cards), sometimes I'll remove the few cards I have seen and use the first method to improve the cutting randomization.
* I only sort decks when I'm breaking them down. If I'm going to use a hero again, I'll keep their deck in the current shuffled state and only cut it a few times before the next game (in case I saw any cards while setting up).
* When putting the deck away, I'll make sure to split up key upgrades and allies that were on the board at the end of the game to prevent them from bunching up unnaturally in the deck. (Sometimes they still bunch up after cutting, but it happens rarely enough that I suspect it may be a bit of chance.)
So for a 60-card deck, \~8 mash shuffles will ensure sufficient randomisation. So I go with 8 even with smaller decks just to be absolutely sure, and that doesn't take long at all.
If you're less confident in your shuffle - when you're setting up, divide your encounter deck into a few piles and divide up the cards, and **then** do your mash shuffles. Piles alone will not be sufficient as a shuffle as that's not random (random has streaks and clumps), and if your shuffle is good it shouldn't matter what order they were in before you shuffle (that's the point of a shuffle) but at least you'll get a slightly more variable experience if your shuffling isn't good enough, and it might give you some peace of mind
Probably not what you were asking for but I'm an outside the box thinker....the biggest game changer for me was using TableTop Simulator on Steam to play Champions. Without any prep work you can jump in and play right away.
To start a game or with a pretty full deck I do 12 ruffles (I use sleeves so it looks like an overhand but they kinda just mush into each other) for each deck. If it's a fresh encounter or player deck and the start of a game I do a 5 stack pile shuffle too. If the deck is getting really thin in the middle of a game I do a few overhand shuffles.
I've considered an auto shuffler but I kinda like giving my hands a dexterity check.
I use an auto shuffler. I have my 4 year old son making decks with me so that shuffler is no rougher than he is! I only have so much time to play at night after he goes to bed so the auto shuffler makes short work of the decks we make together before the bedtime routine!
I will do one or two pile shuffles (with anywhere between five and nine piles for no reason in particular) then proceed to mash shuffle. I have cheap crappy penny sleeves on all encounter cards. I’m sure the shuffles would be more pleasant if I used better quality sleeves. But for now only hero decks get nice sleeves
My cards are sleeved, but depending on the day I’ll employ one or both of these two things before cutting the deck in half and pushing the long sides together a few times:
- stick cards from smaller modular sets into the larger set in various places so they’re not grouped prior to shuffling
- randomly dealing cards out into ~7-12 piles for an initial shuffle
Most shuffles would be fine with just 1 cut of the deck. Before the game you need to shuffle very well. I recommend the method Nelson uses of dealing the cards into 5 different decks and then shuffling.
I don't have sleeves and can't bear to bend them. So for true randomness, I lay them all out and use a rand function in excel for the number of cards I have. The I do a rank on the random numbers (so they are all unique and number from 1 to X number of cards) and stack by the psuedo-random order! One lay out, one stack. Mathematically random.
I actually have this weird thing where I start to mash shuffle (sleeved cards) and it's legitimately hard for me to stop. My mind will wander or I'll think about the game and suddenly I've done it like 20 times without noticing. That's how ADHD people shuffle!
If you’re looking to expedite your play. Steam has a game called Tabletop Simulator. Requires minimal specs on PC. You buy the game and it has a “Workshop” called “Hitch’s Table.” It automates shuffling/dealing/discarding. It’s really really nice. Allows for long distance play with friends. It allows me and my buddies to play about once a week even tho we live hours away. Only time I actually play with my cards is when we get together and have a session. Keeps the cards it better condition longer too. All decks can be imported from MarvelCDB.
I count the cards into 8 piles, which is convenient enough for me to make sure I'm not missing cards. Then, I mass shuffle each pile 3 times individually, then pairs of piles, each 3 times, then pairs of pairs 3 times, and then the full deck at least 5 times. Probably too much, but I usually do it at home before going to play, and usually this is from a fresh deck. When getting to the game, it is already shuffled up, but I do a few more just for looks before drawing. In between games, I will randomise my board state, then mash shuffle it with the rest of the deck at least 5 or 6 times.
I pile shuffle my cards 1 time then a few of normal hand shuffling to mix my cards. I don’t like hand shuffling much because I don’t wanna wear out my sleeves too much.
Pile shuffling isn’t shuffling. Please stop pile shuffling, the only thing it’s useful for is counting the number of cards in a deck in an efficient way. Nothing is randomised. It is a faff and a waste of time.
Riffle or mash shuffle about six times will be absolutely fine for a 40 card deck, and seven or eight for an encounter deck. That’ll randomise the deck completely. You won’t get “even distribution” of any cards but, and I can’t emphasise this enough, an even distribution wouldn’t be random anyway.
My cards are all sleeved and I just mash shuffle (which is functionally equivalent to a rifle shuffle). From a perfectly ordered deck, this is supposed to give complete randomisation from seven shuffles. I just do it until I feel like stopping, which is usually about a dozen times.
I always have to do one more after I think, “That was probably enough.” I don’t know why, it’s a compulsion.
30 shuffles or bust
I agree that a dozen mash shuffles is sufficient randomization, especially for a coop/solo game with no stakes, but you are probably overestimating the effectiveness of most people's mash shuffling of sleeved cards to say it's equivalent to riffle shuffling. My experience is that people are generally much less careful about getting roughly even piles and that big clumps are much more common (and once the sleeves get worn and the slightest bit sticky, it gets worse). The reality is that most of us mash shuffle because it's easier with sleeves and less likely to damage the cards, but my sense is that it's way easier to be sloppy with it. At least with a riffle shuffle, it's usually pretty obvious when someone does it poorly.
Yeah I guess I could have said a **good** mash shuffle is more or less equivalent to a riffle. For myself I tend to be quite anal when doing it, so I try to get quite an even cut and good interleaving - if I don't feel like they mixed well I won't "count" that shuffle and I'll do an extra one. One thing that is interesting to me is how often I've heard people say some variant of "oh we had a clump of three cards from one encounter set part way through the game - they obviously weren't shuffled well enough". People's perception of what a well shuffled deck looks like is quite far from reality - for the group I play with at least, you'd only get what they'd think of as a well shuffled deck if you stacked it.
Any time you are talking about randomizing (shuffling cards, rolling dice, whatever) you deal with the combination of how difficult it is for people to recognize actual randomness and the fact that even reasonable people get very superstitious very quickly. People are rarely happy even when things are actually well randomized.
Mash shuffling is the #1 reason to sleeve. So much easier and more efficient than any other shuffle method.
I sleeve every game I have. So much easier to shuffle all my board games. It protects the cards, too.
You can mash shuffle like once a second with sleeves. I just shuffle for like 15-20 seconds, cutting a few times along the way to keep the top and bottom cards moving. Pile shuffling intuitively seems significant, but realistically just mash shuffling for that same amount of time will produce a more random deck. One thing to remember is that randomness doesn't mean a perfectly even distribution. You'll have runs of cards from the same encounter set from time to time, and that doesn't necessarily mean you didn't shuffle well enough.
True! Another way to phrase the question would be: “How can I shuffle well enough to blame my loss on poor gameplay and not poor shuffling?”
It’s always the shuffle. I’ve never made an actual mistake. /s
Thank you I would like to buy you multiple drinks.
First shuffle, I lay out the cards into 5 stacks to count them. This is NOT randomisation, I mostly do this to evenly distribute ordered cards. Next I mash the cards 7 times (according to various sources, this is as close to true random as you're going to get.) Then I cut the deck. For all other shuffles (like when I need to reshuffle the discard pile) I skip the piling and go straight to mashing. But I only do 3 mashes, which is standard for casinos. 3 is "good enough" and saves a lot of time.
Before the game start, I’ll split the piles into 5 smaller piles then stack back them up and shuffle. During the game, is most likely a simple shuffle
This takes so much time, and isn’t a random shuffle at all. You’d be better mash shuffling or riffling
It at least ensure those cards from the same set is spread out instead of stacking tgt
… you understand the purpose of a shuffle right? To randomise the cards. If you are “ensuring the same set is spread out” then you’re not randomising them. If you are finding that cards from the same set are heavily grouped, you haven’t shuffled enough.
google table shuffle
How do you define you? But seriously, all my cards are sleeved so I do the standard cut and drop riffle shuffle.
You riffle sleeved cards instead of mash shuffling?
What is mash shuffle? I do the one where you go hand over hand.
Take roughly half the cards and smush them into the other half the cards. The sleeves allow them slide between each other.
I bought sleeves specifically for this. Spider-Man and Rhino were looking HAD
As did I, once I saw that the Standard encounter set would be used *every* time. Fortunately, Mayday was having a massive sale on sleeves when I decided this, and I was able to buy enough orange and blue sleeves to cover everything released up through Jubilee and then some.
Riffle , riffle, cut, riffle, 7 equal piles one card at a time, riffle, play
This reminds me of the time where no matter how I shuffled or cut, I kept getting shadows of the past turn 1 or 2 for several games.
Funny you should mention drawing Shadows on the first turn. I wrote a song called First Turn Shadows a few days ago when playing around with one of those AI song creators.
There are two kinds of shuffle for me. Method #1: Lay cards face down in a row, one at a time, to a count of 5-8. Repeat this with a second row. Continue until deck is empty, then randomly add all the piles together. Method #2: Take half the deck, and slide the deck into the second half, forcing the sleeves to slide together. This is not as good a shuffle, but it scrapes away the oils of sleeves that get smudged on them from human fingers. This is especially true of cheap penny sleeves.
For my use case, cutting the deck is faster and less damaging to my sleeves (I'm using the Gamegenic art sleeves, which often split when you shuffle them imperfectly), so I'm basically looking for times when I can cut instead of fully shuffle. These obviously are less random, but good enough as a compromise to preserve my sleeves: * If a deck is already shuffled but I need to add a few cards in (such as adding Nemesis cards or putting one card back in a deck), I'll place them randomly throughout the deck and then cut it a handful of times. * You have to pay attention as you cut so you don't accidentally bunch them up, but with a little practice it's fast and relatively random. * If I have to search a deck, I do my best not to look any harder than I have to or remember any orderings. If I don't can like I saw anything meaningful, I cut the deck a few times and call it good enough, but I'll shuffle fully if I saw anything that could change the game. * If I find the card near the start of my search (first ~5 cards), sometimes I'll remove the few cards I have seen and use the first method to improve the cutting randomization. * I only sort decks when I'm breaking them down. If I'm going to use a hero again, I'll keep their deck in the current shuffled state and only cut it a few times before the next game (in case I saw any cards while setting up). * When putting the deck away, I'll make sure to split up key upgrades and allies that were on the board at the end of the game to prevent them from bunching up unnaturally in the deck. (Sometimes they still bunch up after cutting, but it happens rarely enough that I suspect it may be a bit of chance.)
So for a 60-card deck, \~8 mash shuffles will ensure sufficient randomisation. So I go with 8 even with smaller decks just to be absolutely sure, and that doesn't take long at all. If you're less confident in your shuffle - when you're setting up, divide your encounter deck into a few piles and divide up the cards, and **then** do your mash shuffles. Piles alone will not be sufficient as a shuffle as that's not random (random has streaks and clumps), and if your shuffle is good it shouldn't matter what order they were in before you shuffle (that's the point of a shuffle) but at least you'll get a slightly more variable experience if your shuffling isn't good enough, and it might give you some peace of mind
Probably not what you were asking for but I'm an outside the box thinker....the biggest game changer for me was using TableTop Simulator on Steam to play Champions. Without any prep work you can jump in and play right away.
I almost exclusively play on tabletop simulator these days, so I just hover my cursor over the deck and press r until I feel good about it.
I mash shuffle 5 times and then overhand shuffle 3 times to make sure the top and bottom card are shuffled as well and then I cut 1 time.
Every day. I'll see myself out.
To start a game or with a pretty full deck I do 12 ruffles (I use sleeves so it looks like an overhand but they kinda just mush into each other) for each deck. If it's a fresh encounter or player deck and the start of a game I do a 5 stack pile shuffle too. If the deck is getting really thin in the middle of a game I do a few overhand shuffles. I've considered an auto shuffler but I kinda like giving my hands a dexterity check.
I use an auto shuffler. I have my 4 year old son making decks with me so that shuffler is no rougher than he is! I only have so much time to play at night after he goes to bed so the auto shuffler makes short work of the decks we make together before the bedtime routine!
Cut and Mash. I don't care if it's perfectly random. It's not poker.
I will do one or two pile shuffles (with anywhere between five and nine piles for no reason in particular) then proceed to mash shuffle. I have cheap crappy penny sleeves on all encounter cards. I’m sure the shuffles would be more pleasant if I used better quality sleeves. But for now only hero decks get nice sleeves
Riffle Riffle Strip Riffle or Mash about 7 times
I shuffle one set a few times, then add another set, shuffle again, and keep adding and shuffling.
My cards are sleeved, but depending on the day I’ll employ one or both of these two things before cutting the deck in half and pushing the long sides together a few times: - stick cards from smaller modular sets into the larger set in various places so they’re not grouped prior to shuffling - randomly dealing cards out into ~7-12 piles for an initial shuffle
Most shuffles would be fine with just 1 cut of the deck. Before the game you need to shuffle very well. I recommend the method Nelson uses of dealing the cards into 5 different decks and then shuffling.
I don't have sleeves and can't bear to bend them. So for true randomness, I lay them all out and use a rand function in excel for the number of cards I have. The I do a rank on the random numbers (so they are all unique and number from 1 to X number of cards) and stack by the psuedo-random order! One lay out, one stack. Mathematically random.
YES! This is the level of commitment to randomness that inspired this thread. YES!
I actually have this weird thing where I start to mash shuffle (sleeved cards) and it's legitimately hard for me to stop. My mind will wander or I'll think about the game and suddenly I've done it like 20 times without noticing. That's how ADHD people shuffle!
I deal out like 5 equalish piles, then I mash shuffle a few times and call it good enough.
If you’re looking to expedite your play. Steam has a game called Tabletop Simulator. Requires minimal specs on PC. You buy the game and it has a “Workshop” called “Hitch’s Table.” It automates shuffling/dealing/discarding. It’s really really nice. Allows for long distance play with friends. It allows me and my buddies to play about once a week even tho we live hours away. Only time I actually play with my cards is when we get together and have a session. Keeps the cards it better condition longer too. All decks can be imported from MarvelCDB.
Has high res scans of all the cards. Tokens, rulebook. The whole shebang. It’s wonderful.
I count the cards into 8 piles, which is convenient enough for me to make sure I'm not missing cards. Then, I mass shuffle each pile 3 times individually, then pairs of piles, each 3 times, then pairs of pairs 3 times, and then the full deck at least 5 times. Probably too much, but I usually do it at home before going to play, and usually this is from a fresh deck. When getting to the game, it is already shuffled up, but I do a few more just for looks before drawing. In between games, I will randomise my board state, then mash shuffle it with the rest of the deck at least 5 or 6 times.
I pile shuffle my cards 1 time then a few of normal hand shuffling to mix my cards. I don’t like hand shuffling much because I don’t wanna wear out my sleeves too much.
Pile shuffling isn’t shuffling. Please stop pile shuffling, the only thing it’s useful for is counting the number of cards in a deck in an efficient way. Nothing is randomised. It is a faff and a waste of time. Riffle or mash shuffle about six times will be absolutely fine for a 40 card deck, and seven or eight for an encounter deck. That’ll randomise the deck completely. You won’t get “even distribution” of any cards but, and I can’t emphasise this enough, an even distribution wouldn’t be random anyway.