Shuffling the Hand

Hey guys I’m going to start updating regularly now, which probably means shorter posts but more info on the whole. Yay!

This was something that occurred to me a while ago. Each time I draw a card, before I make my next play, I shuffle my hand. Often my opponent, seeing this, will shuffle their hand in response. Occasionally they will spam it, which accomplishes little and is annoying quite frankly. Usually they just won’t shuffle at all unless a card attacks their hand, like Spirit Reaper or Wind-Up Hunter.

This is not really bad play or anything like that, this isn’t really the most important thing to think about. But there is a distinct purpose to shuffling the hand, and I think a lot of the people I face are missing it.

The purpose of shuffling the hand is to give the opponent less information about your plays.

How does this work, you might ask?

Imagine I have two cards in hand. I draw a third for my turn, and then play it immediately; Tour Guide from the Underworld. The opponent activates Solemn Warning, negates and destroys it. I place one card face down and end my turn.

Looks simple enough, right? But I am giving my opponent more information than I need to right there. Since I played the card I drew and I did it pretty fast, it is likely that I do not have anything else of that nature in my hand. Furthermore, since I had the card I just set already in my hand and I didn’t set it earlier, there is a good chance that it is a bluff and he can play aggressively.

I essentially just told my opponent my hand was worthless.

Compare it to this scenario. I draw a card, shuffle my hand, and then play Tour Guide. My opponent, unless he saw my hand earlier, will not know if I drew it that turn. He activates Warning, negates and destroys it. But now he can’t just dismiss the other two cards in my hand as being worthless, so if I then set a card facedown, bluffing Mirror Force, my opponent will have to play around that. If he knew I didn’t draw it that turn, he would be easily able to deduce it wasn’t Mirror Force, as I would have set it sooner.

Overall, this is a small thing, and one that you do not really need to learn. However, the little things like that can mean the difference between a win and a loss on occasion, and remembering to do this after every draw is overall a pretty easy thing to learn.

I should also note that there are three other purposes to shuffling it, but they are less important in my eyes.

The first of these is to bluff. With Veiler, Maxx “C”, and Gorz being what they are, the thought of them can put players off attempting a game-winning play simply because of how much its failure would hurt them.

I’m not really a fan of this though, because it draws the opponent’s attention to the hand, and they may make deductions based on the fact that you are shuffling it. Now I’m not saying that this method doesn’t work; it most certainly does sometimes. But bringing your hand to my attention can just as easily tell me that I’m in the clear to make my game-winning play, as if you had an out you probably wouldn’t shuffle it and draw my attention to it as such.

If you can pull this off, by all means do so. But I see it backfiring as often as it works, so I steer clear of this.

The second of these is to give yourself a new perspective on your hand. This is useful for some people I suppose, I do use this occasionally, but the vast majority of the time I do not need to do this and think the majority of people don’t either. This is far more useful when dueling in real life than on Dueling Network.

The third is entirely unnecessary if you do it after each draw. It is also the one I see most often; when an attack with something like Spirit Reaper is declared, the player shuffles the hand to randomise the discard. Since the hand would be randomised by the shuffle after each draw anyway, this would be essentially meaningless.

Peace guys.