"The DN Shuffler is Broke"

For the record if this is incoherent I'm writing this because I can't sleep. Just something I feel like addressing.

I hear often from people (though it happens less these days, it still occurs) that Dueling Network’s shuffling system is terrible. That it is a poor simulation of real life, where you never get such awful hands, and that is cannot truly simulate the way a human player shuffles.

This is just nonsense, and I’ve thought so for a long while now.

I get bad hands on DN sometimes. I get bad hands in real life sometimes. On the whole, I haven’t noticed that much difference, the weird occurrences where you never draw that one card your deck depends on despite using a ton of draw cards occurs in real life as well. Its just bad luck, the cards being placed in a random order that happens to inconvenience you. Nothing more.

When it happens in reality, people often blame it on themselves for just not shuffling well, or occasionally on the opponent for stacking. It may be true in some cases, but more often than not it’s just the shuffles weren’t favourable, not that they were badly done. Dueling Network it is exactly the same.

Now I suppose that there could be some credibility to the fact that the shuffler doesn’t imitate the way a human shuffles. A human shuffling will often eight-pile or something, in order to deliberately spread out the cards that got clumped together in the previous games. A lot of players find this results in better hands.

Dueling Network obviously eliminates this advantage with its auto-shuffler. I get that it’s not exactly the same, but its certainly not something worth complaining about when you happen to open badly every now and then.

I can never help feeling that complaining that the DN shuffler is truly random rather than only partially random is like complaining that DN is fairer than real life.