Discussion Forum

Love Sample Hand feature, However...

Hi, whilst I love the sample hand feature I do feel it could be improved upon in future.

For example I have a deck of 60 cards with 20 lands. To not pick up any lands in your starting hand I feel is too unlikely for how often it happens even with that ratio. I just get the sense that it doesn't keep true to the actual probabilities of picking up each card. This is a bit of a shame because it would be nice to get a real feel for the typical starting hand of every deck.

I welcome everyone's opinions on it. And i hope there will be a consensus that it could be improved upon. However, I'm not knocking it. It's great it was put there in the first place.

P.S Also if anyone would like to comment on this deck with any helpful suggestions that would be much appreciated. http://www.mtgvault.com/ViewDeck.aspx?DeckID=52730
Posted 19 June 2010 at 16:31

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5 replies

Hmm.. I did a sample a few times on your deck and got a land pretty much most times.

I'm not sure how I can improve on it, as this is how the process works.

1) It finds your deck and all the cards
2) It works out the quantities of each card
3) It gets all the cards and quantities and puts them into a database table, one row for each card. So 4x card = 4 rows.
4) It selects the top 42 (7 at the top, 35 below) card in a random order

Unless anyone is a MS SQL whizz and knows a better way to randomly order, I'm using "ORDER BY NEWID()" :-)

Cheers

Ian
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Posted 21 June 2010 at 08:10

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i've made randomizers in microsoft excel and it's pretty easy with both randint() and sort alphabetically. put the randint() at something like 1-240 and it should be pretty good.

don't know how that will transfer through to SQL, but it's an idea to consider.

and when dealing with larger quantities of things that need to be truely random, 4x the number of the deck seems (to me) like a good number.



The problem I can see is if the current randomizer sets each row as a different number and pulls from there, then the ratio gets destroyed in a deck with only a few different types of lands(of course talking excel here again). I can't tell you how yours runs or even if i'm anywhere close but it's something to think about.
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Posted 21 June 2010 at 08:23

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I just tried drawing from your deck 10 times and didn't manage to pull a hand without a land in it, with the average number being around 2 or 3. :(

Like Ian said if anybody knows a better way of doing it, feel free to let us know! ;)
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Posted 21 June 2010 at 08:24

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I take the whole thing back. The probabilities all check out. My sincerest apologies for starting a redundant thread and for the unnecessary criticism. Sample hand is an awesome feature:)
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Posted 21 June 2010 at 19:05

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It's amazing, it helped me in the preliminary stages after a new deck is made, It helped me decided how my hands will play out, I am considering removing some mana, because I seem to get a lot of mana in most of my hands.
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Posted 22 June 2010 at 23:02

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