At the beginning of this Feat’s video, I walk you through the Double Nickel.
The Double Nickel is a savage cheat. It is an innocuous-looking table shuffle “technique” that will perfectly distribute your deck. I wrote about it in the influential How to Cheat over on the other blog… But I thought it might be practical to show you how someone might go about doing this technique.
Just something to remember:
- The rules ask you to make a good faith attempt to randomize your deck.
- “Table shuffling” is not shuffling – As you can see in the video, it doesn’t randomize your deck, but in the case of the Double Nickel, actually perfectly distributes your lands and spells. Is a perfectly distributed deck desirable? Well, you won’t be manascrewed. But on the other hand, if you do this, you will be scum. Savage, savage, scum.
Okay, what does that have to do with a #FloresRewards Feat of Strength?
As our wall against savagery, we are going to show our civilized selves!
For 15 #FloresRewards…
- Dress Up! Suit up against cheating!
- Holding a Piece of Bread! Any kind of bread counts; for example cupcakes!
Per usual, additional #FloresRewards or prizes may be given out for the best entries.
This week’s winner will receive a set (four copies of) one of the five Scars of Mirrodin dual lands; that is…
- Blackcleave Cliffs, or
- Copperline Gorge, or
- Darkslick Shores, or
- Razorverge Thicket, or
- Seachrome Coast
(There was some confusion around this already this AM (my fault of course!)… Each prize winner will get a set (four lands) of twenty total Scars of Mirrodin dual lands.)
The minimum points threshold for this week’s Feat of Strength is 67 #FloresRewards; though we may do both a drawing and a “best of” for prizes. So do your best!
The rest of the video is us checking out some Fauna Shaman and / or Baneslayer Angel winners, and the announcement of Bighead Joe, Joey Pasco, and Dexter Stevens as winners (which, if you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you already knew).
Don’t forget that at the end of the month, one lucky #FloresRewards participant will topdeck Jace, the Mind Sculptor!
LOVE
MIKE
4 comments ↓
That is actually very very amusing. I always do one pile shuffle of 5 piles (to count out 60…5 are just easier to remember if I lose my place) before I start doing a random amount of riffle shuffles+push/pull shuffles. At States I had an opponent ask me to do another pile shuffle that was not 5 piles…..while I’m in the middle of my 4 or 5th riffle. I was flabbergasted…He explained that he was afraid of cheating…I tried to explain that it is impossible to do a DOUBLE nickel with only one pile shuffle and that I was shufffling after the piles…nonetheless I did another pile with 7 piles. We wound up with a draw (I scooped because a draw put us both out of contention for top 16)…
I applaud him for being alert…but please please please know how things work or just call a judge….especially in a UW mirror
Man, if I had known about this challenge sooner, I could have done it and celebrated International Suit Up day at the same time.
As for the cheating thing, the thing I meant to say before when we briefly talked about it was that because it’s technically possible to achieve the same ‘perfect’ distribution of lands and spells with actual randomization, however unlikely it is. Especially taking into the possibility of small variations even after the double nickel, I think it’d be hard to prove 100% that someone actually pulled savage cheats just based on a single deck check. Sure, you’re only going to call it on someone you particularly suspect has cheated, but given the possibility of a false positive, is there any way to guarantee the guilt of a suspected cheater purely based on the deck check, regardless of other circumstances?
@admin – could you point us in the right direction of a video or article that teaches the ‘right’ way to riffle shuffle and/or randomize a deck?
Hey Mike, no biggie, but my last name is spelled “Pasco” (not “Pasko”), if you feel like fixing it.
~Joey
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