Splendid Genesis

Splendid Genesis is not an actual real Magic card (not even an "un-card"). Thus it's not legal in any way in any format, because it's not an actual valid card at all.

It was commissioned by Richard Garfield (the creator of Magic the Gathering) to celebrate the birth of his first son. Only 110 copies were created (ie. one printing sheet), and he handed these copies to friends and family. Even though this isn't a real Magic card, it's nevertheless a humongously expensive collector's item. (As far as I know, you might be able to buy one for some tens of thousands of US dollars, if somebody is willing to sell their copy.)

So why am I writing about this non-card? I want to discuss a common phenomenon I have seen surrounding this card. Namely, many players express the desire to try this card in an actual game, because it sounds so fun.

I would posit, however, that this is a rather nonsensical idea for two major reasons: One rules-technical, and another practical.

I consider this a highly interesting card from a psychological perspective. Not because it would be fun or reasonable to play (for the reasons I describe below), but because it so easily fools even experienced players into thinking that it would.

The technical reason why this would be a completely nonsensical card to use in an actual game is that it interacts abysmally poorly with the rules of the game. The rules just don't support the mechanic depicted in the card. If you tried to play this card in an actual game, you would run into tons of rules interaction problems and situations that are just not supported by the rules.

As one, and the most obvious, example, this messes up completely with the notion of the "owner" of a card. There are myriads of rules and other cards that refer to the "owner" of cards, and this would mess up with that quite badly, and raise tons of conflicting situations. The rules of the game simply don't support the notion of the ownership of cards changing mid-game. And, as said, this is just one example.

The practical reason why playing this card is rather nonsensical is that, when you think about it for longer than a few seconds, this actually isn't such a fun idea in an actual game. I mean, this requires three players, and the third player is supposed to... do what, exactly? Just sit there watching the game, and just hope that one of the players happens to draw this card and happens to be able to play it? Chances of this not happening at all are quite high. Personally I would much prefer playing a three-player game from the get-go, rather than have one of the players just sit down there with nothing to do, just waiting for the random chance of joining the game. This card is not so fun in practice, in an actual game. It would be rather boring, in fact (especially for the player chosen to not play from the start.)

And this isn't even going into the fact that even if the card were to be played during a game, it would completely mess up with the deck contents, with each player essentially having random cards from two decks, with no guarantee that they will be playable (eg. because of too few lands, or too few lands of the proper mana colors.) Most likely the game would just become a random mess that screws one of the players, making it completely unfun.

Notice also that all cards are reshuffled into three decks, which effectively means restarting the game (except for life totals), but the card says absolutely nothing about drawing opening hands. In other words, the game is reset and becomes a top-deck mode game.

Some people would still protest and say that they would still like to play this card. The rules problems can be circumvented with house rules invented on the fly. Well, if you want to experience this, you don't need this card, nor do you need to have a third player waiting doing nothing: Just take two decks and shuffle them together and split it into three, and then start the game without opening hands. It will be pretty much the same thing as what this card would do. (And let me assure you that it would not be much fun. I have actually tried "top deck mode" Magic, ie. a game without opening hands, and it was random and boring as heck. And that was with normal constructed decks, not randomized ones.)

But yeah, I find the card interesting for this reason, ie. how easily it fools people into thinking that it would actually work and be fun to play.

Are 7 mash shuffles enough?

An extremely prevalent sentiment among most players is that mash-shuffling is not enough to evenly randomize the deck. They have the strong feeling that cards will not be "separated enough" from each other, and that if, for example (the most common example), they put all their lands on the top of the deck and start mash-shuffling, they will end up with huge clumps of lands, and huge clumps of non-lands (and thus they will either mana-flood or mana-screw). They feel that most certainly 7 mash shuffles (which is the oft-quoted figure) is not even nearly enough. For this reason they will often resort to pile-shuffling to "separate the cards". No matter how they are explained that 7 mash shuffles is indeed enough, and that nothing else is needed, they just can't accept it. They might accept something like 20 or 30 mashes, but certainly not 7.

But I'll try to explain it.

Let's assume that the deck uses decent sleeves (ie. not those cheap transparent thin sleeves intended for double-sleeving that can get sticky and pretty much glue cards together). Let's consider two cards that are adjacent in the deck, and let's examine how their relative separation will behave during mash shuffling.

You'd agree that with one mash, there's roughly speaking an approximately 50% chance that at least one new card will be inserted between them. Question: What are the chances that they will still be adjacent after 7 mash shuffles, on average?

Answer: Approximately 1 in 128, or about 0.8%.

Ok, there's only a very minuscule chance that they will still be adjacent after 7 mash shuffles. But they will still very likely to be very close to each other, right?

No. The thing is, the more separated they are already of each other, the more likely it is that more cards will be inserted between them. If you think about it, you'll realize that, in fact, their distance will, on average, roughly double with each mash shuffle. This means that their separation will grow exponentially with each mash.

What does this mean in practice? On the first mash, their separation will increase on average by 0.5 cards (which is what a 50% chance of a card being inserted between them means). This separation will, on average, double with each mash. Thus their average separation will roughly double the 0.5 seven times, ending up with an average separation of 64 cards. (And this is the average separation between them, not the maximum. The maximum could theoretically be anything.)

Since there is (typically) only 60 cards in the deck, a separation of over that means in practice that the card "wraps around" in the deck, to the other side. In practice this means that it will end up pretty much at a random place within the deck. There's a big chance that the relative order of the two original cards in the deck we were examining will switch (probably somewhere around the 50% figure, which is exactly what should happen.)

Yet, no matter how precisely this is explained, most players will not accept it. They will trust their own intuition more than mathematics. And they will waste everybody's time with useless pile-shuffling, and mash-shuffling dozens of times.