This bogus card draw engine!

Community Discussion
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So CLEARLY there are some pretty obvious parameters involved in the RNG of Hearthstones card draw engine. What are they? Which cards follow specific randomization rules and which run EXCEPTIONS to these rules? If you feel like you have experienced a recurring statistical anomaly, Let’s hear it! I have few that I suspect are a lil less than random! The main one that pisses me off is Farsight pulling Farsight an unusually high number of times! Card draw is not PURELY random, I think we can all agree that, it at least follows some patterns to keep certain synergies in tact and to keep back to back match-ups from being redundant.

I feel like its time for Blizzard to come clean and admit that certain RNG parameters do exist and put out an official rule book containing them! As a competitive eSports title Hearthstone demands standardization. Refined logical foundations are paramount to the longevity of any game and if Blizzard/Activision continues to push quarterly gain over annual growth and sustainability even Hearthstone, the best online card game ever, will collapse.

What can be done to fix/balance the card draw engine?
a.] I think there should be and organized draw sequence based on the median mana cost of your cards at the base. This would mean designing ordered randomization patterns [maybe as many as 3 branches] that produces card draws from least to greatest.
b.] I think additional variables could include…
• a “luck” bonus for choosing NOT to mulligan.
• a smaller “luck/synergy” bonus for ending turns quickly
• a slightly higher likelihood of cards from the current set is also fine.

These 2 ideas alone, I think, would revolutionize game play. Outside of this I think the RNG should perform with respect to a standard set of no more than 4 0r 5 seeds. I liked the days of knowing my cards would more or less be drawn with respect to their escalating mana cost. If I build a deck of 20 2drops I don’t wanna pull all my 5, 6, and 7 drops in the 1st 4 turns, that’s bogus! I feel like the “randomizations” that make that type of foolishness possible ARE rigged, the statistical likelihood of such a draw should be rare and not seen in back to back games so often. The ambiguity in these “hidden rules” that create variables to the game’s basic RNG are part of my frustration but the other part is the turn timer but that’s a whole 'nother post! It would be dope if Blizzard put out a RULE BOOK like a REAL competitive card game and list some of these variables!

~ :crown: ShamanKing #1511

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No. No, we can’t all agree on that.

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Confirmation bias coupled with insanity at its finest.

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So you’re saying with relative certainty that no card[s] or sets of cards follow any additional set[s] of probability rules outside of the parameters set and made clear by Blizzard?

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Yeah Imma say no, dog. :wink: I think we tend to notice flukey things (like Far Sight pulling its other copy) so it feels like it’s not random. From all I’ve heard, humans are great at finding patterns—with the result that past a certain point, the more random something is, the less random it feels, because the clustering you’d see in any random set feels artificial to us.

Flip a coin a thousand times and you’ve got a very good chance of seeing a streak of ten heads. And when you hit that streak, you’ll say “Hey! This coin is weighted!”

So if you’re going to tell me the deck isn’t fairly shuffled (and/or random draw pulls aren’t random), I’d need to see some real data.

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EXACTLY, show us the data BLIZZARD! :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: lmao, I’m a casual gamer, I wish my life would be so 1 dimensional that I had time to create tables and graphs to prove the statistical anomalies in my favorite card game!

*If someone with the time would research this interaction for me, I’d be very thankful thoe. HMU and I’ll provide my decklist. The specific interaction I’m curious about is the Farsight into Farsight probability. I have specific deck build centered around 3drops and when I play my 1st Farsight I pull my other Farsight more than any other card in my deck! Obviously this type of interaction reduces the power of Farsight significantly since it only cheats out 1 card at a 3 manna discount instead of 2.

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Again, show us the data or quit trolling.

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On HSReply they show the number of times a card has been played. The Winrate these cards generate when played or mulligan for.

All they need to do is add when the card was played - but why when we all know Zilliax is on turn 5? Or could be if they wanted to. Sometimes they just hold on to Zilliax until 7 - 10 when he is more useful. But he is ready on turn 5.

If they would only show where they were located in the decks most often.

Someone brings up the old question of RNG is funky. Same responses as all the posts ever created before it. By the same people. Give us proof. Blizzard and HSReplay could prove it but that would be that would be bad for business if people knew the truth.

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Got to love the tendency to have back to back taunts every match.

Proud Defender!
Remove it
Play ANOTHER Proud Defender =P and Power Word Shield.

SafeGuard!
Remove it.
Play ANOTHER SAFEGUARD!

Play Hecklebot
Remove it.
Play ANOTHER HECKLEBOT!

Play Rabblebouncer
Remove it
Play ANOTHER RABBLEBOUNCER!

Cheese n Rice WTH RNG. Oh I forgot. Not random.

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Another great example is vs this Priest in Casual.

Two Sunreaver Warmages in under 15 cards.
Two Proud Defenders in under 15 cards.
Zilliax <---------

So much skill required when you know the top 15 cards of you deck.

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Some of these sound like the kind of things people who play very few games would say.

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Hey this one time I was playing a game and the other guy kept playing cards and I didn’t have any good counters to those cards and the RNG must be fixed because that kind of thing wouldn’t just happen :angry:

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Yeah, if we were dealing thirty cards in real life like this RNG deals, we’d be called card cheats for stacking the deck. I’ve had such horrible luck these last two months, that I’m switching to MtG: Arena.

I started out at 15 last month and moved one whole rank for the entire month. So new month, I’m at 18 and have gone backwards to 20, no stars. This RNG sucks!

God, 30 cards and I get doubles on the first draw. Or how about 20 of your cards are 1, 2 and 3 mana. But you draw 5, 6, or higher, get rid of them and get the same number of mana type cards or even higher?

We are talking 30 cards. MtG:Arena has 60 and you get better mulligans from those 60 then we get from just these 30. I truly am sorry for what is turning out to be a rant.

I played 3 hours yesterday with a Paladin deck. Not a meta , but home brew, and I was doing just fine. I got to 17 with two stars. Within 45 minutes I lost 4 games in a row. Everything I did was wiped out in those 4 games. Total games played on Paladin 21. 11 wins 10 losses.

I realize you should play at least 100 games to get a true reading so I won’t give you the win ratio on the high end before the 4 games loss, but you could probably get a close estimate of where it was. Man, it was like the game said, “Oh you’re doing pretty good with that deck, so let me F##K YOU OVER on the next four games!”

If I had 30 real cards of 2 each and shuffled them really well, the chances are I would very, very, very rarely get 2 of the same card in a mulligan. And if I removed those 2 cards they would normally go to the bottom of the deck. So how is it that the next card to replace what I got rid of would be the same card? You would call me a card cheat for dealing from the bottom of the deck!

I don’t care what you think about statistics. I took finite math in college and even with 52 cards the probabilities are still very high to get 4 aces on a 5 card draw within the first deal. It’s not common. But it sure is common with this digital game!

@Slimjim I know what you are talking about. I just tossed up my hands and have decided to do the dailies, collect the gold and go play something that doesn’t exasperate me.

I don’t know if you have the Dungeon Run solo. I have played that with all nine characters. The most is the hunter with 152 boss kills. Yet I can’t get past the 8th boss because it will give me a boss I have no defense against. It says 40 random bosses. well, I beat 7 of 8, but lo and behold, the game says screw you, here’s a boss that you can’t win against. Honestly?

To you other guys who are reading this rant I guess. You know what I’m saying is true. How many of you can’t even get near the higher ranks because of the way the cards are dealt? If millions are playing this, how many of you actually have this happen to you? And let it be said I have enough cards for 5 tier 1 and tier 2 decks. At this moment I deleted everything I have except for Whizzbang. I get better results of that stupid card over the meta decks I had. Talk about a kick in the face there.

Well if nothing else I hope I gave you a few minutes of enjoyable reading :slight_smile:

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We can actually do the math on that. Assuming you have a 3-card opening hand, the odds that you will get three different cards (again, assuming your deck is 15 paired cards):

1 * 28/29 * 26/28 = 728/812 ≈ 90%

So there’s a 10% chance that you’ll have a duplicate in a 3-card hand. (Higher for 4-card, of course—more like 20%.) One in every 10 games. Not “very^3 rarely”, more like “every day”.

Mulliganing a card and getting back its pair? Much less likely, but still—if I mulligan a single card I’ve got a 1/27 chance of getting its pair. If I mulligan two cards, I’ve got a… (counting on toes)… ≈ 15% chance of drawing the twin of one of them. So, again, the sort of thing that happens pretty often.

My advice? Take up a real card game (with actual physical cards) for a bit. Play poker or bridge. Shuffle the cards yourself. You’ll find that sometimes a really truly shuffled deck gives you strings of cards you don’t like and it feels like the game is rigged.

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I have, Crazy Eights, Pinochle, Spades, Poker, Hearts. The list goes on and on. Again, with a physical deck when you remove cards from your hand, the dealer will either put them in a discard pile or remove to the bottom of the deck. They don’t put them on the top.

Ok, your example. I get to go first so I get three cards. Of those three cards two of them are the same card. I remove those two cards because they aren’t what I want at the start. Now because they have been removed, logically they should go to the bottom of the deck. Guess what? I get exactly the same type of card I just got rid of. How so? Did the digital dealer now deal from the bottom of the deck? I should not have gotten a digital replica of the first two like cards in the first place.

If we did this same example with real cards, you and I know those two would have been at the bottom of the deck. No way could a third card of the same type have shown up since there were only two cards of the same type to begin with and they both were at the bottom of the deck. Or so we thought? Crooked dealer?

I don’t know if you’ve played MtG: Arena, but when you mulligan and you only have two of the same in the first draw, it doesn’t pop up a third like card unless you actually have three. Then again I think it’s only 2 of the same except for the land cards which you can have quite a lot of.

So if you are quoting probabilities, then also figure in how a third card of the same type pops back into your hand when it shouldn’t appear since it would normally be on the bottom of the deck.

Or I guess we could say that it really never goes to the bottom because the fragging digital dealer actually reshuffles the entire deck each time a card goes into it. That then tosses your probabilities all over the place.

Consider, I play a card that shuffles 10 of your deck into my deck, plus I have a card that sees me playing that shuffle and also shuffles in another 10 cards. By all rights if it was real cards, they would be at the bottom of the deck. But now we consider that each time we draw a card the dealer shuffles the cards first before dealing the next card.

So considering that notion, they are not statically in place like a real deck would be if it was shuffled one time. They are being shuffled every single turn, would you possibly consider that?

Has Blizzard ever commented on the fact that when they designed this game they told the players this would happen? That the deck would actually be shuffled each and every single turn then hand you a card? So this is actually luck of the draw?

If this is the case, no wonder why you are seeing a lot of complaints about how the deck is being dealt. If I was the dealer in a poker game and shuffled the deck on each turn someone would pull a gun out and shoot my butt! If I remember right most physical card games are shuffle once and that is it.

So Blizzard in their wisdom has figured out how to screw over the majority of players to get them to buy away their life savings. The lucky few who play standard and actually make it to Legend are actually getting lucky card draws.

Go figure! If I’m streaming on Twitch and playing 3 or more hours each day, every day, and this is our sole income we few who watch and sub to them give them a tidy income based on a game that constantly reshuffles the deck every turn, wouldn’t you be a bit upset about how the cards are being done each turn?

Me, I want one shuffle. I want it to stay put. I want to have cards I sent to the deck go to the bottom like it should. And I want the discards to stay where they belong unless I play a card that brings them back. I don’t want my cards to be shuffled every turn so my strategy is now determined by an actual luck of the draw.

I want to play a digital card game that follows the same rules as a regular game of cards would be unless the people who designed this game at least stated that,
when your turn comes up we will actually reshuffle your deck of cards with the intention of making it harder for you to win because your cards will be randomized so bad that you will never know what you actually will get each turn.

Are we in agreement?

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This.
I can see no reason whatsoever that Blizzard would put some sort of logic behind card draw. Why would they? What reason could they possibly have for doing that, all it does is complicate a really simple concept of drawing a random card. It wouldn’t help anyone. It wouldn’t improve the game at all, indeed it would probably make it worse as someone would be able to do this…
However, if you think you can see some sort of pattern, or bias, in card draw, make a deck to take advantage of it, play it for a while, then come back and tell us how well you did.

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On top of which — because they hold tournaments, that pay real money, if they rigged the shuffle this could all come out in court. Why would they do that?

All the evidence in favor seems to boil down to, “there’s no way that other guy would have so many Taunt cards“. And I don’t see a reason why Blizzard would want to rig the deck in their favor.

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Majority of your post is speculating and ranting, rambling based on that speculation. Where I live, we called that shadowboxing (make an imaginary target, attack it), and you’re doing it very hard.

All you need to do is google ‘hearthstone mulligan’ and it will tell you how it works. Don’t know how they do it in other card games, but in HS, it doesn’t put the mulligan-ed cards at the bottom of your deck, but it does set it aside so you won’t draw it again in your mulligan stage. It does however put the initially mulligan-ed cards back on the normal pool when the game starts, so you do have a chance to draw them again on turn 1 and onwards just like any other cards.

As for the card order in deck, what I heard is that the game randomizes it at the start and the order is fixed then. But if some card is shuffled back into the deck, the game will reshuffle the deck and new order is set. I think that’s what BB said.

Whatever hypothesis you had and shadowboxing with it, it doesn’t matter when mulliganed cards are set aside so you won’t redraw it in the mulligan phase. And for card order in deck, it is practically random so this too doesn’t matter when you’re playing the game.

If you want to argue the game is somehow rigged, well, you have data to back that up? What you’re arguing is so much easier to prove than someone claiming there is rigging in MM. Just keep track of what you draw, that’s it. This would’ve been proven by now if there is anything that suggests it. In almost every case, this is their cognitive bias speaking, oh it happened to me couple of times, and I lost that game, so game must be rigged in card draw, but I sure as don’t remember the times when it didn’t happen. Feel free to refute that.

On a side note, I love it when someone agrees or approves of what certain individual says. People who regularly uses this forum already knows that said individual is one of the worst player/deck builder in this forum and illogical in his argument. Then again, birds of a feather do flock together I guess.

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I don’t know where I said it was rigged. You’re stating that the deck is fixed once shuffled unless something is added or withdrawn, then it’s reshuffled. What I described is the draw stage before the 1st turn. If the cards I removed aren’t being put at the bottom of the deck, then they actually are being put back into the deck and reshuffled so when it becomes “fixed” as you stated then those two cards could actually be at the top of the deck and redrawn to finish off the mulligan. Remember this is before the 1st turn, before you actually get your mana crystal.

So, if I was playing poker and I requested from the dealer two cards for say, the 5 of diamonds and the 6 of spades, that I removed from my hand in return for two I wanted from the deck he was dealing, and he took those two cards, put them in the deck and shuffled that deck and I got one of the two back, wouldn’t you be a bit unhappy with the result, especially if you were betting on the game?

I certainly would be pretty upset and say WTF are you doing? Please remember this is before the first bet is placed. So if the deck is “fixed” in place until something is added or removed but is reshuffled when that happens , then in reality the next “top” card could have given you the winning hand but instead got reshuffled. That makes it a big random game then.

If you know your deck and understand what is written on the cards and know what complements them, then all you would need is your deck staying “fixed” you would rely more now on skill since each next card is being drawn from the top. But I as your opponent throws a wrench into the whole thing now by forcing a card back into the deck causing it to be reshuffled.

Well, gosh darn it! That next card you might have received on the next turn that would have crushed me and caused a win, instead ends somewhere in the deck because I reshuffled your deck. But oh we wouldn’t know because we have no idea what the next card would have been anyways. Talk about the randomness of THIS card game.

Here is a article about the randomness versus skill of the player.
compete.kotaku.com/hearthstones-randomness-can-be-tough-for-pros-to-swallo-1823835943 (sorry this stupid format doesn’t want to add links, You’ll have to copy and paste.) Read some of the comments after his article. They are interesting as well.

I never once commented that it was a rigged game. If it was we’d all be up in arms over this. I’m stating as you just mentioned that the deck gets reshuffled far more often then it should. It’s not as fixed as you described.

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Come on, man. I very clearly said how cards that you mulligan-ed are set aside so that you don’t draw them back in your mulligan stage. This was stated by BB, and hence written down in the wiki page. There has not been any occurrence that contradicts this (again, you can draw them on turn 1, just not before).

Not saying this to demean you, but you should put related argument in the same paragraph, and shorten it really. You’re often repeating the same point over and over again.

Your opponent is not the only player that can put cards back into your deck. It is more likely you yourself do it more often through mechanics like recruit (in which case, you pull the card out of your deck and cause it to reshuffle) and other stuff (not gonna actually count all the cards that does this in the current meta).

And, your next draw could be better because your opponent or yourself caused the reshuffle. Oright, you lost that game, so that’s the only data/situation that matters, right? Not the game you might have won because of it. Or, it could’ve influenced nothing to the outcome.

Either way, welcome to card game where draw rng does influence the game (i.e. it’s not just HS).

Sorry, not gonna click kotaku page. And,

You’re just rambling about semantics here. Don’t care what word is used, ‘fixed’, ‘set’, ‘placed in order like a real card deck (before it gets reshuffled)’, whatever. Btw, even paper card games do this. At least in YGO, as there are many tutor cards in the game, you look through your deck, get the card you want (from tutor effect), then reshuffle it so you don’t know the order. In paper card game some people cheat so that cards they want stay on the top. At least in dCCG you don’t have that.

I know that the phrase, ‘see the glass half full, not half empty’, can sound pretentious, but in your case, your mentality of seeing the glass half empty is almost to the point of paranoia. Having bad card draw can suck. But then just be angry about that, not on some HS mulligan rule or the fact of deck being reshuffled by you or your opponent.

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