Is This Cheating? Some Help Here Please

So I'm cruising the MTG related blogs the other day and I come across this article on Taw's Blog titled How To Cheat In Casual Magic.  Now I am by no means a cheater, but the blatant way he just put it out there had me fascinated, so I checked it out.  What I found was a little mind boggling.  Not only is the cheat possibly not a cheat, but it seems that everybody else in the world already knew about it.  So now I find myself in a quandry wondering whether this is cheating, or just smart play.




The whole crux of the article is something that is apparently referred to as mana shuffling by some.  Basically its a method whereby you uniformly spread the man through the deck, something like every other card.  According to the article, a normal shuffle results in a a 29.5% chance of failing to get three to five lands in the first ten cards.  That's ho.w the author, apparently a computer programmer, defined success or failure.  He used a Ruby program (please do not ask me what that is because I have no idea - Google it or something) to determine the starting hands.  That's where he got the figure of a 29.5% failure rate.  He also determined that the failure rate after "mana shuffling" was 0%.  He went on to add figures for the failure after one shuffle, two shuffles, and, well, you get the idea.  Even after numerous shuffles the failure rate didn't climb over 17%.


For the raw data you can check out the tables he posted here.


Now I'm not here to argue or discuss the math, its the ethics that have me a little flummoxed.  On a strictly reason based level I feel like its not really cheating, but from a more visceral place I feel like it is.  Apparently there are plenty of people out there who have some very definite ideas about the practice and they weren't shy about saying so.  Here's just a few of the comments that were posted in reply to TAW's article:


"The way I see it, if you have an all round good deck, you shouldn't have to cheat unless your opponent is. If it takes a perfect coincedence for you to win than you're not very good are you. I'm guessing you're the kind of people who plug hundreds of dollars into each deck because they're so desperate to win. Sometimes you don't get mana or too much. If you were smart you'd have a strategy to deal with both. Instead you just load your deck with all the best rares and whine when the mana doesn't go perfectly for you to use them"

"Yeah, I've been doing that instinctively since, like, forever."

"It's called mana shuffling, the first thing i ever learned about the game."

"As defined in the rules, this "mana shuffling" method discussed above is cheating. It will get you banned from tournament play, and good players will reshuffle your deck regardless of your attempt to cheat. Don't do it.   Cheating against your friends is a terrible idea. You should be testing your deck for tournament play. Cheating is pointless."


Uniformly placing your lands in a deck that is otherwise randomized through regular shuffling which would then be shuffled normally when actually playing plus subject to be cut or shuffled by your opponent seems to be relatively benign.  Rationally speaking it seems more like just breaking up all that mana that went back in the deck after the last time you played it.  On the other hand there is something about it that smacks of deck stacking.  As far as cheating?  It seems to be something of a grey area here.


What does all this mean?  It means I've reached the end of this post just as torn as I started.  What do you think of the 'mana shuffling' concept?  Cheat or tool?  Comments are more than welcome, so let me know what your thoughts are.