I will confess up front that I have never been to an official tournament for any CCG.

What I am wondering is if there are any kind of standard shuffling rules. It seems to me that they wouldn't force you to shuffle like you do with playing cards, to avoid bending them. If you just do a standard "under-over" style shuffle it seems like it would be easy to "aim" the shuffle, trying to grip certain cards vs. others, and that would be for someone who does not have much practice in prestidigitation. Are there any rules or safeguards against cheating in this way?

The standard card shuffle of tossing the top few cards at a time from one hand to the other and repeating is common. Mathematically speaking, in a deck of 52 cards, 7 times of this is enough for technical randomization. In 60 cards, I'd say 8 would be sufficient.

I pile shuffle and then do some riffle shuffles.

My riffle shuffles do very little bending of the cards. There are some ways of riffling that make me cringe.


Pile shuffling seems to be the easiest way to get the cards randomized withouth inflicting any damage onto the cards.

Well, i don't see much harm in picking a way of shuffling and stick with it, like ruffle shuffling, or top to bottom/bottom to top, pile shuffle, or even Vegas style shuffling; if you get the job done it's good enough

Also, make sure your opponent shuffles well enough also, if you notice that they don't, either tell them to shuffle again or give their deck a good shuffle.

From UDE Official Tournament Policy

15 Shuffling

To guarantee fairness, each player must ensure that his or her deck is thoroughly randomized before presenting it to an opponent at the start of any game. Players are encouraged to mix several different shuffling methods, such as pile shuffling and riffle shuffling, as they randomize their decks. Once a player thoroughly randomizes his or her deck, he or she must present it to the opponent, and the opponent must shuffle the deck for at least ten seconds to further randomize it. Presenting your deck to your opponent implicitly states that you have thoroughly randomized your deck. Players may not pre-set or sort their decks in any specific order before shuffling. Stacking a deck or illegally manipulating the order of the cards during shuffling is considered cheating.

Players are expected to shuffle quickly. Players are limited to 30 seconds of shuffling during a game and two minutes of shuffling between games.

Players are expected to shuffle carefully. Players must shuffle in a manner such that they cannot see the bottom of the deck while shuffling. Players must ensure that no cards are damaged while shuffling their opponent’s deck.

ok... 2 questions on this... as far as putting your cards in order before shuffling, is it ok to like put them into four piles to make sure that each copy of a card is seperated? kinda like mana shuffling for those familiar with magic... And is the 30 seconds of shuffling per game cummulative? so if i have 4 boris and 4 faces of doom i only get 30 seconds? or do i get 4 minutes of shuffling? (4 minutes spread out of course, through out the game, just 30 seconds per individual shuffle)

Could someone point me to where there are exact procedures regarding the different types of shuffling, or just explain a few to me? I don't know the steps in "pile" and "riffle" shuffling, and I can't really think of more than a couple ways to shuffle, let alone several.

I am a little suprised that someone would suggest using a method of shuffling that involves bending the cards. I have never attempted this. Do these cards handle bending as well as playing cards? It always seemed to me that the stock the cards are printed on is a little thicker than playing cards.

Futhermore, are players required to allow their opponent to shuffle even in mid-game shuffles, or only for the initial shuffle?

Thank you thus far for all of the help.

Well, you can do this, but in all honesty, unless you are cheating, it will not help. It has been proven over and over that "mana weaving" gave no benifit as long as the cards were shuffled propperly afterwords.

Also, you only have 2 minutes to shuffel, I highly doubt you could seperate your deck out and thoughly randomize it in that amount of time.

Everytime an effect asks you to shuffel, you get 30 seconds for that shuffel.

I'd suggest doing a search on Yahoo or Google

I personally do not bend my cards to shuffel. No matter how careful you are, if you bend them to shuffle, they will develope a permanant bend over time.

They way I have been rulling it, the opponant must cut and may shuffel.

Pile shuffling

1 2 3 4

5 6 7

You put a card in pile 1 then pile 2 and so on. So given a 60 card deck, you put 8 cards in each pile=56 cards. I then put a card in pile 1 3 5 7. I then 7 on 6 on 5 on 4 on 3 on 2 on 1.


I then do a couple of very easy bridges(riffle) that don't bend my cards.

Well as VS cards are much stronger then YGO cards, and about equal to MTG cards I would do what I do with my MTG deck, traditonal shuffling (two piles and mix, chances are you will here that clicking sound if your doing it right, that means your not jamming the cards into each other.) If I find I had a bunch of cards with the same Cost I would pile shuffle in sixes like so:

1 2 3
4 5 6

and put 10 cards on each pile, I also reccomend doing this if you play someone using the same card sleves as yours so you know that you didn't mix up anycards.

Furthermore I would reccomend you use the first shuffling method, but with the faces of your cards facing you to make sure that the bend you got from doing it one direction is removed, this is a good idea to do after games, or during casual games.

If your not using sleves I'd stick to pile shuffling so you don't screw up all your cards.

You can not shuffel in a way in which you can see hte cards.

I bridge face down, then I look at the ceiling and bridge face up. :)

Please do not mis-quote me.

With most sleeves you can usually take two halves of the deck and just gently push them together and get just as much randomization as riffle shuffling.

I do a mix of that and randomly pulling out the midle and dropping 3-4 cards from the top of that stack onto the main stack. You can so that 7-8 times in about 30 seconds... Combined with one push together shuffle it should be good enough inbetween rounds...

Though I find pile shuffling gives me the, seemingly, best randomization, so in casual games I do that at least once before I use any deck.

-Mike

When pile shuffling you do not want to use a number of piles that divides evenly into the number of cards in your deck.

6 piles of 10 is bad. Do 7 or 8 piles.

In limited with 30 cards use 4 piles.