Cockatrice rant
Online Magic forum
Posted on July 23, 2016, 12:15 a.m. by Wabbbit
I'm posting this partially to ask for legitimate help, but also to vent out some of my frustration. We all know the program Cockatrice, right? Good. Well, I've been playing quite a few games on the newest version that just came out, which is called archivist madness, and I have gotten the most ridiculous mana issues. Like, not normal issue, this wouldn't ever happen with physical cards issues. And no, I'm not the guy that makes this type of post after losing a game or two because of bad draws. I've played probably 100+ games in the past two weeks on Trice, and sooooo many of the games are decided by mana screw/mana flood. As a few examples, I drew 19 lands in a 24 land deck, and that was 19 of only a total 30 card seen that game. The following game with the SAME deck I drew two lands. All game. This type of thing happened multiple other games, but there are a few trends.
The worse instances of mana flood/screw are in locale games, not online ones. Although there are still a high number of games like this even online.
Going into some locale games and drawing some test hands I was able to recreate similar mana flood/screw scenarios. The cards always seem to be stacked, resulting in 9 straight land draws or 9 straight nonland cards on a regular basis. There were some balanced draws thrown in, but the unbalanced draws are just so high that it's unnatural.
I've had some time to cooldown since the frustration started, but it's just hard to stay cool when you own the physical deck and never have any issues, then when I test in Trice it gets mana screwed 70% of the time. Has anyone else experienced these issues on Cockatrice? Or have any insight as to why this might be happening, or what I can do to get my draws back to normal? Any help would be appreciated.
Vicarian says... #2
I think this stems from perhaps a deficient RNG. With that in mind, shuffling a set of cards isn't as random as it could be with a better RNG. The same thing happens in Duels, although not to the apparent frequency you claim. Without going over their code base, it's difficult to tell, but the symptoms are there.
July 23, 2016 1:15 a.m.