>>32981139>It's also worth stating that it's been discussed on judges forums before, and a deck shuffle in-tournament doesn't necessarily need to split up and completely rearrange the entire deck, it's sufficient to make it so that neither player knows what the next few cards will be, or where in the deck any given card whose position was previously known is at now.This mentality had been abused before in competitive M:tG, and I would be a little disappointed if there was a safeguard against it being abused in PTCG.
When you play a deck that needs to draw at least one of two pieces of a combo. Let's say you need piece A and piece B to get an easy win. Drawing one of the pieces is not good enough. The way you exploit "neither player knows what the next few cards will be" randomization is you shuffle the deck normally, but after shuffling, you put every B card adjacent to an A card in order to make pairs, you then move the pairs to be about 13 cards away from each other.
Next, you need to perform a farrow shuffle, which basically means you riffle so that you interlace the cards as perfectly as possible. For every time you farrow shuffle, the maximum distance you can separate a pair is one card. So let's say you farrow shuffle ten times. Ten riffles is generally very good randomization without slight of hand. While this means your opening hand of 7+1 still has a significant chance of NOT hitting the combo, ten cards is the MAXIMUM distance the cards are going to be from each other. They are far more likely to be close together.
The player who does this has stacked their deck in their own favor, but if you asked them what the top few cards of their library were, they couldn't tell you accurately.
Any standard of shuffling that isn't sufficient randomization encourages cheating, even if you use simple metrics to determine if a shuffle is good enough. Intuitively, if a player gets caught doing this kind of chicanery a judge is hopefully going to wring them out.
