MTG Duel of the Planeswalkers 2013

[Jonathan Meer]

Oh, wait, suddenly your play-lots-of-crappy-games clusterfuck has finally broken through to me. See, the other day I was overdrawing a metric ton of land cards. But tonight, I was drawing 2-3 lands in the first 20 cards. (for fucking real) But see, between the games where I drew too many and the new games where I drew too few, the average comes out to about 7-8 lands in the first 20 cards, which is perfectly normal. What an ideal system this is, all of my criticisms are now moot. Thanks for teaching me the joys of averages, meer.

This was the post I was replying to when I generated the statistics for the odds of consecutive bad draws (as calculated by the lower bound of <4, which you specified in the above post, and the upper bound of >10. My reference to five consecutive games was not a reference to your earlier post, but rather a suggestion for a typical number of games that might comprise a set.

If your opponent in argumentation says something that appears incorrect, it's generally much more worthwhile to be charitable and ask for clarification. That way, if there's a misunderstanding, you don't come out of it looking worse (particularly if you indulged in ad hominem).

The redone statistics (using that same calculator, which by the way is not difficult to understand and you can use yourself if you're interested) for 25 lands in a deck, drawing 3 or fewer in the first 20 cards (out of 60 total) will only occur 0.28% of the time (or, roughly, 1 in every 390 games). Will it occur? Sure. Will it occur twice in a row? Almost certainly not. Thus, the argument for multiple games in a set to weed out the unfortunate aberrations.

EDIT: Also lolwut at "statistics [don't] matter in any specific instance"?