Are randomized cards actually random?

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grilledpineapple

Not sure if this has been asked before, but it seems like I always see a few of the same cards every day or so. For example, I played multiple games today and a majority of them had Familiar. I saw Dungeon and Library a fair amount today, too. It just doesn't seem completely random to me (every card having a 1/n probability of showing up). Can someone explain to me how it works?

kieranmillar

#1
Our brains are very good at finding patterns, even when they do not exist. If you want to claim that the kingdom generation is not sufficiently random, you're going to need to analyze a sample size much larger than one day of games played by one person. Sufficiently random generation will still occasionally display clumped results within a small sample, so your examples still fall within the likelihood of 1/n chance distributed evenly.

Ingix

The card selection is supposed to be completely random in automatch games, subject to the disliked/banned lists of all players. If you create your own table, you can say that one or more card slots have to come from a specified expansion. That will make landscape cards to come more often from that expansion.

That said, completely random means that sometimes you do get one card much more often than you would intuitvely expect. That's what "random" means, you get "unlikely" events from time to time, they are not prohibited, just unlikely, so not occuring that often. And the human mind is very adept at spotting patterns, so you will notice the distributions that you mentioned, and many other similar patterns that, as I said, are bound to come up sometimes.