I have started counting cards for quite a while now. For practice I am playing online on a website. I set the deck count = 6.
I have reached a count of +10 multiple times, however is this good enough to bet like half your pot?
I am influenced by the movie 21 and I would bet a lot when the count reached +15 or +16 but in real life I have never reached such a high count.
Where in the count is it profitable to bet a lot of money?
In the question Magic: The Gathering – Are there behavioral rules for sanctioned MTG games? one of the ‘serious violations’ listed is "influencing match outcomes", and a suggested method is ‘using randomness to decide the outcome of the match’. Interestingly, (and probably because of the problem I’m about to point out) this has since been removed from this document’s latest version.
I understand the reason it’s there: if players were allowed to flip a coin to decide who wins and fix the match beforehand, that would be problematic: it could run into gambling laws.
But in the interest of completeness, I’d still like to ask a historical question: Given the rules of the day, could it be possible that this ‘behavior violation’ could come up during the normal course of play if a player decided that using randomness was the best course of action, and did so?
For example, consider a situation in which a player could ‘bluff’ having a counter-card in a combat. Gregory, playing green, attacks with a 2/2 bear into Bob’s 3/3 zombie. Normally, this would be a mistake, but Gregory has several unidentified cards in his hand.
Greg should (to play optimally) bluff some percentage of the time in this situation (the exact amount is some complex game theory I won’t get into in this post). So he could covertly roll a d20 to decide, and do the same thing if he actually does have the buff in hand, but not use the result. (Or use any other method or source of randomness.) He could use the primary colour of the shirt of the player sitting across and to the side of him. Or any other thing that would be really hard to prove. If it is not allowed, then how would one even catch a player using such a covert random method?1
Let’s say that the outcome of this play happens to decide the outcome of the match. If Greg loses his creature, he falls behind and can’t overcome Bob. But the same holds for Bob. If Greg gets in the two damage, that just so happens to be the two points he needs later on in the game. (If Bob was already at two life or below, he would obviously have to block).
1: The reason to do so would be because people are bad at generating true randomness. Using a proxy prevents your opponents from reading a pattern and catching the bluff more often than by pure guess. A pair of sunglasses is also highly recommended.
Does Doubling Cube count as the production source of the mana produced by its ability (meaning that counts as mana produced by an artifact) or does it preserve the production source (meaning it is still be mana produced by a creature, basic land, etc.)?
For example, if I have a Llanowar Elves, a Doubling Cube, and three lands, can I double the mana produced by Llanowar Elves to cast Myr Superion?
Doubling cube has a card ruling that it doesn’t copy the any restrictions on the unspent mana, but in this case, the restriction is on the spending of the mana rather than the mana itself.