Through an experiment, I discovered that TCG ONE is unable to produce a random opening hand for certain decks.
Some background: To troll my friends who were waiting for games, I built a deck with 1 Magikarp, 58 Water Energy, and a Blaziken ex.
It wasn’t until the sixth game I played that I finally took a mulligan. Both my opponent and I took 3 each, and then I took 16 additional mulligans. It was at that point that I realized how peculiar it was that it took me six games until I had a mulligan. After all, a deck with only 1 Basic Pokémon should draw a mulligan 88% of the time. At that point, I decided to conduct an experiment to see how often my Magikarp deck would draw a mulligan. I started 24 additional games. My friend played a normal deck, with several Basic Pokémon, while I played my single Magikarp deck.
These are the results of mulligans from those 24 games:
Game 1: 0 mulligans
Game 2: 0 mulligans
Game 3: 0 mulligans
Game 4: 0 mulligans
Game 5: 0 mulligans
Game 6: 0 mulligans
Game 7: 0 mulligans
Game 8: 0 mulligans
Game 9: 0 mulligans
Game 10: 0 mulligans
Game 11: 0 mulligans
Game 12: 0 mulligans
Game 13: Both take 1 mulligan, Magikarp takes 10 more
Game 14: Both take 1 mulligan, Magikarp takes 11 more
Game 15: 0 mulligans
Game 16: Both take 1 mulligan, Magikarp takes 2 more
Game 17: Both take 1 mulligan, Magikarp takes 6 more
Game 18: Both take 1 mulligan, Magikarp takes 16 more
Game 19: 0 mulligans
Game 20: 0 mulligans
Game 21: 0 mulligans
Game 22: 0 mulligans
Game 23: 0 mulligans
Game 24: 0 mulligans
In all 24 games, the Magikarp deck never took a mulligan unless the opponent’s hand also took a mulligan, in which case Magikarp always took more mulligans than the opponent. Obviously, the odds of the Magikarp deck only taking a mulligan when the opponent does are astronomical—the number can’t even be expressed in the trillions, only in scientific notation. The question we must now answer is what is causing this. Is the bug caused by the deck only playing one Basic Pokémon, or does this bug have farther-reaching implications?
Game starting
Game type: QUICKPLAY
Game format: EX Series
Battle started between JasonKlaczynski and Wames13!
Coin flip result: TAILS
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Turn 1 begins
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