It’s fairly common to see people who, when putting cards from other zones into the waiting room, put the climaxes on the bottom and the non-climaxes on top. The point of this post, as the title suggests, is to encourage everyone not to do that.
First off, what’s the purpose of doing this? Well, to my knowledge, that comes down to one thing: it’s quite common to want to know how many climaxes are in your or your opponent’s waiting room, and this provides an easy way to check that information: just look at the bottom of the waiting room and see how many climaxes there are. And that can be useful, but I don’t think it’s useful enough to be worth the downsides.
For one thing, while stacking climaxes on the bottom of the waiting room can save time when counting climaxes, it can also add additional time when putting cards into the waiting room. And there’s always the risk that you missed a climax and end up having or giving incorrect information as a result (or having to look through your whole waiting room anyway). So the overall benefit is not necessarily as high as it seems (and it doesn’t seem especially high to begin with).
One potential downside comes not so much from a single case of stacking climaxes on the bottom, but from the fact that it’s become a widespread practice: it makes it easier for cheaters to blend in. Having all the climaxes in a known position at the beginning of shuffling for refresh makes it easier to manipulate that “shuffle” in a way that puts those climaxes in a favorable arrangement in the resulting deck. Of course, the opponent has the option to shuffle the deck afterwards, but not everyone is going to do that. That said, I don’t know whether or to what extent this actually happens, so it’s hard to say how significant this downside is exactly.
But on a related note, even someone who’s not trying to cheat may well end up unintentionally influencing their next deck by doing this. The positions of climaxes within the deck (in absolute terms, and relative to each other) is almost certainly the most impactful aspect of deck order by a large margin, and if they all always start in the same position before refresh, that could easily bleed into making their positions more consistent after refresh. It shouldn’t, of course — that’s what shuffling is meant to prevent — but I’d be hard pressed to believe that everyone always fully randomizes their deck on every refresh. There’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around shuffling, and it’s generally just a complicated subject.
Seven riffle shuffles is often considered enough for a standard deck of 52 playing cards (see this video); that should be basically equivalent to seven mash shuffles for a deck of 50 Weiß Schwarz cards (since the mash shuffle is meant to be a version of the riffle shuffle that doesn’t bend the cards). But for one thing, not everyone is aware of that; and for another, there are cases where you might need more shuffles (see this blog post, for example, and this twitter thread that’s also about stacking climaxes at the bottom of your waiting room). So while, of course, you should be trying to shuffle sufficiently regardless of whether or not you stack climaxes on the bottom of your waiting room, you can’t necessarily be certain that you are. Minimizing the amount of order introduced before refresh helps maximize the chance that you reach a fully randomized state after refresh. (To take an extreme example, if a deck is already fully randomized, then any amount of shuffling is sufficient, since you can’t un-randomize a deck without looking at the cards.)
It’s also very hard to tell if a deck has been only partially randomized; in another video related to the one I linked earlier, there’s a story about how bridge players were consistently shuffling insufficiently, to the point where expert-level players had built expectations that were at odds with the true probabilities, and no one noticed until those probabilities were calculated in the 1980’s. So the upshot is that it’s easy to shuffle insufficiently in a way that affects the game, without realizing it either at the time or in retrospect.
I suppose this blog post has ended up being largely about shuffling, but the point is that I don’t think it’s necessarily enough to say that stacking climaxes at the bottom of your waiting room is fine because you shuffle afterwards. You might not be shuffling sufficiently every time — or even if you are, someone else might see you put your climaxes at the bottom of your waiting room and think it’s a good idea, and they might not be shuffling sufficiently. Naturally, we should all aim to shuffle sufficiently, but that’s hard to guarantee, and so: don’t put your climaxes on the bottom of your waiting room.
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