Hand-smoothing is good but it should be explained in game

A few weeks ago I posted that handsmoothing ruins the game, without really understanding what handsmoothing was. I’ve since learned some things thanks to this community and a little experimentation and I wanted to share in case it helps someone else.

I was under the impression that hand-smoothing balanced the draws for the entire game. It’s only the opening hand in BO1.

I would draw a solid opening hand then not pick up lands for 7 turns resulting in a loss whenever I was matched with a low curve deck.

I was convinced that because I consistently drew opening hands with 3 lands that my land base was fine. That’s how I learned to determine balance when playing paper magic.

But it turns out the hand-smoothing was making up for the land base being too small.

I played 100 games with the same deck and tracked my draws against different opponents in a spreadsheet, modifying my land base.

When I increased land base from 24 to 26 I won consistently. When I stayed at 24 I won about 40 percent of the time and when I decreased from 24 to 22 I lost consistently. And no matter what, I drew lands in my opening hand. It made no difference what deck my opponent was playing or what their curve was.

A big thank you to the people who explained hand-smoothing in my first post. This has literally been a game changer.

It makes me wonder if wizards should be more transparent about these things, though, since I’ve been playing magic and arena for years and am just now discovering why my play online and on paper have been so different even with the same card pools and rules.

Hand-smoothing might not ruin the game, but it does change how the player experiences playing their deck, and they should probably be aware of it.