The Best Way to Shuffle Cubes (Fast and Truly Random)
Table of Contents
This post helps MTG Cube owners choose a shuffling method that’s fast and actually randomizes the whole cube, so draft packs don’t accidentally contain “chunks” of last week’s decks.
TLDR
- Most “everyone grab a pile and shuffle” cube nights feel random, but can leave big clumps intact unless you remix piles frequently.
- The biggest upgrade is structure: mix piles early and often instead of doing lots of shuffles on the same stack.
- If you want the best speed-to-randomness ratio, use the Broadcast Shuffle (4 piles, 3 shuffles, then redistribute each pile evenly into all new piles, repeat 3–4 times).
- Weird packs still happen in truly random systems. That’s not a broken shuffler, that’s probability doing probability things.
If you’ve played Cube for more than five minutes, you’ve heard two questions on repeat: “How many basics do I need?” and “How do I even begin shuffling this thing?”
Shuffling a single 60-card deck is easy. Shuffling a 360–720 card Cube is a different animal because you’re forced to shuffle it in chunks, and then you have to make those chunks actually interact so you don’t deal “mini-decks” into packs. That’s the real failure mode: not that the cards weren’t riffled, but that the cube wasn’t remixed.
And when somebody opens a pack that looks like half of a mono-red deck, the table verdict is immediate: the shuffler is broken.
Sometimes it is. Just not in the way people mean.
What “not shuffled enough” actually looks like
A cube usually starts in a highly ordered state: sorted by color, sorted by type, or (most dangerously) still grouped as last draft’s decks. When you shuffle “locally” (riffle a pile over and over) without mixing that pile into the rest of the cube, you get a cube that’s shuffled inside each pile but still structured between piles.
That structure shows up as:
- color clumps
- repeated archetype pockets
- noticeable bands of “cards that were neighbors a moment ago”
The goal is not “each pile got riffled a lot.” The goal is “every part of the cube got to collide with every other part of the cube.”
Why casual cube shuffling underperforms
The classic method is social and well-intentioned: everybody grabs a stack, mash shuffles it, and occasionally swaps half a pile with someone else. Call it Casual Chaos.
The problem is simple: exchanges are too rare and shuffling the same pile has diminishing returns.
After a few good mashes, your pile is basically random relative to itself. More mashes don’t magically make it more mixed with the rest of the cube. If your starting condition includes “this stack is last week’s Azorius Blink deck,” that deck can stay suspiciously together for longer than anyone wants to admit.
Worse, Casual Chaos is unpredictable. Nobody can confidently answer “are we done yet?” without either:
- starting the draft too soon, or
- wasting another 10 minutes “just to be safe”
A big improvement: Pass-Left shuffling
If the main problem is piles staying isolated, the intuitive fix is structure: shuffle a little, then pass.
Pass-Left is exactly that. Everyone shuffles their stack a small number of times, then passes a chunk of it to the left, repeat.
Two counterintuitive lessons make Pass-Left much better than Casual Chaos:
- Fewer shuffles before passing is better. Around ~2–3 mashes is plenty. More is mostly wasted time.
- Fewer piles is better. More piles means more time before any given card has had a chance to meet the rest of the cube.
So yes, it can be “more efficient” to have fewer people shuffling bigger stacks, even if it feels rude to leave hands idle. (Give those idle hands token sorting duty. Or snack duty. That’s real value.)
Pass-Left is solid because it’s easy to teach and it’s consistent. The downside is speed: diffusion around a circle is slow. Cards migrate gradually, and it can take a lot of iterations before the cube looks like uniform noise.
A clever tweak: Hop, Skip, Jump passing
One simple way to speed up Pass-Left is to pass farther than one seat.
A popular structured variant is:
- Pass half one seat left
- Pass half two seats left
- Pass half four seats left
…shuffling a little between each
This reduces the “slow crawl around the table” problem by forcing distant mixing earlier. It’s a nice middle ground when you have a group helping and you want a method that still feels explainable.
The best method: The Broadcast Shuffle
If your goal is maximum mixing per minute, you want every pile to feed into every other pile each iteration, not just one neighbor.
That’s the Broadcast Shuffle idea: after a small amount of shuffling, you redistribute each pile evenly across all new piles (including itself). This creates fast, global mixing. It’s the difference between “walk around the table” and “teleport everywhere at once.”
The Broadcast Shuffle (practical version)
Use 4 piles if you can. Fewer piles makes remixing dramatically faster.
- Split the cube into 4 roughly equal stacks
- Shuffle each stack 3 mash/riffles
- Broadcast: deal each stack into 4 new stacks by cycling one card at a time (or small packets), so every new stack gets about 25% from each old stack
- Repeat steps 2–3 for 3–4 total rounds
That’s it. The shuffling isn’t “more intense,” it’s just “more connected.”
If you want one iconic Cube card to think about while you do it, it’s this energy: take a known resource and multiply its reach.
: Add 
.And breezes kiss where Eirdu lies."
—Verselet of Lorwyn
Quick comparison table
| Method | What you do | What it’s good at | Where it fails | Best use case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Casual Chaos | Everyone shuffles a pile, occasional random swaps | Easy, social | Piles stay isolated; unpredictable; clumps survive | Already-mixed cubes, low stakes, casual nights |
| Pass-Left | Shuffle a little, pass a chunk left, repeat | Consistent; easy to explain | Takes many iterations to fully mix | Groups who want “simple rules” over pure speed |
| Hop/Skip/Jump | Pass farther each round | Faster global mixing than Pass-Left | Still coordination-heavy | 6–10 players willing to follow a script |
| Broadcast Shuffle | Shuffle 4 piles, then redistribute each pile into all piles | Fastest true mixing | Slightly more “procedure” | Hosts who want reliable randomness fast |
The “shuffler is broken” feeling (and why it persists)
Even when you shuffle perfectly, randomness is weird. True random sequences naturally contain:
- streaks
- clumps
- “how is it possible I saw that again?” moments
A totally random cube will still produce the occasional pack that leans heavily one color or feels like a little archetype pocket. That doesn’t mean you failed. It means you succeeded at producing an outcome that isn’t “human-random” (which usually tries to look evenly distributed).
The real red flag isn’t “a weird pack exists.” The red flag is repeatable patterns: the same chunks showing up draft after draft, or decks from last week reappearing as recognizable clusters. That’s usually a remixing problem, not a riffle problem.
A simple checklist you can actually use on draft night
- Start from worst-case assumptions: last week’s decks are still clumped somewhere.
- Favor remixing over over-shuffling: 2–3 shuffles, then mix piles.
- Use fewer piles if possible: 4 piles beats 8 piles for total mixing speed.
- Pick a method you can execute consistently: “slightly less optimal but actually followed” beats “optimal but chaos.”
FAQs
How many times should I mash shuffle each pile?
About 2–3 good mashes per pile per round is the sweet spot. Past that you get diminishing returns. The bigger win is mixing piles again.
Is one person shuffling alone really okay?
Yes, if they use a structured method like Broadcast Shuffle. One person doing fast, consistent remixing can beat a table full of people casually shuffling isolated stacks.
Do I need to fully shuffle the entire cube every time?
If your cube gets fully drafted and then recombined, you should assume it needs a real shuffle again. If you store it randomized and only draft part of it, you can often get away with less.
Why do I still see clumps after “good” shuffling?
Because true randomness produces clumps sometimes. Look for repeated, recognizable chunks across drafts, not a single weird pack.
What if my group refuses anything complicated?
Use Pass-Left, but keep it tight: shuffle a little, pass often, and consider using fewer piles (even if that means fewer people shuffling).