Every now and then, you’ll need to do something ‘randomly’ in Magic. The most common way this’ll come about is by discarding a card randomly, but there’s a few cases where you’ll have to select something to be affected at random (Grip of Chaos, Tyrant of Discord, etc). So what’s the best method?

Many players tend to do ‘random discard’ either by shuffling their hand where they can’t see it and grabbing a card, or just fanning their hand out to let their opponent pick one ‘randomly’. The best method for the hand thing is to shuffle up your hand and fan it out face-down on the table, away from other cards. Grab an appropriate die, assign values to each card, and roll. If you have 3 cards in hand, for example, you could have the leftmost card be 1 and 2, the middle be 3 and 4, and the rightmost be 5 and 6, and just roll a d6. Or if you have 5 cards, roll a d6, with 6 being a reroll. This way it’s truly random. This is also highly advisable if you happen to draw a Miracle as the first card with your Desperate Ravings; this way, you can keep the Miracle revealed but still discard RANDOMLY. There’s also some occasions you’ll need to flip a coin (Mana Crypt is the most common one for me, since I have one in just about every Commander deck I run). You could flip a coin, or you could roll just about any die you have handy; just call ‘evens’ or ‘odds’ rather than ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. There’s 3 even and 3 odd numbers on every d6 I own, so it’s the same odds as heads or tails.

Today’s Tournament Tip written by
Trevor Nunez