Originally posted by Russell Deutsch:
One more thought to add: Philosophically, there is no real reason NOT to do this other than player-based superstition. When it comes to cards' specific locations within the library the program has a consistent philosophical stance of ”random is random“ other than this corner case where preserving the location of a random card becomes important for no practical reason other than to prevent a ”feel-bad" that shouldn't exist and only adds to gameplay insecurity by allowing players' opinions to alter judge call outcomes. (Sorry for the run-on sentence)
I disagree with this assessment. Nowhere in the IPG (that I'm aware of) are we instructed to use a “random is random” line of reasoning when applying a fix. As a practical matter we can note that multiple randomizations of a set are identical to a single randomization (as with
Green sun's zenith, for example), but we only ever shuffle away seen cards when the player who has seen them has no legitimate claim to knowing their location in the library.
The point of having a fix designed to disincentivize abuse is that we don't catch every cheat, and so having the “penalty floor” be in place to mitigate any potential advantage gained. This means that we need to look at what an abuse situation looks like to determine how we want to mitigate it.
For HCE, the abuse case is simple. Having more cards gives more options, so players will be incentivized to commit this error when they want to improve their hands or their choices from a card like
Collected Company. We disincentivize this by ensuring that, when we fix the HCE, the set that gained the extra card is never better than (and is often worse that) it would have been had the extra card not been added to it.
LEC is a risk for abuse when a player is instructed to manipulate some number of cards in their library. The abuse case, then, is when the player looks at the cards they are entitled to see and sees that they are “bad,” so they are incentivized to look at extra cards to try and find “good” ones. It's unlikely for a player to see a “good” card and then decide to look at extra cards, they would risk a penalty in an already favorable situation. Since the abuse case for LEC is when the player is digging for their “good” cards, a judge coming along and shuffling all the “bad” cards away would be to incentivize the abuse, since the player has now gotten twice as many looks for their “good” cards as they were entitled to. We can disincentivize this sort of behavior by preserving the location of the cards the player was entitled to see so that a player doesn't gain extra looks for their “good” cards and is stuck with the “bad” ones they had anyway.
I also want to note that even in HCE cases we never shuffle all the cards away, only the cards that are in excess of what the player was entitled to. This is completely consistent with only shuffling away the extra seen cards from LEC, as opposed to shuffling away all the cards seen in the infraction.