A Bad Draw Isn’t The Same As A Bad Spin: How Games Use RNG Differently

Every TCG player has blamed RNG at least once… don’t pretend you haven’t! You start with a perfectly respectable opening hand in Legends of Runeterra, draw into something considerably worse, and spend the next few turns staring at the one card you absolutely did not need.

Or perhaps your Magic: The Gathering deck—lovingly tuned over an embarrassing number of evenings—decides today is the day you’ll draw four lands in a row while your opponent curves out beautifully.

“Blasted RNG,” you mutter, perhaps through slightly gritted teeth.

Fair enough. But randomness isn’t doing what you think it is here.

How come? Because randomness in a card game is not the same as randomness in a slot, or at the roulette wheel or blackjack table. It might determine what arrives in your hand, but unlike this trio of casino classics, it’s not going to determine what happens next.

Keep reading to find out why…

Your Deck Already Messes With The Odds

Before a single Runeterra card gets drawn, you’ve already played fast and loose with its inherent randomness. That’s because you have to build a deck before you play it. It gives you a certain form of agency… heck, you’re studying mana curves, card types, and quantities in deck builders for that very reason. 

A deck stuffed with expensive finishers gives you a very different opening-hand problem from one built around cheap followers and spells. Then comes the mulligan, and now you’re making another probability decision. Keep the boring hand that’s nevertheless an excellent workhorse? Play aggressively for one matchup-defining answer and risk making the rest of the hand worse?

Sure, the actual drawing of your cards is a randomized act, but the environment you build around it absolutely isn’t.

Casino Games Put RNG In Very Different Places

Now we come to casino games, because the gaming community never gets tired of comparing competitive collectible card games with their real money cousins! Which is interesting, because Legends of Runeterra was built for screens from day one. Meanwhile, blackjack, roulette, and slots have all become just as comfortable living inside a browser or mobile app as they are on a physical casino floor.

And that move online makes the differences between them much easier to pick apart.

Today, casino platforms bring several very different formats together under one digital roof; for instance, the SlotsLV casino offers many games, with slots lined up beside poker, roulette, and other table games. Put them side by side, and you get a neat little spectrum showing how much control a player is left with after randomness enters the game.

A conventional slot sits at one end of the spectrum. You choose the wager, press spin, and the RNG resolves the outcome. Once the reels stop, there’s no equivalent of sequencing around the result or finding a smarter line three turns later. The randomness won’t hand you a situation to figure your way out of; it simply ends play.

Blackjack sits at the other end: the card draw is random, but actively playing the game involves making decisions on the cards in your hand. Hit, stand, split, or double; they’re all decisions made after chance has dealt you the problem.

Now, let’s come back to Runeterra, or any other TCG of choice. You’ve built the deck, mulliganed the opening hand, drawn randomly, and then started making decisions with everything the game throws at you. See how it’s a lot more elaborate and gives you the control?

A Card Draw Gives You A Problem, Not A Verdict

The differences become a lot more apparent when you start to look at things through input randomness and output randomness. 

Input randomness happens before any player decisions are made. An obvious example here is the shuffling of a deck. Output randomness is the reverse of that. You make the meaningful input first, then randomness determines the result. And here, a slot spin is the perfect example.

Okay, that’s all well and good, but what difference does any of this make when what you’re trying to do is wear down your mortal enemy’s Nexus?

Quite a lot, actually. In Runeterra, the random draw doesn’t close off the decision tree; it opens one. Maybe you drew removal a turn later than you wanted, but you can still decide whether to spend it now, sacrifice a cheaper follower to buy time, or simply eat some Nexus damage and save the answer for something nastier.

That’s why a bad draw can still produce a good turn. You’re constantly adapting to whatever comes up in the deck, and the strength of your play comes from squeezing value out of that rather than demanding the perfect card every time.

It’s also why experienced TCG players start thinking in probabilities rather than certainties. You know what’s left in your deck. You know what you’ve already drawn. You know what answers your opponent might still be holding. RNG creates the uncertainty, but your knowledge of the game gives you something meaningful to do with it.

A slot spin shifts that so that randomness is in charge – which can be great for moments when you just want to switch off and enjoy a game without having to engage your brain too much. There’s something rather pleasant about letting the reels take control, but there’s no doubt that the feeling is very different.

Eliminating RNG Is Not The Goal

So, having read all that, where do you stand on the whole randomness in Runeterra thing now? It’s kind of essential, right?

From Hearthstone to MTG and yes, even League of Legends itself, if randomness were removed altogether, there’d be no need to adapt on the fly when the game refuses to follow your carefully imagined script. Conversely, if there really were comparable levels of randomness between a casino spinner and your favorite TCG, the game would lose one of its key elements!