Some games come with gigantic stacks of cards that I find hard to mix with card-friendly methods. Games like Ark Nova, Clank, Hogwarts Battle have unmanageable decks but I hate bending the cards.
Whats the best way?
A good way to shuffle large decks in my opinion is to get some sleeves an den learn to Mash Shuffle. Here is a video about this on YouTube. Depending on the form factor of your cards it may be tricky to get fitting sleeves, but if you do it’s very much a game changer.
Normally when I’m struggling with a big deck I ask a friend to help out. It can get overwhelming handling all these big decks and your arm definitely can get sore.
With nice stiff sleeves, I cut the deck into manageable sizes, then push the bottom corner of one stack into the middle of another stack until they’re riffled with each other.
I do that until every stack is paired with another, then cut the stacks and mash them into an unpaired stack.
Keep doing this until all the stacks have cards from every other original stack in them, then get somebody else to stack the stacks in whatever order they want.
Sometimes I also just leave the deck in multiple stacks (as you mentioned, Ark Nova’s deck is huge, TM as well, and with sleeves can be impossible to stack high) and let people take the top card from either stack. Obviously if the top card of the deck can be manipulated then you need a rule for what happens in that case.
Table-riffle, split into smaller decks if needed. Easy to learn and not too bad on the cards since you bend them much less than you’d with a regular riffle.
I enjoyed watching this video about how the pros do it.
For Ark Nova before we place the board we do something like this
We did two games with a new ark nova and the cards were not random enough. We reshuffled again and are on a third game and it appears a bit better. I guess with time it will improve.
I usually sleeve the cards on card heavy games, so regular shuffling doesn’t work for me. Usually, I will give some cards to another player or two and we will all do some shuffling of those cards, then hand some of the cards from our pile to someone else, while taking some of their cards and shuffling them into the group I kept.
Doing this allows for the shuffling to be divided by a few people, making the amount of cards being shuffled by each individual more manageable. It also helps to get the other players involved in set up, which can keep them from being bored.
Shuffle them in smaller stacks then cut each and stack them differently and shuffle again. Repeat a few times.
I usually “deal” the cards face down in 6 different piles and then stack them together again, and repeat the process two or three times
This, but I vary the number of piles between shuffles as well.
In TCG tournaments you usually do this with 5 or 7 stacks of cards to shuffle your cards.
A deck for the Commander (EDH) version of Magic is 99 cards; usually sleeved. With good-quality card sleeves, “mash shuffling” usually works pretty well: split the deck in halves and just kinda push them together edge-to-edge, using the shape of the sleeves to help.
cut the deck into manageable stacks.
shuffle the stacks.
cut each stack, and mix the other half with a different stack.
reshuffle each new stack
reassemble the stacks into a complete deck.
repeat as desired.
