I have a general question for the audience, to anyone that might be able to answer. I was giving some thought to some of the decks I have built, and I was curious if there was a good way (or preferably a good program) that could be used to calculate the exact chance of a specific hand being dealt, and in addition to that if there was a good way to calculate the chance of one of several different hands being dealt.

For example, assuming a deck of 50 cards (taken from my Reanimator build), among which are included 3x each of Grimgor, One Orc's Scrap, Innovation, Raise Dead, and Rip Der' 'Eads Off, and 35 other cards, what would be the chances of having a hand that included at least 1 of each? Additionally if I was wanting to check for a different combination (say one hand that had two of innovation and one of the others), and compound the probabilities together to find a general probably of any one of these possible hands from showing up from any number of possible draws?

These odds might be fairly (or at least subjectively) easy to figure out since you are usually only looking for one specific hand or a small subset, but I have a different deck that I was trying to put together and there is probably (at a guess) 4-5 possible ways (combinations of cards) a perfect hand could show up, another 10 or so a good hand could show up, and another 10 or so that a sub optimal but ok hand would show up. I figure this kind of computation would be beyond what I would be able to do myself, or at least beyond what I know how to do. Any math gurus out there able to offer any suggestions. If so, thanks for answering my random curiosity

Easiest way is deckbox.org where you can go to tools -> statistics and then get a starting hand + next 5 cards you would draw.

edit: just saw your sig and I think you are familiar with that site so I can't help you with the math but I guess it's more extensive than just click onto "new hand" and count how often you get your hoped result.

Sounds like a really fun way to play the game.

It was more of an idle curiosity. I just had a thought that what I was looking for is easy to see when I have it in hand, but what is the chances of drawing it in the first place, or if it do not draw it what is the chances a mulligan would look better.

You probably could calculate it somehow the math way, probably heavy stuff.

Easier would be to just generate 100000 hands with a programm and grade them.

The easiest answer is the deckbox solution as it lets some one else run the numbers for you and allows you to simply get a sample of say 1000.

Otherwise as noted the numbers get stupidly long to do. here is a website that can give you the maths to let you do it yourself:

http://www.kibble.net/magic/magic10.php