Today I was playing RT against the following deck:
Blue Sun’s Zenith
Storm the Vault
Talent of the Telepath
Sift
Thousand Year Storm
Oath of Teferi
Rupture Spire
Djinn of Wishes
Muldrotha
Zetalpa
You won’t be very surprised to hear that this deck had beat me back to this position after a few turns:
What is surprising is this: my opponent stopped playing cards and passed the turn. There are no cards in the deck which cannot be played. There are cards that a human player might choose not to play, but the AI doesn’t work like that, does it? Perhaps the AI has some kind of limiting effect which stops it from going infinite?
For the next 3 or 4 turns of the game, my opponent would play a Muldrotha, and I would bounce it back to their hand with a spell or a creature. But still, it didn’t play the other cards in their hand which were full of mana. Even if there was some kind of limiting effect to stop the AI going infinite, why would it now end it’s turn over and over again after playing just a single card?
Eventually I pulled a River’s Rebuke and started to work my way back into the game. With the board clearer, my opponent started playing cards. The first two it played were Oath of Teferi and Thousand Year Storm. These cards must have been in it’s hand already, why did it not play them? A player can’t even choose not to play supports full of mana, can they?
In the end I won the game. Did the AI let me win?
I’ve noticed this happen in games before, usually when the AI is playing some kind of looping combo deck (e.g. with Imminent Doom), but this is the first time I’ve logged the entire deck so I could be 100% sure that the AI wasn’t just locking up it’s hand with spells it can’t cast (e.g. Reclaim)
Has the AI been deliberately nerfed so that it can’t play combo decks properly? We know that it’s already been nerfed in many ways that we can see, it doesn’t always pick the best color move, and it no longer tries to destroy your supports like it used to.