Fast NPC victory strats for leveling ToT ranks?

Kharnamantic

I found that it takes me an average of 10 minutes to beat the proficient (intermediate) NPCs for the daily. Holy ***, the early game is so mindnumbingly boring (upgrading gold coins and waiting for a good card to appear in the tavern).

At ToT Rank 5, I need 3700 experience points to level up. Beating an intermediate NPC grants me 60 experience points.

So I've calculated that I need basically 10 hours of grinding NPC games to reach the next rank.

I have nothing to prove PvP wise - I've already reached Rubetide rank. Also, I don't like grinding PvP because I've had many people forfeit/abruptly drop the game and I didn't gain XP or rewards. I just want to get to the end of the ToT storyline asap, experience Brahgas's voice acting, and get all the achievements/unlock the new decks. I'm using NPCs to level as a braindead grind task that I can do while listening to podcasts, etc.

Any strats to speed up NPC leveling and NPC games to speed up the leveling process?

Skvysh

AI's pretty bad at using patrons. It will prioritize treasury power first if it has at least one Gold in play, unless Orgnum deck has been selected.

Hlaalu, Crow, Ansei, Rahjin and Red Eagle have pretty easy conditions to activate their powers, requiring either resources or a card.

Perhaps the most efficient strategy is to start a game and wait to see which decks the AI selects - if at least one of their choices isn't on the list - concede and go in again; otherwise - select two other decks from that list. Then it's just a matter of getting all the resources needed to win - one action/agent for Hlaalu, 2 power for Ansei and Red Eagle (power-generating actions work fine, but so do Blackmail and Imprisonment), Crow is basically free and Rahjin can be easily afforded on most turns.

Purchase cards which can be used to use patrons' powers, ignore everything else and make sure to trigger a patron power every turn, if possible. You will usually have 6 turns before AI starts using patrons other than treasury and you can easily close a game in 4-5 turns (~2 mins). If it gets past that point - it's easier to just concede and go in again rather than wait for all those damn animations to play out trying to win the old-fashioned way or hoping to get Tithe/Currency Exchange.

Necrotech_Master

on PC at least they did change the NPC AI around some

even the novice NPCs will regularly use hunding patron, so its not easy to maintain anymore (used to be able to use this early and then get the extra +1 gold per turn helped the early game some

my fastest win against an NPC was about 5 minutes using a patron win as the novice NPCs dont use any patrons except hunding and hlaalu

i dont have a high enough rank yet to play the proficient NPCs yet, although im almost halfway to rank 4 (i have only been playing NPCs, i have no interest in really playing other players, except im sure i will at some point to get the achievements)

Kharnamantic

Ok, I did some experiments with AI deck compositions.

With proficient AI, try to get them to pick Red Eagle (which you won't have unlocked yet). Then you can pick Raven. Even if you can't get a patron victory, you can quickly set up Raven combos with card destruction to win the game via gold and the Raven patron. The AI is really bad with using card destruction to optimize their hand.