The Shuffle in NPC Games is Insulting

El_Borracho

Had one today that absolutely infuriated me. Patrons were Pelin, Ansei, Rajhin, and Druid. NPC is P1, draws 4 coin cards and one Fortify. Cashed a coin for a 2 coin card, used the remaining 2 coins to buy Harvest Season, which resulted in one more coin card, end of turn. Harvest Season gets replaced by The Armory and I am thrilled as the chances of getting 6 coins is pretty good. I get 4 coin cards and Fortify, so 5 coins. I cash a card and end my turn. Lo and behold, the NPC gets a shuffle because he only has 4 to start and gets 4 coin card and the 2 coin card for 6. Sigh.

The shuffle has been a running joke for a while, but I think with Gold Road it has become obnoxious. At this point, if the NPC gets a card like Archer's Volley, Customs Seizure, or Pool of Shadow early, you will see that card 3 out of every 4 hands as it seems to rise to the top with every shuffle. Conversely, if you get the same card, or something better, like The Armory, March on Hlaalu, or Squawking Oratory, you are lucky if you see that card more than once in the same 4 hands.

As if that is not enough, the NPC seems to stick their starter cards with the combo cards, especially Crow and Mora, without any thinning of their deck. Whereas if you get multiple Crow, Rajhin, Druid, etc. cards, they seem to be equally dispersed through your deck until you thin your deck. Its got to the point that I will check the NPC's deck and hand before every turn just to see what they have, then check it again to see what was left behind. More times than not, their remaining cards are 4 starter coin cards and a starter deck card, meaning all of their 2 coin and/or better purchased cards have magically stuck together and are played as a unit.

Then they take what I used to think was a stupid move, i.e. Harvest Season without enough coin to buy anything that may come up or is in the Tavern. But I have since come to realize that is how they constantly cycle their bad cards out so you never see them, like a de facto thinning. This is something no player I know would do as Harvest Season, or similar cards, almost always are replaced by a good card you don't have the coin to buy and you have just set your opponent in the process.

This gets even worse when the NPC uses Celarus and the shuffle to essentially whittle their hand down to 6 cards that you see repeatedly, which is absolutely impossible. Its as if Celarus brings all the garbage to the top to eliminate every time, leaving only good cards to play.

This insults the intelligence of the player. You can't replicate these results if you were to play this way. There is no way this is RNG.

Necrotech_Master

from my experience, i still havent really noticed this

i still mostly play red eagle + rahjin against the npc and just flood them with bewilderments if they are moving too fast

they did fix the part of their AI so they dont destroy every card in their deck anymore, but i still seen them do a lot of really dumb things that take their massive lead and ruin their own lead lol

i was playing a tribute game last week where the npc within the first few turns got both an armory and midnight raid, the next time they got the midnight raid, they ended up converting it to a writ of coin with treasury, they ended up doing the same thing to the armory card a couple of turns later

ive mostly played novice npcs, though most of the npcs seem to have roughly the same AI, it reduces some of the randomness limiting the npcs to 4 decks to pick from

my experience using the psijic deck is that is the exact intention of the mechanic to throw cards in your cooldown, i almost never deck prune, but if i get psijic cards ill use them to dump all of the weak cards still in the deck (any 1 coin cards like coins or starter cards), and doing this usually can curate what my next hand will look like and more likely to get the good cards