Oh that's fair. Keeping it fun but feeling like you're awesome is why games stack up visibly unfair bonuses so the opponents are strong but dumb to fight against once you're comfortable with it. It's nice to be the champion. But yeah. Same game over and over gets stale after a while.
I played Magic the Gathering back when. 4th Edition? My friends weren't insane collectors but they had more cards than I did for putting together their "super serious decks" that we'd take every once in a blue moon to a type 2 tournament. I looked through all the winningest decks and realized all the really good versatile control cards were the expensive ones I didn't own. So the longer any game went on the less win conditions I had and the more they had. In every deck they tried to build to be good. So I went for speed.
The deck was "cheese" instead of "meta" in the lingo of these days, I guess. "Sly" in the lingo of the days the followed shortly after then, gradually becoming "rush" then "tempo" if the cards had been of quality. But they weren't good cards, so "cheese" it was. We called it the Goblin Grenade deck and it was straight burn. It was twitchy and had to draw right. It under allocated land cards and was the only deck I knew so tuned, because to draw more than four generally made it run out of gas and lose. Almost anything could disrupt it. A couple creature removals. Land disruption, discards. But those weren't generally early game cards in popular tournament rounded decks. Those all revolved around periodic resets so they could re achieve lock combos if the game got out of control. But man, when it drew right it was cooking with nitro glycerine. It usually worked well enough to be dangerous. Best case scenario turn 3 rolled around and it finished spending all its mana, all its cards, all its creatures, and all but one of its own lands, but it could wrap up dealing 20 cumulative damage. Turn 4 was more normal, and by turn 5 would happen if it didn't misdraw and completely fizzle. Which it could. If your deck was designed to lock its combo on turn 5 and relied on resets to recapture the pace, it doesn't matter when you've already lost. My friends got very tired of dealing with that deck. It was about 60 cents worth of cards and it became a stage in tournament testing any deck they built long after. If it couldn't deal with the goblins when you knew what their trick was, then whatever its other merits, it was too slow.
Almost beat a guy in a type 1 tournament running the power 9 back before those were whisper worthy cards. Nuked him down in the first game because he didn't respect the noob. Almost got him in the 3rd game. He got saved by a Kird Ape, a good first turn card with dual forest/mountains in the game. It forced a lightning bolt that I needed to win. Fun though! Eventually Fallen Empires cycled out of Type 2 and everyone was saved the experience.
Game AI can be too good. Chess is a done game on the highest levels, it's dead. Go too.
