I support this decision. It is all, at least at the lower levels, players versus bots. It was fun when you could just see a bot name and....smoke em, but now that their algorithms are so good, well, it just isn't fun anymore. It is more of a grind for very minimal rewards than fun at this point. And the team just keeps gearing all of the better parts of the game toward whale accounts, it seems.
Oh well, at least they are still having fun and collecting decent rewards while they await the eventual windfall of the land functionality.
In the mean time...how are they getting new players?
If spellbook purchases tell the tale, they're not.
I was playing in Gold and even there it was Me vs. Archmage/XBot and farming accounts that lapsed their rentals. When I was in Silver, it was strange to see Silver accounts with 6,000+ DEC in rentals. With rentals being so cheap - we have a good number of cards going for less than .1 DEC per day, it has disincentivized ownership and allowed for the proliferation of what we've seen.
If you're botting this game away, what does that say about the game? Said it before, will say it again - it's reduced to mining with extra steps. There are a good number of whales who are botting and even have bot farms or a stake in them as well.
The recent proposal that failed was a bit of a vote of non-confidence by proxy, which was interesting to say the least.