Hey, glad you enjoyed my article.
And regarding beating the top players: you're heading in the right direction with your theory. But there are two/three sides to the story.
One is, that people start to develop an intuition which moves work and which don't. That intuition comes from repetition and challenges. Then that intuition is combined with logical planning. And that's how you reach a team selection as a human.
My bot uses a logical approach without any intuition. It tries to learn an optimal behavior from scratch against an opponent by trial and error. That puts it at a disadvantage. Imagine you trying to learn a game withing just two minutes. That's what my bot is essentially doing.
The better approach would be to use intuition combined with that logical approach. That's what Google did with alpha zero. Their system played for weeks against itself and started to develop an intuition how to play.
They achieved that by training a machine learning model on the "discoveries" of the logical planning system and used the estimates to guide the planning. With that approach they beat a famous go champion and the leading chess engine stockfish. (Which already played much better than any human)
That system is what I'm going to work on next. With that I think beating aicu might become pretty difficult. It's still possible due to the probabilistic nature of the game. But it should be much harder.
Another aspect is, that there are a couple optimal teams for each ruleset /mana cap situation. They don't win every time, but they win frequently.
Just by using those consistently you can reach the top 50. Plus a max level deck. But that approach seems boring to me. That's why I've never really looked into it.
Another major one is a bit more technical, but it has to do with probabilities. Some matches can depend on a single successful dodge. And learning a optimal behavior for a non deterministic game is harder than for a deterministic game like go or chess. Especially within the time limit.
That's pretty much all there is to it. Good luck with the giveaway :D