I doubt an ai controlled DE team can beat a well set up player controlled Skeleton Key thief team…
And i can guarantee you that it will never hit the hero 
See, I feel like this is the kind of post that gets swallowed up as fact because it sounds good, but it’s pretty far from a global axiom. The thing is there are a lot of different DE teams, and it’s possible you’ve never played against the ones I’m thinking of and had bad enough luck to lose.
I say this because a few weeks ago I was grinding out trophies and Thief levels, so I was speed-running the Skeleton Key team. I played about 330 matches total and every one of my 20-25 losses was to a DE team.
Skeleton Key’s glaring weakness is it can only deal significant damage via the hero. DE can’t specifically target that hero, but it’s got a roughly 25% chance of nailing it on turn 2. When that happens, and the DE team is configured properly, it’s either going to take 5+ minutes to win or victory cannot happen.
“Configured Properly” tends to mean the Thief class with the hero in slot 3. Slot 2 also works, but I think more people do slot 3 to mess with Yao Guai teams. Anyway, what’s relevant here is Stealthy, Backup, and Dodge (though for this matchup Dodge and Stealthy aren’t relevant.) Here’s how a match where Skeleton Key loses goes:
You start with an excellent first turn. You cast Egg Thief a couple of times and use Skeleton Key. It kills a troop that’s replaced by a Bandit, then you Egg Thief again and miss a turn.
Then the DE team gets a decent match and fires off its generator, filling DE. It casts and hits your Egg Thief, then the aftermath gives it an extra turn. It makes a match and passes.
Now if you’re not super lucky, you make a match that doesn’t matter. But let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say you fill Skeleton Key and manage to cast it. You hit the Bandit and the other troop, kill the other troop, and it gets replaced with a Bandit. You make a match and pass the turn.
DE casts and hits your hero. How you have maybe Egg Thief and Greed, or Egg Thief and Sparklesack, or Greed and Sparklesack. That’s not an easy win, and you’ve got to take down 2 Bandits, DE, and a mana generator.
That’s how it goes south. It’s nothing particular the AI does that makes it come about, it’s all about how your gems fall. That’s always the deal with the Skeleton Key team: some boards starve your red/green/brown and it’s best to just retreat. When a good DE team is rolling it’ll flood you with Brown, but it doesn’t care if you’re SK spamming because something like 25% of the time both of your fresh kills get replaced with Bandits and the hero remains safe.
Backup is the major problem here. I don’t think it’s triggering much more than the 50% implies, but I do know when you hit more than 3 procs in a match it’s infuriating. My life is better since I quit bothering with DE matchups.
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