Yeah, this has nothing to do with M:tG at all.
This is more like competitive Yahtzee.
Ha, I donāt disagree.
What I donāt like about what I see of looping teams (I only just leveled up enough to start facing Nobend Brothers frequently) is pretty much what @Ariel said and I sort of referenced it (or at least I did in a draft I mightāve deleted.)
If I want to play a ānon-interactiveā game I can play Bejeweled. I walk into that game knowing Iām going to lose, but Iām curious how long Iāll last. In this game, Iām supposed to think choosing a good team and scouting my opponent so I can make adjustments will do that.
Vs. Nobend, my āstrategyā is āI hope I get barriers up before they go off.ā Thatās not a tactic. Thatās hoping for a dice roll. I hate those games.
I was speaking more generally when I made my original post. I find it interesting that luck plays a big part in GoW, just like players in Magic hate the mana system but tend to agree the game wouldnāt be the same without it.
Thatās the odd state I joined GoW in. People love to PLAY looping teams. They hate to FIGHT looping teams. Itās a lose/lose for the devs, which is why I think they should take measures to discourage both looping teams on defense, and āI set my defense team and never look at it againā.
Iāve noticed pretty much every single team I meet these days is a looping team. Maybe Iāve just leveled up enough to reach midgame and get to that MMR or something.
Every single time itās either Kraken/Kraken/Forest Troll/Something or Kraken/Kraken/Wisp/Wisp. If not that then Khorvash (I hate that card immensely)/Justice, Valkyrie, Mab. Dragon teams with double Shiny+TDS+Sylvanimora are popular as well but those arenāt nearly as annoying (unless enemy TDS decides to resurrect 8 times - yes, that has happened to me, I was on the verge of reporting it as a bug but probably just got super unlucky). Even Maw/Mercy and similar setups that arenāt as common are all built around supporting one specific troop. Iām not sure Iām happy about that.
It feels like there is zero strategy involved. The whole match is determined on whose team goes off first. I canāt remember a match where either I or the AI didnāt get some kind of ridiculous mana surge or cascade that led to the win. And some of those are absolute bs - itās easier to remember when it happens to me, of course, but quite often I find myself with a starting board that gives me next to no mana of the colors I need and is perfect for the AI. āCreate X random gemsā always seems to screw me over, giving the AI multiple extra turns instead of being helpful to me. And donāt even get me started on the pure RNG effects like āORā and ā% chance to devourā, those are just pure frustration.
I tried to experiment with multiple different teams. But I just canāt really make them work as well as they should. If I want to win and beat meta teams, I need to do it with other meta teams. I 100% blame the huge discrepancies in troop power for this. Other teams Iāve tried to build either donāt really work because meta teams are a lot more powerful or theyāre not efficient enough (my Dwarf team has a nice winrate but itās way too slow and itās better for me to take a bunch of losses in between a lot of wins with a dragon team).
Because of this, I find myself playing less and less because facing the same few looping teams over and over and over again is tiring me out.
I lose to Ā« luck Ā» , to answer the original post.
Just now I lost in 1 turn when the opponent filled Bone Dragon in 1 turn on a lucky 5 gem drop, then cast, the skull produced created many 4 matches, and enough lucky gem drop that it refilled the dragon 3 times.
I have seen TDS and Shiny go on chain-casts-of-doom, but this is my first for Bony
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I lost twice recently to Bone Dragon, myself. Weirdest thing. It is definitely still a threat when it casts.
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Ya know what causes me to lose more than anything? Phone callsā¦ I play exclusively on mobile and if i am playing when someone calls me it interrupts my game and it counts as a lossā¦
If i lose 10 matches in a week 6 are from calls and 2-3 are due to game crashing
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haha you makes me laugh so good, time after time! 
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Does iOS let an app make any last-ditch commands before it gets scrubbed from memory? If so, maybe when GoW goes from āsuspended/not the onscreen appā to āyouāre gonna have to reload everythingā, the game could upload a summary of the current match to the servers. On startup the game checks for a save file and offers to resume the match from the state stored on the server. There are surely still security holes in this idea, even if iOS had that command as an option; I look forward to hearing what they might be.
The only notification an app gets is āyou are going to the background NOW.ā It gets a really short period to do stuff, and if it needs longer it can ask for up to 10 minutes of extra CPU time if it needs to do more than a second or two of work.
But the āup to 10 minutesā is not guaranteed if the phone feels itās under stress. There is no āyou are being forced to dieā notification, because in that case the phone is so low on memory the assumption is you wonāt be able to do anything anyway. If the phone feels real cramped, itāll give your app the axe even if youāre in your āgrace periodā.