Improving my Pharoah Deck so it can grind AI5

[Tiltias]

I need a deck to grind AI5 with, with a decent win rate and enough control/defenses to avoid being screwed over by the AI getting lucky.I think I've got the deck down to as few cards as possibly needed:
35 cards:

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4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vo 52n 52r 52r 592 592 5c6 5c6 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rj 5rn 5ro 5ro 5rp 5rp 5rs 5rs 621 6qq 6qq 6qq 6u6
This is how it stands at the moment. I'd guess it has about 30-40% win rate against AI5, and it sometimes struggles against AI3 rush decks. Especially if the time quanta is slow, or an anubis never turns up.
Where it is weak is early defense, and the pharoahs are a bit slow.

This is the skeleton of the deck, which is what I built up from:

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5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rj 5rj 5rn 5rn 5ro 5rs 5rs 5rs 5rs 5rs 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 621 621 622 622
Does well against AI3 despite a slow start. But the defense is nowhere near good enough for AI5, and I want to keep the deck size down.

So. How could I improve the deck so it has a decent chance against AI5, yet remains <40 cards? I have both a Pulvy and a Lobotomiser, but a butterfly-scarab works well with permanent control, and still counts as part of the swarm. Also, I don't have many upped cards. Only a few quantum towers and an elite oty + druid.

[hrmmm]

on the first sight:

try to diversify  your shields.
-2 bonewall
+2 other shields: fog shield/ice shield/gravity shield

1 enchant artifact and 1 eternity seems enough for me.
-1 ea
-1 eternity
+2 sundials

pillars are always the most tweaking stuff. maybe you can reduce your quantum pillars.

[Xinef]

I'm not sure if half-time half-rainbow decks are good at AI5 grinding... they are extremely powerful if you get a good draw, but they often suffer from bad draws, and unupgraded you cannot add essential cards like Shards of Gratitude.

My suggestions would be to add:
+plague (helps to get big creatures into devouring range, great synergy with procrastination and ice shield because opponents take damage even when frozen/in time bubble)
+ice shield (nice against FFQ, skeletons, scarabs and even against bigger hitters if they get frozen)
+maybe 2-3 hourglasses... I'm not sure because unupgraded they are quite expensive to use, but you definitely need some.
+quintessence (it really helps if you quint an early pharaoh, then use the second one on anubis)
+4 sundials (they don't count as additional cards because of their ability to draw a card, and your deck is slow so a little stalling always helps)

Remove:
-2 bone walls (they are nice when you are already winning, but they rarely help you out of a losing situation)
-boneyard (also helps only when you are already winning - even if you consider bonds, I still think a plague helps you to survive more often than a boneyard)

Also, I'd go either for butterfly effect or for fallen druid, but not both. Fallen druid makes battles more interesting, but butterfly effect is more reliable... using both is already heavy on
Maybe replace butterfly effect with antimatter? (you need healing and it's nice it one antimattered dragon heals back what 2 dragons do against a procrastination).



Overall, I'm not sure if my advice is helpful, because I've been mostly playing against False Gods and when I switched to pharaoh I already had 1/3 of the cards upgraded (shards of gratitude are essential!). Anyway I mostly used 48-51 card decks so that's why suggested adding more cards than removing... also, in 51 card deck I use 10 time towers and 8 quantum towers, so I guess your tower count is quite good. Yes, it often ends in bad draws, but the only thing you can do about it is to add more hourglasses and more towers, but that would in fact make the deck less consistent, probably.