The
Icy Manipulator one is irritating, and not easily fixable. The problem is that the AI only activates spells or plays abilities at a very few limited times (from memory, during each of its own main phases; before and after blockers; during your discard phase; and in response to another spell or ability). It won't ever choose to play a spell or ability during your turn before combat's already begun, unless you do something for it to respond to.
We can
force it to activate whenever we want - basically, it adds text to the card equivalent to e.g. "At the beginning of each opponent's upkeep, if you are the AI, pay
and tap
Icy Manipulator. If you do, tap target artifact, creature, or land." There's lots of problems with that, though - for one thing, it will always "activate" (really trigger) the
Icy Manipulator, even if doing so would be detrimental. (Maybe its only land is a
Desert, and the creature that's beating it to death has 1 toughness. Or the
Icy Manipulator has a bunch of
Relic Bind's attached to it, or the AI's only land has a bunch of
Psychic Venom's.) For another, neither you nor the AI can respond to these fake activations, since Manalink doesn't let you respond to triggers - the AI's
Icy Manipulator would be able to keep you from ever being able to ping him with a
Prodigal Sorcerer, for example.
Most cards that currently use this technique trigger during the human player's discard phase. They're actually poor uses of it, since that's one of the times that the AI
will spontaneously play spells and activate abilities, and we now know how to encourage it to do so using its normal speculation framework.