Indeed! The stat change to RN just made me immediately think of the Green matchup getting unbalanced, but really, all the changes are in the style of solve one problem, cause another, hopefully less severe problem.
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I will say that my experience of playing Blue against Green is hellish anyway. I rarely ever win that MU because Calamandra is powerful and feels unstoppably so with Blueâs tools. That said, reading everyoneâs thoughts here leads me to believe that the skill gap between me and the rest of you is even more of a chasm than I initially believed! 
Cal is indeed a beast, but free speech is the main answer to her. doing tht and still setting up a board can be a problem though. Its a 50/50 matchup, I think. Though maybe the stats dont bear that out.
Yeah, thatâs definitely one of the problems I run into. Between Calamandra and Rampant Growth, I find it very difficult to defend Quince long enough for the Free Speech to have been anything more than a simple, nearly meaningless delay.
Newsman on 2 really messes with green, assuming you can keep it around. That and Tower are very important.
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Tower being the 11th card in the Blue starting deck, of course 
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Yeah, I consider a Tower against Green mandatory and put it up generally quite quickly. I also use Newsman against 2-cost spells but that doesnât generally help nearly enough since killing the Newsman is pretty free since heâs not threatening.
My main problem is that without overwhelming force, what is Blueâs win condition? The most sensible win condition for a color built around stall is having an overwhelming set of T3 units as a catastrophic endgame. Otherwise youâre just sort of durdling and hoping to land incremental damage along the way.
(This would be way more than a balance change, but it would be kinda cute if Blue got an Exodia condition in one of its specs.)
Blue can lock down the opponent and gradually wear them down until they give up.
This would only be true if blue had an answer for everything, but I would argue that it has to choose to answer only 1 or 2 things and even telegraph what that choice is, meaning the opponent should just choose to go the other way and smash you. Admittedly this requires highly optimized play, but we arenât balancing for low to mid level play with these suggestions.
And stall without an eventual I win isnât really a thing. Control decks have a late game I win button.
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Blue does have an answer for everything except upgrades already in play (though admittedly, its answer to tech 3s already in play is just attacking them, which isnât a great answer, and if a player manages to deploy tech 3 units against a Blue player, the Blue player has likely already lost), it just canât always afford them all quickly enough. Newsman doesnât really need to do much if you use Injunction and Free Speech to block tech cards, spells, and hero abilities. Blueâs multitude of cards that reveal the opponentâs hand can make it easy to pick the highest priority to block, but yeah, a good strategy to avoid being locked down by Blue is to diversify your options and slip whatever you can through when you get the chance.
And yeah, if the game drags on long enough, eventually either their base will break, or youâll be able to afford to bring in some major damage, but I think most players would prefer to concede if it becomes apparent they wonât have an opportunity to retaliate.
Also, Iâm not saying this is a reliable win condition, just that itâs a win condition. Whiffing a key spell for a lockdown is more likely the thicker your deck is and the smaller your hand is, and Black has ample tools to put both units on the field and cards in hand into the discard pile to bloat and slow your cycle.
Thatâs a pretty sucky wincon though. âWear down your opponent with papercuts or mentally wear them down into concedingâ is just awful. Like, âmy deck loops you infinitely with no actual way to winâ levels of awful.
Thatâs why Blue gets the ability to do something besides countering, because endless stalemate is not a wincon.
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Itâs actually a loss condition if the game is using a clock, because your opponent takes turns more quickly and with less mental energy.
By âgradually wear them downâ, I meant wearing their base down by trickling damage, e.g. the 2 from breaking a tech building, not wearing them down mentally until they ragequit. So, itâs not as bad as an infinite loop with no way to win, and even if you take more time than your opponent, that doesnât necessarily imply that you take so much time that you run out your clock before their base implodes.
A big part of why I love Codex is that thereâs such a wide variety of strategies that are, at least theoretically, possible. Some of us actually like lockdowns and infinite loops. And speaking of infinite loops⌠cough Insurance Agent cough Ebbflow Archon cough Rememberer cough Seer cough
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Blue doesnât have any answer against hero-based strategies. Free Speech is a 2 gold, short-term option and you actually loose 2 gold while your opponent doesnât loose anything. What is more, wasting a card for that prevents you to invest this card advantage into a unit. Youâll eventually think about card-free options but recruiting an hero is especially bad against hero-based strategies because free level up for the opponent and there isnât any anti-hero defensive add-on. How can you spend a card and 2 gold into Free Speech and ensure your Quince is safe ?
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I think about this often. I feel like Blueâs anti-X strategy cards are actually only useful if you can IMMEDIATELY take advantage of that gap. Like, Injunction isnât great unless you force your way in and break/kill something crucial.
Free Speech feels similar. If it doesnât somehow lead to you being able to set yourself up to remove the offending hero on the following turn, it seems to be a waste of resources. That said, Iâm willing to admit that this could actually just be an indictment of my lack of skill.
By and large, I donât find that Free Speech is worthwhile unless you can start casting it every turn which basically means it needs to be paired with Garrisons, which is generally strong enough on its own that Free Speech isnât really necessary.
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Blue counterplay is inherently weaker in Codex than in other games because it costs gold and cards to use without costing the opponent anything, and because its neutralizing cards are proactive rather than reactive, which makes a lockdown very challenging to pull off effectively⌠frustratingly so at times. But, there are a few things to realize about this.
First, $2 and a card are much more costly in the early game than in the late game, but the threats to be countered by Free Speech are also more dangerous if the opponent has more gold (and in some cases, more infrastructure, as with Garth Torkenâs maxband).
Second, while the neutralizing cards are proactive rather than reactive, being able to see the opponentâs hand and pull spells directly from your codex via Jurisdiction allows you to play them reactively, albeit at greater expense. Itâs not necessary to cripple everything each turn, and seeing what cards the opponent has in hand can inform you of when shutting down an option is worth the investment.
Taken together, this means a complete lockdown is a win condition, not a viable opening strategy. In order to reach this point, Blue needs to find some other means of competing for resource, board, and hand advantage, with at most a well-timed splash of lockdown mechanic usage in the early game if the situation really warrants it. Factoring in how Quince is generally not physically competitive without gold to funnel into Mirror Illusions, Free Speech spam in particular is viable only in the mid-to-late game, when you have other cards to support it (e.g. having Flagstone Spys in play or spamming Insurance agents to offset the difference in gold expenditure, playing cheap units with Flagstone Garrisons and/or using Bigby Hayesâs hand manipulation to improve reliability of availability of desired spells, etc.).
That Lawful Search canât be cast every turn in the early game (and canât be cast before committing to deployment of a hero), and that other hand-revealing cards are either not available or too expensive to be viable before tech II deployment, mean such well-timed splashes of lockdown usage are especially difficult to pull off and risky to attempt. Blue starterâs lack of aggression combined with a heavy reliance on synergistic plays among Blue cards in general give mono-Blue a âwin-moreâ feeling: difficult to get off the ground, but capable of incredible suppression once it gets rolling⌠and conversely, difficult to manage a recovery after falling behind.
This, combined with Vandy + Black starterâs hyper-efficient early aggression, reactive flexibility, persistent hand destruction options, and midgame threats which are difficult to defend against and must not be ignored, are what make the Black vs. Blue matchup feel so one-sided.
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This analysis is spot on for why Blue has such a hard time.
Given that you highlighted the issues of playing Lawful Search early, If Lawful Search became a new special type of spell (e.g. âPublic Ordinanceâ) that allowed Administrators (and Guards?) to cast it [Previously suggested by @Hobusu] would that help a lot vs Black? I think it might allow Blue to take on less risk before committing to gold spend or heroes for example.
As an aside, I know an upgrade version of Lawful Search (Search Warrant?) has been suggested but I donât think I like it as much as giving Blueâs weaker stat units some additional utility.
We could also look at making Arrest a similar category of spell?
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Thatâs pretty cool. Something like âBureaucratic (Administrators can cast this spell.)â
Indirectly buffs Law to compete with Peace. Sorta leaves Truth in the dust.
I wouldnât expect letting Lawful Search be cast by Administrators to help all that much against Vandy+Black, though it might help some. You probably still wouldnât want to play it on P2T1 to check if itâs safe to play a hero, because the card draw would mess with your cycle and you donât want to delay access to your tech I units. If you got to play it on P2T2, though, you might luck into drawing one of your teched cards and/or get a chance to see one or both of the opponentâs and get some insight into their strategy. It would require a fair bit of testing to determine if itâs worth paying $1 for so early, but my hunch is that it would be, at least on average. If you want it to be useful on P2T1 as well, but not make it an upgrade, Iâd suggest also having it grant Stash until end of turn (not sure if it should stack with Bigbyâs or not), and maybe even go so far as to reduce the cost to $0.
I suspect letting other Blue starter spells be cast by Administrators would probably help Blue more against colors other than Black than against Black. Arrest and Lawful Search are really only worth casting as a prelude to an attack, but if your board is getting cleared every turn, theyâre not going to help much. Then again, against other colors, itâs much easier for P2 Blue to actually play a hero without just wasting gold and giving away free levels, so maybe it just wouldnât be that helpful in general.
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