No need to apologise for the wall of text, it’s all good stuff for me to think about. I’ve ended up doing my own wall in response :
Thanks for saying that I “actually know what I’m doing”. I certainly don’t feel that I do most of the time, and I’m pretty sure if the likes of EricF were to look at my play he’d find all sorts of things wrong with it! But I have been reading and thinking quite a lot about the game. My first f2f games against @Fenrir on Sunday really opened my eyes to how much there was to think about in this game and how hard it is to make decent decisions in a real-life game - I played 4 and lost 4, getting utterly destroyed in at least 2 of the games. I think the PBF format suits me because you get to make a plan on the spreadsheet, go away from it, then come back and stare at it for a while thinking “what are the risks here? can I do better?”. I hope that if I play more PBF games it will improve and speed up my decision-making so that I can be more competitive in F2F games without taking forever. (I have horrible Analysis Paralysis in all sorts of games.)
You mentioning your trying to teach a Magic player the other day brings me to mention something that may surprise you: I’ve actually never played Magic before, nor any other combat-oriented card game. That’s in part because most of them are CCGs or LCGs, which I have no desire to get into because of the heavy costs, and also because I’d have no-one to really play them against. (I really shouldn’t have bought Codex, but I am an admirer of Sirlin’s previous games even though I also don’t get to play them, and was intrigued enough by the previews that I decided to get it anyway.) In some ways that lack of experience in similar games probably makes the learning experience harder - but perhaps in some ways it could be an advantage because I guess regular Magic players would have a lot of ingrained ideas that might not apply so well to Codex.
Enough philosophy, back to discussing our game!
War Drums: I guess what you say makes sense. You’re right that just a couple of units out with a flyer and War Drums could have been pretty scary (although as you’ll have seen, I was planning to go for flyers myself). And, as you explained in your thoughts during the game, that’s what made you go Fire for Tech 2 rather than anything else - even though I was scared of Blood Tech 2 more. I’m actually intrigued by the decision of which spec to go with at Tech 2 - it feels like something you should decide based on what your opponent goes for, but since you’ll often be needing to build Tech 2 at turn 3 or 4 you won’t have very many pointers (one player won’t know their opponent’s Tech 2 choice yet). I might start a thread to discuss that when I’m not at work and I have a bit of time.
On my turn 2 patrol: yeah that could have worked. There’s really a lot to think about in how to patrol, with a lot more to that decision than meets the eye. I probably need to get away from my instinctive reflex of “put your biggest available body in Squad Leader”. I think I was just scared about Ogre attacking (since, as you said, you basically have to do that), as well as Drakk and the Nautical Dog. I’ve not really thought about using the patrol zone to force you into bad trades - to be honest, apart from obvious examples (like trading a 2-cost for a 4-cost or something), it’s not clear to me at this stage what trades are favourable and which ones aren’t. Again, that really deserves to be the topic of a separate thread!
Behind the Ferns: you’re right that it’s no use if you wipe my board. But I think that’s true of a lot of the Green spells - certainily of Ferocity and Dinosize. I’ve got to assume that at some stage I’ll have a unit still alive at the start of my turn, or I’m basically assuming I’ve lost before even really starting the game! And I think Codex is relatively forgiving at letting you tech cards which aren’t guaranteed to be useful when you draw them - you’re very rarely going to want to play everything from your hand in any case. That’s why you can destroy Tech buildings and kill heroes, and get rewarded for them, without necessarily completely locking the opponent down. Having said that, looking back at that first game there’s no doubt I was lucky in drawing things at the right time.
I think I did watch the start of that mysticjuicer video which you describe, but I wasn’t really listening too closely so I must have missed that part of the analysis. I’ll try to re-watch it at some point (although I don’t think White is a colour I’ll play a lot of - I quite like the look of Ninjutsu, but I’m not sure the other White specs match my preferred playstyle). And I’ve certainly read EricF’s starting deck analysis - again I don’t remember getting that message, but it was a while ago when I last read it.
Thanks again for the pointers, and also to @ARMed_PIrate. I’m glad you didn’t see the play he describes - wipe my board without going down on cards, double ouch!
I’ll try to take my turn in our new game later today.