I won’t lie - this is the most frustrating part of Codex. Not getting either teched cards on reshuffle is a huge bummer and has a surprising impact on the rest of the game.
It’s an interesting design issue because for a game that minimizes bad variance as much as it does, the little that creeps in is incredibly frustrating.
So I put together a theme deck specifically to take all of the opponent’s stuff: [Law]/Blood/Future, to get some Arrest/Manufactured Truth, Community Service, Kidnapping and Ogre Recruiters, and Assimilate.
Things start off very smoothly with an early Assimilate of his Rich Earth. But he hit his Community Service before I hit mine, just in time to steal my second Recruiter (first one not yet played) out of my discard pile. I finally get my own Recruiter on the table and disable his with Porkhand, and he goes and kills it, then steals that one. I have to resort to Kidnapping one of my own Recruiters from him and trading it with the other one! So rude.
I pulled it out in the end, but only due to an insanely lucky double-Injunction draw, and an unlucky hand for him.
The Ogre actually never recruited anyone. We just stole it back and forth from each other until the two ogres ran into each others. I was actually running jurisdiction to play fire spells but he went for tech 2 blood so I teched community service. Fun times!
I think that the Community Service worked against me actually. If I stayed on cheap units that mostly suicide and fire spells, he would have no targets for his kidnapping and community service. It was only because I stole his ogre with community service that he found a target for kidnapping and that meant I spent a lot of resources on nothing.
Our four-player free-for-all is nearing its end — I’m at ten workers and Tech III like everyone else — and my board has little more left on it than a maxband Zane and a tech lab so I can play both Blood and Fire. My base health is kind of middling, so I hope to escape notice.
I discard my hand and somehow draw the combination I had been hoping against hope for. Hotter Fire, Captured Bugblatter, and — the keystone of this plan — Maximum Anarchy. Imagine the damage I can do by destroying ALL HEROES AND UNITS in a four-player game and having each unit deal two damage to a base of my choice! I could practically take EVERY base to zero!
And then the next player goes and immediately wins the game by eliminating one of the other players.
I’m pretty sure that when my wife rolled a natural 20 against me the other night to decide who goes first, it dropped my luck stat by at least a few points. How else do you explain drawing my first Tech I card after building my Tech II building
I played a few games again last night against @Jeremetroid, my Purple against his Red. In the first game, I hoped that maybe having two Immortals in play might help protect me from Kidnapping, but: no, it turns out that Immortals are very good at taking each other out. Whoops.
Then, after he Zergling Rushed me to death in three turns during the second game, he proclaimed at the beginning of our third game, after I played P1T1 Plasmodium, that he would win before Plasmodium arrived (“So you’re basically going for the Plasmodium% speedrun, then”). He was unsuccessful at this effort, but he did manage to win both the second and third games with only six workers each. Well played, but… salt.