[details=Blue Starter, Heroes and Spells]I want to talk about Codex: Time card strategy, a new game from Sirlin Games, and I want to specifically talk about the Flagstone Dominion faction - from here on out I will just refer to them as “Blue”. But first some disclaimers.
Codex is a brand new game that supports a lot of creativity, and there are a lot of different strategies yet too explore. The amount of different spec combinations are into the thousands, and the player base is currently still extremely small, so no “metagame” has yet been established, and once one is, the things I say might be obsolete. I am a new player, and I can be wrong when it comes to my conclusions. Not much, if any of what I say is original either, and most of it can be read over at forums.sirlingames.com, so if you want to know more, take your time to look through some of the threads over there. I am going to assume that you already have a slight understanding of the rules and how the game plays, so I will not go into every single little detail.
So what is blue? Blue is a color that has a lot of very specific tools that gives you a fair amount of flexibility in how you want to play. It has a lot of very card efficient and gold efficient units. It also has quite a few disruptive abilities, spells and units, that all help with your main gameplan, which should be stalling until you either clear their board or are able to play your tech 3 units. It also has numerous ways of cycling cards, which isn’t as common in the other factions.
Your early game is not as strong as other factions because your units are smaller then general and 2 of your 3 heroes are not combat oriented. This leads blue to be less forgiving if you make any kind of mistake. Understanding Blue defence is the key to being successful with Blue. Do you play Spectral Aven? When and against who? Will Quince Mirros help in patrol or not? When do you have time to build a tower? What do I worker and what do I keep for the late game?
After surviving the early game, you have to figure out how to snowball yourself into victory. With Law, you want to limit your opponents options as much as possible with Censorship Council, clear the board with Judgement Day, and with with Lawbringer Gryphons.
With Peace you want to flood the board with tech 1 units while you have Drill Sergeants and Flagstone Garrisons out to get a massive amount of tokens to resupply to ensure favorable trades until you can smash your opponents tech buildings and base.
With Truth you want to rush as fast as possible to tech 3 to play your extremely cheap tech 3 units to win with favorable trades, in a similar way to Peace.
But lets start this runthrough of Blue with looking at its starter. The blue starter is a hard nut to crack, as it probably is the starter with the most relevant late game cards. Knowing what to worker and when is hard, because so many of them are good in the late game. But your primary focus should be surviving and coming out of the early game, which includes workering cards you don’t want to. Surviving the early game means playing patrollers and making workers each turn.
Building Inspector is probably the easiest starter card. If you are player 1 turn 1, you easily just play this one to disrupt your opponents Tech 1 building. A 1/1 for 1 gold is nothing to be super happy about, but it interacts with your opponent when she wants to build a tech 1 building. This is one of the only places where you could actually get a tempo advantage, especially against multicolor codexes, since they have to pay 3 gold for their tech 1 if you are able to protect your Building Inspector. The disruptive ability of this card is mediocre at best when playing against an opponent that is super agressive, since they rely on their starter units for longer than other codexes. If you draw it after a tech 1 building has been built, this should be your first worker.
Spectral Aven is the largest flyer in any starter and would have been the best starter card in all of codex, was it not for the fact that it is an illusion. Costing 2 gold means it is a large price to pay for something that can be dealt with by a free ability from some classes. There are colors you shouldn’t even bother to put this out against at all, because they have cheap targeting spells or abilities that can hit you anywhere. Some colors you just need to be careful not to patrol it, since they only have cheap ways of targeting patrollers. So, check your opponents starting cards before you play it and make sure to only play it if they have to pay as much (or more) gold and cards to deal with it as you did for playing it. Playing this and using Manufactured Truth on a unit you control without arrival fatigue can give you trades you normally wouldn’t get since flying goes over patrol. If you are planning on playing Truth and siding in Macciatus or Reteller of Truths, then save it. Macciatus makes this thing into a 3/3 flier, which is not to shabby, and you don’t even have to use a tech oppourtunity for it.
Bluecoat Musketeer looks really bad, but if your opponent is playing lots of tokens or low health units, this could be a very good agressive unit. 2 gold for a 1/2 with Long Range isn’t very exciting at all. It does takes care of 1/1 tokens without taking damage, and if you have a tower, this can be enough to get some extra trades in. So if you play it, you should have something like that in mind, or have it be the only unit in your opening hand / second hand. But mostly, this is your first worker.
Traffic Director is a pretty sweet 1 drop. Being untargetable means your opponent has to trade into it, allowing you to more predictably set up a patrol line. You probably never really use its unstoppable ability, because you probably always want the patrol bonus from this card. The second time you see this card in your hand, worker it.
Porkhand Magistrate is one of my favorite cards in the game, and is also the only card in blue that can directly interact with an opponents Tech 3 unit! A 2 / 3 for 3 is nothing to write home about, so the ability needs to be very good indeed to be worth it. So, is it? Well, not really. It is slightly underwhelming, but it has some uses. If you for some reason need to make a new Mirror Illusion with Quince but can’t actually kill one? Target it with the Porkhand! You get to draw a card for 1 gold and make a now mirror! This is soooo fringe that you should not really consider it. The one use for that ability tho, would be to stop an opponents Tech 3 unit or a scary Hero. But generally, if your opponent has their tech 3 unit out before you, you are most likely already dead. It also has some synergy with Law tech 2 Censorship Council, since your opponent can only play 1 card at the time, giving them a surplus of cards to play from doesn’t really matter much. All in all tho, this seems like a very very situational card, and should probably be workered as card nr 3 or 4 depending on the situation. If you plan on using Law and Censorship Council, try and hold on to it as you probably need the Disable ability for the tempo loss of Censorship Council.
Reputable Newsman is one of the most important cards of the Starter. Stopping a specific spell or an upgrade at the correct time is soooo valuable. Having 3 health helps a lot too for surviveability, possibly having it at 4 health from SQL should be enough to keep it alive from quite a few things in the early game. This synergies a lot with Lawful Search from the starter, Eyes of the Chancellor, Flagstone Spy and Community Service from Law spells. This can help you stop powerful any kind of early game spell, midgame finishers and lategame spells. A must keep at all times at the game. As a quick note, for people starting out playing blue you should name 2 as your number, as almost every starter has their best spells on 2, outside of white. Against white I would put it on 1 until I would want to protect a hero from Snapback which is on 3.
Jail is a tricky card.If you are already ahead on gold and/or board, you should play it, because it really interferes with your opponents plans. They have to play more cards than they want to, and more money than they want to to deal with it. You can absolutely not play this while you are behind on board, as they will just use existing units to deal with it before they play them from hand. As long as you have an even board position, you shouldn’t fall too far behind by playing this card. It synergises a lot with Censorship Council + Free Speech, making your opponent not able to play any card essentially, for a turn. But a worker most of the time as it is too expensive in the early game.
Lawful Search is such a valuable card. For 1 gold you get to plan your turn to perfectly counter your opponents turn AND draw a card! The cycle ability alone is pretty decent, allowing you to reshuffle your deck and possibly draw recently teched cards. This is a perfectly non-intrusive card to have in the late game. You are almost never sad to see this card in your hand unless you are very VERY tight on gold. This synergizes a lot with Community Service, Reputabile Newsman, Free Speech, Injunction and just general “what do I play this turn” for anything else. Keep as long as you can.
Arrest is also a very scaleable card, it is the only other way of interacting with Tech 3 units from Blue, which is good, but only if they patrol. At that time where Tech 3 cards are out, your opponent might assume it has been workered, but still it is a decent card. It can give you time to tech in a card that can deal with it more permanently. It might be slightly redundant if you are planning on running Injunction. It can also help you get in favorable trades by disabeling a strong SQL. In early game, it can help you stall by disabling a particularly nasty earlygame unit like Jandra the Negator, which easily 3 for 1s anything you play in the early game.
Manufactured Truth is a very strong early game spell, and is possibly the only thing keeping Blue from falling too far behind in the early game. It synergizes with all your other Blue starter units, making them into more than 1/1’s and able to trade in ways they might not have been able too. It also works on Mirror Illusions from Quince, so that you don’t have to go down on cards to trade favorably.
Secret 11th card in Blue: Tower. For 3 gold you set up a detector that deals damage to attackers. Since your regular units are usually not very high attack until later on, getting that extra damage in can be crutial in stalling for the late game. Having it also stop stealth and invisible units/heroes helps stopping your opponent going past your patrol to destroy your said tower, or tech buildings.
So, with 6 units and 3 spells and 1 (2) buildings, that is the the starter cards from Blue, and as you can see they have a lot of different tools, quite a few disruptive abilities, but some of them are quite underwhelming. There are no powercards that stand alone and are able to force your opponent into doing what you want them too in the early game, but some of them reveal synergies that will be able to force your opponent to do what you want them to in the midgame and/or late game.
Key cards from the starter are in tiered order
1: Lawful Search - always useful, and is at worst a 1 gold cycle card that lets you see your opponents hand/discard. Which is crazy strong.
Reputable Newsman - your opponent HAS to deal with this one, the trick is to make your opponent deal with him in a uncomfortable way. Very important to stop upgrades and spells.
Manufactured Truth - A tool that keeps you alive in the early game. Copying a Brave Knight with your Overeager Cadet is always fun. If your copied Brave Knight dies, you get an Overeager Cadet in hand, which you then can play again for 0 gold. Making 0/1 Mirror Illusions into other Tech 1 units form your opponent is also great value without going down on cards.
2: Arrest, Spectral Aven, Building Inspector, Traffic Director, Jail - these all have very specific threats and uses, but are either only useful for a short time during the early game, or they require some amount of set up to get to work. Building Inspector,
3: Porkhand Magistrate, Bluecoat Musketeer - Bluecoat Musketeer is always the first worker, and Porkhand has a very specific late game ability that synergizes mostly with a Law strategy
Cards to make into workers in tiers
1: Bluecoat Musketeer, Traffic Director, Building Inspector,
These cards should probably only be played 1 time unless you end up with some unlucky draws.
1,5: Porkhand Magistrate
Has a very fringe late game use, but only save if convenient.
2: Manufactured Truth, Arrest
You probably end up with some kind of board clear that will replace Arrest at some point, through Injunction or Judgement Day. Manufactured Truth quickly loses its value when either you or your opponent plays a tech 2 unit.
3: Jail, Spectral Aven
These are gamedefining. If you keep jail, you probably should go Law spec. If you keep Spectral Aven, you should probably go Truth.
4: Lawful Search and Reputable Newsman
Don’t worker. Usually skip a worker turn instead of workering any of these ones.
So now that the Starter cards are done with, lets take a look at Blues heroes!
The blue heroes consists of two spellcasters and one combat oriented hero. The spellcasters are Bigby Hayes and Sirus Quince. The combat hero is General Onimaru, so lets get the “easy” combat character out of the way.
First the obvious thing, it is a 2/3 body for 2, which is standard. His top band ability grants him Frenzy which is +1 attack on your turn, which is not standard. This is a big deal, especially in the early game, well come to that later.
Onimarus midband, at level 5, is the very solid Readyness, which is one of the best defensive abilities in the game, allowing you to attack into something, hopefully killing it, return to patrol and hopefully kill whatever tries to break your patrol. A two for one, as they say. He also gets the very solid combat oriented 3/4 body, which turns into a 4/4 while attacking due to Frenzy.
His maxband, at level 8, gives you 3 1/1 tokens with sparkshot, which are great chump patrollers, and his stats turn into 4/5 which makes him a beast. When he attacks at max band, he has 5 attack, which is enough to take down tech buildings without help.
Level 8 heros are the most expensive heroes in the game, so this is quite the investment, unless you are able to reliably kill off your opponents heroes to gain “free” levels to your hero, which is a hard task, but might be possible with tools such as Arrest, Boot Camp or in the mid/late game, Injunction or Bigby midband ability, to move stuff out of patrol to get through to a hero.
There are quite a few spells out there that target heroes that will make you regret putting money into him if you invest too much. Origin Story from Pasternak, Snapback from the white starter, Nether Drain and Doom Grasp from Necromancy to name a few. Be careful with how you invest with Onimaru, because having him out early will make your opponent tech in cards to deal with an Onimaru focused strategy. Keep that in mind while we go forward.
Onimaru, is a serious threat in the early game, as the only hero that can attack for 3 as default. If you start turn 1 player 1 with Onimaru, one of your 1 gold drops and a worker, then you are really having strong tempo going into turn two, being able to deal 4 damage on board, possibly more with Manufacture Truth copying a strong unit from your opponent onto your 1 drop, then do an Arrest to disable a defender to turn that 4 (or more) damage to a tech 1 building, a hero, or whatever you like. And this is what he is capeable of when you only have access to starter spells and he is at level 1!
So what else can he do? His selection of 4 spells range from fringe to very strong, so lets start with his least good ones and move upward.
At the bottom of the barrel you have a 3 gold spell Generals Hammer, which deals 3 damage to a building, and that’s that. Compare this to Wrecking Ball from Bashing, which is 2 damage to a building for 0 gold , and you start to realize how limited this card is. It is, however, the only way for blue to deal with buildings that are hidden behind patrol, and most building cards are 3 health, so if you are up against probably Black in particular, you can get some good value from it by destroying a Graveyard. There are some who are at 4 health, at which point it has some synergy with Traffic Director as well.
Then on a shared second place, you have Elite Training and Boot Camp. Elite training gives two of your units and or heroes +1 attack, +1 armor, anti-air and sparkshot until your next upkeep. This is a splendid unit combat card, and since a number of your tech one choices has 3 health, making them have 4 (or 5 in SQL) makes them more survivable against agressive strategies, while also giving them +2 attack makes you more likely to trade evenly or make more favorable trades than your opponent. This is also your only way to get the codeword “Anti-air” in Blue, but blue usually deals with fliers by having fliers themselves. If you are planning on not teching fliers, you should get this one.
Boot Camp is another cycle card from Blue, draw a card for 1 gold. Also, exhaust a unit or a non-peace unit and put a +1+1 token on it. This can be done on units that are already exhausted, which means you can attack with it first, and THEN cast it, which lets you boost your units and draw a card. You can also use this to exhaust a unit in your opponents patrol, effectively sidelining it, it obviously also gives them +1+1, but this can be very effective to get at a tech building or something else that is more important than the difference between a unit being +1+1 or not. This is great flexibility, and since it cycles for 1 gold, it almost never is unusable in your hand. This has also great synergy with Quinces Dreamscape, as an effective 1 gold removal that draws you a card. I would give this a ever so slight edge over Elite Training due to its cycle and its flexibility of sidelining your opponents patrol at the expense of giving them a +1+1. I might be wrong.
The real gem in Onimarus spells is his ultimate. The Art of War gives your Peace Hero unstoppable, swift strike and +2 attack +2 armor until next upkeep. But only being available at level 8 makes this a much harder task to acomplish. Getting levels on your hero can be hard since you don’t have many high attack units in Blue, so getting free levels by killing off your opponents heroe(s) isn’t very easy. Which leads to having to use coins to level him up. This makes it easier for your opponent to prepare countermeasures for a large hero, and should be able to stop him before he gets Art of War out. If it doesn’t tho, this card alone can easily be a win condition in itself, dealing a massive 7 damage to whoever or whatever you want due to unstoppable.
I can’t say that Onimaru gets “quickly” out of hand, since he has such a high maxband, but he can definitely get out of hand if he goes unchecked. In the early game he is just such a good body to have on your side if you can avoid giving levels to your opponent. This is best done by being P1T1 with a 1 drop and a worker.
Speeking of Free Speech, lets look at one of the more tricky heroes in the game, Sirus Quince.
Quince is a measly 1 / 3 body for 2, but he summons a 0/1 mirror illusion. Quinces topband ability is that he can summon a 0/1 mirror illusion for 2 gold, up to a max of 2 mirror illusions. These can be used as card efficient ways of stopping attackers from getting through patrol to easily. It is not gold efficient, as 0/1 is not worth 2 gold in it self, but if you are low on cards, or desperately need to draw a card like Judgement Day, making one and putting it in Technician is a thing you can do. 0/1 mirrors are exellent targets for Manufactured Truth targets.
His midband is at level 3 and gives him the ability to copy a tech 0,1,2 unit, which if you have an illusion out you can “play” a “hasted” version of any unit that is currently on the table, for only 2 gold. That is some value right there. This will weigh the option to play an expensive tech 1 or 2 unit, as the value you would get from copying it would be so good. Making sure that you have one or two mirrors out at all times so that you can threaten “hasted” units if she plays some, is pretty decent, but expensive. So don’t overdo it.
Quinces maxband is at level 5, and has the ability that whenever a non-token unit of yours arrives, you can turn one of your mirrors into it, and it only goes away when either the original or Quince goes away. It is still an illusion, so it still dies from being targeted. This ability is clearly geared to help with getting out tech 3 units, the dream would be that you play a Lawbringer Gryphon which gets copied to a mirror without arrival fatigue, which can obliterate 4 and kill something which is almost a board clear in itself. It obviously also gives you good value out of tech 2 units, and while the tech 2 units arent super inpactful, it is still great value.
All in all, Quince is a very scary hero, especially in the midgame and the lategame with his midband and maxband abilities. Your opponent needs to deal with his illusions, or else he takes the risk of you copying his stuff which he has payed for with more money and with cards, while you get to not go down on cards to do the same, and punish him for playing good units. All of these things is somewhat forcing your opponents to play less with units, and invest more into heroes, which might be one of Blues greatest weaknesses. A good combat hero is a pretty hard for Blue to deal with in general. Outside of Porkhand Magistrate and an upcoming spell, Free Speech, Blue has to deal with heroes the hard way, actually killing them.
But, lets take a look at what is in Quinces goodiebag. I would say they range from mediocre to very good. Again, I will go from what I feel is the worst one, to the best one.
Mind Control is an might seem like an expensive card, but it could read “Remove your opponents X from the board, then summon X for you” for 5 gold. So it both removes a card from your opponents board, and you end up controlling it, which is pretty sweet. If your opponent plays a 7 gold unit, you spend 5 gold to effectively remove it, and effectively spend 0 gold “playing” it for your self. The thing is, that with the next spell, you will see that there are cheaper and easier ways of using removal from Quince. Having the requirement of making sure that Quince lives at least a turn makes this more of a preemptive card, than a reactive card.
Hallucination is a 2 gold spell that makes up to two tech 0, 1 or 2 units into Illusions. This means that if you target them with a spell or an ability, you get to deal with them painlessly by not sacraficing units to kill them. Then we have to see what things in Blue can target? If you include Porkhand Magistrate, you can target with that one and Arrest from your starter cards. Within Truth itself, you could tech 2 of these spells in, and you can play both to do a 4 gold 2 unit kill spell. So, as long as your opponents units cost 2 gold each or more, you are dealing gold efficient clear. Into the midgame, if you have Bigby Hayes out, you could use his midband ability to deal with tech 0 and tech 1 units in patrol “for free”. Or you could use Onimaru with Boot Camp to get rid of one thing for only 1 gold, AND you get to draw a card. This is a fairly decent unit clear combo card, but it has the issue that Blue always has, that it can’t target tech 3 or heroes. But if you are teching in either this or Dreamscape, I would seriously reccomend that you end up teching Boot Camp as well.
Do you think Hallucination sounds like a good card? Well, if you do, you should look forward to Dreamscape.
The Dreamscape spell is one gold more than Hallucination, and is a channeling spell. For as long as you are able to protect Quince, this will stay out of your deck, which is a good thing, since a thinner deck makes you draw the cards you need earlier. This spell makes every single non-tech-3-unit an illusion, which is good for you if your opponent has lots of them and you can deal with them by targetting stuff. All the same things said about Hallucination applies here, but since this stays in play until Quince is returned to the Command zone for any reason, you can set it up more, and continually use things like Hallucination, Bigby Midband, Boot Camp to remove threats from the board. This also works as part of a Peace combo, where you have Flagstone Garrison and Drill Sergeant. I’ll go more into how it works specifically, but for Dreamscape it is sufficient to say that you end up with a lot of tokens on Drill Sergeant which you can use to wipe your opponent’s entire board. The drawback of Dreamscape is that you also make all your own units into Illusions, which also makes your opponents job of clearing your units also a lot easier. Luckily, Truth has two in-spec ways of mitigating that in Macciatus and Reteller of Truths. Compared to Hallucination, Dreamscape requires you to set it up more to either make sure that you are able to clear your opponents board completely with the Peace combo, or protect your own stuff with Macciatus or/and Reteller of Truths.
The easiest spell might be Free Speech. A lot of what Blue is about is unit control, disabling opponents units, copying them for cheap, removing them with illusion spells, all of this makes your opponents want to focus more on heroes and spells, which is maybe why Free Speech is so good. It stops all of an opponent’s heroes from casting spells and using abilities until after your next turn. The iron carpet has been put down. This has crazy synergies with Lawful Search as well, check their hand to see what it is about. Only spells? OH HAH! No spells for you! Oh, have you some targeted spells for my illusions? Well, I guess I have to stop that! Only costing 2 gold is also great, because it isn’t such a large investment. You might end up stopping your opponents momentum completely before a huge swing turn where she might have gathered up lots of spells to win the game, but you just say “nah”.
Quince is super scary and has a lot of neat tricks, he doesn’t do much for board presence in and of himself, but his illusions become scary fairly quickly. They are costly, so make them worth it!
Bigby Hayes is a 2/3 hero, which is the standard for a topband hero in Codex. His topband ability is Stash, which is a great tool that lets you be able to save a specific piece of your combo, or save a big board clear spell until your opponent has more units out on the board, or save a spell for another hero until you can summon him again.
Bigby gets his midband at level 3, where he becomes a 2/4, which is not very exciting. He can still be effective against tech 0 units, and deal with some of the tech 1 units, but in general he looses some of his combativeness. His midband also has a early game focus, only being able to target tech 0 and tech 1 units to sideline them from patrol.
Maxband at Lv 5 he ends up a 3/4, which is adequate but not exciting. His maxband ability is to exhaust to draw a card. Drawing a card each turn is a truly great ability, this might give you the draw you need to clear the board or play a tech 2 or 3 card you need.
So, from his stats and abilities, he might not seem like much. Drawing cards is nice, stashing cards is nice, but it has the minor drawback of halting the reshuffle of your deck by 1 card. And His midband ability is very slight. He more than makes up for this with his spells.
His spells are all very good and have fairly large impacts on the board most of the time.
The worst spell, is also the most flexible, which is Jurisdiction. Jurisdiction lets you play any non-ultimate Spell from your codex. It basically means you can play whatever you need whenever you need it by only paying 2 extra gold, which is amazing. In the early game, this is probably a bit too expensive, so you shouldn’t rely on this one helping you out there. In the late game, this one is totally fine as long as you have the money for it. A thing to think about is that this spell makes your deck thicker since you are shuffling in new card into your deck every time you use this one together with the Jurisdiction card, so this might give you some draw timing issues if you are not used to it.
Injunction is a super good stalling spell. When you are disabeling a tech 1 building, not only are you disabeling all the tech 1 units, but you are stopping your opponent from building a tech 2 building in the first place! The dream is to disable tech 1 to stop them from building tech 2 for two turns in a row, and then maybe destroy the tech 1 which he hasn’t been able to build from in a while anyway. And then you will have tech 2 units out before he has been able to attack with his tech ones at all! Injunction does not target the tech 3 building sadly, so that limits its usefulness in the late game.
Community service is a great card for preemptively stopping unit oriented combos from your opponent. It is very similar to Mind Control, but instead of dealing with the card on the board, you can either take a card from the discard or from your opponents hand. The upside with taking it from your opponents hand is that you are shrinking his handsize, which is great. If you are able to combo this with Lawful search, you can get away with some really great units and learning what they are trying to do. Which are both great things. Thieving Imp is a card that lets you discard a card at random from your opponents hand for around 1 gold, so having Community service “discard” your opponents best unit from hand is probably worth at least 2 gold, and then you kinda get to play that unit for 3 gold. Of course, you want to play Lawful Search with this, to make sure that you actually get a unit. If you play this and you end up don’t stealing a unit? You are in trouble, effectively just paying 5 gold for a worse Lawful Search. Remember that this does not hit tech 0 units, so you can’t bust this one out too early!
But, at some point, you need to do something about those pesky units! That is where Judgment Day comes in as one of Blues most defining spells. It clears the board of everything but heroes and tech 3 units, for only 4 gold, and he can play it the turn he arrived! Playing it the turn he arrived is a 10 gold combo, so that’s not ideal, but it is nice to have it at least. This synergizes with both Censorship Council and Justice Juggernaut from Law, since your opponent can’t easily get a new board if the Council is out, and Justice Juggernaut has two lives.
All in all, Peace, Truth and Law all have useful spells in them, but none of them are good ways of dealing with Tech 3 options, outside of maybe The Art of War from Onimaru, but as we covered, maxing him and letting him have the spell is very expensive and slow. While, as we have already seen with the starter set, and we will see in a while with the other tech choices, the units of Blue are kind of underwhelming and lackluster for the most part, they do have some tricks up their sleeve. It is designed in a way that makes you want to stall, stall, and stall until you get an upper hand, either through Judgement Day, Dreamscape or steal something nice with either Mind Control or Community Service. Having a lot of cycle options makes it also likely that you end up populating the board with patrollers so that you live on through the late game.[/details]