Guide / Overview to Flagstone Dominion! [wall-of-text]

Hey!

This is my attempt at a guide / overview to the cards in the Flagstone Dominion. It is pretty long, so I made the meat of the post hidden in post 2 and 3 in this topic. Hopefully this ends up being a decent resource for new players ^^ feel free to give feedback in the topic.

[details=Original Post]Hey!

This started out as me wanting to make a youtubevideo about the startercards in Blue, as I started with no script - because pffft, I could just wing it! - I quickly realized I needed a script.

So, as my script ended up being being more intrecate and I wanted to include more and more cards, it ended up being 16 pages long. And it being 16 pages long, I figured if I am going to make this in to a videoreview, I would want it to be not very misleading. So, I thought posting the script here would help guarantee that I am not completely off base. I am not trying to cover every exact angle here, but talk briefly about the surface use of each of the cards. Some things I go slightly a bit deeper into, and somethings i brush over more quickly.

Any feedback would be nice, if someone wants to embark on the mission that is my rundown. If there is things here that I should include which I havent, please let me know ^^ Also let me know if I am way off base on some of the stuff I have.

PS: Ooops, I guess I exeeded the number of letters in a single post. I guess it will have to be in several.[/details]

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[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]

[details=Tech 1, 2 and 3 units]Now, lets talk a little bit about the tech 1 units, and lets do it in the peace, truth, law way since that is the way we have been talking about our heroes.

For peace we have Brave Knight and Overeager Cadet. Brave knight is a 3/3 for 3 with an important ability, while Overeager Cadet is a 2/2 for 0 without any abilities. Both are important cards for Blue, in contributing either card efficient or gold efficient trades and/or stalling tools. Brave Knights ability is that if it dies from combat damage, it gets returned to your hand instead of dying, this means that your opponent has to trade very deliberatly to avoid you getting card advantage. If they have no obvious way of doing it, you can often times discard 2 cards instead of 3, because you expect to be able to get back up to 5 cards either during your opponents turn because she might trade into your Brave Knight or you are able to make sure your own Brave Knight dies from combat damage from trading into something, letting you “draw it” to get back up to an acceptable hand size. Since Brave Knight doesn’t “die” when it dies from combat damage, you aren’t going to get Technician or Scavanger bonus from it, so having this one be in SQL to get a point of armor or in Resist to deter it being magiced away are good strategies for keeping it cycled between your hand and your board. It having readyness also means you can trade into something and then patrol with it afterwards, which is again a great stalling strategy. So basically, Brave Knight is great for card efficiency, while it it expensive.

Overeager Cadet gives you another efficient way of dealing with things, which is gold efficiency. Having it be 0 gold to play, makes you always able to play them, which is great for putting things in patrol. 0 gold 2/2 + draw a card? Put your Cadet in Technician! 0 gold 2/2 + get a gold? Put it in Scavanger! Against more agressive colors, having a 2/2 often trades 1 for 1 anyway, so their lackluster stats don’t matter much as they are doing their job. But having it be 0 gold makes you able to build a tech 2 building without loosing to much tempo, cast an expensive spell or build an add-on. It gives you lots of room to do stuff that you might need, but can’t usually afford. They also play an important part in the Peace Flagstone Garrison Drill Sergeant combo, but more on that later.

For Truth, we have two illusions Spectral Hound and Spectral Flagberearer. Both of these are 1 gold units, where the Hound is a 3/3 and the Flagbearer is a 2/2 with the flagbearer ability. Flagbearers forces your opponent to target it if your opponent wants to try and target anything, which is great if you are desperately trying to protect other units, buildings and heroes from being targeted. The Hound is fairly decent early game, often requiering your opponent to deal with it for at a higher price than what you payed to play it, or at least as much. Putting the Hound in resist to make it “trade” better with spells could be a thing, but then again, more spells target patrollers than not, so maybe not do it? If it survives a turn, thats great, trade into something expensive before your opponent gets an oppourtunity to deal with it efficiently. This can also be used as a part of the Flagstone Garrison Drill Sergeant Combo, which at some of the higher levels can be used as a ruse: If they see a Spectral Hound, are you going Truth spec? Or are you going Peace spec? Being so cheap and large, it can often be a good pick against colors without lots of target abilities, since they have to use a card and gold to deal with it anyway.

The Flagbearer is more of a tech card used in specific situations. I have only really seen it be used in the Flagstone Garrison Drill Sergeant combo, which I promise you we will get to soon! It is cheap and lets you protect your other stuff from abilities and spells. Not a high impact card, especially with Free Speech and the Reputable Newsman around.

As always, Illusions are not worth it if your opponent can deal with them with easily targeting them.

From Law we have the most lackluster cards in Scribe and Tax Collector. Both for 2 gold, the Tax Collector comes in at 2/3 with the ability to steal a gold from your opponent if she floats some. So if that ability triggers, you and up with a 2/3 for 1 gold essentially. If it gets a gold from scavenger, it becomes a 2/3 for 0, which is better value than Overeager Cadet. All of these things are kind of conditional tho, they have to float at least one gold, they have to want to attack into your Tax Collector before you want to attack with him yourself. If you are able to steal a gold from your opponent in the early game, that can be devestating, one gold in the early game can be the difference between fending off an opponent or not. It scales pretty decently tho, later on in the game you are often expecting your opponents to float gold, so you can almost always get 1 gold back from playing it.

Scribe is only a 1/3 , which is a lot worse than a 2/3 , so he’s ability has to be appropriatly strong. And it is, Draw a card! Between, Lawful Search, Boot Camp, Bigby Hayes max ability and this, Blue has 5 individual “draw a card” cards, which is more than any other color can brag about - tho Purple has some draw tricks themselves. The way I like to think about Scribe is that it you don’t need to put him in Technician or Scavanger, because he has already done his job, which is drawing a card. After drawing a card, you either put him in SQL to soak up 4 damage, or in Elite, to make him trade against 2 hp units. This is, again, a stalling card you won’t mind seeing in the late game, since it soaks up damage to make you survive for longer, and lets you draw the cards you need in the late game. So while Scribe is a terrible unit to have on the board, it at least lets you put cannon fodder on to the board without sacrificing your hand, and still forwarding your deck so that you can draw Judgement day or Injunction.

So we can see here, that the most dominant tech one options for blue are gold efficient minions, or card efficient minions. They further the blue cause by stalling or being super cheap. The cheap units help the stalling plan by making you have enough money to tech up, get addons and get levels on your hero, while the card efficient plan lets you put more units onto the board without emptying your hand. The cheep units also help with one of the stronger strategies from Blue, the Flagstone Garrison + Drill Sergeant combo. Which segways neatly into our tech two choices.

Lets talk about the juicy gem which is the Flagstone Garrison + Drill Sergeant combo. There is literally no sense in talking about those two options separately, so we’ll do it here. The Flagstone Garrison is a 4 health building for 3 gold that has the ability: Whenever you play a unit from hand, draw a card. This is peak card efficiency, as long as you are able to protect this building, you shouldn’t have to go down on cards any time soon. Playing two of these, will let you even grow your hand while playing units from hand, which is awesome. The problem is of course that the turn you play the Garrison, you go down 1 card on hand, paying 3 gold to do literally nothing, and the building itself is defenseless. If you play this when you are behind, you are in deep doo doo. The Drill Sergeant is a 3 gold 3/3 that has the ability: Whenever you play a unit from hand, put a +1+1 rune on this. It also has the additional ability of freely distribute +1+1 runes onto any card you want to. So you should have an idea of the outline of how this works. Side in cheap units, play them to protect the Garrison, play two Drill Sergeants, keep recycling your cheap units, use the +1+1 runes on Drill Sergeants to make sure you are able to trade away the enemy patrol, and then use a large +1+1 monster of a unit to destroy your opponents base. GG!

The rest of Peace is a slight mishmash of hodgepodge. There is a 3/3 flyer for 4 gold, that gets +2 attack when attacking damaged buildings. I guess this has a slight synergy with Traffic Director, but you often want to destroy either tech 1 or tech 2 buildings with these guys, so having a traffic director out at a time when it is able to hit a tech 2 building doesn’t seem likely. All in all, this only means that these birds need 2 turns to destroy a tech building, an addon, and multiple other buildings. Copying this one with a Quince Mirror could be very good, as fliers can deal with units and heroes pretty neatly.

Delibitator Alpha is a 4/5 that gives attackers attacking it -1 attack if it is the Squad Leader. For 5 gold this isn’t much to write home about. It is just very … bland.

The Flagstone Spy on the other hand is very cool. A 3/3 for 3 that is invisible, and steals 1 gold from your opponent if it damages an opponents building, AND it can take a look at your opponents cards? That is pretty fun. The thing is, if you are going Peace, you kinda already have a plan: which is the Garrison + Drill Sergeant plan, and this card doesn’t really fit in with that one. Maybe as a one off to sneak in a bunch of +1+1 on a Spy through patrol to close it out unless they have a tower, but still. It doesn’t really fit with that plan. It is not a bad card by any means, but its ability of stealing a gold and looking at the cards of your opponent doesn’t synergize particularly well with any of the cards that exists within Peace already. This card would, however, be amazing in Law. It synergizes with Community Service, and considering how Censorship council forces your opponent to not spend money on playing cards, having a stockpile of money to steal from is always nice, and Law could get some gold theme going with its Tax Collectors and the Flagstone Spy. But that is not the universe we are living in.

Truth is, as their tech 1, an illusion driven tech choice. 3 of the 5 tech choices are illusions, while the other two cards are support cards to keep them alive, since Illusions die so easily to target spells or abilities. So, outside of being Illusions, Truth is basically gold efficient, card efficient, strong units. They are what you can want while still also rushing for Tech 3. But on to the cards.

If you are running Truth, the first tech 2 card you should side in is Macciatus. He is a 3/3 for 2, which in itself is nothing special, but his ability gives +1+1 to all illusions, and makes them not die when targeted by spells or abilities! Your 1 gold 3/3 hounds? They are now 1 gold 4/4 hounds! Truth screams value if you are able to get out Macciatus. Even your Spectral Avene from the starter set becomes a 3/3! If you are able to get Macciatus out with a few Illusions, your Illusions are probably still going to survive, because Macciatus is so threatening. One thing to keep in mind is that Macciatus is a legendary unit, so you can never have 2 of him out at the same time, this includes illusions made with Quince. So play that Bigby and Stash your second Macciatus until the first one dies.

The card you are teching in with Macciatus is going to be Reteller of Truths. It is only a 3/3 for 2, but has the ability of returning the first 2 illusions (which may or may not include itself) that die each turn. This is a very important card that will help you not die quickly, if they have an easy answer to Macciatus. It will help you retain good card efficiency even if Macciatus is around, letting you ensure that you have units to play the next turn, no matter what happens to your board. 2 of these might be too much, but if you are up against someone who has a lot of targeting spells, you might want her.

Spectral Tiger is just a really solid unit. A 5/5 body for 3 gold? Don’t mind if I do! She becomes a 6/6 with Macciatus as well. You probably want one of these at least. Other than that, there isn’t much to say.

Spectral Roc is kinda like the Tiger, just a really solid unit, but it has flying! 4 gold for a 4/5 flyer is very good. These gals can oneshot tech buildings if Macciatus is out, and obviously ignores patrol without anti-air.

The Eyes of the Chancellor is a very fun card, and one of my favorites in Truth. It is an upgrade for 3 gold, and while there are a few upgrade destruction tools out there, this upgrade at least has haste on it, so that you get to use it’s ability immediately. On the other hand, your opponent is going to be busy dealing with recurring illusions that don’t die from targeting spells or abilities from Macciatus and your Reteller of Truths anyway so they might not have cards or gold enough to deal with the Eyes. It is a detector, so you are able to see any invisible unit or stealthed, you can also make one unit of your own invisible - which Macciatus might be a good target for, just saying - but most fun of all, your opponent has to play with the cards in her hand revealed. So you know everything that is going on at all times. You can plan your turn perfectly, cast injunction on a tech building she wants to build from, play a free speech on a hand full of targeting spells, or newsman an upgrade you don’t want her to play. This also synergizes with Community service from Bigby Hayes as a sidenote.

Truth is card efficiency and gold efficiency heaven, just make sure your illusions don’t pop as soon as someone looks to closely.

Law on the other hand is the home of lacklusterness from Blue. There are some really questionable cards in here, but also some real good ones.

Guardian of the Gates is probably the worst card in Law. Guardian of the gates is a 3 gold 1/6 that can’t attack, but if it deals damage to an opponents unit, the opposing unit gets disabled. This is a good effect, but since it can’t attack it is soooo easy to play around this ability. Either they will use one hero to attack over two turns, or do a one for one trade with a spell. If it also disabled Heroes at least, or if it could attack. This is just strong enough impact to be worth your tech slot. At least it has a lot of health, in case you are playing against units that don’t deal a lot of damage.

Appropo not a strong enough effect, lets look at Arresting Constable. It is a 2/3 for 4 gold, with the ability to exhaust to disable an opponents tech 0, 1 or 2 unit. Not tech 3. Not Heroes. Porkhand Magistrate can disable more stuff than Arresting Constable, and you only pay 3 gold to play Porkhand. You do have to pay 1 gold and give a card to your opponent if you disable something from your opponent, but still, that could be better than having to deal with a scary hero or tech 3 unit! So you get a bad statted unit, with a less than stellar ability, that doesn’t impact the board in any great way when you play it. For 4 gold. Of course, if you are able to play two of these, and they live a turn, then you are a happy camper, but these guys die too easily to almost anything.

Insurance Agent is a very good card on the other hand. A 2/2 for 1 gold, you are almost certainly going to get more gold back and a card for playing it - another cycle for 1 gold?! In Blue?! Be careful tho, if your Insurance agent dies before your insured target dies, you won’t be able to get the payout. But you should be able to time this in a way where you can Stash your Insurance agent until you have an expensive unit that has low HP at the start of your turn, then insure that unit with the Insurance Agent, trade in with your low hp card, reap the rewards! Insurance Agent is an important piece to make sure you are able to get to Tech 3 and play your Lawbringer Gryphons without losing too much tempo. Remember that you can target opponents units, and also remember that Brave Knight doesn’t “die” from combat damage.

Justice Juggernaut is an expensive unit, but a prime target for insurance! (Just remember that it has to die with the crumbeling rune on it!) For 6 gold you get a 4/6 with two lives! It can’t patrol, but is unstoppable. Buffing this with Boot Camp makes it oneshot tech buildings, which is nice. This also synergizes very well with Judgement Day, because of the two lives ability. Not being able to patrol is a pretty huge deal tho, especially for a color that wants to stall. But if you are going for Law, you are most likely having Judgement Day in your deck, which is good with your Justice Juggernaut. If you are able to get your Insurance off on it as well, it has payed for itself both in money and cards, so only take it if you think you are able to defend yourself without it. This one is probably also one of the few ways of dealing with heroes. A very convoluted way, but still.

The last card in Law tech 2 is my favorite card, and perfectly embodies that which fuels the heart of blue players: Censorship Council. It is a 4 gold building that has 5 life, and has the ability: Opponents cant play more than one card from hand during their turn. I get a little tingly when I play this and get to experience its effect on my opponent. Your opponent can cheat out cards in other ways tho, so be wary about stuff like that. She can also play heroes, and buff them - and since she can only play 1 single card each turn, she is going to be stockpiling money quickly. (And here the Flagstone Spy would shine!) The Council synergizes a lot with Jail from your starter. It also wants you to play Free Speech, so that they can’t play anything either from hand or by cheating them out.

Law has some trouble setting up, but can end up locking your opponent down in the most oppressive way possible with Censorship Council, and a mix of spells / jail. But as blue, you kind of want your opponent to play lots of units, since you have such efficient ways of dealing with them. If your opponent gets to tech 3 before you, that could spell serious trouble, especially if you go down the Law tech, since they don’t have easy ways to snipe off tech buildings. Justice Juggernaut is an obvious one that could with a Boot Camp buff, but that is so expensive that it will delay your inevitabile tech 3 end game plan.

Appropos tech 3 units? Lets look at them in the same order we did anything else: from Peace, Truth to Law.

All of the tech 3 units of Blue are on face value, slightly underwhelming. This is probably a deliberate effect due to Quince’s maxband ability of copying a card played from hand. So if you have Quince out with a mirror, maxband him and play a tech 3 unit, you can copy that tech 3 unit onto the mirror, and since the mirror was played last turn, it can attack immediately. So always have that in mind whenever you are closing in on playing a tech 3 unit.

The Patriot Gryphon is a 6/7 for 8, resist 2 and flying. She can ignore attack 2 units. Also, whenever Patriot Gryphon deals damage to a building, it also deals damage you that players base. A very agressive card, but gives no immediate impact outside of a Quince mirror. Not being stopped by attack 2 units means that in practice, you can fly by chump flyers, but any type of tech 2 or more flyer will stop you and force you to trade. Any type of trading with this one will make it easier to kill with spells next turn, stopping you from getting an easy kill on your opponents base. Also, remember that if you are able to destroy a tech building, you end up doing 2 extra damage to your opponents base, so almost never correct to attack base directly.

Liberty Gryphon is a 5/5 for 3 gold with Flying and haste. It is also unstoppable, unattackable, and untargetable while you control an Illusion with any other name than Liberty Gryphon. If you copy your Liberty Gryphon with Quince Maxband, that doesns’t work, so you would have to control another illusion to get all those good keywords. This thing gets +1+1 from Macciatus as well, so keep him around for that one. Since this one has haste, this has an immediate impact on the board, and you can snipe off tech building easily with these girls. Being the cheapest tech 3 unit in the game helps get them out a lot faster than any other ones.

Lawbringer Gryphon makes your base fly! That is pretty cool, that makes it so that the only way to deal damage to your base is either through flyers, spells or destroying tech buildings or add ons. The Lawbringer also has flying and resist 2. But the real kicker is the Obliterate 4. Whenever you choose a target for your attack, you first destroy 4 of the lowest tech cards of your opponent. If your target is now gone, due to having been obliterated, you choose a new target - but obliterate does not trigger again. This is the one that benefits the most from having a Quince maxband before you play it. If your opponent has a lot of tokens on the other hand, you might fail to actually hit any good cards, so be careful and probably play Judgement Day before you play this one.[/details]

I don’t know how to make those “drop down” things that would make this less wall of texty, if someone could either admin-edit it into my post or give it to me so that I can do it later, that would be nice ^^

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there is a gear icon symbol above the text when you are creating a post. The “Hide Details” option creates the tag for hiding a block of text inside a spoiler.

I have broken this one so it shows as plain text
[ details=Summary ] This text will be hidden [ /details ]

Summary

This text will be hidden

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The proper way to show the code is to use the </> button. Your example would show as: [details=Summary]This text will be hidden[/details]

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It still did the trick tho :wink:

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True, but it’s good to know. That way it can look better next time!

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Bluecoat Musketeer is an OK replacement for Aven against black/red where you don’t expect the aven to be able to survive. You don’t want to be blocking with it, but against an opening like Garth + Skeleton + haunt, responding with Musketeer + Hero is pretty good.

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Porkhand is one of your favorite cards, but you say it’s underwhelming. What’s up with that? You focus a lot on the fact that it can be used against Tech III, but I think its use against heroes is probably more interesting, maybe talk about that some?

Find all instances of “mana” and remove/replace, pls

I’ve been thinking that Lawful Search was pretty bad, but you make it sound good, wow! I will have to try it some more.

You mention that you’re not going to explain basic stuff about the game, but you describe mechanically what the Tower does in great detail. Instead of that, could you talk more about how it fits into the game plan?

I am amused that the title is both “quick rundown” and “wall-of-text.” Yay for cognitive dissonance!

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True story I guaranteed a loss by workering Lawful Search in a Blue vs. Black game, where I ended up Community Servicing my opponent’s hand blind and he didn’t have any Tech I or Tech II units. Spending 5 gold and a card to literally accomplish nothing put me irrevocably behind.

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List of buildings with 3 or less hp:
Rickety Mine
Jail
Verdant Tree
Graveyard
Slow-Time Generator

Everything else has 4 hp with few exceptions. Generals Hammers strength isn’t that it can kill most buildings outright (just imagine how strong that would be) but that it can setup building kills very well. Hammer+traffic director(or any other source of damage) hits the 4 damage required for almost any building card and all add-ons. Hammer+aven will kill a tech building.

Generals hammer is probably most useful if you feel you have a strong opening and will have the board presence to finish off the tech building. With the blue starter this can be as simple as keeping Spectral Aven alive. It’s theoretically useful against Black starter(Graveyard) and, ironically, Blue starter (jail), IF you suspect they will attempt to abuse the card. Some multicolor decks seem to be built entirely around graveyard.

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The disable mechanic is my favorite in general, but it just isn’t very dominant outside of Injunction, which in itself is fairly easy to play around (just play different tech things a lot!).

I think disabling tech 3 is better than Heroes, because heroes can still cast spells even tho they are disabled. Most of tech 3 is unusable of you disable them. But in general, you probably end up workering him anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the replies! Keep them coming, imma edit my doc as the tips come chiming in ^^

I just wrote this up out of personal curiosity, hope this isn’t a problem.

Suggested Reputable Newsman numbers by starter deck:

Natural- 2

 1: Spark
 2: Wither, Bloom

Green- 2

2: Rampant Growth, Forest's favor
3: Rich earth

Red- 2

1: Pillage
2: Charge
3: Bloodburn, Scorch

Blue- 2

1: Manufactured Truth, Lawful Search
2: Arrest

Black-2

0: Deteriorate
2: Skeletal Archery, Sacrifice the Weak
3: Summon Skeletons

White- 1 or 3

0: Grappling Hook
1: Safe Attacking, Sensei's Advice
3: Snapback

Purple- 2

1: Time Spiral
2: Forgotten Fighter, Temporal Research, Battle Suits

So funny story, I told a new player(my sister) who insisted on playing blue to select 2 for Newsman. I must secretly hate myself as it turns out that 2 gold is the perfect sweet spot of power for a starter deck spell. Except for White. The rest of the world is using the 2-gold-spell system, stop being such a brat and get on board already!

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Injunction can’t target Tech 3

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Spells can cost whatever they want in Rook’s land of do-as-you-please.

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Also “coin(s).” I might have been able to forgive mana (a number of things suggest @neigutten is using Magic terms), but half the time coin is used instead. Either use the official term of “gold” of pick one other word, please!

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monies tho

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I believe you mean, “Munnies.” (;

@neigutten: There are a number of spelling errors (which won’t matter for the video, but which might be worth cleaning up if you want to leave this guide up; it’s not bad). The Magic terminology is a problem. “Block” instead of patrol shows up, and “creature” instead of unit, and a few others.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that it really is not a quick rundown. To be fair, a rundown that is both quick and thorough would be impossible. But just as you had to break things up to post them, make sure you break each section into a separate video, so it’s posted as a series, not one long lecture. Shorter videos are much more watchable. Think of how many times you “didn’t have the time to watch a movie” on Netflix, but then binge-watched eight 30-minute episodes or four 40-minute episodes; the same is true of YouTube, on a smaller scale.
2-minute videos are like Skittles: you can eat a ton without realizing how many you’ve eaten. 5-minute videos are like small snacks, and you can probably gorge yourself on too many without realizing it. A 10-minute video is like a decent meal, and you want to make sure it’s what you really want before you start eating. A 30-minute video is like a feast; if the food’s not amazing, you’ll probably stop part of the way through, and you might not come back to it.

Overall, the structure makes sense, it’s mostly pretty clear, and I think players who haven’t tried Blue yet (including myself) will find it pretty helpful. Thanks! But I would try to comb through it to cut some of the fluff so it’s a bit more to the point. For example, in the first summary, you say, “Blue is a very versatile color that can do a lot of different things, and has quite a few tricks to it.” That’s the exact same thing said three different ways. Cut it down to one of those three clauses; the sentences that come after are more useful and specific, so you want to get to them right away. (;

Best of luck!

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I have changed all mana/coin(s) references to “gold”, removed block and creature from the text and put in patrol and unit, changed the tower text, mentioned that injunction cant target tech 3 buildings, mentioned that newsman should probably be used on 2, explained a bit more about how to use the Generals Hammer and explained more about the fringe use of Bluecoat musketeer. (In my original document that is)

As for cutting away stuff, that might happen later :stuck_out_tongue: my biggest strength is not keeping things short and succinct.

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