Greetings from Denver, CO!
I am a geek of gaming in general, and love competitive excellence and solid design wherever I can find them. I’ve dabbled in most genres to a greater or lesser degree, but there are a few I’ve avoided, waiting for the right game. CCGs were one of those . . . until now. I saw the plug for the Codex kickstarter on Erfworld a while back, and the pitch made all the right noises – I thought, “Wow! That could be the one. Better grab a copy.” And promptly forgot about it for several months. 
My main competitive game is Descent, and has been for the last three years. It’s a tiny but fierce community, and staying near the top takes up pretty much all the time in my life I’m willing to allot to games. That’s okay, though; it’s the rare game that comes along that I want to seriously pick up. Most games I’ll play for a couple weeks, learn what they have to teach me, and move on. Anyway, a couple months back, one of my fellow players pointed me to Play To Win, which really struck a chord with me. With a lot of us, really; I was amused to recognize people I knew and experiences I had had in most of the chapters. At one of our recent gatherings, I would stand and read aloud one of the archetypes chapters and then say to the room, “Who is that???” and we would all look at someone in the room. Or I would walk up to someone and say, “Hey guess what, you’re in a book!” and start reading their chapter to them. It was uncanny.
The chapter on scrubs in particular was passed around to much general snickering and assent. I thought, man, what a great book, this guy gets it, how rare and how delightful!
And at some point clicking around the site of the guy who wrote that book I like, I noticed he made games. Well that’s worth checking out, they aren’t gonna suck. And I saw Codex!
Oh man oh man oh man, I thought the design commentary had shown understanding, but I had no idea how much! This is gonna be great! I immediately regretted getting the core set instead of the whole thing.
So now it’s here, and I’m super excited. I’ve played a few games face up on the couch against myself, and I’m super super excited. This is really nicely done, and . . . I have literally no experience in the genre. No friends who play. No local connections. Zip. Nothing. I am hoping to get my brother in law or my husband or someone into it so I have someone to play against, and we’ll see how that goes. But this is really cool! I wish to learn! There is clearly a lot of excellence here, and everything I know about it is by analogy with strats. I laughed out loud at one of my face up games the other night – I called my husband over and was like “Check it out, AIR RUSH!” and he watched for a couple turns and was like, “Sure enough, so it is.” Haha, great! Ingenious! It captures it so well!
Anyway. I’m actually here for rules clarifications and such, as there are a handful of rules lawyery discussions I have had with myself that have gone nowhere, so the threads on that are super helpful. And hey! Play by post! That sounds great! I would love to get in on that. I am game to get the stuffings beat out of me while I learn what ABCs I am missing from CCGs that strats don’t teach. 
But um – great game, you guys. Great job. Truly refreshing to see design with competitors in mind. It is so common to focus on casual first these days, and even when I’m going to play a game casually (as, let’s be honest, I’m probably going to play this one . . .
), it’s so wonderful to feel the weight of something intended to hold up to intense pressure. I wish you every success, and I hope to learn what I can as long as I’m here. 