[Strategy] Codex Roles P1 vs. P2

I think you are placing a ton of emphasis on this, but there are many mitigating factors in a game of codex:

-Haste
-Patrol Zone Bonuses
-Combat Tricks
-Removal

Yes, P1 has an advantage and can make the initial good trades, if there are any. The original post was outlining these advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes all your opponent lets you do is damage their base early. Much like Magic, managing your life total as a resource is key. All the base damage doesn’t matter if they can’t finish the job. I still think that a conversation about P1 and P2 roles is more important for Codex than Magic because you start with so much more gold (mana). In a game of Magic, going first lends itself a big advantage especially when 2 decks are racing. Going first means you essentially are 1 turn faster than your opponent, which is a huge deal.

However in Codex, while you do get to set up initial trades and will have that 1 extra virtual turn, the benefit is smaller because P2 can set up a lot of blockers, always, with any starter deck. In Magic you can stumble on lands, which is an advantage to P1 if they are aggressive. You can also just not draw your cheaper cards, which again is an advantage to an aggressive P1. These situations rarely happen in Codex. While you may not draw your best starting unit in your first 5 cards, you will definitely have access to it in your next 5 cards (barring Thieving Imp and variance). This is a huge boon to defensive play! Aggressive magic decks are designed to be consistent and low to the ground, filled with cheap creatures and cheap spells so that stumbling on mana is minimized and not drawing cheap threats is rare. However slower decks can have those bad luck moments of drawing all their expensive finishers first and their roadblock creatures too late. In Codex this scenario simply does not exist.

Consider a mirror match a Mono-Red vs Mono-Red - how much do you base your decisions on whether you are P1 or P2? It’s a big deal for when you summon your hero, how you assign the Patrol Zone, and what you tech. The decks are theoretically the same, but your decisions will change based on whether your are P1 or P2.

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Decisions should not change based on whether one is P1 or P2. They should change based on whether one is behind on the board or ahead on the board. That’s completely different.

P2 will always remain P2, but if/when they manage to flip who is ahead on the board they should begin teching and playing differently. That is a solid reason not to assign roles based on who is P1 or P2, but to assign based on who is or isn’t ahead on the board.

Ok, well what about at the beginning of the game? Also, you haven’t addressed the mirror match? Wouldn’t you play differently whether you were P1 or P2 in a mirror-match?

I would say that anyone staring at an empty board (P1T1, for instance) should be first trying to stick a high threat hero if possible and otherwise to stick high threat units. The better one is able to do this, the more limited the opponent’s range of responses will be. P1T1 would be encouraged to, for example, put out Feral Hero and Merfolk Prospector. They will want to do as much as possible to remain ahead on the board. That will generally include playing offensively and trying to setup profitable trades.

For anyone staring at a board where they are behind, which would usually include P2T1, somebody should be doing whatever possible to flip to a board where they are ahead. They might try to prepare for an early game where they use Nullcraft and Chaos Mirror to kill something major and allow themselves to stabilize. Shark Attack might also be a card useful to the person behind on the board because the person ahead on the board is encouraged to do a lot of attacking to maintain their lead rather than blocking, allowing sharks to hit high value targets. Haste in general is really good at helping people to stabilize and flip.

Just putting out high value stuff and blocking can work as the defender, but it’s risky. The attacker is in control of what trades with what and handing off all decision making like that makes it too easy for the attacker. I would not suggest that the defender rely only on putting out efficient blockers and racking up patrol zone bonuses. It can work, but in my experience it’s difficult to come out ahead that way. Creatures with haste are really valuable on the defense for messing up otherwise simple math and forcing people ahead on the board into playing sub-optimal lines.

I wouldn’t play strategically any differently regardless of which decks were in use, for the most part. If I were ahead on the board I would play like I were ahead. If I were behind on the board I would play as if I were behind. Mirror match doesn’t have to do with it.

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Yeah, I mean that’s like a level 0 strategy. What do you do against people who are saving gold to combo out? I think Patrol Zone bonuses are better than you are giving credit also. If both players are playing 2 gold 2/2s, then the defender getting half their gold investment back, or adding an extra armor, or drawing a card all feel like getting another virtual gold’s worth of value. It’s “risky”, but necessary to learn the right patrols in the right situations because eventually you’ll be P2 against hasty creatures.

Ultimately I think formulating a plan to win the game, as early as possible, against what you think your opponent is going to do is the best move in Codex. But it’s incredibly difficult to stay focused on winning, countering, and just building a deck that does enough. I guess that’s why it’s such a fun game :wink:

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It’s not really “risky” per-se, just hard. When I’m focused on winning, I will calculate out all possible attacks my opponent could have on their next turn, including any spells or Haste they might have teched in, and determine how I want to patrol based on what covers the most / most likely combinations of things they could have. Usually there is a way to arrange what you play and how you patrol to leave only medium value attacks.

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Beat them before they combo off, I guess? If somebody is not playing very much to the board so they can hoard resources, you can probably try to destroy tech buildings or something to hinder them from accomplish whatever their goal is.

I am not saying that it’s ideal for the defender to try to have every card in their deck be a hasty beater (not saying not either). I would strongly suggest defenders make use of patrolling bonuses where it makes sense to. I am just saying don’t skip haste because threats cause opponents to play worse. It makes sense to use every tool at your disposal to flip the board advantage to yourself if you are behind and haste is a good way to do that.

I maintain that it’s risky for anyone to have no other defensive plan than shoving creatures in the patrol zone and hoping for the best. That allows the greatest number of options for somebody already winning to win even more. Adding spells and hasty creatures to the equation is much less risky. It gives them a reason not to do the mathematically optimal offensive plays. It forces them to devote thinking time to defense and increases the likelihood of mistakes on the opponent’s part.

While this is sometimes true, it’s important to remember that there are several inter-related resource pools that each player is maintaining:

  • Hand
  • Gold
  • Workers
  • Board (including the sub-pool of patrolling HP/armor, and the overlapping sub-pool of heroes to unlock spells, which itself has the sub-pool of levels, which can potentially unlock ultimates)
  • Tech buildings (which are technically on the board, but separate enough that I think of them as their own things)

Often shoving creatures in the patrol zone gives the opponent just as much to think about as hitting with a hasted creature or a spell.

Consider: I’m at 3 cards in hand at the end of my turn. If I worker and play one card next turn, I’ll still be at 3 cards in hand. If you’re at 5 cards, I’m at a significant disadvantage, because I’m slower to cycle in my new (better, or more optimally answering, techs). I’m also at a significant disadvantage because I have fewer options each turn to address the threats presented on your turn, and I have a higher chance of drawing a very weak or dead hand.
So I patrol in technician.

You, on your turn, might not want to do the mathematically optimal offensive play if you decide that that keeping my hand resource starving is more important than starving my board resource. You may then decide to build up (level heroes, build tech buildings) instead of keeping the board pressure on. Or you could decide to keep the board pressure on, but you know that it risks me drawing into answers and coming back to equal footing more quickly. You face the same problem anytime I put something in scavenger.

It’s not always an obvious choice. Sometimes killing a technician will cause a deck cycle, giving the opponent a chance to draw a really nasty threat.
It’s almost always correct to break Tech buildings if you have the opportunity, but sometimes it’s more important to take out a hero. Sometimes it’s more important to keep the opponent’s hand or money low so that they are unlikely to be able to do much even with their fancy Tech II, and if they manage to, their hand goes down even further.

It can sometimes be really hard to tell whether an opponent put a unit or hero in technician because it’s valuable and they want some compensation if they can’t have it, or because it’s not valuable to their plan, and it’s bait, and they really need to draw a specific card on their next turn. Figuring out which it is can be crucial.

Oh, one last thing: because of the fog of war, you often don’t have to add spells and haste to your deck as defender; they just have to be in your codex. Since the opponent doesn’t know what you teched, they often have to assume that spells and haste are possibilities, and try to play around them.

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I agree with most of that. I am not well known for teching when my opponent’s hand size is low, but I can see how some people might. I would probably keep blowing their technicians away and trying to destroy tech buildings more often. Letting people swing with something is worse to me (usually) than just giving them another card/gold.

I also like to have Zane in my lineup because of the ever present threat of hasty beatdown even if I don’t use it. I for sure use that in my own play. I am more of a fan of putting the crashbarrows/hyperions in, though, and not just letting the opponent be terrified that I might put them in.

Between letting opposing creatures live and letting the opponents have patrol zone bonuses, I find that I lose most often after letting opposing creatures live.

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It sounds like a lot of disagreement people have with you comes down to this paragraph, which I think confuses inevitability with board control, and to a lesser extent, tempo with board control.

[quote=“Raiddinn, post:24, topic:1905”]If P1 is ahead by some amount and then both players do things that cancel each other out for the rest of the game, P1 will win. P1 playing to an empty board gives it inevitability at the end of P1T1.
[/quote]

This in particular seems like it ignores degrees of advantage. Depending on the Codex, an even board favours the player who’s Codex has inevitability - in other words, it favours the OTK Codex, or the player who has a Tech III or Ultimate Spell gameplan to which their opponent cannot respond.

P1 doesn’t have inevitability as a function of being P1. P1 starts with an advantage in tempo, which is important because all OTK/control-style gameplans which have inevitability can only be disrupted in one of two ways: (1) you hit your OTK/unanswerable win condition first (in which case, P1 never had inevitability, you did), or (2) having such an advantaged board state that you can indefinitely prevent their key tech building or hero from persisting on the board.

This makes sense as to why you feel inevitability and tempo are interchangeable in Codex. For example, if P1 is making trades and clearing P2’s board throughout the entire game, but the P2 builds Tech III and thereafter wins the game by playing and attacking with Pirate Gunship, then I wouldn’t say that “P2 won by gaining control of the board” even if that is an apt description of what playing and attacking with Pirate Gunship does. I would say “P2 won because P1 had no answer to Tech III Anarchy, and couldn’t prevent their opponent from attaining it.” P1 couldn’t establish enough tempo advantage for it to become a win condition.

TL;DR - P1 starts with tempo and P2 is likely to make tech decisions and plays with an eye to preventing P1 from attaining significant board advantage. Inevitability is “who can hit their ‘I win’ button first.” Significant board advantage is the key tool in preventing the player with inevitability from winning the game.

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All that said, I’m pretty heartened by the win-rates posted in this thread, especially the expert winrates being so close to 50/50. If tournament games so far show a P1 advantage of about 10% (excluding very unsuccessful and very successful players), I think that falls to the fact there are more points of failure possible on the P2 side of the coin?

Like if you patrol badly as P2 it can be very bad, compared to attacking badly as P1 which is probably not as bad overall. Then you have teching badly as P2, which is also probably worse than teching badly as P1. And I would agree that both of those things are probably going to be most significant at the mid-level of experience. If two inexperienced players are both making bad decisions, P1 advantage probably doesn’t mean much in the face of more costly misplays. If two very experience players are playing, we’d expect misplays to be minimal, and a near 50/50 winrate would indicate P1 advantage is minimal in that environment.

So that’s pretty rad imooooo!

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Yeah as someone who has played a fair bit I don’t feel like p1 is a big advantage, and I think the game is really well balanced around p1 and p2. The patrol zone, tech buildings, starting gold and starter deck + hero portions of the design all play a role in coming together to make “first to act” not the heavy advantage it often can be in similar games.

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