The Game Design of Codex

There’s been plenty of interesting discussion around determining the ‘core mechanic’ of Codex.

While it is true that Codex is a complex game of many interacting systems, I feel like the obvious answer is being overlooked here: teching cards, or the unique take on deck building. This is the core mechanic that the entire game is built around, the primary innovation and likely the first thing you would describe about the game. The fact that you build your deck over the course of the game from a personal binder of cards determined by your spec selection.

Resource management is clearly central to being a good player and winning the game, this is true of nearly all games of sufficient complexity. Gold, hand, and board management are all parts of this.

But for Codex, the deck building would be the one thing you couldn’t take out without completely destroying the design of the game. Could you simply draw a set number of cards a turn? Yes. Could the patrol zone not exist? Yes. Could tech buidings and add ons be removed? Yes. The game would play quite different, but it would probably still feel like Codex.

If you removed the deck building aspect, not only would the game be completely different, but many of those other mechanics would now seem strange or unnecessary. To me, every aspect of the design flows from that central ‘pull cards from your binder’ principle.

Workering allows you to thin your deck of irrelevant or poorly chosen cards, while allowing your teched cards to matter more since there are no dedicated mana or energy cards filling up your deck. Discarding your hand and drawing new cards allows you to cycle through your deck quickly while still punishing you for using too many resources. Tech buildings add nuance and complexity to teching.

The game is even named after your binder after all!

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To dig into this a bit more, it seems to me that playing Codex well involves being able to thoughtfully tech well, thinking ahead to know not just what you need right now, but what you’re going to need in the future.

The patrol zone is just as innovative and important as teching cards. If you don’t patrol right, what could have been favorable trades become terrible.

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Codex has an active measure to prevent slippery slope with the patrol zone. You can point to any number of games where players have made comebacks without their opponent making in egregious mistake. You can also point to a lot of games where someone makes a mistake early and it costs them the game (slowly).

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I’ve deleted some off-topic posts. Please stay on-topic.

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Sirlin said this in the Rules Questions thread and I am curious to know: why is that intentional? I would have thought, based on how much balance and even playing fields are a priority, that you wouldn’t want player 1 to ever have any advantage over player 2 at the start of a match (beyond what’s simply unavoidable). Maybe I am making some mistake or mis-read that comment but if heroX + specY counters others, doesn’t that mean that that kind of advantage sometimes exists?

I understand that the countering effect is really minimal since, as it was stated in the other thread, there’s plenty to counter the countering effects with. In other words: this is not at all a criticism of Codex; I just am interested to hear more about the design philosophy, from anyone who knows the answer to this question.

(Sorry if this is a dumb question. And hopefully this is an OK thread to ask this question in, as it is a question about the game design of Codex!)

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I think the issue here is one of interpretation: I’m pretty sure the the “counter” thing applies in terms of things you can do to use an option available to you as part of your loadout to counter one of the options your opponent is using from theirs, rather than in the usual sense of “this choice coming into the game beats the opponent clean before we even start.” More like playing scissors when you expect them to play paper than playing an anti-goblins deck in MtG when you expect a tournament full of people playing goblins.

I may, of course, be mistaken.

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You’re not understanding what’s being said. Imagine a game where all possible things you can do are equally effective against all possible things the opponent does. Besides being practically impossible to construct such a game, it would make no sense to play and be terrible. Of course some things need to be better than other things against various things the opponent does. That is why there is even a game at all to play. That is how you use strategy and get ahead. The notion mentioned here has nothing to do with uneven playfields, so leave any discussion of that out of this. It’s just a simple fact that all possible things can’t and SHOULDN’T be equally effective against everything.

So yes, it’s intentional the some combinations of a certain first hero you summon (e.g. Blood hero) + a certain tech 2 path you choose next (e.g. Fire tech II) are stronger against some things an opponent might do and weaker against other things an opponent might do. If we made that particular combo have no advantage ever and no disadvantage ever then it would be a much worse “strategy game”. Your choices wouldn’t really matter because no tech path would have advantage over any other tech path.

You have 3 heroes to play first and 3 tech 2 paths to play first, for a total of 9 different common starts. That doesn’t even count spell-based strategies, so really it’s quite a bit more than 9. The set of all possible strats you you can do with a deck should have somewhere in it a good thing to do against whatever specific thing your opponent does. So that’s why you shouldn’t really need to sideboard. In essence, your whole deck is a gigantic sideboard, an order of magnitude bigger than an MtG sideboard.

In other CCGs, it’s much more important to be able to switch decks or add a separate sideboard mechanic or something. Usually your deck is tuned to do ONE thing really well, not this huge bag of tricks with 10+ tech paths like it is in Codex. So in that kind of game you sit down to the table at a big disadvantage a lot of the time because the ONLY thing you can do loses hard to the ONLY thing your opponent’s deck does. Here’s it ONE thing you can do loses hard to ONE thing your opponent can do, but you each have like 10+ other things you can do, so there’s enough leeway that your not destined to lose before a single card has been played.

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Ah, okay. I did in fact misunderstand you, sorry. I thought you were saying you wanted there to be like a “black slightly counters white” effect, but I see what you meant now.

To summarize what you’ve said, it’s something like, “any starting conditions’ counter-based biases in Codex are so vanishingly small that they aren’t a concern”, which is why blind picking is all that’s necessary - right?

If so, that is a cool game design thing that I think people should really appreciate about the game. Probably most people would agree that this cannot be said for a lot of asymmetric games.

Thanks again for the responses!

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Here’s how I take it, based on my brief experience with the game: a hero/spec combination is often able to answer another hero/spec combination effectively. For example, teching the Blood spell Kidnapping against Feral Tech II, because that lets you absolutely destroy them with their own powerful units. And that’s definitely crucial to the game. By anticipating someone’s plans, you can tech in cards to help you deal with that.

The balance comes more in terms of any monocolor having answers to the shenanagins that any other monocolor tries to pull.

I’m not sure this is quite right, though perhaps I am simply misunderstanding you; the way I would phrase it would be

“When beginning a new game of codex, each deck should have an answer to virtually anything the opponent’s deck may throw at them. Advantages and countermeasures are then the responsibility of the players to identify within their chosen deck, and add from their codex to their deck at the appropriate time. The player who more effectively counters their opponent’s gameplan should win more often than not.”

In essence, since you should be able to construct a balanced deck that has multiple winning strategies based on how you tech cards in, blind picking is totally sufficient, as you won’t accidentally blind pick into an unwinnable or extremely unfavorable matchup.

You may “play into” a poor matchup over the course of the game (like for example, choosing to max out Rook as a white player when your opponent is playing Purple and can Origin Story Rook for a very effective trade), but you weren’t doomed from the start of the match: you could have instead played Setsuki and beaten purple with a swarm of ninjas / stealthing into the backline of the purple player.

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Any deck should be a complete toolkit; it will have the tools to have a reasonable matchup against any other deck. The player still has to pick the right tools and use them correctly, with their opponent doing the same, providing the opportunity for counters.

The big thing for me is that the overall game design provides so many mechanisms to give reliable access to the desired tools (heroes, add-ons, teching cards from your Codex, workering useless cards, deck cycling, patrol zone).

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