Blue balancing suggestions

Ohh Interesting, do you have a link to who played what there or even vods? would be lovely to see what they do differently to me. I will agree mono purple can be very effective, but I would disagree on the answers front, their answers are so expensive that they can be so easily punished (note, never make them cheaper, then purple would be so OP) . My point before was mainly that Undo etc get a lot better when its bouncing an opposing unit back to your hand, one of the very few times its good.

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It’s not about answers being super efficient by themselves. It’s more about denying lots of strong gimmicks and cheeses like Max Rook, tokenspam, MoLaC etc. etc., forcing people to play “fair” against Purple who does anything but :grinning:

There are no VODs. The guy passed St. Petersburg qualifier with flying colors (scene there is still too fresh), and then destroyed us in the finals. He faced Nightmare, monowhite and a meme Troq-Midori-Arg deck.

He executed the same Rememberer gameplan every time, backed up by strong defensive tempo plays early. I got murdered as monowhite due to me being shit at playing P2 White vs P1 Purple and proceeding to get a hand of 4 Starter cards from an 8 card deck on turn 5 with surviving T2 and 12 gold against his almost empty board, losing all my chances to stabilize.

Nightmare game was much closer, he almost lost control when Metamorph into Vandy+Garth finally happened, but instantly responded with Rememberer + double Seer. Nightmare was beaten into pulp with a sudden onslaught of infinite 6/4s.

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Now Im really curious, I’ve always struggled with the Tech 2 Past game plan, I’ve got it to work against a few Codexs (Mainly Peace engine ones). I will agree to struggling to with the Nightmare matchup with purple, but if he actually manged to keep his tech 2 online, he had probably won it at that point, the struggle for Purple against Nightmare is getting to tech 2, not winning once its online.

With the matchups you listed, I’m not too surprised they did well, Purple really falls on its face against decks with fast/aggressive game plans, (off which only Nightmare represented on your list, and with good play/luck its not unwinnable, just very hard). It seems like they got the meta right and chose a strong codex against it.

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Purple meta calls offtopic

I don’t know, I don’t believe in “meta calls” in Codex. I could’ve realistically won my game if I had more experience playing this particular matchup and knowing what opener to go for.

While matchup certainly influences how exactly the game is played and what strategies are on the table for consideration, making claims like “Purple falls flat against decks with aggressive game plans” is, imo, taking it too far.

Ask yourself this. ARE THERE any non-Black “decks with fast/aggressive gameplans” that Purple really falls on its face against? Maybe no, not really? MonoRed maybe does not quite do this? Maybe the problem is Black specifically? Maybe because it’s slightly OP?

Yes, Red deck focusing on just killing you ASAP has done quite well against my purple in the past, I have little ways of stopping the burn hitting me in the face, and I can’t get online quick enough to kill them first often. I don’t disagree that Black is very strong, but against purple I put Red in the same category.

EDIT: If you want to continue this topic, we should probs move to a different thread, as we are derailing this one slightly, but I’ll happily take about things that deal well with Purple (along with many things people think deal with purple but don’t in practise)

Purple vs Red offtopic

I am very wary of going balls-deep aggro with Red against Purple. Purple simply seems to always have very strong patrol. Hard to create an initial opening to start racing.

Anyway, Red’s not that oppressive in my experience. Maybe I just don’t have the sample, because Black is much more popular among good local players than Red is.

Eh, I guess I should play more Purple to figure out how to beat it :grinning:

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Yes, Join us :stuck_out_tongue: We have futuristic cookies!

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I have come more and more to agree with this. My biggest problem is how it affects black vs everything but blue. Deteriorate is such a weird effect most of the time. It makes all 1hp units die except nullcraft, or it makes a unit trade easier so instead of trading a unit, the black unit survives with 1 hp left. The cost change to black probably hurts the purple matchup the most, actually. That said, deteriorate plus sacrifice the weak is possibly the most difficult combo to play around in all of codex, but especially in the starters.

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Second this. It’s very often the correct move to play INTO it (it is a 2-card combo after all), but then they have it and you get rekt really hard.

My point of reference for Deteriorate is Wither.
As I mentioned earlier, Neutral Starter recently came in vogue in these places, and Wither is a surprisingly good card, finishing off 1 hp heroes and helping you trade.

So, if 2g for permanent -1/-1 that works on everything is balanced, discounting that by 1g and taking away ability to target heroes seems reasonable. Non-permanence of effect, as you gather, is seldomly relevant — you usually kill whatever you debuffed right away.

Following that logic it’s really hard to justify 0g Deteriorate.

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Even though it’s hard to justify on paper, I still think it will cause real problems with the purple matchup

Do you think it would make the Purple/Black matchup as bad as the Black/Blue matchup is now?

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No where near as bad, the Purple Black is defo Black favoured, but there are options, I’ll put the Purple Black matchup as a 60/65 in favour for black (personally I think feel like it should be possible to find some good purple strats that make it 50/50, but I haven’t had the time to explore the options yet, and they may have good black counter strats).

Deterioate isn’t that scary in the Purple match up though. I find the real powerhouses to be graveyard/Theiving IMp, so it may not really adjust this much.

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Anyone up for testing some play by forum with the deteriorate changed to 1g and blue v black and purple v black. I would play either side.

Injunction is 100% tempo spell. It’s kinda like Sap on steroids from Hearthstone. You play Injunction when you are either slightly ahead or more or less equal on board to compound your advantage and deny comeback to opponent. Injunction clears patrol zone, denying Tech + Scav bonuses (possibly recouping 1g+card cost just by this virtue) and lets you go full-out offensive, dictating trades and taking out Tech II. I’ve used it many times successfully this way and basically winning the game on the spot. It’s especially good against freshly developed multiple T1 walls like Argonauts or Centaurs.

I’m relatively confident you didn’t mean to be insulting but your level of ire over me describing times that Injunction didn’t work the way I wanted it to felt rude and excessive. Anywho, what do you mean when you say tempo? I’ve never really understood what people mean when they say that in the context of games. I’ve looked it up before and that hasn’t been a fruitful experience yet. For quite some time I’ve suspected that I may not fundamentally understand some core aspects of this game and I don’t think I ever will. I was rather hoping it was a barrier I could start to intuit from obsessive plays but that hasn’t worked out yet.

In my experience, I’ve never been able to keep a board long enough for Injunction to do anything other than prevent my own murder for a turn so it sounds like my problems are rather separate from any individual cards. Or perhaps it’s tied to all of them because I apparently don’t know how to assess cards at all. Oh well, I still like playing.

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A tempo play is one that improves your position incrementally against the position of your opponent, and often compounds over time. For example, I am P1 and I play my combat hero and a unit with high attack. My opponent plays some cards and units, and on my turn I clear their patrol zone at the cost of my unit, level my hero, and play a larger unit that is better suited to clearing an even better patrol zone. My goal is to eventually gain so much tempo that I break through entirely and kill Tech 2 or a key hero, achieving an insurmountable advantage.

Contrast this with ‘value’ which is about gaining marginal/compounding economic or defensive advantages by defending and removing threats efficiently, and eventually having such a massive economic advantage that I can play some “I win” card(s) to take the game.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, I wouldn’t say I’m 100% confident I got that right.

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@zhavier I’ll happily take up the purple side as always.

Tempo is a term to describe the pace at which one plays threats. A game plan with a lot of tempo is one where you are playing threats out very quickly, and so involve a very low average cost. Tempo plays normally put you at a resource disadvantage in the long term, but give you material now, and so set you up to either trade well (and therefore off put the resource disadvantage) or kill your opponent before they can recover (such that the resource disadvantage doesn’t matter).

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So they’re arguing that Injunction is kind of a bad ‘value’ play, but a very good ‘tempo’ play. That would argue for teching it with a game plan that looks for board parity or advantage, rather than one where you are trying to bring yourself to parity against your opponent’s position.

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I’m pretty crappy at blue but I’d be willing to give it a shot. I feel like I’ll still get hosed by vandy though

@Shadow_Night_Black
@Bryce_The_Rice

Go ahead and start some threads.

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Ugh no, it was not personal. Sorry if it came across that way :frowning: I was just using strong language to drive home the underlying message.

I’m backing both of these descriptions.

I personally think of tempo as anything that forwards your board position. “Tempo play” is something that gives you big advantage in the momentary board state, usually at the cost of long-term value/resources. A lot of Blue spells are tempo.

In Codex tempo is very important because it lets you dictate trades. Good trades naturally lead to economical and value advantage. I.e. if I use my 3g 3/4 to kill your 2g 3/3, you lost your dude and my 3/1 is still standing and can potentially kill a second 2g 3/3 turn later, netting me overall advantage of 1 gold and 1 card.

Dictating trades (I also often call it “Initiative”) is also a strong position because it can be used strategically — i.e. to take out Tech II or a key hero.

Initiative in Codex is so strong that Codex has a built-in mechanic to offset that Initiative advantage in Patrol Zone and its bonuses. I.e. someone who is playing catch-up, like Player 2 always does, is usually behind on tempo and relies on Patrol to not fall behind.

Pretty often P2 wants to setup a strong unit in Squad Lead that effectively denies all good trading for P1, and lets P2 seize initiative and start dictating trades himself. I.e. a simple P2T3 Argonaut in SQL is a 3/5 which might take out opposing 2g 3/3 and 2g 2/2 if P1 goes offensive, which is a big advantage both in tempo and value, so P1 probably wants to pass up and not attack at all, giving up on initiative.

That’s where Injunction shines. Instead of ramming your 3/3 and 2/2 into SQL 3/5 and not having anything else to compound your advantage and take good trades, Injunction removes big things from patrol and lets P1 continue his onslaught without second thoughts, since removed big thing is not going to retaliate next turn either. It’s not a super flexible tool, but it’s powerful in that circumstance and the scenario comes up often enough.

Think of it as Arrest that costs 1g more and denies cost-efficient Tech I plays next turn, while sometimes disabling two things instead of one.

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