Nudging the tiller - balance

Codex
162

Maybe Jail should cost 2g? Jail is a bad play mostly because it has no board presence, but if you could play Jail+1-drop as P1 it might be pretty decent? Compare it to graveyard which is the the best starter building and costs only 2g.

Also what if Jurisdiction was an ongoing spell “choose a spec, your law hero can now cast spells from this spec”. This would be better flavour for Bigby actually gaining Jurisdiction than the way it currently works. I wonder if it would be broken to let him cast ultimate spells while this is active…

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163

Absolutely not. Jail is very strong in the right circumstance, and it’s not even that rare an occurence — basically, any time you are heading into T2 and your opponent is low on card count Jail is going to be a strong move as long as you can protect it. There’s also Censorship Council synergy. And some specific cases like playing Jail into freshly reshuffled Demonology T3 with 0 gold and exactly 10 workers.

2g would make it a no-brainer play a lot of the time. 3g cost is justified.

That version of Jurisdiction would be bananas, honestly. And quite far from the current version, so I’d say “No”.

However, let’s entertain this idea, because it seems fun! I mean, that would certainly be an interesting design direction to check out. So, uhm, make it an ongoing channeled spell that’s attached to Bigby? What would you use to denote the choice of a spec? Or just let him cast any non-ultimate spell while he is alive and Juri is in play? I do foresee a few problematic consequences.

How should you cost it? It breaks one of the fundamental rules of the game and basically guarantees you will have a caster for a specific spell as long as you have a large handsize / slim deck.

Make it cheap and it will be OP. Imagine a 1g Jurisdiction:
— Hire Bigby, pay 3g and 2 cards, you are Free Speeched. Btw, my Bigby can now cast Free Speech forever unless you murder him.
— Well OK I don’t want to be Free Speech’d so I expend some resources to murder Bigby.
— Whatever, I just summon Quince and cast Free Speech anyway.
— OK, I strain my chakras and dethrone Quince as well.
— Ehh, here is a Juri+Free Speech combo again, get rekt nerd.

Current iteration can do off-color casting only 2 times per game per spell max, while the channeled version can do it indefinitely.

Current Jurisdiction also asks you to NOT tech a spell you want to play, but leave it in Codex to tutor. That’s an important thing — you have to sacrifice some of your ability to play Free Speech (Kidnap, Ready or Not, Elite Training…) in a usual cheap/efficient way to be able to surprise tutor it. Channeled version contains no such strategic conflict.

Make it expensive and you kinda relegate it into the ghetto niche it currently occupies.

  • Like, pay FOUR for that effect? No thanks.

  • 3g is still too much, considering that it paints a huge target on Bigby and you just spent 5g on stuff that does not protect Bigby.

  • 2g is the current price point, but current Juri occupies a different niche — it lets you summon an exact, most painful, answer from your Codex for a given board state. That has to have a huge board impact by definition (or why are you even doing it in the first place?) It also has no lingering effect, unlike the channeled version. Does a lingering effect equate ability to tutor a specific spell? I’m not sure, because of the next point…

  • Why even bother with Juri if you already have the required spell in your hand anyway? Just summon the proper man and do it like everyone does. Oh, he’s dead? Well, okay, do Juri then. But wait, do you seriously expect this to consistently occur more than once per game for a persistent effect to be better than current one in this particular niche? Is that belief worth sacrificing the tutoring part?

  • And if you do not have the required spell in your hand yet… Why bother with Juri again? It’s a card that costs 2g, has zero immediate impact, requires you to fetch a specific hero you might not want to fetch, and probably setups some future combo? How is that better than constructing Tech II or a Sanatorium / Training Grounds?

  • So 2g is overcost still? But 1g seems OP, like in above example…

So, uh, it’s a really fun idea, but I don’t see it executed :heart:

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164

Thanks metalize, I appreciate the indepth analysis a ton. I did kind of expect the Jurisdiction suggestion to be a no-goer to be honest, but I thought I’d share it anyway since the concept seemed (at least at first) quite neat.

Tbh I was more surprised that you rejected 2g jail so off-handedly. I was aiming to make Jail a much more common play for blue so it’s not really downside to me that it might be a no-brainer play. An issue would be if it were too strong to be able to use it very early, but I don’t imagine it being any nastier than early graveyard + imp spam in terms of card suppression. Maybe an alternative would be give it 4HP so it’s harder to kill? Relative to the other buildings something just feels off about it to me.

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The danger with jail is how good it is at 3g against certain decks or strategies. If you make it 2g, its suddenly good against almost all decks and strategies, which isnt the intent of codex.

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Ehh, that was my gut reaction. I have a lot of positive experience with Jail. Up to outright winning games with well-timed Jail installs. I love how it always catches people off-guard. And when they seem to play around threat of it correctly — whelp, worker it, no biggie.

I see no value in promoting Jail for the sake of promoting Jail. It’s a healthy card as-is. However, I do perceive cheap Jail being potentially oppressive.

Also, on a second though on Juri, I did not consider that you can have your cake and eat it too.
Imagine the following

3g Jurisdiction
Channeled Ongoing Spell
Attach to Law Hero
Your Law Hero can cast and channel any non-ultimate spells as if he was the proper hero.
Arrives: Pick a non-ultimate spell from your Codex, show it to your opponent and put it into your hand.

Now that card is a functional standalone design.

It’s ± current Jurisdiction, but with lingering effect that sticks only if Bigby sticks. So, very often, it’s the same old Jurisdiction because you likely play a single spell with it on your turn and Bigby gets instagibbed after that. But oh boy is it one hell of an annoying win-more if it sticks.

That is impossible to cost. A lot of time it’s the same old Juri, thus costing it at 3g seems prohibitive. So it should cost 2g, right? Spoiler alert: prooooooobably no.

As part of my “Errata for Law” project I already did like 10 games, both as or against Law in various decks, not just monoblue. We were specifically trying to force Jurisdiction and modified T2 Law. We discovered that 1g Jurisdiction is… REALLY strong.

Even in straight up monoblue you do have enough situational spells to fuel it. And it’s impossible to play around. Elite Training, Bootcamp, Free Speech, Community Service, Injunction, even Hallucination — ANYTHING can appear at a drop of a hat.

It eliminates all the mindgames and predictions around teching proper situational spell at the proper time and having a proper hero available at the right moment… It was even a bit… Unfun at times? It does break one of fundamental Codex mechanics, after all :sweat_smile: And, turns out, 1g is not too expensive of a price to pay for it. We even got away with teching it in first two cards of the game — yes, really! — that’s how strong it is.

We also kept track of cases where the difference between 1g and 2g actually mattered. There were some when I’d gladly pay 2g for Juri — especially in that ungodly abomination of a deck [Law]/Blood/Present. Most often, though, that was not the case and 1 extra gold made all the difference.

I am still not sure if 1g Jurisdiction is fun in a good way, or fun in destructive, OP BS way. Gotta play a lot more with it to develop a better feeling.

For now — woe is me! — I can’t test it at 1.5g. And can’t invent a meaningful drawback to tuck upon a 1g version.

2 Likes
167

One thing that I think would be interesting to try would be to keep Jurisdiction at 2 cost, but let you look at your opponent’s hand or discard before you choose the spell. You gain a bit of information, which helps you choose a better spell potentially, and now Jurisdiction is like a super Lawful Search.

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168

Honestly, that looks so elegant that I’m probably trying it out next time I get a chance to.

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That’s super interesting! I’m glad to hear people in the community are actually testing changes. Your suggestion for a channeled jurisdiction with a fetch seems really good, but my gut reaction is definitely that 3g is too much for it, even after your well put reasoning about costs. If you end up testing it I’d be interested to know how it goes (and also @cstick’s “super lawful search” idea which seems an elegant approach). One suggestion I might have for a downside to 1g jurisdiction is that you need to exhaust or disable Bigby to cast it? From a flavour perspective maybe he has to go fill in a lot of paperwork :smile:

Also I appreciate the well reasoned comments on 2g Jail from you and @zhavier. Consider me convinced.

170

New bizzaroland codex suggestion from me, what if sacrifice the weak judged “weakest” using combined atk+hp (not armour) rather than just using attack.

Then Newsman would be stronger than both building inspector and traffic Director, which lets blue counter deteriorate much more readily. I think the only other thing it might do is maybe let the Neutral+White Flagbearers protect 1/1s from deteriorate slightly better too. I haven’t thought much about Tech I and beyond, but from the starter cards only this seems like a good change, I guess apart from the additional math.

1 Like
171

I had a thought today about tuning down Black:

What if Shadow Blade and Thieving Imp, instead of discarding at random, allowed the opponent to chose what was discarded? Would that really be such a bad nerf? As I thought about it, I would still play them the exact same amount of times as the Black player, as the card advantage econ-wise is really the primary driver of using both cards; the fact that it could hit a really critical piece is mostly gravy.

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The fact it could hit a critical piece is more than gravy, there is always a card in hand you could live without (workers!) I would argue its not gravy, its a critical part of the effects. Though more importantly, I find random effects in codex to be somewhat counter to the rest of the game. Notably, rickety mine when it grants 3 turns of extra gold is almost always devastatingly good. When it grants only 1 extra its laughably bad. When imp or blade hit a critical card it can swing a battle drastically. That element of luck is already captured in the random draws, adding luck to other elements feels a little overkill. BUT, thats mostly my desire for skill to matter more than luck in all the games I play. Not that I am above using luck to win. :wink:

Duke is a really good game for having that element of luck, but leaving the actually winning up to skill. If you aren’t familiar, its very vaguely like chess, played on a grid, with pieces that have well defined movement options, except that you place pieces as you play, drawn randomly from a bag, rather than start with a defined set.

Or to compare further, what I like is being dealt a hand and figuring out if there’s any way in hell I can get out of the hole I seem to be stuck in and come back for a win. Solving the puzzle of my current hand, with an eye for future hands of course, but its always a puzzle.

I would say that about 30% of the time, I play a discard effect hoping to keep the worst card from being played against me, but knowing that at least I am making the future turns a little tiny bit worse.

On a completely different note, your plan would break the asynchronicity of Codex. It creates a decision for the opponent during my turn, and saying that they can wait until I have finished my turn and started there’s has lots of problems, mostly with the timing of discards vs draws and reshuffles.

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173

How about if Shadow Blade negates scavenger/technician effects if it kills a patroller? No randomness, and it preserves the asynchronicity.

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Kinda wordy to negate just those. Kinda makes me wonder how crazy would it be of it ignores patrol bonuses in general. That seems crazy. But maybe neat?

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175

Could we make the discard effects work like StW / hoodie and get rid of the cheapest/lowest tech card in hand? I know this might be a tie and just put us back in the same place but I like the idea of the targets being moderated somehow. Plus pruning the cheaper cards makes it more likely to bag a good value StW so it’s not even all bad for black either.

I like this idea. Maybe you and @FrozenStorm could test it?

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I think the problem with it removing the cheapest/weakest card is that it requires letting you see the opponent’s hand, which arguably makes them more powerful than before. Thieving Imp letting you see their hand on turn 1? Wow.

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Yes seeing their hand would be required and would be problematic. Lawful search let’s you see the opponents hand on t1, but at the expense of doing kinda nothing except hero. Imp would be way better on 2 counts, not risking a hero and reducing their options, so yeah probably way unbalancing.

Completely separate,

How cool would lawful search be if it created a 1/1 soldier token instead of giving a draw?

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178

Why not both? XD

180

This seems more thematic than the card draw imo. With Deteriorate at 1g it might start to balance the early game in Blue vs Black. I’ll add it to my testing list

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181

I think my favorite consequence of lawful search making soldiers is pairing it with growth, suddenly using the blue starter with blooming ancients seems kinda good.

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Yeah I like anything that makes Blue more viable as a starter.

If we also changed Musketeer’s ability to simply say “Long Range” (a change I’m testing atm) then green buffs and anarchy would both likely work well with Blue starter.