Cyrus Quince is the chief justice of Flagstone. They say he is telling the truth and everyone loves him. He is a famous and successful politician, although in fact all his power is lies and delusion. In his younger years, he was a lawyer who faced DeGrey in court. Now the court is in his pocket and took the highest position in the country. Here is the hero of truth:
Quince has a lot going on. It comes with a 0/1 Mirror Illusion code, so you can use that as a guard for some extra defense if you need, but ideally you’ll save your mirror. It is fragile though it is an illusion. All illusions in Codex die instantly if you target them with a spell or ability.
The reason you want to keep your mirror illusion is that once you reach level 3, you can get your mirror copy of another running unit. You’ll lose it at the end of the turn, but you can get some great value if that happens. Your opponent will be hesitant to play really powerful units, like the Rampaging Elephant or something, knowing that you can mirror them at any time. This is a form of control because it makes the opponent afraid to play strategies that include a small number of powerful units.
At the maximum level, Quince gets more Mirror Illusion tricks. At this point, you won’t even have to pay any gold to turn your mirror into a copy of the unit you just played. This ability can even create dummy copies of third technology units!
Speaking of transcription units, you can also do this with this incantation from the blue start set:
Synthetic truth is part of how to survive the early game in the blue. The opponent may have stronger units than you, but you can copy their units and start trading.
Quince spells offer more tricks with illusions. Do you see what this spell is?
On its own, it doesn’t really do much to turn something into an illusion. You really need to combine that with something else that is targeting the thing (look up the target icon to see the targets). If you can turn something into an illusion, *then* target it and it will die. One combination here is hallucinations as a group with another version of herself. To get 4 gold and 2 cards, this allows you to kill any 2 units (non-Tech III). Not bad, but it’s hard to arrange your raffles to make this work. This can help:
Dreamscape stays in play as long as Quince lives, so any time later you draw a hallucination lets you kill two things. You can also combine any of these two cards with absolutely any object aiming card. A really good example is the Drill Sergeant, although it’s of a different blue spec. Remember that you can easily use a hero with another spec and another tech building for another spec, so this combo is actually very reasonable.
When you play a unit, you get a drill sergeant’s rune that can be used to kill any illusion! Quince speaks the truth, after all, so of course it cuts through illusions. And remember that under Dreamscape, all your opponent’s units are illusions. But what if someone wants to question you and get killed for you illusions? Quince has an answer to that, too:
With Free Speech, it’s hard for your enemies to hack your illusions. You get a full turn where they can’t cast spells at all, or use the hero’s abilities. Free speech is actually pretty cool in general anyway. Yes, it protects your illusions but it also deconstructs any spell-based plan your opponent would have wanted. Remember that in the manuscript if they have a spell in their hand that they want to cast, but cannot cast due to free speech, they will have to cast it with the rest of their hand at the end of their turn. So it’s really like a preemptive “counter-spelt”.
You know about Quince’s Mirror Illusions, but let’s take a look at a handful of other illusions offered by The Truth specification.
3/3 for 1 super great deal! Your goal here is to ride that value toward victory. Force your opponent to spend more to deal with your fantasies than you had to spend to create them. If you can attack with a Spectral Hound and do 3 damage to something, you are probably a bit ahead of that. If you are worried about your dog dying before he attacks, you can put him in the watch hole as a guard. He’ll get one resistance there, so your opponent has to pay one extra gold to target it.
Here’s another cost to the illusion:
It’s only 2/2 but it protects your other fantasies. If they want to target one of your illusions to kill it, they’ll have to target the Spectral Flagbearer first. Why would you want to do that when the Spectral Hound only costs one gold anyway? The answer is that you have other illusions that must be protected. The Mirror Illusions that Quince comes with and also your most powerful Tech II illusions, like these:
5/5 is substantial and the pilot is a huge threat because aviation is so strong in Codex. You can protect these units from dying to something to target with a Spectral Flagbearer or Free Speech spell, but there’s another very powerful layer of protection available to you as well:
Maciatos is the Counselor of Quinces. He is the mastermind of the art of attaining political power and staying in political power. Although he acted in whispers behind the scenes, he was a huge asset to Quince. Quince speaks of a powerful truth, but Macciatus can reinforce that fact even more. Your illusions get +1/+1 and don’t die even when they are targeted anymore! (Philosophical question: If an illusion is targeted in a forest and does not die, is it really an illusion?)
Macciatus is the key to the illusion plan. Turns your Spectral Hounds into 4/4s for 1. Turns Spectral Rocs into 5/6s for 4. Remember that 5 ATK is a critical threshold for attack power because it can destroy a Tech I, II, or III building in one hit. Meanwhile, your opponent will have to kill Macciatus before they can easily kill your illusions. Protect it however you can, but beware that you can’t have two copies of it in play – it’s an Epic unit.
If you want to play the whole bunch, try having a Reteller of Truths in the mix:
Illusions are cheap to play in the first place, but they still cost a card. With Reteller of Truths, it’s still cheap to play, and it doesn’t cost any card anymore. This can be a valuable torrent if you keep this up. Your fantasies seem fragile and easy to kill at first, but this is another feature that you can pile on and make incredibly effective.
The Tech III Truth Module is an unusual module where Tech III works:
It only costs 3 golds, which is the least expensive of any Tech III unit in the game. It’s so cheap that you might even play two! Each one is 5/5 flying fast (a rare effect of the Blue Faction). The opponent has set the clock 4, but this is actually 3 laps only to respond due to rushing. If you play two copies of it, your opponent will only get one turn before he dies unless he deals with your Liberty Gryphons.
The additional script for Liberty Gryphon says that if you have one more illusion, i.e. another illusion, opponents must deal with that first before they can even target Liberty Gryphon.
While the law specification gives the blue faction precise control and ultimate closure, the truth specification is your chance to dash and kill very efficiently. Meanwhile, it offers its own form of control where you can turn off spell-based plans and you can make opponents afraid by playing big units. The drawback is that relying on the truth also makes you vulnerable to being blasted by an opponent who has a lot of targeting effects which can prevent you from amassing your whole group of buffs. In fact, you can still fight a tough fight even in unfavorable matches with the truth, so the risk is not high. But for truly maximizing gains, mix up your build orders so the opponent doesn’t quite know how important it is to have a range of targeting effects.
And if you have any complaints about the blue faction, you’d better keep them to yourself. Quince speaks the truth and will enforce free speech laws if you go too far.
