Sirus Quince is the Chief Magistrate of Flagstone. They say he speaks the truth and is loved by all. He’s a popular and successful politician, though all of his power is actually from lies and illusion. In his younger years, he was a lawyer who faced DeGrey in court. Now the court is in his pocket and he's taken the highest office in the land. Here is the Truth hero:
Quince has a lot going on. He comes with a 0/1 Mirror Illusion token, so you can use that as a patroller for some extra defense if you need, but ideally you’ll save your mirror. It’s fragile though because it’s an Illusion. All Illusions in Codex die immediately if you target them with a spell or ability.
The reason you want to keep your Mirror Illusion around is that once you reach level 3, you can have your Mirror copy another unit in play. You’ll lose it at the end of the turn, but you can potentially get some great value out if it. Your opponent will be hesitant to even play really powerful units, such as a Rampaging Elephant or something, knowing that you could make a mirror image of it at any time. This is a form of control in that it's making the opponent afraid to play strategies involving just a few, powerful units.
At max level, Quince gets even more Mirror Illusion tricks. At that point, you don’t even have to pay any gold to make your Mirror into a copy of a unit you just played. This ability can even create Illusion copies of tech III units!
Speaking of copying units, you can also do that with this spell from the blue starter deck:
Manufactured Truth is part of how you can survive the early game with blue. The opponent might have more powerful units than you, but you can COPY theirs and go for a trade.
Quince’s spells offer even more tricks with Illusions. Do you see what this spell is for?
On its own, it doesn’t really do much to turn something into an Illusion. You really need to combo that with something else that targets the thing (look for the target icon to know what targets). If you can turn something into an Illusion, *then* target it then it will die. One combo here is Hallucination as combo with another copy of itself. For 4 gold and 2 cards, that lets you kill any two (non-tech III) units. Not bad, but kind of difficult to line up your draws to make that work. This can help:
Dreamscape stays in play as long as Quince lives, so any later time that you draw Hallucination lets you kill two things. You can also combo either of these two cards with any card at all that targets things. A really good example is Drill Sergeant, even though he’s from a different blue spec. Remember that you can easily use a hero of one spec and a tech II building of another, so this combo is actually very reasonable.
Whenever you play a unit, you’re getting a rune on Drill Sergeant that can potentially be used to kill any Illusion! Quince speaks the Truth, after all, so of course it pierces Illusions. And remember that under Dreamscape, all your opponent's units are Illusions. But what if someone wants to question your Truth and kill your Illusions? Quince has an answer to that too:
With Free Speech, it’s a lot harder for your enemies to pierce your Illusions. You get a whole turn where they can’t cast spells at all, OR use hero abilities. Free Speech is actually generally great anyway. Yeah it protects your Illusions but it also dismantles whatever spell-based plan your opponent was going for. Remember that in Codex if they have a spell in their hand that they want to cast, but they can’t cast it because of Free Speech, they’ll have to discard it along with the rest of their hand at the end of their turn. So it really is like a pre-emptive “counterspell”.
You know about Quince’s Mirror Illusions, but let’s look at a bunch of other Illusions the Truth spec has to offer.
A 3/3 for 1 is a pretty great deal! Your goal here is to ride that value to victory. Force your opponent to spend more to deal with your Illusions than you had to spend to create them. If you can attack with Spectral Hound and deal 3 damage to something, you’re probably a little bit ahead from that. If you’re worried about your Hound dying before he gets to attack, you could put him in the Lookout slot as a patroller. He’ll get resist 1 there so your opponent has to pay 1 extra gold to target him.
Here’s another 1 cost Illusion:
He’s only a 2/2 but he protects your other Illusions. If they want to target one of your Illusions to kill it, they’ll have to target Spectral Flagbearer first. Why would you want to do that when Spectral Hound only costs 1 gold anyway? The answer is because you have other Illusions to protect. The Mirror Illusions that Quince comes with and also your more powerful Illusions at tech II, such as these:
A 5/5 is substantial and a flier is a big threat because flying is so strong in Codex. You can protect these units from dying to something targeting them by using Spectral Flagbearer or the Free Speech spell, but there’s another very powerful layer of protection available to you too:
Macciatus is Quince’s advisor. He’s a mastermind at the art of attaining political power and staying in political power. Although he works in whispers behind the scenes, he’s been a great asset to Quince. Quince speaks a powerful Truth, but Macciatus can enhance that Truth even more. Your Illusions get +1/+1 AND don’t even die when they are targeted anymore! (Philosophical question: if an Illusion is targeted in a forest and it doesn’t die, is it really an Illusion?)
Macciatus is the key to the Illusion plan. He makes your Spectral Hounds into 4/4s for 1. He makes your Spectral Rocs into 5/6s for 4. Remember that 5 ATK is a critical threshold of attack power because it can destroy a tech I, II, or III building in a single hit. Meanwhile, your opponent will have to kill Macciatus before they can easily kill your Illusions. Protect him however you can, but beware that you can’t have two copies of him in play—he’s a legendary unit.
If you want the full combo going, try to have 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, they are still cheap to play, and they basically don’t cost a card anymore. This can be an avalanche of value if you keep this up. Your Illusions seem fragile and easy to kill at first, but this is yet another perk you can pile on that makes them incredibly efficient.
The tech III Truth unit is an unusual one as tech IIIs go:
He only costs 3 gold, which is the least of any tech III unit in the game. He’s so cheap that you might as well play two! Each one is a 5/5 flier with haste (a rare effect for the blue faction). He puts the opponent on a 4 turn clock, but that’s actually only 3 turns for them to react because of the haste. If you play 2 copies of him, your opponent will only get one more turn before they’re dead unless they deal with your Liberty Gryphons.
Liberty Gryphon’s extra text is saying that if you just have one other Illusion, ANY other Illusion, then opponents have to deal with that first before they can even target Liberty Gryphon.
While the Law spec gives the blue faction careful control and an eventual lockdown, the Truth spec is your opportunity for rushdown and highly efficient kills. And at the same time, it's offering its own form of control in that you can shut down spell-based plans and you can make opponents afraid to play big units. The drawback is that relying on Truth also makes you vulnerable to being blown out by an opponent who has lots of targeting effects and who can stop you from assembling your full set of buffs. You can actually still put up a solid fight even in unfavorable matchups with Truth, so the risk isn’t THAT high. But to really maximize your wins, mix up your build orders so the opponent doesn’t quite know how important it is for them to have a bunch of targeting effects.
And if you have any complaints about the blue faction, you better keep them to yourself. Quince speaks the Truth and he’ll enforce the Free Speech laws if you go too far.