Just like in RTS games, you have to actually invest in your economy to build it up. You can hire up to one additional worker each turn, and it costs 1 gold and 1 card. You put a card from your hand face down in your worker area to represent your new worker.

Putting It All Together

Hiring a worker costs 1 gold but then gives you 1 gold on every future turn of the game—that’s a great investment! It also removes a card from your deck, which is very important. It might sound bad to remove a card from your deck, but actually you want to remove whatever the weakest card in your deck is so that you’ll be more likely to draw your strongest cards. Remember, your cards will cycle from your discard pile back to your hand so you’ll get to play them several times.

This deck thinning mechanism interacts with your codex. Every turn you’re adding two cards to your deck, and some of those might be long-shot combos you’re trying to pull off. They might be answers to game situations that don’t end up happening. Or it might be that you were starting to go for one strategy but then you saw what the opponent was doing and wanted to shift strategies. In all those cases, you have cards that you might want to get rid of…and you CAN. The ability to get rid of some cards and turn them into workers gives you some leniency and flexibility that really helps.

Playing workers also interacts with your card draw though. Remember, if you play more cards in a turn, you’ll draw fewer at the end of the turn. For example, imagine you have 5 cards in hand, and you play two of them. Should you play a third as a worker? If you do, you’ll get to remove one of your worst cards from your deck cycling, and you’ll get 1 gold on each future turn of the game. BUT, you’ll go down to 2 cards in hand, and that means you’ll only draw 4 at the end of the turn (you draw the same number that you discard + 2, capped at 5).

You can’t always afford to hurt your card draw like that. The most important thing might be drawing a certain card you desperately need, in which case you should probably hold off on playing a worker. Or you might have to hold off because of the gold cost. What if you have 5 gold to spend, and you really need to play something that costs 5 or you’ll probably lose? In that case, you just can’t afford the investment of gold in a worker that turn.

Playing workers is generally a very interesting decision because it interacts so much with gold, card draw, and your deckbuilding choices.

Here’s the next Codex design article.