Building a deck of deckbuilders

Just got my first win in Nowhere Prophet (on the base difficulty). Really liking it so far, and it does some things differently than anything else I’ve played in the genre.

There’s no deck cycling – each follower card is a named individual, and once you run out of cards in a battle, you’re not getting any more. This results in making the battle of attrition over the course of a run more varied than just “how much health did I lose and did I use up any consumables?”

In addition to your leader’s a health pool, followers that fall in battle become wounded. You can rotate them out of your active battle deck before the next battle to keep them safe until they can be healed. But if you leave them in, they lose 1 health and cost 1 less mana to play (generally a favorable tradeoff that makes them more powerful/efficient). If they’re destroyed again, they’re dead for good, but if they deal the killing blow to the enemy, they heal for free and get a +1 power “blessed” buff for good measure.

So there are lots of tricky tradeoffs between damage to your leader, wounds to your followers, when it’s worth the risk to play a wounded follower, when it’s worth risking damage by prolonging a battle to collect extra resources or control who gets the killing blow, etc.

Glad you like it. It was one of the better games I played in this genre. Now that the Dev fixed the unlocks system it’s quicker to try different race/leader combos.

Also, I like how some battles can go really wrong REALLY quick.

Strangely enough, I just picked up Nowhere Prophet on the Switch thanks to 50% off. I am midway through my first run on base difficulty and liking it a lot.

In addition to what Thraeg has said, the energy system is similar to Hearthstone - you start with 3 and refill +1 every turn, so 3, then 4, then 5. There’s two decks though, representing your followers which come out on the field, and your leader’s actions, which are basically sorceries. I like this addition.

I also like that there’s two ways to remove cards from your decks - your follower deck, you can intentionally play your follower when wounded to remove it permanently. But you can also edit your follower deck at any time, so you don’t really have to. Your leader deck, every level up you have to add a card and you get a token to allow you to remove a card. So that’s more limited.

Followers so far have neat abilities, and I imagine the unlockable factions will play with that even more.

Events call out your followers by name which I think adds to the story a bit and makes me more attached.The story overall is neat post-apocalyptic weird.

Overall I am quite psyched to explore more!

I still play Monster Train but I am starting to burn out on it pretty hard. And I haven’t touched StS in ages. Anyone else pick up a new one of these lately? Still so much in early access…

Griftlands is great in my opinion. Closer to Slay than Monster Train but with a couple of its own systems and superbly sublime Klei quality.

Slay also has a good selection of mods and a smart guy made a list of recommended mods that are worthwhile and change the game a lot.

Thanks! Yeah, Griftlands is great. I played through both characters who have a full story. Will probably do the same for the new character once their story is finished, and then wait for official release.
One thing I’m wondering about that game is whether I will get into playing the game solely for the cardplay aspect, or “just” enjoy replaying for story differences. I like the cardplay but I’m not sure I could do endless runs like I have for StS or Monster Train. I guess I’ll see once it’s been thoroughly polished to a fine sheen.

As for StS mods, I have messed around with Downfall, which is very interesting and also hard, and a couple other character mods. I don’t think I want to do the ascension climb any more, even with new characters. I’ve been more reluctant to play with mods that just add stuff, but I’ll take a look at the ones you suggest. The Jungle was fine for a couple times through as well. Ultimately though I’ve just played a LOT of StS.

Two days ago Vault of the Void was released in Early Access.
Well designed and implemented so far.

Pretty close to Slay the Spire mechanically. The main difference is that your deck always has 20 cards and you can freely adjust it before each fight using the pool of cards you accumulated on your run.

I’m sure many people will like that one (Seeing a lot of praise), but fiddling with cards in my deck between fights is exactly what I don’t want in a deckbuilder, personally.

Don’t know if this belong here but I saw this on Steam. It’s looks like a Dominion/Ascension clone.
The art work is absolutely beautiful.

Wingspan is certainly a well-regarded boardgame, but it’s not a deckbuilder. It’s more of a tableau builder in the vein of Terraforming Mars or Race for the Galaxy.

EA launch for Arcanium:

Yeah its really fun! Beautiful as well! I hope they add the European bird expansions at some point!

This one looks to be a StS clone at a glance (especially because the first character released was quite similar to one from StS). However, it has much more of a story to it, along with moral choices and a more rpg-like loot system (and equipment adds cards to your deck which is something I like—gear alters appearance too).

Only ten bucks, but a great-looking game for that price. Haven’t played yet, but think I will grab it soon

Launching into EA tomorrow, Feb 1:

This one looks pretty damned interesting. Each character has two decks, main hand and off hand. Some cards do different things depending on which deck they are in. There are also utility cars that can go into either deck, but don’t count toward minimum deck size (so they can cause bloat). Gear determines stats like ap per turn and hand draw size. All combined with Dungelot-style map exploration.

It just went EA, at a very reasonable price (regular $8, launch price of about $7). I wishlisted it, but I’m resisting buying any more EA card games until Griftlands and Trials of Fire actually launch.

Wow. It did not look at all like like a cheap game. It’s certainly not perfect either. The ranger looks to be completely overturned, for instance.

One thing I forgot to mention that I thought was neat is that the skills you learn can have prerequisite cards in one or both hands. Using the skill then moves those cards to the discard pile. Thought that was an interesting way to keep more basic cards interesting and relevant well into a run.

Been playing a bunch of Griftlands, Gordian Quest and some Monster Slayers again. Also fired up Fights in Tight Spaces and it’s a lot of fun, but tuned a bit hard for me so far.

Monster Slayers is great! Probably my favorite deck builder.

Saw this on the Steam Game Festival. “From the Devlopers of Faeria and Richard Garfield.”
The art work looks very in line with Faeria and there’s a demo for those interested.

Planning to try that demo today. The exploration mechanic is rather appealing to me. Basically, the pages of the book are on hexagonal maps with fog of war. You have a certain number of uses of an ability that uncovers the area around you, but you also pick up different abilities to uncover the fog from battle. Those might be different shapes, for instance, a line of 5 here’s in a row. If you don’t uncover the map efficiently, you will miss out on gold and upgrade opportunities and not scale up your deck to be able to handle the boss.

This video illustrates it really well, as he gets roflstomped at the end

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRo6aqcotoM

I just saw the video. That looks really good