Monster Train or Deckbuilder: the ‘good parts’ version

:) Considering Rogue wasn’t even the first roguelike… I stand on precedent!

I just had the closest win with an unconventional setup I tried.

Covenant: 6

Umbra Trample Hero
3x Void Binding + Holdover (Gives damage shield and rage, but subtract ember generation)
1x Perils of Production + Holdover (Gives 2 ember)

I did not pick up any other units and used the train steward. Once I lucked out holdover early, I just duplicated the card when I had the chance. This allows me to just keep pumping up the Trample hero.

The last boss Seraph almost did me in when it killed my Trample hero. It got to the last level and I had to use an endless Train Steward kill it. It was basically down to the last hit.

On hindsight, if I managed to luck out with a multihit or quick card I can use on the trample hero, it would have been a breeze. The void binding makes the Trample hero viable (I always thought he was useless).

monstertrain://runresult/0ec14e9f-2132-42d1-993c-1f48e6f85ed5

Edit: I really love playing on random with the random starting cards. I would never have thought that Void Binding makes the Trample Hero viable if they did not give me void binding as part of my starting card.

This makes it so much more superior compared to StS in finding working combos.

That’s basically the joke - I’m so bad at games that I can’t even reliably beat tutorials :-)

This game is really fun! The difficulty ramps right up though, like @cicobuff I just finished Covenant 6. I was doing an Orange/Green run.

But my easiest game by a long-shot was as Purple/Green where I somehow ended up with a Naga Siren with multistrike 22, 94 damage a swing and Quick. That was neat. Some really busted stuff can happen in this game.

Yeah, it can be fun trying to figure out how too make stuff work. That’s half the fun.

This is the other half 🤪

Kinda embarrassing . . . having won 5 times now, and lost maybe 10, I have literally just notice that when you start a new game the very first screen tells you what form of Seraph you will be fighting at the end. I guess I should start plotting just a little bit earlier . . .

You can tell from the map too

So my question is, can you tell what form of Fel you would get? (and would it make any difference?)

I appreciate why they did this, but by Covenant level 14 where they just keep adding starter cards to my deck, I am wishing for a different form of difficulty. The deck is just so bloated with crap at the beginning.

I almost won with a hellhorned champ but I screwed up in the fight against Seraph by not paying quite enough attention which spell was consumed by playing it first.

I feel like that first couple unit selections and choices which upgrades to go for are really hard to figure out what the right thing to do is. I have been focusing on unit upgrades more lately because the deck being bloated makes it harder to get that particular spell, whereas units are permanent. But I don’t know, that’s clearly not always right.

There are so many ways to get rid of cards, though. And you can pop +20/consume on some too.

Well, I had never noticed even now… so thanks!

Got my first win after 4 games.

monstertrain://runresult/9930cbab-ff35-46bf-9e89-45a1a01d67ab

Isn’t that the antithesis of Deck building? Wow you just turned me off by a huge amount… Not looking forward to covenant 14.

So this appears to have relics, like Slay the Spire? Are they as overwhelmingly dominant as they are in that game? I.e. are some of them auto-wins no matter what crap you’re running? Because that nonsense kinda killed StS for me.

At “Normal” it certainly is the case that the right treasure can make all the difference. I’ve found the ones which damage or stun enemies when they appear or transition to be especially effective.

Good to know, if disappointing.

I haven’t run into anything super-silly the same way some relics in STS sometimes compound each other. They’re very powerful, though, to be sure.

There was one that randomized card costs and gave you extra draws… But I got offered it late in a run with a deck of mostly low cost spells, so alas, I didn’t try to Snecko Eye my Monster Train!

It’s just as good in Monster Train. Not in that situation, but even halfway through a run with a bunch of lower cost stuff it’s still amazing.

Well, I don’t want to oversell it, as Misguided says, there are a lot of ways to remove cards. It’s just that at the higher difficulties I feel more forced into that than I was earlier. Also it’s been around since the earliest deckbuilding days in Dominion, the more you win, the crappier your deck gets sort of thing.

Relics are almost the exact same in usefulness and in many cases function identically to their Slay The Spire counterparts. This game also features a Snecko Eye (I have no idea what Monster Train’s version is called, but it does the same thing), and I suspect that much like in StS, it’s the best relic. If you get the Multistrike Tome and upgrade it with doublestack and remove the Consume for the extra cost, it costs 6 by default. Which isn’t reliably playable in anything other than a Snecko Eye deck, where it can never cost more than 3 and will average out at 1.5.

The only way to deal over 2k damage before the enemies can act that I’ve seen. Though obviously many other strategies can win, that felt pretty busted. I feel like relics are only slightly less relevant than in StS because on average you end the game with less of them in MT. But they are still run-defining.