Nope that’s the game I’m playing! I parked a big awoken tank in front of them, put a Railbeater after the tank so the enemy units will get swapped and put that guy in the back. Just about every turn he killed one or two units and eventually he gets strong enough that he will be reliably killing each turn and the skies the limit at that point.
You can say that is gimmicky and relying on too many cards and maybe you’re right but I had to rail beaters in my deck and two tanky guys and that was enough to make the cards reliably show up in the first three turns.
Nah, man. This game is all about gimmicks. It’s why I find it so much fun. That sounds awesome and I love hearing about the crazy ideas people came up with.
Somebody asked about Trample Penumbra upthread. On the run I just finished, if I had only checked the event before I last upgrade, I would have taken Trample 3. I didn’t, then realized the event was the one that lets you add space to floors 😭
Added quick with a unit upgrade. Multistrike with three copies of Onehorn’s Tome, one of which had been upgraded to doublestack and remove consume. The attack with holdover Razorsharp Edge. And a Volatile Gauge to actually afford to play all of that.
That’s not at all what I meant in the earlier discussion! I personally find the Hellhorned champions too fragile and inconsistent. But obviously anyone who can win with them is in a much better position to say what good Hellhorned play looks like :)
Anyway, sometimes the game forces you into a gimmick, and then you just need to do what you can with it.
Yesterday I had a run where I could not get any kind of tank; the highest HP unit I was ever offered was 20 hp, and I saw no +25 hp upgrades at all in the shops. Just some of the +5/+5 ones. For the final battle, that 20 hp unit died in the first few rounds, and for the rest of the battle my extremely fragile back line was protected by a 15 hp Morselmaker. Gimmicks and hoping for just the right cards at the right time were definitely involved in pulling out a win from that.
I love it when you can creatively solve a problem, like my Molluscmage example earlier.
I just had a similar run with no tanks offered, other than my champ. My first melting remnant run and my started hand included two cards that buffed attack and burnout, so I went the burning bright route (150/150) at the end. While I had healing, I didn’t have enough to make him tanker which made for a really dicey run. The stealth elite took my pyre down to 5 health, which I managed to get back up some before facing Seraph. This happened:
I played two rounds so far at base difficulty. Got a little further in run two than the first (I think stage 6 or 7), but both times I was really limping along by the end and just kinda waiting to die. My longterm planning skills are very bad, so there was very little done to go for powerful combos. I also badly misread a starter artifact and didn’t realize the error until way too late, oops.
It happens. Just try and pick a theme and go with it. A little planning does help, but it’s more a case of not bloating your deck and recognizing where your deck might be lacking, so you can try to compensate.
I found that looking ahead to see what upgrades are coming 1-2 floors ahead has helped me a bunch. Knowing there is a card duplication coming so i spend this floor getting a super card so I have a worthy target, or taking a spell upgrade now, knowing I want to purge cards from my deck next floor and that path has unit upgrades on it etc…
Anyone know if there’s a feasible build that involves buffing the pyre itself? I keep coming across cards/artifacts that hint at this being feasible, but I don’t know if it’s an actual strategy or a way to mitigate pyre health loss.
Finally snuck a won. Seraph is a right asshole. He didn’t just apply the debuff to my units this version of him did when they were first summoned, but also each time he bounced around to their floor again! Oof. Luckily a mixture of rage-scaling demons and heal-scaling, multi-striking, uh, plant thingies kept me going.
I think you can feasibly use it as a backstop that is part of your strategy, but not so much a primary way to kill enemies. From what I’ve seen, anyway.
I bumped to Covenant 1. Like STS Ascension 1, it’s largely easier. I will keep bumping until I start hitting some walls, because I still haven’t lost and that’s silly. The difficulty curve seems much shallower than in STS and Monster Slayers and Dream Quest and such.
The artifact that daze units when they reach a floor below Pyre
Card that lift entire group to pyre and daze
Card that daze entire group but discard
4: Artifact that heals spite when killing units
The good stuff is that pyre does aoe. But I don’t see how it can handle a tanky boss. It is impossible to bring down the HP with a mere 40 dmg per round with so few daze.
Edit: realized that the autocorrect mangled my sentences
Yeah I haven’t played this yet, but in Slaythespirelikes, the pre-ascension level isn’t the “baseline difficulty.” It’s the tutorial. You have a 33% winrate on the tutorial! Git gud!
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).
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.
