Well it is a rogue-lite as well – there’s definitely randomness involved. But you can get past that. As others have mentioned upthread, the key is fighting as many elites as possible. The more relics you get, the more your power spirals, like in Isaac. The secondary objective is getting as many useful ? sites as possible, since they can increase your power levels in other ways.
Yep, that’s definitely the way I play it.
I’ve been playing a ton of Slay the Spire in the last few weeks, and this time actually thought about the game rather just play by intuition, like the last time in binged on the game. For example figuring out which fights I was taking unreasonable amounts of damage in, and building specifically for those fights rather than just the endgame.
In the last three weeks I’ve advanced the Defect from Ascension 5 to 20, Ironclad from 4 to 12 and Silent from 3 to 12. (The asymmetry is partly because I split my PC vs. Switch games by character).
The interesting thing is how much my playstyle has changed in this short a time. Forget making a tight 20 card deck, at high ascension my winning decks tend to be around 35 cards (peaking at up to 45). The only time I would end up with a small deck is probably because of some very specific relic interaction; maybe Singing Bowl, or Sundial + cheap card draw, or starting with a lucky Astrolabe that gives me an endgame deck directly without needing early- and mid-game decks at all.
The cards I’m prioritizing are totally different. What I buy in the shops is totally different. The paths I’m taking on the strategic map are different. (No, I absolutely don’t go for paths that maximize the elites any more. It depends totally on how well I think I can do against each of them. And e.g. taking advantage of never getting the same elite twice in a row).
At the high ascension levels, my wins do indeed still feel random. But that’s because playing at the highest available ascension is also playing at the limit of one’s skills, and you kind of need a boost from the randomness. I’m pretty sure it would no longer feel random at lower levels, though I haven’t gone back to try it systematically.
You pretty much nailed it on the head. This game feels very RNG when you aren’t quite at the skill level appropriate to your ascension level with that character. Right until your skill improves and then it really doesn’t.
Congrats on beating A20, and a fellow Defect player. A lot of people say Ironclad is the best but I had the easiest time with Defect myself.
I’d like to know how you guys play a 35 card deck. Even if 25 of them have block on them, you could draw 10 cards and not get any block, and when the heart is hitting you for 65 that round, I guess you have the skill to survive anyway? Like, I’m really good at this so I’m not really dead!
If you can Weaken/Reduce Strength on one of the Yx15 rounds, you can basically turn that into nothing. Any source of Intangible or that Relic that ignores the first source of damage each turn renders the big one-shot attack pretty useless. There’s other stuff you can do apart from just stacking pure block.
Yeah, I totally get all that. I’ve beaten the heart about 10 times now and failed a number as well. If you don’t have the intangible relic (the one that gives intangible every 6 turns is really amazing), and you don’t have block, and the heart is hitting you for 65, you’re dead. I was playing the silent for this one example, the heart was permanently weakened since I hit it with weak every other turn. I also hit it with the one that gives X+1 weakness and negative X+1 strength but the heart powers up and I think clears negative status effects as well.
I also had a torii and a titanium bar, the damn thing couldn’t touch me with it’s 1*12 attacks.
My main point is none of that matters if you’re unlucky for a turn or two, which happens more often with larger decks.
I think in a large deck you can also improve your luck by getting more draw-based cards and relics.
I play big decks most often (though I’m not A20, I think I have defect around A10?). I don’t go for the Heart usually unless it happens to line up with my strategy and then why not? I personally feel going for the Heart is a lot more luck dependent. But don’t feel that way at all about beating the Act 3 bosses. I believe this is why ascension levels only depend on beating the Act 3 boss. The Heart is just a bonus crazy challenge. I personally assess how well something works based on its ability to get me through Act 3.
I find big decks work pretty well with some luck mitigation. There’s still going to be luck because it’s a card game after all. The Watcher has a lot of extra card draw and scrying to mitigate luck. The Defect can build baseline guaranteed defense with frost. The Ironclad heals after battle so can take a few surprise hits. He also has a bunch of ways to carry-over block. I have no idea how to play the Silent big deck style though.
I did not realize this, I always go after the heart.
For what it’s worth, I’m with you. I wouldn’t call a deck tight unless it was 10 or fewer, maybe up to 15. Anything over that and I have a lot of trouble making it work without exactly the right relics; even with a 25 card deck that is 100% reliable the second time through once powers and such have built up whiffs way too often in the first couple of turns. (I’m in the Ascension 10-15 range with all four characters, for what it’s worth.)
Silent has some great card draw (e.g. Backflip, Calculated gamble, Prepared; I don’t love Acrobatics unless at 5 energy), the best card retention of the original three characters (via Well Laid Plans), the most accessible block retention (Blur), a way of playing block for the next turn (Dodge and Roll), a way of converting any card plays to block (After Image), and the most reliable access to Intangible (Wraith Form).
So I find that with defense, there’s ways to make it work. Offense can be trickier, since you’ll probably be packing fewer offensive cards. If you’re dependent on getting a single copy of Catalyst on just the right turn, all the card draw in the world won’t save you with a thick deck.
So, tonight I played 4 runs as Silent on Ascension 1, with the explicit goal of beating the Heart rather than just act 3. Just to see if my belief of actually having gotten better at the game was true, and to see if the fat decks I argued for really would work against the Heart. (Which I usually don’t go for).
All four attempts reached the Heart, three won.
-
Won on round 9 via getting free block from relics on rounds 1, 2 and 3 (got all three of them) and then staying intangible for the rest of the fight (with a doubled up Wraith Form + the incense burner + an intangible potion). This was a 36 card deck that had a Well-Laid Plans and tons of card draw from Predator+, 2x Backflip+, Acrobatics+, and 2*Dopperganger+, so there were no trouble with having the right cards available on each round.
Once the intangible ran out, I then had one more round of 40 block at zero energy from Panic Button (which I could retain at will), so there was very little risk in this fight.
-
Played on the Switch, which has somewhat different balancing. Most importantly Well-Laid Plans has energy cost 0, which makes it an absolute no-brainer. This game was a loss. Blocking wasn’t a huge issue (the fight went to round 9), but I just didn’t have sufficient burst damage. Basically it had just three energy, and in the endgame ended up too reliant on poison despite not having even a single Catalyst. That was a 40 card deck.
It had worked in Act 3 via getting basically infinite dex scaling from Kunai + Ornamental Fan + shivs. But that just wasn’t viable against the Heart, since it scales a lot faster than that. Maybe an After Image would have helped.
-
This one was a bizarre run, since I ended up starting the game with Transmutation. (X energy to gain X colorless cards, each costing 0 for this round). Which is good, but rather high variance. So I was just going into early fights with absolutely no idea of what I’d be playing with. Ended up with an absolutely disgusting 41 card deck:
Runic pyramid ensured I never cared about having the right cards. 2*Wraith Form+, with Orange Pellets to make sure I could just immediately get rid of the dex loss debuff. 4 backstabs which trivialized most non-boss fights, 3 Catalyst+, a Caltrops+, and a lot of other goodies. That fight was over in 6 rounds, took 14 damage.
-
The last game was maybe the most interesting one, because it seemed to be going really badly. I took the Coffee Dripper as the first boss reward, despite not having any alternative form of healing. It worked fine in act 2, but I got absolutely mauled by the Reptomancer as my Act 3 elite (17 hp; no healing available) and had to plan what might be my most cowardly route ever. Which was particularly bad since I’d taken the Black Star as the Act 2 reward, and was really counting on fighting 3 elites to get some value out of the Black Star.
The relics in general were just utterly mediocre. The only thing of any relevance other than the Coffee Dripper was the Paper Crane which makes Weak reduce damage by 40% instead of 20%. There was no source of intangible, and nothing giving any kind of scaling over the battle.
This was 37 cards, with basically no dedicated attack cards added during the game. 2 Backstabs (which don’t clog the deck), 1 Dash, 2 Dash+ (which generate a ton of block in addition to the attack), a Sucker Punch+ (mostly for inflicting Weak), and a full upgraded set of 5 Strike+.
The star here was having 5 dexterity, 3 Dodge and Roll+, 5 Defense+, and 2 Piercing Wail. Combined with a bottled Well-Laid Plans+ and the heart’s super-simple pattern, it was really hard to get screwed on getting the blocks on the wrong round.
This was kind of fun, since I’d previously just beaten the heart once, and then concentrated on climbing ascensions. And that one win took like 25 attempts :-P Maybe I’ll try it with the other characters too.
Got this in the Humble Bundle. Somehow won my first run, despite not being very good at deckbuilders in general. My deck was stupidly bloated, but Demon Form guaranteed in my starting hand each time did a lot of work.
Finally got a Defect heart-win today. This isn’t something I normally go after, but my build was so freaking powerful and unstoppable even as the third spire started that I went for it and won without any issue. Just an incredible deck that really came together when my 4th relic was the mummy hand that makes powers cause a random card in hand to cost nothing - I filled my deck with heatsinks (draw cards when you play powers), storm (gain lightning when you play powers), and a creative AI to get a random power every turn, which was usually one of the above or even something amazing like echo form. Play, play, play the powers and watch the enemies fry! I finally got an Electrodynamite or whatever it is (all enemies are hit by lightning) and then I used a miror on it at a shop to get a second one, because it’s my favorite power for the Defect.
Just a mind blowing run. It helped I was geting double-value, and health, from potions and they were dropping after every fight, too, for sure.
The most ridiculous deck I ever had was a Defect deck with 5 upgraded storms and an upgraded heatsink that always started in my hand and a mummy’s hand. Killed everything on the first turn, pretty neat.
I am the worst at this game. I picked it up for Switch right after it came out (I think it was in January) and within the first few days managed to get through act 3 with armor guy and orby. Since then I’ve made about a billion attempts with the silent and I think I’ve only seen the act 3 boss twice. Most runs end by early act 2. Please help I just want to finish this so I can go back to playing the other characters that I like.
Poison. But also. . . poison!
What seems to be giving you issues? Can’t kill fast enough? Can’t block the big hits? Missing useful synergies?
Hard to say, but it seems like the Silent is super prone to getting screwed by rng on card draws. Like I’ll get a poison card in my first or second fight and then see nothing with poison on it for several fights. So I keep passing on cards but that just means I’m using the base deck for way too long and I’m taking a lot of damage along the way.
Aside from cards that actually have the word poison on them, what else should I be looking for in that deck? Or should I just restart the run at a certain point if I’m not seeing poison instead of wasting my time slowly grinding my way to a loss?
I mean there are other strategies for Silent for sure; I’m just bad at most of them, hah.
Silent generally benefits from taking advantage of their large pool of card draw and deck modification options. Individual cards may not be powerhouses in quite the same way as, I dunno, a Searing Blow +16, lol. But drawing a ton of cards via Backflips and Acrobatics, Retaining via Well Laid Plans, making use of Backpacks… Ensure you always have a way to get to your best options.
You can go nuts with Shivs, especially with the right powers and Relics, but Time Eater and The Heart will make this much harder, especially on higher difficulties; you’ve gotta be able to soak or mitigate a ton of harm between bouts of knife lobbing.
Generally, expect to need a lot of defense (ideally with Footwork) and/or Mitigation, a lot of draw or deck management, and then work towards a scaling damage solution based on relics and rare cards, especially as you move into act 2.
Standard strategy like hitting Elites you can safely tank and playing the ? Mark RNG game are also solid.