~The Game Pass Thread~

Slay the Spire successfully sucked in cohorts of card-curious customers. It’s pretty much the inflection point that solidified the genre, so would make a really safe entry into it, and a good baseline to understand before seeing how other games mix up that template.

That said, if it doesn’t click with you for whatever reason, you can’t go far wrong with any of those four.

Nowhere Prophet is the one I’ve played the most (actually just about to wrap up the last achievement in it), and it’s got a really compelling system of tactics and attrition, where your cards are units that can be wounded or permanently killed, so you’re often making choices between short and long-term values. But it’s kind of a genre outlier in that you’re not drawing a new hand every turn and cycling through the deck multiple times in a battle.

Tainted Grail and Monster Train both have pretty extensive threads here, and there’s also the catch-all Deckbuilder thread