Slay the spire

I snagged this. Very fun. But if you don't get some good relics you know you aren't going anywhere.

You bastards are getting up to the 3rd boss? I get about halfway there and BAM. Totally ass fucked.

1st floor I build my deck by hitting all the fights I can. Depending on what I got I try and upgrade certain cards 2nd floor. Collect as many relics as I can.

3rd floor comes the slow drain until death.

Relics are actually bad. well elites are.

First thing you need to do is collect some base cards, and form a path, focusing on bonfires. Strikes/defends are garbage. if you can drop, or transform them, likely do so. especially strike,(unless running perfected strike build.)
So, focus on regular enemies for the first 5 nodes or so. based on those cards, form a plan.
Bonfires. Upgrading cards is the best thing you can do. more cards, dilutes your pool. Relics can be powerful or hurt you.., and the elite def can end your run.
This is not like hearthstone or magic, where when you play a card its gone. only exhausted cards are gone. your discard pile gets recycled into your draw pile. so LESS cards, but more powerful cards is way way more important, then lots of weak cards. you can check out vids, where people have decks with like 7 cards total, between card removal, and exhaust. and just keep recycling the same cards over and over.

picking cards. The key to winning, and making good runs, is actually picking high value cards. not focusing on relics, or even making "builds" in most cases.
thanks to rng, making key builds, that rely on specific cards or relics, tends to be a bit hit or miss. when it works, it works. but it fails most of the time. you are better off, just building solid all around decks. This is especially true with the silent.

Backflip, dash, neutralize, blur, roll, adrenaline, footwork, dagger spray, skewer, bouncing poison, heatbutt, etc. amazing cards.
Caltrops, fumes. ok cards.
bane-Garbage (doesnt scale much, requires a secondary effect to be useful at all)

Compare bane to catalyst for example. Catalyst also requires a secondary effect to be useful. the target to be poisoned, as well even. The difference is catalyst scales way way better. So, while catalyst is not something you want to grab early, if you do have just about any means of applying poison, catalyst becomes a win condition basically. Doubling(TRIPLE) the poison on a target. its a finisher. getting 30stacks of poison on a target is not that hard. Suddenly throw a catalyst at that boss... 90 stacks of poison. boom. dead. 90 damage, 89 damage, 87 damage..
And this is also why I say Skewer is top tier. It scales way better. vul on a boss, and +energy for silent from lots of cards. you can often get skewers with 4-5energy, dealing 15 damage 4-5x.
This is also where noxious fumes is only ok, and a bit of a noob trap. its just too slow to be useful often. its not awful, do grab it, if theres nothing better offered. but its not as high value as backflip, etc.

If you focus on solid all arounders, you should start hitting the boss every run, generally. even if you still lose..

Great tips, thank you.

Caliane´s tips are good, but Im a sucker for Fumes. Had one deck with three of em, an envenom, snecko skull, and two catalysts. I got the knight boss at the end of the 2nd floor, the one that goes beserk once you take him below half. He didnt even get to swing after going beserk, I drew pretty well and ended up having over 200 poison on him when he went beserk so he had like 10 hp left after casting it and clearing the stack. Was pretty lul.

1 room away from 3rd floor boss. Get 3 of those fuckers that put unusable cards in your hand. 2 rounds, I could do nothing. Lost by 4HP's. I almost punched my monitor.

I got lucky on my fourth try exchanging my starting relic for one that gave you 3-4 extra cards and randomized the cost of everyone. Just picked nothing but high value cards and beat the 3rd level boss. Get a card that upgrades every card in your deck and 1/4 of the time it came up it was no cost. Crazy.

Haven’t had any luck with poison guy though. Gonna try some of the tips and report back.

Julian The Apostate said:

I got lucky on my fourth try exchanging my starting relic for one that gave you 3-4 extra cards and randomized the cost of everyone. Just picked nothing but high value cards and beat the 3rd level boss. Get a card that upgrades every card in your deck and 1/4 of the time it came up it was no cost. Crazy.

Haven’t had any luck with poison guy though. Gonna try some of the tips and report back.

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Snecko´s eye (the relic that randomizes the cost of everything and draws you two extra cards) is considered by Celerity to be the best relic in the game. Especially if youve got some card draw in your deck, that relic is amazing. Typically exchanging your starting relic for the random boos one isnt a great idea though.

yeah, what he^ said.

Yeah it was beginners luck. Somehow it seems like the more I learn about the game the worse my results are. I haven’t been able to get a silent shiv build off the ground yet but did win with a poison build. Still have two unlocks to go on the silent. I do love getting the vampire event as silent.

Snecko Eye is obviously good, however there is a chance it literally will kill you. It's going to be amazing 90% of the time but that 10% means you can choose to skip it if your deck is already doing good things.

Also for anyone new to the game, the biggest tip I'd recommend is just not over-doing it with win conditions. Being defensive is generally more powerful if you have the opportunity.

yeah.

Just had my easiest win to date. I had been playing silent till getting all unlocks. very first ironclad run, since.



just a total cakewalk.
Several very simple synergies.
2 offensive win conditions. 1 defensive.
Ghost, champion, time eater.
I skipped alot of cards. I had my rampage win condition early. Additional cards would have been a detriment in many cases. Skipped body slam, perfected strike, true grit. these are great cards, but would have diluted the pool, to recycling rampage and flame barrier.

Cards started with rampage as the win condition. Demon form came soon after, however the 3 energy cost of demon form early is dangerous, and weak.
Rampage is just a win condition on its own. However, paired with headbutt, its super strong one.
Later, the str from demon form, as well as vajra, and girya, again, super easy offense.
Entire offense could have just been rampage+headbuttx2. (demon form optional.) 3 or 4 cards.

inflame wasnt doing much. this could have been skipped.
Demon form became more viable with velvet choker. that +1 energy allowed demon form+ ablock or whatever as needed.
as well as metallicize.

Madness is a very strong card as well. it also can reduce demon form to 0 energy. as well as flame barrier, clothsline, barricade etc.
Armaments is great. block, and upgrade all cards in hand. upgraded madness costs 0. upgraded barricade reduces cost from 3 to 2.

thus armaments synergizes with barricade very well. Flame barrier of course as well.
Headbutt+flame barrier also. Particularly with barricade up.

I had a choice for power through, and skipped it. (add 2 wounds to your hand, gain 20 block.)

So the defensive setup was more work. Metallicize x2. for 8 block per turn, barricade to keep it. flame barrier for big buff, kept.
This was fairly easy to get up vs bosses, but I very much needed to make use of all those healing relics and upgraded bandages vs regular enemies.

Clothslines, and bash honestly didnt do much. str stacking did the deal, as well as rampage for damage. I needed my energy for block stacking.
thunderclap as well, ended up a waste. I wanted it for minions/packs, but the reflect/explode dudes ended up making it useless.

I’ve been watching Celerity today and based on what he was picking a lot of cards I thought we’re terrible are actually very good and vise versa, to an almost absurd degree.

Julian The Apostate said:

I’ve been watching Celerity today and based on what he was picking a lot of cards I thought we’re terrible are actually very good and vise versa, to an almost absurd degree.

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I had the same relevations watching him. I originally thought the cards that cost 2+ werent good, in fact its the opposite. I do however almost exclusivlely play the Silent.

Kiroy said:

FUUUUUUUUCCKKK Silence

Have sailed through to ascension 8 on ironclad fairly easily. Just did 30ish games on silence and still stuck on ascension 4. FML

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I was in the same boat until I figured out discard decks on silent. Sailed pretty smoothly from 4 to 8 almost exclusively on them. I will say though, if you don't get at least one, preferably 2 footworks going on silent the higher ascends are really pretty ugly.

Edit:
On Celerity: The thing that impresses the hell out of me on his runs is how big his decks often are at the end. Any time I go over about 20 cards I fail miserably due to draw inconsistency, but he is just so much better at keeping tabs on his resources and building the right amount of draw into his decks, he makes 35 cards look easy as 16 is for me

Silent tends for larger decks imho.
Ironclad, Ive got some really tiny decks, and see vids of 2-5card decks..

Ironclad seems like he has a number of REALLY easy to get win conditions. Rampage, perfected strike, are common. demon form pretty easy to get as well. demonform/ramage do not need any other offensive cards. Defense is similar. shrug it off, metallicize, barricade. very simple combos to pulloff. yes, there other combos as well. but these are so easy compared to silent.
had a run yesterday. 3 metallicize, 1 dual wield...

flex/artifacts(pancea)/limit break..

wound/immolate/exhaust runs are fun. but a bit more rng in getting the cards you need.
he can go infinite easier as well I think thunderclap/dropkick.
Flash of steel is colorless. however, I think he can exhaust cards, as well as drop cards out of his deck easier.

The thing is, nothing cleanses buffs. So, with ironclad you can barricade or demonform/str stack, and when time eater ends your turn, who cares? when awakened one/champion, cleanse themselve, who cares? donuts, collector, etc. you can swap targets and are still doing your buffed damage. with silent, your poison needs to start from 0 again, after minions are summoned, or they cleanse themselves. Malaise is cleansed. tactically, you can and have to plan for this of course.. but the ironclad doesnt. he just one shots them.
he also plays with velvet choker better.

but yeah, 4/22 Silent. 4/6 ironclad.