So I have been playing a lot of slay the spire 2, I just passed 200 games and have gotten to around a 70% A10 winrate on every character except ironclad (where I am in the gutter at 30%, how do you play this character if you don’t get the vulnerable cards? How do you play the vulnerable cards against aeonglass with 3 artefact?).
I’ve been entirely on the beta branch for context.
This game fascinates me, it’s one of if not the best strategy games I have played. Feedback for most things is extremely salient, you makes a judgement call and then a turn or 2 later you have lost N or N+M health and can evaluate your tactics. The thing that keeps me coming back though is the less salient stuff, the layers and layers of thinking to pathing.
As I improve (I would consider myself approaching mediocre at the game, I think 90% winrate is when you can probably say you are good) I find myself evaluating turns on a much deeper level, asking questions like “the elite that’s coming up has a big attack on turn 3, given that and how many skills I play each turn what number should tuning fork be on so that it goes off that turn?”
I think people think of the game as requiring luck but my experience seems to be outside of rare occurrences (like an awful 1-in-a-large-number shuffle against a boss you struggle at) luck is not usually a major factor. If I don’t die in the first few floors of act 1 (or reach a state I cannot recover from because I am bad) I usually die on the act 3 second boss.
One of my favourite aspects is how A10 forces you to build for all 3 act 3 bosses, since there is a 2/3 chance you face them. This really tickles your brain to get you to think of how you’re going to make your deck do everything it needs to win.
My one criticism of the game is that almost all the interesting enemies are in act 1, although with the recent (oppressive, halp!) changes to infested prism and aeonglass I think that things are on the right track.
If you’re into deck builders, or just marvelous strategy games, I unreservedly recommend it.
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It’s a great game and I really appreciate the MS Paint placeholders for the epochs, especially since they aren’t AI slop.
I am looking forward to unlocking the beta art again. Spite was hilarious, so was power through with the buldak ramen lol
i need the sponge back on abrasive
I really liked the adorable baby Defect on Shadow Shield. I’m for sure bringing that back once we can unlock the beta art
Is good? I really liked the first one, but for some reason I just haven’t felt a desire to play the sequel. I think I was waiting until the game is a little more fleshed out.
I find it more engaging than the first. It’s more polished, and some new mechanics are interesting.
I haven’t felt a desire to go play the first one again but it is very much under development.
It seems like they’re trying to make events less punishing and remove some of the brain dead decisions around “always take” cards (or make them rare).
Also there are act varients with different enemy/boss/event pools although only act one has them currently
Oh that’s good, I did hate when I got an event that was just like “lose one of your three best cards and completely ruin your deck’s synergy.” I think I might still wait a little bit before getting it, but I’m glad to hear it is developing well!
Well there is one event like that haha, although you can pay HP to randomise a different choice.
There’s also a really cool enemy that steals an uncommon and even if you win you don’t have to take it back. So you can take an act 1 uncommon that is bad later and lose it deliberately.
and if you do take it back any picking a card bonuses apply to it like eggs, ceramic fish, or various new relics.
sts 1 falling event is a skill issue you have to plan ahead for, and is very rarely your actual three best cards.
I know, most of the time it’s usually a “hell yeah, I can get rid of that last strike card that I couldn’t get rid of.” kind of event, but an event that can just make your deck worse through bad luck isn’t a fun event.
just passed 200 games and have gotten to around a 70% A10 winrate on every character except ironclad
I would consider myself approaching mediocre at the game, I think 90% winrate is when you can probably say you are good
Well it’s quite easy at the moment and they are trying to make A10 harder, act 4 isn’t in yet either.
It’s not a PvP game where you expect a 50% winrate when appropriately bracketed. In STS1 I think only 1 unwinnable seed was ever found.
I am excited to have a game I will be playing in 5 years and still discovering new things about.
Can they make it easier instead
You can play on A0 through to A9 :) or with custom runs.
It’s nice to have high difficulties that take hundreds or thousands of hours to master. It’s very rare to have games that hold up after years of play.
Oh we have not reached A10 w anyone, weve been playing just those ascensions anyway
maybe we will try a custom run, the unpredictability is a part of the fun tho but its been too unpredictable for us 
tips if you want them
Don’t take speculative card, take cards that solve a problem your deck currently has. Exception: hail marys when you have no hope
Don’t build a deck that counts on not facing a certain boss.
Strikes are a terrible card, an early priority is to make sure you aren’t playing them. Removing them, diluting them, or adding card draw help do that.
Don’t add card draw if you have nothing good to draw.
Don’t add 3 cost powers/cards unless you have a way to play them (e.g. hold them till the right turn, extra energy and the card in the same hand, zero cost block, or the card solves a turn)
When routing, mentally add up how much HP you expect to lose. Obviously don’t take a path where it’s more than your total. Try leave ways to choose not to take a dangerous path if things go bad but try fight 3 elites if you can do it safely.
You get 3 easy halway fights act 1, 2 in act 2 and 3. After that they get spicey, keep that in mind.
Skip is often the best card in the card reward screen, unless a card does something don’t add it. Be cautious about taking attack commons after solving the “have stuff that isn’t strikes to play” problem
All of those have caveats, and I lose slightly less than half the runs I play so you know… Just that when I see people struggling they’re often making mistakes like that because they think in terms of “good cards” and “bad cards”. So a “good card” like idk void form comes up and they pick it but that just made the “I can’t block enough and take a lot of chip damage” problem they’re facing worse (at least for the first deck cycle).
That said there are a few cards where you almost can’t have enough copies like footwork. As a win condition for any character is “play 10 footworks and then each defend will fullblock and I can do whatever I want” so keep an eye out for those :p
there’s asterisks on that unwinnable seed like not starting with neow’s lament and not doing glitches to get extra floors. we wouldn’t call a mario level unbeatable if you had to do a wall clip, everybody would just do the wall clip.
I think it’s fair to call it unbeatable if it requires a glitch to get through. There’s actually a situation like your example in the C64 RoboCop game where you can’t finish a level normally, but it’s possible to glitch through a wall.
Of course, in that case you can’t progress because that version of the game is literally not finished.
Well, you don’t assume an average seed requires any glitches etc.
Generally the game was extremely well balanced for challenging but winnable play. Although sometimes finding those lines can be very hard, I don’t miss gremlin nob lol that was a very frustrating enemy to have shaping early deck building.
Very impressive, I’m still working on getting all the classes to a10, only beat a10 with the silent and that took me super long to manage probably over twenty attempts, although near the end I was getting to the act 3 bosses fairly reliably.
Mostly just been playing the goofy dailies for fun though
There’s no wrong way to play with a toy (well unless you hurt people I guess).
I rrally enjoy the challenge of constant improvement, although it took me years to get anywhere decent at slay the spire 1 and mostly played casually.
Defect is a very strong and straightforward character in slay the spire 2. A good one to try next if you’re interested in climbing. Statuses with rocket punch are very strong, feral fits there and also supports go for the eyes/beam cell/claw. You have turns like rocket punch for 0, draw deflect and play it, rocket punch again for 0 (if returned by feral) and suddenly you’ve done 28 damage, drawn 4, and got 6 block for the price of a daze. It can even happen the turn you play feral.
Compact and flak cannon also support status builds, and flak cannon is a hilarious wincon against aeonglass.
I can’t get good results with darkness or lightning defect though. I think they could use some support. Although with some bulk up or a lot of frost orbs and slots you can reach for your damage pretty much wherever you can find it.
Still working my way through the first one. Nice to see the Ironclad is just as useless in the sequel as he is in the original.
I think it’s actually a strong character but I tend to try and play defensively which is incorrect for it.
I’m shit at both the games but they’re fun. There’s a dope board game version, it just takes a while.
Does it have mods/workshop? First game even had mod where you could play as the Soviet Union
I think I’ve got about 200 hours into it so far; I’m just so happy there is an actual multiplayer mode now. My friend and I played a lot of the original game using a co-op mod and we are having a blast in #2.
I think the way to play Ironclad is with big bonks/playing lots of attacks and exhaust synergies/exhaust-thinning the deck to play your biggest bonks more often. Perfected Strikes, Ashen Strike, Bludgeon can actually be really good.
Playing around vuln is obviously also good, but it’s not really meant to be your main feature of your deck unless you get Bully and lots of exhaust so you only have vuln+Bully cards. But mostly vuln is just a support and way to get strength with Dominate. Uppercut is kinda necessary to break through artifacts fast in that case.
But yeah I would say that Ironclad generally feels pretty weak compared to the other characters right now.
My problem is that there’s exactly one exhaust damage pay off so you can’t count on seeing it (ashen strike).
I have got wins with perfect strike (once with clone lol) but often you’ve removed strikes by the time you see it and it’s sort of variable unless you haven’t removed them and have also added other strikes. It also makes exhaust cards worse as you can’t target strikes without lowering damage.
Vuln has draw (vicious) defense (collosus) damage (vuln in general but also dominate, bully). Counterpoint: artefact on aeonglass will just eat trembles, dominate. Bash kinda sucks and is very slow.
Also iron is so bad at blocking it seems like you kinda need the strength as even if you have one large ashen strike you might have to be like 6 turns in for it to really pop which is a long time to not die against the double bosses. Perfected can be faster but without clone your deck is also full of arse and it’s in the bottom half of your deck just as much as the top.
I feel like it’s much harder to get consistent fast damage than in 1
Exhausting strikes does not lower the damage of perfected strike. Perfected strike counts the exhaust pile. It’s even fine to still remove normal strikes, but obviously, if you go the perfected strike route you’ll be trying to pick up lots of pommel strikes and other pstrikes.
Also, “exhaust payoff” is not solely Ashen strike. Ashen strike is one and works, of course, but the main purpose of exhausting is thinning your deck, not having a card like ashen strike that’s a direct payoff. If you reduce your deck to 5 good cards, you get the same amazing turn each draw, which is what allows you to steamroll fights. That seems to be what you’re missing.
My problem is that there’s exactly one exhaust damage pay off so you can’t count on seeing it (ashen strike).
Read again lol.
Idk if you play a10 but you are 100% dead before you can thin down that much. You have about 6-10 turns to kill each boss unless you’re doing something extremely interesting with block scaling. Assuming a reasonable deck that’s 4-6 deck cycles. Maybe 2 if you mirror. Obviously you include some cards with exhaust, second wind is very strong against aeonglass, burning pact is good draw, but you need to look somewhere else for your damage, and it’s very hard to output ~400 damage in 8 turns without strength which is now all based around vulnerability.
I didn’t know that about perfected strike. That does make it less worse, it’s still not very good though.
Obviously there are ways to get better but I just don’t see where scaling damage comes from without strength and unlike silent, detect, or regent you can’t reduce the incoming damage to 0 easily so it’s even more imperative to have a damage solution that comes online in one or two deck cycles.
Read again lol.
I did read it, maybe you didn’t understand my answer. The damage payoff from thinning your deck is to, for example, get to play Thrash 5 times instead of twice. Or Pillage. Or Bludgeon. Or whatever. That is a damage payoff from exhaust that did not include Ashen Strike, the damage payoff comes from being able to play your high-damage cards more often. Like I said, it’s not a direct damage payoff like Ashen Strike, the damage payoff comes from not having to draw shitty cards.
Getting more energy and card draw is one of your priorities. Offering is probably the best ironclad card, but Bloodletting, Pyre, Expect a Fight, Pommel Strike, Vicious, Battle Trance aren’t far behind.
If you combine that with the plethora of exhaust options, you can often cycle through your whole deck by the second turn and exhaust half the shit you have, and then just keep drawing idk, Rage+Pillage+Anger over and over again. Full block and tons of damage each turn. You can do so many things like that with exhaust, it depends of course on what cards you find. Or if you get Thrash, in addition to exhaust, you only want more card draw and energy and stuff like Headbutt and you can draw Thrash like every turn or every 2nd one and keep blocking with Evil Eye, which you would also just keep drawing the whole time.
Block is tough with Ironclad, no denying it. But with stuff like Rage, Colossus, Evil Eye, Flame Barrier, Shrug It Off, Feel No Pain, Taunt, Uppercut and even colorless cards like Fisticuffs, Prolong, Finesse, Shockwave, you can get Block through still doing/increasing your damage. The point is to draw these cards more often by getting rid of all the shit by exhausting.
And yes, I play all characters on A10. My worst char is defect with like 25% win rate, lol. Ironclad is at 60.
I get what you’re saying and there are cards which are almost always good like offering and bloodletting but I don’t see how the sort of turns you propose solve queen and aeonglass, and at A10 a deck must be capable of doing all bosses.
On those turns you’re playing blugeon say, you still need block. So propose you have a near ideal hand, you have bloodletting + blugeon + some defence you draw into. If you have to pay for draw you have 1 energy to block, you’re probably eating like 40 damage, I mean on aeonglass turn 1 you need to put up 30 block. Card spam against aeonglass will kill you unless you have second wind, so you can’t build a spam deck until you get that card and you might not see it. Decks without redundancy frequently brick against queen if 2 cards you need to play are in the first three draws so you can’t center a strategy around rare cards. You have 75 health, that’s 2 bad draws and you’re looking pretty close to death.
Pyre is really slow, you’re sacrificing 1 turn for marginally better turns later, if you see an upgraded one it’s more attractive but that’s unlikely. Ironclad doesn’t have retain or scry so odds are you’re eating damage on that turn too.
Uppercut doesn’t work against aeonglass, and it eats a campfire to make it good.
Idk, when I see players with high winrates they seem to favour very different strategies to what you propose. Like look at these spirebird rankings: https://spirebird.com/#cards=&c=strongA10
By picked wins above replacement
- Dominate
- Colossus
- Tremble
- Unmovable
- Stone Armour
- Offering
- Bloodletting plus
- Pyre (huh maybe I am wrong about this card)
- Crimson Mantle
- Dark Embrace
Which is all pretty much in line with my expectation that vulnerable is the most reliable damage solution, but then aeonglass is sitting there laughing in the wings.
Card elo says a similar story.
Sorry, it’s a bit funny to me that you give me this link, but then when you just sort by the normal card ELO, you have things like Burning Pact, True Grit, Feel No Pain, Stoke, Second Wind, Feel No Pain, Dark Embrace, Evil Eye, all in the top 30 ;) Like just look through your link, literally all exhaust cards are in the upper third of all Ironclad cards.
And yeah, of course vulnerable is amazing damage, I almost always pick Tremble and Dominate when I can find it, but it’s still exhaust that makes the strength you get from vuln actually super effective. Obviously, exhaust will not directly show in stats as damage because it enables other cards/damage strategies by getting rid of the crap and only leaving the good cards you built your deck around.
Same with block, maybe you struggle so much with block because you too rarely take Evil Eye (1 energy 22 block, wtf) or Feel No Pain, Second Wind. Same with damage, exhaust itself doesn’t even have to block, since you also can play your good block cards more once the other crap is out.
Also, you miss the point of Uppercut. It’s not useless, it’s actually the best card against it. Aeonglass has only 3 Artifact. 1 Uppercut removes 2 Artifact. Uppercut a second time and you have your vuln on Aeonglass. Getting either 2 Uppercuts or playing it twice is not actually hard. Just because an enemy has Uppercut, doesn’t mean you stop playing debuffs against them, you actually play more debuffs to get through the Artifact. You plan for Aeonglass by getting like 1 or 2 more debuff cards than you would usually get.
And if you never take Pyre because you think it’s bad, that is telling, because I’ve actually played 2 Uppercuts in 1 turn against Aeonglass, which you can do if you have 5 energy. Or you can play Bludgeon and still have 2 energy for blocking. On Bludgeon, of course if you have it you use some strategy to play it, for example taking the relic that makes your fifth card play free, or Unrelenting/Pyre/Stampede/Cascade/Havoc/Mayhem/Catastrophe. Though true, often Bludgeon is just a single card being a curse most of the time if you don’t find any way to play around it specifically, which is also fine.
Ironclad can get like 85% a10 winrate lmao I hate playing it but it’s so good keep at it. Think more about the boss stuff, what your problems will be & your overall path, what you want to do each combat, not just turn-by-turn tactics
GOTY 2026 and 2027 when it’s fully released probably 2028 too
Slire!
I have played hundreds of hours of the first StS on my Switch Lite. Still haven’t beaten a two boss A20 run but I’ve gotten to A20 with Silent and Defect (my two favorite classes)
I’ll be waiting for the full release of this one.
sts1 is much harder imo. The elites in particular are extremely oppresive and events are less rewarding.
Got the game, but unfortunately i get bored about 25 minutes in and just close the game. I am pretty ass at it too. I just really don’t like figuring out what path to take and on what turn i should kill the enemy so that the incremental relic goes off on the perfect turn against the elite.
I think strategy games are just not for me tbh. My ADHD ass is feeling no reward at pulling off the perfect turn.
That being said, the art sytle - just like the first game - is purified, unadulterated, ultra homogenised, ass. Like, absolute dogwater and every recommendation from me needs to be qualified with “yeah, i know, it looks trash, but…”
The first game had the excuse of being the first game, but they really just rehired the janitor with aphantasia for the second game too 😭
I think the game would get me more excited if it had the HD2D artstyle of octopath traveler and such. Or even just normal pixel art.
I agree that the game is ugly as fuck. That fact somehow actively ruins my experience.
It’s strange because I’ve never had a problem with ugly graphics before, especially if I like the gameplay. I just can’t deal with StS
I know, i know, i am alone with my opinion and i don’t understand why haha.
Took me a year to get over the art style of the first game before i even attempted to try it out 😅
2 is awesome and I had fun doing some co op runs with friends, necro is so much fun with souls. Especially when you’re able to feed them to your buddy to do some incredibly elaborate combos! Haven’t played it much since release and decided to “finish” the first one while waiting for more updates instead.
Any tips for ironclad in the first game? It’s the last character I need to beat the heart with and I just haven’t gotten a build with enough survivability that doesn’t hit like a wet noodle. Every ironclad run that’s gone well has been built around hitting hard enough I don’t get hit back (much). This tactic just doesn’t work against the heart and I’ve had a hard time even getting there in decent shape with block focused builds.
