I have no idea if this will help you in particular (depends on how you play right now), but something counter-intuitive about deck-building in general that helped a friend of mine up his win-rate in StS a lot is that you need to consider the cost of taking a card.

StS lets you not take a card when you are offered one, and often this is the best play, particularly as you go later into the game and have a deck that is stacked with powerful cards.

Fundamentally having more cards is bad, because it increases variance in what you can draw. Obviously taking a good card can be worth that cost, but often players fall into the trap of assuming the best card of the options given is worth taking, when really the question should be "does this card beat the average card in my deck, or does it dilute the power of the deck", because you are reducing the chance to draw one of the other cards in your deck.

Obviously there are edge cases: sometimes something may reduce the power of your deck right now, but introduces the chance for later synergy, which may be worth the cost—especially early on, but in general it is worth considering not taking the card.

The ideal deck is always the minimum number of cards that allow you to pull off your win state, everything else is just stopping you getting there (this is also why cards that allow you to draw cheaply are good, and one of the reasons why removing cards from your deck is powerful).

>Fundamentally having more cards is bad, because it increases variance in what you can draw.

StS has a number of enemies that shuffle bad cards into your deck, so this dillution works both ways. On higher difficulties more of these cards get shuffled into your deck. Trying a "thin" strategy with no countermeasures in such a fight (high damage output to end the fight fast?) can get you railroaded. You also start out with 10 starters that you want to dillute because virtually any card is better than them. Cards with "draw" and "exhaust" written on them also let you workaround the problem of drawing starter or negative effect cards. Picking up one or two versatile 2-cost cards early (attack or block card) can give you a good way to use your energy even if you draw mostly starters or negative effect cards while avoiding excessive deck dillution later on.

StS does offer you worse cards at the beginning of the game, and limited ways to remove or upgrade these cards, so picking up too many cards can burden you later on.

Really to be good at StS deckbuilding mostly requires you to know which enemies will come up when and building your deck sufficiently to survive them without shooting yourself in the foot long term too much. Jorbs is usually focused on building his deck to beat the hardest fight in the game while absorbing the minimum deadweight to survive until that point. Watching a stream can give you a rough idea of what a good "pace" for adding new cards into your deck is.

Jorbs's way of thinking about the game is very well considered and I'm sure useful for new players but his skill at taking turns makes it hard to copy him. Try it - take a seed from one of his runs, copy his decisions, and play the fights out yourself. You'll get flattened.

Jorbs can reliably reach the heart with a much more challenging deck than you or I can. He's also playing a game mode that imposes challenges that don't exist for new players. Just shoving a lot of good cards in your deck might be pretty good advice for new players up until about ascension ten.

An important idea is that you're not only drafting to make a generally good deck, you're drafting to defeat the immediate challenges that are coming up.

If you're in Act 2 and headed for an elite, you have to think, "can my deck beat book of stabbing? gremlin leader? taskmaster?".

If right now your deck sucks against the book, and you're offered a disarm or caltrops, it might be worth picking it even if it's doesn't generally make your deck stronger. Cause otherwise you might get stabbed to death.

On the flip side, Demon Form is a very strong card, but it's practically a curse for most of Act 1, because it's too costly and slow. So sometimes you might skip even a strong card if it doesn't help you right now.

That concept is what has helped me get over the A15-20 hump. It's more important to draft cards that shore up immediate weaknesses than it is to draft cards that might pair well with other effects in your deck. Draft for the short-term, not the long term, because stronger short term victories means you can pathfind more aggressively and acquire more gold/rewards.

I'd say that's probably the most important "ah-ha" moment where my winrate really started to significantly improve. That and knowing when to min/max # of combats while pathfinding.

Yeah, I definitely don't mean to imply that the comparison to your current cards is a hard and fast rule, but more that it's a good thing to start thinking about if you never skip cards.

I do skip taking cards, but I probably don't skip it enough. It's difficult to get over the psychology of 'I beat the battle, I get to pick my reward.' It's my reward, I should pick one, and anyway I get a choice of 3, so one of those 3 ought to be good for me, right?

No, not necessarily. But my brain wants to pick one anyway.

It takes a while to get a feel for the strategy and a lot of counterintuitive or seemingly impossible things become straightforward. Considering there's a lengthy stretch just unlocking cards, it doesn't sound like you're in some particularly unusual place, 40 hours in.

What you're saying is true, but I think people with card-game experience tend to over-skip the card rewards in the name of consistency. Low difficulty levels reward this, because the bosses are the only real challenge and holding out for cards good against bosses helps your win-rate.

At high difficulty levels you need to pick a card (and possibly buy cards at shops) through most of Acts 1 and 2 because you won't be able to reach the boss without a bunch of damage commons.

Yeah, my advice was squarely aimed at those who are struggling with the base game difficulty. Your advice is sound for those who get better for sure, the game will definitely punish you for being greedy and trying to keep your deck too clean as you ramp up the difficulty.

>going over which cards are better than other

I mean, that is perhaps part of your problem. There aren't any cards I've not picked at least once and made good use of on ironclad even at A20.

The game really is more about building a deck based upon what comes up and constantly reassessing what is actually working in your current deck.

Choosing "good" cards based on their overall strength out of context is essentially a brute force approach to winning.

I'm aware it's contextual and there are different strategies for winning, and there's a reason for each card being in the game. But I wasn't aware of how some cards combo together, or some situations/battles where they might be stronger than others, etc.

And there are plenty of discussions online for pretty much every card on how strong or weak people think the cards are overall (like is it worth picking it up if it's offered to you late in a run because the payoff might not be worth it, or if you see you're getting a specific boss that act, etc), and most of the cards have been buffed or nerfed multiple times since the game has come out, so clearly the developers have been convinced that some strong may end up stronger than others on average too (and are trying to keep things pretty even as much as possible, I assume).

One thing you may want to try is sticking to a certain class for a while. It'll give you a better feel for how all of their cards work together, and you won't "forget" about certain aspects of the class. I found that I hit a wall around Ascension 8-10 before I started trying this.

Yeah, I agree, good advice. When I decided to win my first standard game, I at first floated around from character to character, but then decided to stick with Ironclad until I won. Took like 20 tries, but I finally made it work. Silent took less tries, currently focusing on Defect.

A really important point with card choice: even ignoring your current deck (and you shouldn't ignore your current deck), the best cards are Act dependent. At the start you want to pick flat high-damage cards that are immediately useful. In act 2 you need cards that scale with the number of enemies, because mobs are common. In the final act it's all about card synergy and things that enable you to manage your deck.

With that said, as the Defect, Defragment and Capacitor are nearly always a no-brainer. Capacitor not so much in Act1, because nothing lasts long enough for it to pay off. And if you've got anything that adds orb slots, Consume becomes really powerful (even without, you can do 10 damage a turn from two orb slots instead of 9 from three, which isn't nothing).

Loop builds are very strong as well, but trickier to get right because you need to pay close attention to your front orb. Finally focus+frost can easily give you so much block most enemies can't cut through. (Watch out for Reptomancer, though, she doesn't respect anyone without DPS.)

I had 1 Loop+, 2 Defragments, and 1 Capacitor that last game I lost this morning :) I got 'All for One' as my random rare card to start with, so I was doing my best to get a bunch of 0 cost cards, and I also ended up with 2 relics that let me pick cards to shuffle in every battle (Nilry's Codex and the Toolbox), along with a Jack of All Trades card, so I got to pick cards to help whatever my situation was each battle and turn.

But I was a little too weak on my defense that go (had some frost generation, but not enough), and I made a dumb mistake attacking the Masked Bandits instead of losing all my gold, who did 50 damage to me before I killed them, bringing me down to 18 health, then I couldn't get to a campfire until I fought 3 more regular enemies, and the next enemy brought me down 6 more, then the second enemy after that got me down the other 12. Oops.

Ouch, that's a nice deck, but I suspect I wouldn't have bothered with the 0 cost cards (Silent's 0 cost cards are amazing, Defect's are meh). Glacier I _highly_ recommend. Autoshield and Stack are great too. (These two are brilliant for surviving early turns before you've got enough frost up.) Use your upgrades on Defragment, then Loop. Upgrading Zap and/or Dualcast from your starter deck is great because they become zero-cost. Creative AI, especially upgraded is amazing. Oh, and don't sleep on Biased Cognition. You can only use it right at the end of a battle, but it can end a battle very quickly. (Unless you've got a source of artifact,

I'm a bit tapped out at A8, but it's amazing how the base game goes from nailbitingly impossible to seeming pretty straightforward. (The mechanics contribute to this: the easier a battle is, the more upgrades you do and the more likely you are to grab an elite relic.)

I finally beat defect using, among other things, darkness plus recursion. It never occurred to me that recursion would retain the power generated by the dark orb you just evoked. All for One to pull upgraded 0 cost recursions to hand.

Nice. Darkness+Recursion is quite nice in the base game, but I've never found it very effective in Ascension. (I'm sure someone with more experience could analyze why, exactly.)

Good luck with Watcher. The biggest advice here is: play it safe until you have multiple cards to get out of wrath. Watcher is super-powerful and _very_ easy to mess up.

Note that this is a general tendency and not a rule. Act 1 benefits from an AOE card for the sentry elite and the slime boss, damage scaling will help against most bosses at any time, and so on through act 2.

For the ironclad, you might take a cleave, or a whirlwind, or a spot weakness, or an inflame in act 1. The first two give you AOE, and the last two will help scale damage if you find a limit later on.

A1 is usually considered easier than A0 because you get more elites but they aren't very punishing yet.

You're possibly bringing baggage from other deck builders, mentioning combos and better cards is an example of this.

Generally you want to judge cards for what they do for you right now (in the next few fights) to maximise rewards and build long term value. Try not to build into "just in case" combos or synergies or you bleed HP before it shows up. The exception is if you are confident your deck can handle the hallway fights then you might take picks for the boss, and if you can handle that then you can start building for the future.

Apart from that, general pickup rules are: Act 1 is front-loaded damage, Act 2 is AOE damage with some damage scaling for the boss, Act 3 is scaling offense and defense (without damaging your other factors too much). You usually want to be plugging holes rather than building on your strengths but there are always exceptions.

One example: A single dark orb can be enough to kill Champ on Act 2 as defect. Any more is excessive.

I was about where you were 40 hours in. Then I bought this game on switch so I can take it everywhere with me and have since dumped about 500 hours into the game. I only recently got all characters to A20. Still working on A20 heart kill and a few other achievements.

It's always intrigued me seeing other people pick up the game and master it much more quickly than I did. There's some people that get their A20 heart kill just 100 hours into the game.

I really enjoy the feeling of slowly but steadily gaining knowledge and intuition about the game - in the 500 hours of play there's been no shortage ah-ha moments throughout. Truly one of the best $/entertainment value games I've ever purchased.

Similar for me - there was a real sense of accomplishment on my first win in Slay the Spire on the easiest difficulty setting. To think that players have >90% win rates on that setting, much less on Ascension 20 is remarkable.

I've learned a lot from Jorbs - a twitch streamer. It's surprising how much statistics and planning can go into any given fight. It's possible to puzzle out how much of the fight will go ahead of time, with knowledge of one's deck and the enemies moves.

You're better than me at the game. I have close to as many hours and attempts and I've only ascended once. Although probably should be at ~3 ascensions and made a couple blatant tactical mistakes fighting bosses with The Silent.

> By the way, for anyone thinking this game isn't really for you, you might want to give it a chance anyway (watch a video at least). I don't usually care for Rogue-likes

...Slay the Spire has nothing in common with roguelikes?

It’s procedurally generated, dungeon crawler, with collectible items and permadeath and resource management. I don’t like arguing over definitions, so call it whatever you want, but those are a number of components that feed into the appeal of roguelikes!