Slay the spire

[Lewwyn]

Today's daily challenge was an ironclad with 3x whatever cards you get. I won with that deck of like 97 cards and I bought Mind blast+ so I had 3 innate mindblasts at the start dealing 120-130 a pop. Last boss died on the second turn. I like playing big decks with big hands, big draw and mass cycling. Harder to do that with Ironclad I guess.

Tried the Demon form and Inflame powers didn't do too bad but I think I definitely bloated too much and crashed in the city again. 

I haven't been replacing the starting relic with Ironclad because I realized it hurt him too much. Silent I went into boss battles at like 46 health and didn't even sweat. I might try a block and body blow build.

[Gustaran]

Ironclad relies a little more on deck compactness and synergy than the Silent does, in my experience -- although I would imagine YMMV enormously depending on playstyle. Luckily it's much easier to run a manageable deck with the Ironclad; 10 cards vs 12 at the beginning of the game goes a long way.

Things to watch out for: Demon Form (or other reliable strength gain in general) gives you a hard and sure win condition if you can survive to see it through. A very common deck archetype is Demon Form with mostly defensive cards and something like a single Heavy Blade. Again, a small deck is important as you can't afford to wait too many turns to get DF in play.

Otherwise you can go for something cheesy like a bloated Perfected Strike deck where you basically take every card with 'strike' in the name. This works to some extent but is very draw dependent (your deck will be 30+ cards).

Also, replacing the Ironclad's starting relic at the start of the game is hugely more painful than it is for the Silent! I don't know if you've been doing that, but it might be part of the reason you're struggling.

I personally feel the most reliable way to play if you can find the cards is a deck with Barricade, Entrench and upgraded 0-cost Body Slams for damage. Your armor will usually outscale pretty much all encounters and Body Slams keep dealing damage for no mana.
I used to like Demon Form a lot, but in case you get unlucky with energy relics, the 3 cost can really hurt in the later stages of a run. Obviously having a small deck with something like a Lantern and an Offering is a different case, but for a Strength build I almost prefer Inflame + upgraded Limit Break.

That being said, I stopped playing at around Ascension 6, so if you generally find Demon Form still viable in Ascension 15 I will admit I am wrong.

[v8mark]

I personally feel the most reliable way to play if you can find the cards is a deck with Barricade, Entrench and upgraded 0-cost Body Slams for damage. Your armor will usually outscale pretty much all encounters and Body Slams keep dealing damage for no mana.
I used to like Demon Form a lot, but in case you get unlucky with energy relics, the 3 cost can really hurt in the later stages of a run. Obviously having a small deck with something like a Lantern and an Offering is a different case, but for a Strength build I almost prefer Inflame + upgraded Limit Break.

That being said, I stopped playing at around Ascension 6, so if you generally find Demon Form still viable in Ascension 15 I will admit I am wrong.

Haha no I don't play A15 regularly. I've done Ascension but I tend to play normal on a regular basis, with a win rate of ~80% or so and a high streak of 12. So I'm not the best by any means, but I know my way around the game (and particularly the Ironclad).

In my experience it's very rare that you don't have any way at all to cheat with energy -- whether it's Lantern, an energy relic, Offering, Bloodletting, etc. Demon Form is almost always huge value, and if you can build around it from early in the run it's absurdly strong. An ideal Demon Form deck tends to be small for obvious reasons -- with something like two-thirds defensive/utility cards, one-third offensive cards that either a) are 0-cost (Flash of Steel is S+ tier) or b) proc DF multiple times. Examples of the latter include most obviously Heavy Blade, but also things like Pummel, Sword Boomerang, Whirlwind etc.

If you happen to have exactly three energy on every turn there will be some painful turns with DF. Even then the value it provides in the later part of the game is incredible, though. It's a hard win condition in a single card. Also: Snecko lol.

The deck you describe is also extremely strong. The issue with it is that it tends to fail if you're missing even one of the requisite parts (by which I really mean Barricade, Entrench, and Body Slam). Also, are some of those cards unlocks? I forget... I know DF isn't, though. Anyway, if you're missing Barricade, you don't keep your block; if you're missing Entrench, you can't keep your block high enough; and if you're missing Body Slam, you die of old age before you kill anything.

[pindicator]

Loaded this up again and I still can't win with the silent. Must be a playstyle thing because I've found the ironclad easy for many differnet kinds of strategies.

[Lewwyn]

Loaded this up again and I still can't win with the silent.  Must be a playstyle thing because I've found the ironclad easy for many differnet kinds of strategies.

So weird. Complete opposite.

[Gustaran]

The 3rd character is now officially available in the non-beta branch. To unlock it, you have to play one game with the Silent. I am not sure if you need to get a Silent win, I lost that specific Silent run and the unlock worked, but had of course registered a Silent win before.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/06...character/

[SevenSpirits]

When they added character 3 to the beta branch, it was enough to start a run with silent and immediately concede the run. (Possibly only because I already had a silent win on record?)

[Lewwyn]

Won with the defect. Ran a power deck that just kept feeding thunder orbs. Pretty fun. Still haven't won with Ironclad. 

[v8mark]

I came across Spire Logs the other day which has, among other things, a card tier list with stats and tracking capabilities.

There are some problems that I've noticed after uploading some of my games -- deck size is never accurate (it seems to include cards that were removed) and various other minor bugs. But it's very interesting, and the card tier list overall is aroundabout what I would expect based on my experience.

(And here is my profile from the last two weeks or so of runs...)

[El Grillo]

Here's mine.

Comparing my card choice deviations has been interesting. Apparently I'm way more optimistic about Finisher than average

This was a particularly silly run from yesterday where I found myself going all-in on Grand Finale, to the tune of having no other real sources of damage against Time Eater. Resolving Grand Finale 8 times within Time Warp's 12-card cycles, including 2 fizzles due to me forgetting the -1 card draw debuff he inflicts, was an awfully close-run thing. Special shout-out to Centennial Puzzle for being surprisingly helpful in assembling turn-2 Grand Finale against the hallway fights in Act 2.






In retrospect, this decklist looks like a trainwreck  I think it got carried most of the way by how strong Malaise is with any enablers, and I had 5+ energy and Burst to pair it with.