Slay the spire

[Lewwyn]

I finally won with Ironclad yesterday. I decided to go full perfected strike. I only picked up strike cards and clashes tried to get rid of all my shield cards so I only had attacks a couple inflames and double tap and draws. I got lizards tail and made it to the end with full health 100/100. Got the awakened one, beat him up with perfected strikes and multiple clashes per turn, still needed that lizards tail.

[El Grillo]

Congrats on the win! Committing to frontloaded damage can be a fun change of pace, it lets you pick routes with more elite fights and snowball. Higher variance than the alternative of avoiding elites and focusing on campfire upgrades, but there are some elite relics that, if found early, make winning the game so much easier. Some examples include Ice Cream, Dead Branch, Thread and Needle.

EDIT: I've finished taking Silent to Ascension 15, capping it with a run where my starting relic was swapped into Snecko Eye (+2 draw per turn, card costs are randomized uniformly from 0-3 each time you draw them). Naturally this lead to some unlucky fights in the early floors, when the Silent's starting deck of 0- and 1-costing cards is a real issue, but I was able to take all the expensive and X-cost cards I could, gambled on some Act 1 elite fights, and ended up with a Pen Nib (doubled damage on every 10th attack) and Phantasmal Killer (next turn, doubled damage on every attack) to output a lot of damage, most commonly 40x3 with Skewer. I debated taking Sozu (+1 energy/turn, can't obtain potions) but ended up unable to resist Pandora's Box which transformed all of my Strikes and Defends. The best of these was Bullet Time (can't draw more cards this turn, all card costs set to 0 until end of turn), which neatly countered the drawback of Snecko Eye, and the result was more consistent than I would've expected. The RNG is a fickle thing

[v8mark]

Very nice, El Grillo. I've seen the Bullet Time + Snecko Eye interaction a couple of times on joinrbs' stream... it's very strong indeed.

I've started doing Ascension again after my save was reset... highlight so far was this ridiculousness at Ascension 3:




An unreliably infinite deck that absolutely destroyed Act 3, and killed the Awakened One without taking any damage, mainly through cycling and free Bludgeons.

[Japper007]

Here one sees a fine example of a Creative AI+ (add a power card to your hand every turn), Heat Sinks (whenever you play a power: draw a card, which is itself created by CA+, don't even have that card in the actual deck ) build. The sheer amount of effects I have up are unable to be displayed because they fall of the hover-over display and the ones below my HP bar actually extend a bit further under Deka's health bar!  

The rest of the deck where Frost/Block creation cards and 2 Defragments, oh and Turbo's and Charge Batteries to create energy. I generated upwards of 130 Block and 3 extra energy per turn by creating and consuming frost orbs and playing Turbo's and Charge Batteries. 
The result:



A perfect (no damage taken!) Deku and Donu fight  I ended up with a deck of 200+ cards from the random card creation and Donu and Deku not even doing scratch damage at about 25 strenght apiece.

All in all an utterly ridiculous but very fun run. I'm still hyped up!

[El Grillo]

The Defect's scaling synergies are so strong for how few cards you need to develop them. If you can put enough front-loaded damage and defense in the rest of your deck, all it takes is one Creative AI or Echo Form or Biased Cognition + Artifact to overwhelmingly win boss fights. Speaking of that last, it may be common knowledge, but I just realized that Artifact is incredible with any card or potion that gives both a buff and debuff. E.g. if you drink a Steroid Potion (+5 strength, -5 strength at end of turn) while you have Artifact, Artifact negates the second effect and you get +5 strength for the rest of the encounter. Similarly, Biased Cognition turns into straight up +4 Focus. Sources of Artifact are uncommon, but the effect is strong enough that I think it's worth keeping an eye out for Steroid/Speed/Artifact potions at shops if you're heading into a boss fight with an iffy deck.




This deck came together with a shop in Act 2 that sold both the Runic Capacitor (+3 orb slots) and the Data Disk (+1 focus), and I was regularly playing multiple 30-40 damage Barrages on turns 2 and 3, with Seek, Hologram, and Rebound to play 4-6 copies of Barrage per shuffle.

[El Grillo]

Winning A15 with Defect took me much longer than the other two classes, featuring a 12-loss streak at A14 and a whole bunch of getting run over in Act 2 (someone needs to tell Snake Plant that going 8x3, 8x3, debuff is not okay). I came to realize that since Defect has no way to debuff enemy strength, I had to start taking front-loaded block much more highly, especially Boot Sequence and Reinforced Body.




My A15 win was boosted by three strong early relics, but had to work around not seeing an energy relic after the first boss, and literally never seeing any ways to get more Orb slots, despite Prayer Wheel and visiting a bunch of shops. I ended up using a couple copies of Loop+ to make do, which introduced some constraints so that I could keep the orb I wanted in the first slot to get the Loop triggers. This deck could also assemble the Artifact & Biased Cognition combo with Seek+ and a couple copies of Hologram, and would regularly get 8-10 Focus before the first reshuffle.




Awakened One's +8 strength is kind of a joke compared to the 60 free block per turn I was getting

[Gustaran]

Winning A15 with Defect took me much longer than the other two classes, featuring a 12-loss streak at A14 and a whole bunch of getting run over in Act 2

Well, you certainly showed some impressive perseverance - I find even the lower Ascension levels rather frustrating...

[Kuro]

I don't have much to say right now, but I LOVE this game and have played it a good amount. Figured I would link my Spirelogs page!

https://spirelogs.com/pages/profile.php

I just finished A15 with Silent and am at A9 with Ironclad and A13 with Defect. Now to go after A20...

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Terror got me playing this game. I haven’t played in a couple weeks, but I was playing 3-4 runs per day for a couple months. I only play Ascension 15 at this point. I’m 16-5 on A15 with Silent which is easily my best class. I also had an eight game win streak on A15 on Ironclad recently. (Some weird stuff in there. I had a 35 turn win over Awakened One where I exhausted 33 cards down to 6, was damaged for 89 HP despite only having 82, and used Spot Weakness over and over while exhausting and blocking to have Pummel hit for 330 damage on the first turn after he awakens. Also had a Donu and Deca run where I was down to 2 HP, then Reapered back to full 106 HP in one attack and won at full health.)

I think probably the biggest mistake new players make is taking too few cards. Deck size is basically irrelevant. I usually am in the 35-40 range at high Ascensions. You take cards to solve problems. You might take something that’s only good in narrow scenarios, but it is all about filling your deck with “outs.” Also, having more cards makes curses and starter cards a smaller portion of the deck and also means status effect cards don’t take over your deck.

I haven’t felt like running up to A20 yet but I’m sure I will eventually. I’ve watched some joINrbs A20 runs and it’s a different game entirely. It requires massive amounts of frontloaded damage because everything hits so hard. You want to aggressively hit Act 1 elites at high Ascensions, but skills are so detrimental against Gremlin Nob and Lagavilin that you have to fill your deck with attack heavy dreck and hunt good relics and rares. Hallway fights are often worse than elites too, especially Act 1. The multi-gremlin and multi-slime hallway fights in particular are awful.

The easiest class at A20 is Defect I think—so long as you get Electrodynamics. It’s basically not winnable without that card.

[Japper007]

At the risk of performing the dark art of thread necromancy, I would like to share my first heart kill. A 0 damage taken one at that (I started with the 2 hp missing). The deck ended up insane, the game just kept chucking premium cards at me, it had 3 After Images and three Noxious Fumes! The blocking startegy furthermore revolved around using Nightmare to triple an Apperition, with two Ghost pots that meant I had 9 turns od invincibility So not the hardest win ever, but I'm still super-stoked I pulled it off!