Slay the spire

[Japper007]

That's an impressive win - you have, what, 3 powers vs the Awakened One? And a 39-card deck as well... you did well to win that one!

The thinking behind it was a "why not both?" on the Strenght scaling with Demon Form and on Block stacking with Metallicize and Barricade. Win condition ended up being both Anger (which scales really well with strenght and you can duplicate it until you can use it ~twice a turn) and Heavy Blade, and Bodyslam.

The rest of the cards was just bloat TBH, I really need to work more on making more efficient decks.

The key thing behind the win was lots of elite fights, Relics are a must.

[v8mark]

Yeah - decks with clearly defined win conditions are generally better, with not too many cards that don't directly feed into that. Often in practice that means skipping a lot of cards, particularly in Acts 2 and 3, and taking the opportunity to remove cards (usually Strike and Defend) whenever possible. It's one of the things that is generally very unintuitive about this sort of game... having a big deck is generally a net negative because although you have more stuff to use, you only draw 5 cards a turn -- and every card you have in your deck prevents you from potentially drawing something else.

Something like Demon Form and Barricade in the same deck is occasionally fine -- both are very powerful cards. But you do need to have the energy to use them -- and if you happen to draw them on the same turn with a big deck, odds are you're not going to be able to play one of them at all.

Generally, for reference, at the end of the game I would consider a 'normal'-sized deck to be anything between about 18-25 cards. Less than 18 is small, which is often good but occasionally bad, because the impact of status effects is so much higher. More than 25 begins to get unwieldy, because a) there's much more variance in draws and b) you don't get to see cards again for a few turns, so cards like Limit Break+, which you want to play multiple times, lose effectiveness. Also it means that if you have a power that's crucial to your win condition (Demon Form, for eg) you may not get to play it until turn 5 or 6, which is a long time to wait to begin ramping.

[yuris125]

Yeah - decks with clearly defined win conditions are generally better, with not too many cards that don't directly feed into that. Often in practice that means skipping a lot of cards, particularly in Acts 2 and 3, and taking the opportunity to remove cards (usually Strike and Defend) whenever possible. It's one of the things that is generally very unintuitive about this sort of game... having a big deck is generally a net negative because although you have more stuff to use, you only draw 5 cards a turn -- and every card you have in your deck prevents you from potentially drawing something else.

It isn't unintuitive if you played other card games. In Magic it's one of the first things you tech a new player - always play the minimum size deck. Of course, it's not as obvious nowadays, when popular card games have a fixed predetermined deck size, so you don't have a chance to play a bigger deck and see for yourself how its consistency goes down. And as you rightly say, you usually don't want to go below a certain size in Slay the Spire. But the general principle of card games still applies - smaller deck = more consistent deck = better deck

[v8mark]

It isn't unintuitive if you played other card games. In Magic it's one of the first things you tech a new player - always play the minimum size deck. Of course, it's not as obvious nowadays, when popular card games have a fixed predetermined deck size, so you don't have a chance to play a bigger deck and see for yourself how its consistency goes down. And as you rightly say, you usually don't want to go below a certain size in Slay the Spire. But the general principle of card games still applies - smaller deck = more consistent deck = better deck

Agreed - you also learn this the hard way playing Dominion.

If you haven't played any of those games, though, it's definitely unintuitive. I've witnessed first-hand Northernlion trying to internalize the core premise -- that removing a bad card from your deck raises the average quality just like adding a good one -- and failing over and over. He says it, but clearly doesn't quite believe it, and routinely passes over opportunities to streamline the deck in order to add more bloat. And over and over again you see the prized 'first win' screenshot, posted with (entirely justified) triumphant pride, with a number somewhere around 40 in the top right corner.

[Japper007]

If anyone here wants to try the new character opt into the beta branch (this does reset progress unfortunately). You don't need a code to do it just click on it in the drop-down menu on Steam! I wish I knew that sooner.

[Herman Gigglethorpe]

It isn't unintuitive if you played other card games. In Magic it's one of the first things you tech a new player - always play the minimum size deck. Of course, it's not as obvious nowadays, when popular card games have a fixed predetermined deck size, so you don't have a chance to play a bigger deck and see for yourself how its consistency goes down. And as you rightly say, you usually don't want to go below a certain size in Slay the Spire. But the general principle of card games still applies - smaller deck = more consistent deck = better deck

Agreed - you also learn this the hard way playing Dominion.

If you haven't played any of those games, though, it's definitely unintuitive. I've witnessed first-hand Northernlion trying to internalize the core premise -- that removing a bad card from your deck raises the average quality just like adding a good one -- and failing over and over. He says it, but clearly doesn't quite believe it, and routinely passes over opportunities to streamline the deck in order to add more bloat. And over and over again you see the prized 'first win' screenshot, posted with (entirely justified) triumphant pride, with a number somewhere around 40 in the top right corner.

The Pokemon Trading Card Game for Game Boy Color tries to get around the "smaller decks being better" issue by forcing all decks to have 60 cards.  You can still manipulate it to an extent by having few Pokemon and having "draw more often" Trainer cards such as Professor Oak and Bill.  Are there any tactical card battle games that reward large decks?  (I wouldn't really count Baten Kaitos, because it's more like a traditional turn based RPG where your menu options happen to be randomly drawn attack and item cards.)

[Quagma Blast]

It isn't unintuitive if you played other card games. In Magic it's one of the first things you tech a new player - always play the minimum size deck. Of course, it's not as obvious nowadays, when popular card games have a fixed predetermined deck size, so you don't have a chance to play a bigger deck and see for yourself how its consistency goes down. And as you rightly say, you usually don't want to go below a certain size in Slay the Spire. But the general principle of card games still applies - smaller deck = more consistent deck = better deck

Agreed - you also learn this the hard way playing Dominion.

If you haven't played any of those games, though, it's definitely unintuitive. I've witnessed first-hand Northernlion trying to internalize the core premise -- that removing a bad card from your deck raises the average quality just like adding a good one -- and failing over and over. He says it, but clearly doesn't quite believe it, and routinely passes over opportunities to streamline the deck in order to add more bloat. And over and over again you see the prized 'first win' screenshot, posted with (entirely justified) triumphant pride, with a number somewhere around 40 in the top right corner.

The Pokemon Trading Card Game for Game Boy Color tries to get around the "smaller decks being better" issue by forcing all decks to have 60 cards.  You can still manipulate it to an extent by having few Pokemon and having "draw more often" Trainer cards such as Professor Oak and Bill.  Are there any tactical card battle games that reward large decks?  (I wouldn't really count Baten Kaitos, because it's more like a traditional turn based RPG where your menu options happen to be randomly drawn attack and item cards.)

There's one corner-case example I can think of. In the campaign mode of the old 90s-era Magic the Gathering computer game (sometimes called Shandalar, because of the setting) the maximum number of copies of a single card you can have scales with the size of your deck. One of the relic-equivalents relaxes this limit by one - unless your deck is large enough, in which case it eliminates the limit entirely. If you can manage to get your hands on enough copies of certain cards that can make it worth it.

[Lewwyn]

So I bought this today. On my fourth run I made it all the way to the Awakened One final boss with the silent dude (second run with him)... I missed by one round. So painful, I had discarded a fairy in a bottle potion because I had one already two battles earlier. If I had kept it I would have won. 

I ran it with Infinite shivs basically. No minimum deck size because they were innate and I had the relics that let me draw cards every turn so I basically had a full hand every turn (SNecko Eye and bag of preparation). I almost didn't run it because I replaced my first relic with the Snecko Eye and the confusion was crazy at the start. But once I had was getting a full hand I'd get multiple 0 energy attack cards. Had shuriken and ornamental fan giving me +1 str and blocking. I also used lightning in a bottle to get bullet time in my first hand with the infinite shivs so that even if the infintie shivs were 3 energy I could bullet time it, put all the shivs in, then run out another 4-5 attack cards at 0 energy... I had like 40 cards and I just cycled through each round using the shivs and any other cards that were randomly 0 energy.

+White elephant means I had a potion use every battle. BUT I discarded the one extra potion I need to survive the last turn. 

A lot of fun though, really easy to pick up and start putting together interesting, workable combos.

[Lewwyn]

Next run with Silent beat it. Poison + Corpse Explosion = Easy win

I've played several Ironclad games since, and I haven't been able to get past the second stage. Silent plays pretty naturally for me but I'm having a hard time syncing Ironclad so far.

[v8mark]

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.