Bash+ is also a huge boost against this boss. His HP pool is huge and he scales pretty hard with strength gain and adding Burns to your deck. Hexaghost: Find at least one scaling card, preferably more if you aren’t offered garbage. Flame Barrier and Disarm are particularly good here. Grab some extra block if you can afford to, ideally you’ll make about 10 per turn during Defensive phase. Vulnerable makes it much easier to get a good split before the big attack. You’ll block the least against this boss, compared to the other two. Enemies have low HP, so don’t prioritize scaling yet unless you’re offered a premium card. Probably don’t skip many card offers, probably don’t take any Exploiters. Exhaust-other cards aren’t that strong yet either, for the same reasons. Card draw sucks right now, because you have no energy to work with and very few strong cards to draw into. All elites have low HP, but scale very quickly, so you need to kill them in very few turns.įind any 2-3 damage cards ASAP, then a mix of good block and utility cards + 2-3 more high-quality damage cards. The first enemies have tiny HP pools and don’t do much too much damage. Special mention to Dark Embrace, which feels like it should be a Synergy card, but because drawing after you spend energy and exhaust cards is much, much worse than drawing after you play a 0 cost exhausting skill, I consider to be an Exploiter. The line between Exploiter and Enabler can be a bit blurry, so use your judgement on which a card is when you’re offered it. But, some of the strongest combos in the game are Exploiters and Synergy (Power Through and Evolve+, Corruption and Dark Embrace, Nightmare and *insert Silent combo of choice here*).
If you add too many Exploiters, you lower your chances of drawing your Synergy card, and your deck becomes far worse. Typically, only take if you have the Synergy card. Examples: Bloodletting exploits Rupture, Fire Breathing and Wild Strike exploit Evolve, Exhume exploits Feed and Reaper. Special mention to Feel No Pain and Evolve: while they seem like Synergy cards, enough enemies will add status effects to your deck, and enough Ironclad cards will say ‘exhaust’ anyways that I consider both enablers.Įxploiter: Card that does x thing to activate a Synergy card, but it’s pretty bad unless you have the Synergy card in play. A good enabler is strong enough to take on it’s own. Examples: Combust enables Rupture, Evolve enables Wild Strike. Generally, you don’t want to take these unless you already have an Enabler.Įnabler: Card that does x thing to activate a synergy card. The key concept is that they do LITTLE TO NOTHING if they don’t have a strong card to activate it. Synergy card: Card that becomes stronger when you do x thing, such as Double Tap playing a strong attack twice or Rupture giving you Strength when you deal damage to yourself. Utility: Anything that doesn’t directly contribute to damage or block, like card draw and energy gain. Scaling: Anything that becomes stronger over the course of the fight, like powers, exhausting your bad cards, strength gain, or poison. Obviously cards that generate Block are block cards, but so are Disarm, Feed, Clothesline, and Apparition. Some of these are real, some I made up on the spot and people will look at you really funny if you say them, but they make sense to me so meh.īlock: Stuff that keeps you from dying. I wish I could say this is a well-thought out and masterfully written guide I’ve put months of work into, but in actuality it’s mostly a massive comment I dropped on some dude who asked for tips in Discussions before my meds kicked in, lmao Terminology I use Ironclad cards as the examples, but the principles apply to every character, just with some different nuances. What up y’all, I play Ascension 20 Slay the Spire and watched a bunch of vids and streamers to figure out the game before I got consistent, so here’s some general deckbuilding principles I learned so you don’t have to take as long as I did.
The cards I mention are Ironclads, but the principles apply to all characters. Here’s a breakdown of what your goals should be as you craft your deck in each Act.