Can Defect even make a deck that doesn't slam Snekco Eye?
I'd figure it's a Slient deck relying on 1000 cuts and needing to know it can use several cards a turn to both do damage and survive, but I dunno.
Yep, it can. Snecko Eye is not as strong as it used to be, simply because most cards got buffed across the board - which pushed the value of Runic pyramid up. And in this case the cost randomization would cripple the deck.
it's a AfO deck using claw for damage and glacier + coolheaded backed by Biased+Surge for defense. By the time Box was offered, it was down to 2 defends and no strikes, and it had a potion belt.
Can Defect even make a deck that doesn't slam Snekco Eye?
I'd figure it's a Slient deck relying on 1000 cuts and needing to know it can use several cards a turn to both do damage and survive, but I dunno.
Yep, it can. Snecko Eye is not as strong as it used to be, simply because most cards got buffed across the board - which pushed the value of Runic pyramid up. And in this case the cost randomization would cripple the deck.
it's a AfO deck using claw for damage and glacier + coolheaded backed by Biased+Surge for defense. By the time Box was offered, it was down to 2 defends and no strikes, and it had a potion belt.
Was going to guess something along those lines but I would generally take Box there in a vaccuum. Didn't realize you had already shaved so much out.
There’s basically one way to make them work, and that is finding a copy of All For One with a small deck; until you do, you’re on the struggle bus, especially if you don’t find one in Act 1
Then there’s the problem of Time Eater literally existing, and there being a 2/3 chance you’ll encounter it in Act 3 means you’re going to have to dilute your deck with some way of dealing with it
Funnily enough my first boss is in fact time eater, which is going to be fun to get past.
Claw decks are more bad because Claw just isn't very good usually. It's just slow damage scaling, and defect has much better ways to scale it's damage. The fact it scales infinitely is mostly irrelevant because you really only need too hit about 100 damage a turn to beat A20 heart.
The only reason this deck went in on Claw is that my whale bonus was 2 transforms, which on turn got me AfO and a claw. Which meant I had actually good damage scaling, especially when combined with frost generation for block
There's tons of options for making non-snecko decks for Defect as well. You have one of the best card draw and energy generation suites, which makes things very handsome. Runic pyramid is still insane, and I would have windmill slammed that if I'd seen it
If anything, AfO is normally an argument to go snecko, and if it wasn't for the multiple 0 costs in my deck already, I would have. (AfO dosen't care for how something costs 0, just that it's in your discard and costs 0). As it is, my deck sometimes goes infinite via abusing madness and Af0, so that's fun
Didn't even use the Fairy pot OR the Lizard tail, so hey!
Probably the best choice i made for this deck was on Floor 11, where i removed a strike... and bought Preserved Insect. the gamble on Floor 29 of just taking the damn Warped Tongs and immediately getting to remove them the next floor also paid off big time. Madness was another excellent pick up, as it let me create infinites or just get 0 cost Glaciers for oodles of block. Very fun run, def one of the most interesting one's I've had for a while.
Time Eater and the Heart were both rough, and i still have zero shame on reloading the game to figure out what the fuck I'm doing. Props to people like Jorbs who can play without reloading, but I'm a learn-by-doing fellow
My favorite decks are the ones where I can play lots of cards so Time Eater is my mortal enemy
stop killing my shiv decks you jerk
I think of the bosses, Time Eater is the feels-bad the most. The Heart's beat of Death is functionally a similar mechanic (Both punish you for playing low-value cards), but Time Eater takes control away from the player which just feels awful, even if objectively if you can hit 12 cards a turn every turn Time Eater is probably in real trouble.
It's the thing i think people miss with Time Eater/Awoken One - they're not hard counters at all. They're soft counters, and what they counter is low-value/low impact plays. On lower diffcutlies/agaisnt other bosses "just spam powers" works, but Awoken One says you have to be scaling (especially defensively scaling) hard with your powers or sucks to be you, jimmyboy!
In general i think that Donu and Deca is actually the most terrifying of the act 3 bosses - The right deck can plaster them, but they're rooooough with how often and how hard they swing. And the fact you're either getting filled with statuses or Donu's scaling everyone out of control is evil.
I’ve never actually had much of a problem with Donu and Deca, weirdly. I’m always happy to see them.
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Honestly what I like the least about Time Eater is that it's main mechanism can also just punish you for getting shitty draws. "Make sure to plan your turns around not being stuck on 11 card plays" sucks, and it's not like you can give up large chunks of turns easily "just in case you get the card you need next time."
While decks that want to play a lot of cards can certainly be curtailed by Time Eater, they do at least tend to offer you enough control over your card play that you won't get stuck on a bad number.
I would also agree that Donu and Deca can easily kill you, but are so linear as to always be welcome. As long as you can handle one of them in a few turns the fight is far and away the easiest, and I struggle to think of times I would have beaten either of the other act 3 bosses but would lose to D&D.
Another thing about Time Eater is that one character has a card that just fucks him and pretty much lets you pick whatever kind of bloated low cost cards you want. Playing Vault as Watcher when Eater has 11 cars tick procs him but skips his turn and resets the card counter. If you have a couple of Vaults in your deck he just can’t do anything before you get your deck set up.
This may be one of the most satisfying ways i've ever killed the Heart. Scrappy fucking deck, but it worked. (Also fun fact: because Beat of Death is something the heart *does*, when it dies you don't take Beat of Death damage)
Edit: also the only deck where I've gotten the card remove cost up to 200, and actually paid that cost to boot. Gods i wish i'd found a Blue Candle
I honestly didn't know the beat of death thing until today - I looked at the screen after the heart was dead and noticed I still had the buffer stack, and went huh.
I should post the deck lists of some of my recent wins soon. There's some fun stuff in the past few days. The defect deck taking Tiny house over snecko and Pandora's remains a real highlight.
Also on Donu/Deca - the trick with them is that any deck on A20 that's going after the heart has to have a plan to beat Spear & Shield.
Which are just a harder, nastier version of Donu/Deca anyway
So D&D end up looking easy because you're automatically already sculpting a deck that can beat them, while Time Eater and Awoken One don't have direct correlations in act 4, so you're more likely to run into issues (as an example, Watcher Rushdown builds can deal with the heart easily, but get run into trouble with the forced turn end of the TE and it's debuff cleanse)
It's one of those weird little subtitles that makes the game so good
It's been a while since i got to do a properly good Dumb Snecko Watcher deck, but hey, we got one! Bottled Omni is really good, funny that.
Also got this fun Silent deck that could slam Coffee Dripper because every fight was worth 10hp, and then it just did stupid discard things once it got rolling. Sword and Shield nearly murdered it (werid, a deck that needs to setup nearly died to the "Fuck you!" fight?), but the heart was a joke.
Extra fun is that thanks to how good this deck's card draw and discard was, you could pop Wraith form whenever the fuck and then outscale the dex debuff - getting at least 2 dex a turn was not uncommon.
Also recently i got to charge up a 1k damage dark orb just for fun. The poor spiker never saw it commin'
You know, if i had any skill at programming and knew what the fuck I was doing, i'd like to try my hand at a balance mod for StS. There's a few things i want to tweak
Rushdown to rare. Flurry of blows moved up to uncommon, but give it a bit more damage (like 2 points). At Uncommon/Common these are just too reliable right now, and i think they kill the phase space for Watcher decks in a very boring way - why do anything else when you've got solid chances of going infinite very easily? TBH i almost think you could remove rushdown, or make it a version that only works when you *enter* calm (it'd need a renaming), and the Watcher would not suffer overly for it.
I think you can knock weave down to common, and move conjure blade down to uncommon. The later would open up a bit more space in the "Heavy energy" watcher approach.
I'd like to see how Ectoplasm feels if it only costs you 50% of your gold, or 75%. If there's some way that it's interaction with Thieves could be fixed too, that'd make it feel better.
I'd maybe like to see Repgrogram on Defect looked at. It's just too narrow right now. Honestly, Defect's a whole thing - I do wish we had a version of it's orginal gunslinger concept, where orbs only did things when Evoked, and didnt have passives.
Catalyst is probably the only other I want this changed - or rather, Catalyst+. I'd prefer it to read "Apply Six poison, then double all poison". Tripling poisoin. is just too nuclear. Though honestly apply six might be too strong? Apply 4 or even apply 3 would still be very good as a card, but would go less horrific places when you've got Nightmare. (It's honestly mostly the Nightmare/Cata interaction that's really a issue but it is a big issue for how mindless it tends to be)
Some of those combinations are necessary for heart kills
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ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Weave to common is a weird one for me. But I think that's more due to the card sitting in a weird place? I'd hazard that many of the other Scry sources are among the Watcher's weakest cards, so it always felt like that MtG uncommon that's uncommon less because it's a good card and more because there aren't a lot of things it works with, so you don't want them flooding your option pool. *shrug* I would not die on this hill.
A friend told me to try Slice and Dice on my phone, so I did. There's something clever there but I'm not sure I'm sold on it as more than a novelty. However it is definitely worth checking out (there's a free demo!) to see what they're trying to do.
Some of those combinations are necessary for heart kills
Nah. The watcher stuff is just mindless to do on A20. The watcher would be a lot healthier if Rushdown wasn't basically an auto pick. (Knocking Rushdown down to draw 1 card or making it a once per turn would also work, but would be a lot harsher than kicking the card to rare). It makes infinites stupid easy.
Silent has a lot of ways to kill the heart, and making poison decks have to commit more instead of just combing out seems fine to me.
@ArcticLancer - the thought on weave and flurry switching places is precisely because scry is a bit weaker in general. stance swapping is already incredibly good, and flurry being common feels like too much reward - it can basically solve your damage problems.
Weave at common gives more reasons to lean into the scry stuff, while reducing the upside to crazy stance switch decks. This ideally opens up more space in the Watcher's builds, and you'd see more Conjure Blade, Fasting etc decks as a result.
I brute forced my way to A20 on the silent by only building shiv or poison decks and promptly dropped the class to go smash my head on defect.
After 50+ losses at A19 on defect I started watching A20 streamers to actually figure out how to play this game.
Anyway I am home sick and decided to do a Silent A20 run, and ended up with this super fun discard deck. I think this is the first time I ever willingly picked Evis
Apply 6 and double Catalyst would be a straight up superior option over current up to 12 starting poison where it evens out and starts to decline. I think that change might actually make multiple Catalyst decks more dangerous as they can get going faster?
Apply 6 and double Catalyst would be a straight up superior option over current up to 12 starting poison where it evens out and starts to decline. I think that change might actually make multiple Catalyst decks more dangerous as they can get going faster?
Quite possibly. The goal of the change is to make Catalyst more generally pickable, while also nerfing it's top end. I suspect in practice i'd make hte upgrade something like Apply 4, then double, or even apply 3 then double - This makes it still a toothy card as long as you can sink the upgrade into it, but it makes the absurd combo out things way harder to do.
ArcticLancerBest served chilled.Registered Userregular
Honestly I think it just makes the card better regardless. Catalyst is so often massive overkill it doesn't matter, so improving the floor and making it less dead in opening hands just seems nice.
The Slay the Spire boardgame kickstarter is up, no link due to forum rules
It looks like they basically just mapped the game nearly 1:1 (though some numbers fudging for damage, block, etc) and defect and watcher are changed the most mechanically. It is co-operative though, so that may be worth the price of admission.
I had avoided this game for so long, because I'm not a big fan of card games but when I saw this was more Fairway Solitaire and less Hearthstone, I gave it a try and now I'm super hooked! Already got to the heart on two characters.
I do have a question, can you get ANY card during a run, or does the game limit you to cards similar to what you're building? E.g. if I'm focusing on poison, do I get more cards related to poison? Or is it completely RNG but still stays within a certain type of card?
Also, applying 225 poison to a boss so you kill him in 3 turns is nuts.
I had avoided this game for so long, because I'm not a big fan of card games but when I saw this was more Fairway Solitaire and less Hearthstone, I gave it a try and now I'm super hooked! Already got to the heart on two characters.
I do have a question, can you get ANY card during a run, or does the game limit you to cards similar to what you're building? E.g. if I'm focusing on poison, do I get more cards related to poison? Or is it completely RNG but still stays within a certain type of card?
Also, applying 225 poison to a boss so you kill him in 3 turns is nuts.
card drops are complete RNG. in general, card rewards don't care about what's in your deck already at all.
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Yep, it can. Snecko Eye is not as strong as it used to be, simply because most cards got buffed across the board - which pushed the value of Runic pyramid up. And in this case the cost randomization would cripple the deck.
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Was going to guess something along those lines but I would generally take Box there in a vaccuum. Didn't realize you had already shaved so much out.
There’s basically one way to make them work, and that is finding a copy of All For One with a small deck; until you do, you’re on the struggle bus, especially if you don’t find one in Act 1
Then there’s the problem of Time Eater literally existing, and there being a 2/3 chance you’ll encounter it in Act 3 means you’re going to have to dilute your deck with some way of dealing with it
Claw decks are more bad because Claw just isn't very good usually. It's just slow damage scaling, and defect has much better ways to scale it's damage. The fact it scales infinitely is mostly irrelevant because you really only need too hit about 100 damage a turn to beat A20 heart.
The only reason this deck went in on Claw is that my whale bonus was 2 transforms, which on turn got me AfO and a claw. Which meant I had actually good damage scaling, especially when combined with frost generation for block
There's tons of options for making non-snecko decks for Defect as well. You have one of the best card draw and energy generation suites, which makes things very handsome. Runic pyramid is still insane, and I would have windmill slammed that if I'd seen it
If anything, AfO is normally an argument to go snecko, and if it wasn't for the multiple 0 costs in my deck already, I would have. (AfO dosen't care for how something costs 0, just that it's in your discard and costs 0). As it is, my deck sometimes goes infinite via abusing madness and Af0, so that's fun
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Didn't even use the Fairy pot OR the Lizard tail, so hey!
Probably the best choice i made for this deck was on Floor 11, where i removed a strike... and bought Preserved Insect. the gamble on Floor 29 of just taking the damn Warped Tongs and immediately getting to remove them the next floor also paid off big time. Madness was another excellent pick up, as it let me create infinites or just get 0 cost Glaciers for oodles of block. Very fun run, def one of the most interesting one's I've had for a while.
Time Eater and the Heart were both rough, and i still have zero shame on reloading the game to figure out what the fuck I'm doing. Props to people like Jorbs who can play without reloading, but I'm a learn-by-doing fellow
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stop killing my shiv decks you jerk
I think of the bosses, Time Eater is the feels-bad the most. The Heart's beat of Death is functionally a similar mechanic (Both punish you for playing low-value cards), but Time Eater takes control away from the player which just feels awful, even if objectively if you can hit 12 cards a turn every turn Time Eater is probably in real trouble.
It's the thing i think people miss with Time Eater/Awoken One - they're not hard counters at all. They're soft counters, and what they counter is low-value/low impact plays. On lower diffcutlies/agaisnt other bosses "just spam powers" works, but Awoken One says you have to be scaling (especially defensively scaling) hard with your powers or sucks to be you, jimmyboy!
In general i think that Donu and Deca is actually the most terrifying of the act 3 bosses - The right deck can plaster them, but they're rooooough with how often and how hard they swing. And the fact you're either getting filled with statuses or Donu's scaling everyone out of control is evil.
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While decks that want to play a lot of cards can certainly be curtailed by Time Eater, they do at least tend to offer you enough control over your card play that you won't get stuck on a bad number.
I would also agree that Donu and Deca can easily kill you, but are so linear as to always be welcome. As long as you can handle one of them in a few turns the fight is far and away the easiest, and I struggle to think of times I would have beaten either of the other act 3 bosses but would lose to D&D.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
You can drink a duplication potion during omnisciences cards selection screen, and it'll duplicate the card you select with omniscience.
Just casually get 3 copies of your best power into play
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This may be one of the most satisfying ways i've ever killed the Heart. Scrappy fucking deck, but it worked. (Also fun fact: because Beat of Death is something the heart *does*, when it dies you don't take Beat of Death damage)
Edit: also the only deck where I've gotten the card remove cost up to 200, and actually paid that cost to boot. Gods i wish i'd found a Blue Candle
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Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I should post the deck lists of some of my recent wins soon. There's some fun stuff in the past few days. The defect deck taking Tiny house over snecko and Pandora's remains a real highlight.
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Which are just a harder, nastier version of Donu/Deca anyway
So D&D end up looking easy because you're automatically already sculpting a deck that can beat them, while Time Eater and Awoken One don't have direct correlations in act 4, so you're more likely to run into issues (as an example, Watcher Rushdown builds can deal with the heart easily, but get run into trouble with the forced turn end of the TE and it's debuff cleanse)
It's one of those weird little subtitles that makes the game so good
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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It's been a while since i got to do a properly good Dumb Snecko Watcher deck, but hey, we got one! Bottled Omni is really good, funny that.
Also got this fun Silent deck that could slam Coffee Dripper because every fight was worth 10hp, and then it just did stupid discard things once it got rolling. Sword and Shield nearly murdered it (werid, a deck that needs to setup nearly died to the "Fuck you!" fight?), but the heart was a joke.
Extra fun is that thanks to how good this deck's card draw and discard was, you could pop Wraith form whenever the fuck and then outscale the dex debuff - getting at least 2 dex a turn was not uncommon.
Also recently i got to charge up a 1k damage dark orb just for fun. The poor spiker never saw it commin'
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Edit: Or twitch is just gonna shit the bed and not let me start broadcasting. So uh.. going live whenever they fix it.
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Rushdown to rare. Flurry of blows moved up to uncommon, but give it a bit more damage (like 2 points). At Uncommon/Common these are just too reliable right now, and i think they kill the phase space for Watcher decks in a very boring way - why do anything else when you've got solid chances of going infinite very easily? TBH i almost think you could remove rushdown, or make it a version that only works when you *enter* calm (it'd need a renaming), and the Watcher would not suffer overly for it.
I think you can knock weave down to common, and move conjure blade down to uncommon. The later would open up a bit more space in the "Heavy energy" watcher approach.
I'd like to see how Ectoplasm feels if it only costs you 50% of your gold, or 75%. If there's some way that it's interaction with Thieves could be fixed too, that'd make it feel better.
I'd maybe like to see Repgrogram on Defect looked at. It's just too narrow right now. Honestly, Defect's a whole thing - I do wish we had a version of it's orginal gunslinger concept, where orbs only did things when Evoked, and didnt have passives.
Catalyst is probably the only other I want this changed - or rather, Catalyst+. I'd prefer it to read "Apply Six poison, then double all poison". Tripling poisoin. is just too nuclear. Though honestly apply six might be too strong? Apply 4 or even apply 3 would still be very good as a card, but would go less horrific places when you've got Nightmare. (It's honestly mostly the Nightmare/Cata interaction that's really a issue but it is a big issue for how mindless it tends to be)
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A friend told me to try Slice and Dice on my phone, so I did. There's something clever there but I'm not sure I'm sold on it as more than a novelty. However it is definitely worth checking out (there's a free demo!) to see what they're trying to do.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Clearly you just need to murder *faster*
Nah. The watcher stuff is just mindless to do on A20. The watcher would be a lot healthier if Rushdown wasn't basically an auto pick. (Knocking Rushdown down to draw 1 card or making it a once per turn would also work, but would be a lot harsher than kicking the card to rare). It makes infinites stupid easy.
Silent has a lot of ways to kill the heart, and making poison decks have to commit more instead of just combing out seems fine to me.
@ArcticLancer - the thought on weave and flurry switching places is precisely because scry is a bit weaker in general. stance swapping is already incredibly good, and flurry being common feels like too much reward - it can basically solve your damage problems.
Weave at common gives more reasons to lean into the scry stuff, while reducing the upside to crazy stance switch decks. This ideally opens up more space in the Watcher's builds, and you'd see more Conjure Blade, Fasting etc decks as a result.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
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After 50+ losses at A19 on defect I started watching A20 streamers to actually figure out how to play this game.
Anyway I am home sick and decided to do a Silent A20 run, and ended up with this super fun discard deck. I think this is the first time I ever willingly picked Evis
Really makes the silent's 2 energy five hits attack look awful, it's like ... Good if you have a flex pot, or got stuck with Snecko Shuriken, I guess?
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Quite possibly. The goal of the change is to make Catalyst more generally pickable, while also nerfing it's top end. I suspect in practice i'd make hte upgrade something like Apply 4, then double, or even apply 3 then double - This makes it still a toothy card as long as you can sink the upgrade into it, but it makes the absurd combo out things way harder to do.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
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Twitch Page
Yeah, now I want all 4 StS characters to make an appearance.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
It looks like they basically just mapped the game nearly 1:1 (though some numbers fudging for damage, block, etc) and defect and watcher are changed the most mechanically. It is co-operative though, so that may be worth the price of admission.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
my brain broke when up against the time eater and i think i played the worst turns i have ever played
the only way it could have turned out worse was if i had simply ended turns without playing anything
like, brain, why you do this
I do have a question, can you get ANY card during a run, or does the game limit you to cards similar to what you're building? E.g. if I'm focusing on poison, do I get more cards related to poison? Or is it completely RNG but still stays within a certain type of card?
Also, applying 225 poison to a boss so you kill him in 3 turns is nuts.
card drops are complete RNG. in general, card rewards don't care about what's in your deck already at all.
https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/Card_Rewards