Current Events > I'm terrible at Slay the Spire

(+) Yeah! (+)

I pick up too many cards trying to get something not shitty and then I can't get rid of them again. Getting rid of cards is too hard! Make it easier for meee!

DodogamaRayBrst posted...

Make it easier for meee!

Never take cards and you never have to remove them.

You have to get a fine tuned deck. You are generally always removing cards. It sucks but its just how to get better. Smaller deck equals seeing your better cards more often. So get rid of your starter cards and then you can pick better replacements. Or pick the replacement attack or defense first then next shop you already know what to remove.

Plan your route! Look for shops and mini-bosses. You want to try to get as many relics as you can. Try to time it so you can power up right before a mini boss or have a pit stop right after.

Dont sleep on stacking defense too, the more you can keep your HP from not taking a hit the better. Damage will come but healing is usually much harder to come by.

Now go out there and Slay that Spire!

So, do small deck proponents recommend just skipping like most of the freebie cards? This is what I don't really understand.

I've played maximalist every run and i'm at ascension level 14

Just get rid of the obviously bad stuff, and base defends

Also this is monk only

DodogamaRayBrst posted...

Make it easier for meee!

Be more selective with your cards. If you don't feel like something will fit into the deck you are building, skip taking a card. Having even a decent card that doesn't synergize with everything else ends up being dead more often than not.

ReturnOfDevsman posted...

So, do small deck proponents recommend just skipping like most of the freebie cards? This is what I don't really understand.

Yes! Its counter intuitive I will admit and it took me a long to understand it. I just burned a run as I got too greedy and my strategy fell apart because I took too many cards.

You want to kinda fine tune the strategy your relics are giving and what cards you see at the start. And hopefully after the first boss you get a gold card that really ramps you up. Thats what youre building towards really. Because generally that gold card will give you a good idea of what to focus on for the rest of the run.

ReturnOfDevsman posted...

So, do small deck proponents recommend just skipping like most of the freebie cards? This is what I don't really understand.

Yes, but also no.
You want to take goated cards and get rid of bad cards.

The main advantage of getting rid of cards is you get more control over what you draw, your deck becomes more consistent, and then you can actually plan out what you want to do with the deck.

Hospy posted...

The main advantage of getting rid of cards is you get more control over what you draw, your deck becomes more consistent, and then you can actually plan out what you want to do with the deck.

This. Remember that you just keep redrawing the deck so there is no advantage to having mid level cards taking up a spot that could be instead a critical card to your deck redrawn again.

ToadallyAwesome posted...

Yes! Its counter intuitive I will admit and it took me a long to understand it. I just burned a run as I got too greedy and my strategy fell apart because I took too many cards.

You want to kinda fine tune the strategy your relics are giving and what cards you see at the start. And hopefully after the first boss you get a gold card that really ramps you up. Thats what youre building towards really. Because generally that gold card will give you a good idea of what to focus on for the rest of the run.

So then how do you clear act 1?

Dont feel bad. Ive got like 20 runs under my belt and only managed to get to Ascension 2. I think I have a similar problem where I take a majority of cards and when a build starts to coalesce I have a bunch of fluff. Im good enough to juggle what I have effectively and strategize between cards and shop purchases that it will carry me, but too often Ill die in Act 3 or 4 because a heavy hitter is coming in swinging and I cant put together a defense.

I used to focus on small decks explicitly, but it has downsides too - especially on battles that throw lots of junk cards into your deck. Now I focus much more on ways to consistently get card draw and energy. Slimming the deck to is still important, but I do it with the intent of getting rid of cruft, rather than assuming I'll be able to redraw cards. Even if your deck is pretty small (~15 cards), without card draw, that's still 5-6 turns of drawing five cards (maybe an extra card here and there) before you might see a particular card twice. I want most of my battles to be over before that point if possible.

ReturnOfDevsman posted...

So then how do you clear act 1?

Not sure if you're doing ascensions or not yet, but the single best guide I read to StS is this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/s/q9JqY7kSWD

It's long but worth it. tl;dr, focus on your immediate problems. That means picking up cards that might not be ideal in the long run, to help you in the short run. A single card that costs 2 energy to do 20 damage might not be great to have in act 3, but in act 1, that takes out a lot of an elite's health. That will help you fight more elites, which get you relics and better cards, which snowballs. I beat A20 heart runs with both ironclad and silent recently for the first time by roughly following that strategy. Still lots of room for me to improve, but it's no longer impossible to me.

i reject a great many cards and thin out my deck at every opportunity. i just made it to Ascension 16 on each character

I try to aim for 20-25 in terms of deck size, outside of specific build circumstances

AlienDestroyer4 posted...

Not sure if you're doing ascensions or not yet, but the single best guide I read to StS is this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/s/q9JqY7kSWD

It's long but worth it. tl;dr, focus on your immediate problems. That means picking up cards that might not be ideal in the long run, to help you in the short run. A single card that costs 2 energy to do 20 damage might not be great to have in act 3, but in act 1, that takes out a lot of an elite's health. That will help you fight more elites, which get you relics and better cards, which snowballs. I beat A20 heart runs with both ironclad and silent recently for the first time by roughly following that strategy. Still lots of room for me to improve, but it's no longer impossible to me.

I think I remember reading that one before. But let me take a closer look just in case. Thanks!

Anyway, I've been stuck on A2 with Ironclad/Defect/Watcher for literally 80 runs. Oddly enough, I got past A2 with Silent first try. I have 3 wins and 2 losses with Silent, and like 2 wins and 40 losses with Ironclad/Defect, lol. And Watcher? I just don't think my brain works for that one.

ReturnOfDevsman posted...

I think I remember reading that one before. But let me take a closer look just in case. Thanks!

Anyway, I've been stuck on A2 with Ironclad/Defect/Watcher for literally 80 runs. Oddly enough, I got past A2 with Silent first try. I have 3 wins and 2 losses with Silent, and like 2 wins and 40 losses with Ironclad/Defect, lol. And Watcher? I just don't think my brain works for that one.

Yeah, Silent is the first character I felt like I was pretty good with. Then one day Ironclad just clicked for me :) Agreed about Watcher, she still boggles my mind haha.

Not sure what might help most for your runs, but one thing that I was definitely doing in lower ascensions was trying to build a "theme" deck too early on. e.g. with Silent, going for a "poison run" or a "shiv run". There are plenty of decks like this where cards clearly play off each other very nicely, but taking certain cards too early just because you think they'll synergize well if you get another card or two, is usually a recipe for a loss. Beyond that, just paying attention to what sorts of things you're missing, and trying to adjust to your deck from there - again, rather than trying to build some hypothetical deck built around a theme like poison - really helps. At least, that was one of the big logical hurdles I had to overcome.

It took me upwards of 100+ hours to finally to start to really understand the game fully. I can probably get through any basic run 9/10 times tries now.

Still working on a couple achievements on and off which are just the ascension ones. Got all the other ones(outside of killing Domu with feed which I could probably knock out quickly).

u guys i got such a god satisfying play just now check this out

https://imgur.com/a/rFquH0k

i used nightmare on upgraded catalyst

Nice, yeah Nightmare can come in clutch a lot