On the base mode you fully heal after each boss.

Ascension Mode is unlocked after you beat the base game 5 times or you beat all of the Act III bosses at least once.

Ascension I - More elites.

Ascension II to IV - Enemies deal more damage.

Ascension V - Heal less after boss battles.

Ascension VI - Start Damaged.

Ascension VII to IX - Enemies have more health.

Ascension X - Starting deck now includes a copy of Ascender's Bane.

Ascension XI - Potions are worse.

Ascension XII - Upgraded cards appear less often in fight rewards.

Ascension XIII - Bosses give you less money.

Ascension XIV - Lower Max HP.

Ascension XV - Unfavorable events.

The hardest jumps for Ascension are II, V, VII, X, XI, and XV. These correspond to "Normal enemies deal more damage", "Heal less after boss battles", "Normal enemies have more health", "Start with an Ascender's Bane in your deck", "Potions are less powerful", and "Unfavorable events". The rest of them aren't hard enough difficulty jumps to be a real issue once you've gotten good enough to unlock them.

Ascension XI messed with my head real bad. I got stuck on it for so long with Ironclad that I keep forgetting potions' normal values and think they have their Ascension XI+ effect.

Pandora's Box is one obvious option.
Philosopher's Stone has enough of a downside that you wouldn't take it if you didn't really need the energy.

I guess the third one has to be between Runic Dome, Sozu, and Ectoplasm, since I don't see what else could have a downside. I can't see a reason for you not to take Sozu, so I guess one of the other two.

I am going to have to get artifacts and relics straight fast. I had the chance to buy Apotheosis which would have upgraded all my cards for 1 combat, but turned it down to buy Panacea. I thought I could get a free, permanent power-granting relic every combat, and not just an artifact that negates 1 debuff. I thought it seems too cheap to be true, but what it actually was didn't click for me.

apotheosis is pretty sick

panacea is not as sick

Here are the results of a very lucky run with the Defect: at the beginning I chose to lose my starting gold for a rare relic, and I got Unceasing Top! After, that, I did my best to tailor the deck around it. As you can see, with the following boss relics I renounced both gold and potions in order to have more energy and keep the turns going, and I tried to gather as many 0-cost cards as I could. All For One, of course, is already good by itself, but it was the icing on the cake here. TURBO is a card I usually avoid, but with Unceasing Top it prolonged my turns even more (the Void it shuffles into your discard pile will break one streak in the future, but it's totally worth using). The last boss was the Awoken One, luckily not the Time Eater.

Needless to say, I got the "C-c-c-combo" score bonus at the end.

Correct, Correct, and close enough. You either forgot or didn't know that Ectoplasm can't spawn in Act II.

Pandora's Box, Philosopher's Stone, and Runic Dome were the three options I skipped. I needed my upgraded Defends, Philosopher's Stone wasn't worth the energy, and this is one of the rare decks I've gotten where I need to know enemy intents more than I needed energy. in hindsight I got the one boss where your gameplan drastically changes based on enemy intent, so it was very much the correct call.



I would main deck a Panacea and use a bottled lightning on it.

For people late to the game, there are several unwritten rules that you'd basically have to go look up old patch notes to know.

The biggest two are that Ectoplasm can't spawn in Act II and that certain cards that randomly generate things have had things specifically removed from their card pool (Creative AI and Magnetism being recent examples).

Well this was the first run of the night. My plan was to play until I got another level done..... well I did that. Final bosses were Donuts. I won by defending for 30+ per turn for most of the fight and taking for freaking ever to kill Deca. This one was very very close, and I'm lucky I went into the fight with 70/70 hp. I basically got a 2 fight 3rd Act map layout, and I had a smoke bomb, so I only had to kill the 300 health dude before fighting the actual bosses. Went into the fight with a thorns pot, a dex pot, and a gambler's brew. Put terror on the Donut and let him buff the pair of them up to 15 Str before finally getting to kill him. Then defended against 20 x 2 attacks for ...... a lot of times (this was a perpetually weak Deca btw). Won with I think 11? hp remaining.



... So my run history for the last 8 games played looks like this:

Silent - Victory Ascension Level 6
Silent - Slain on Floor 10 by Exordium Thugs
Silent - Slain on Floor 33 by Champ
Silent - Victory Ascension Level 7
Silent - Victory Ascension Level 8
Silent - Slain on Floor 21 by Cultist and Chosen
Silent - Victory Ascension Level 9
Silent - Victory Ascension Level 10

Anyone want to explain to me what is going on here? Because I suck as the Silent compared to Ironclad. Or at least I think I do. There's definitely a reason I have like 1/3rd the playtime on her as the other character.

I have realized I barely ever take the following cards. There are no cards in the game that are so bad that I would never take them, but these are the ones I almost never take outside of special circumstances:

Ironclad:
- Anger
- Iron Wave
- Warcry
- Wild Strike
- Dual Wield
- Firebreathing
- Power Through
- Searing Blow
- Seeing Red
- Second Wind
- Sentinel
- Barricade
- Berserk
- Dark Embrace
- Juggernaut

Silent:
- Bane
- Deadly Poison
- Outmaneuver
- Distraction
- Flechettes
- Infinite Blades
- Reflex
- Setup
- Well-Laid Plans
- Corpse Explosion
- Grand Finale
- Nightmare
- Tactician

Colorless:
- Good Instincts
- Swift Strike
- Purify
- Enlightenment
- Thinking Ahead
- Transmutation
- Apotheosis

Anyone want to discuss any of these? Or the fact that I take some things often enough that they aren't on these lists?

Edit: Forgot to add Apotheosis to the list.

Well-Laid Plans is a good card for most decks. Nightmare is a strong speculative pick to work with certain cards like Blur but can also be flexible. I like Infinite Blades

According to spirelogs, Well-Laid Plans is strong in general, Nightmare is strong except on high ascension, and Infinite Blades is strong on high ascension

First things first, I don't trust the stats on sites like Spirelog and quoting them at me is useless. Let's just get that one straight out of the way. I've played too many card games with some version of that site where the devs have out-right proven those sites are flawed, so you can't convince me of anything with voluntarily submitted user data. If you show me dev statistics, then I will care about that.

----------------

Even your own quoted statistics say Nightmare is bad except on the mode where you can literally play anything and get away with it. I don't even feel like I have to argue that one further at this point.

Corruption has one of the highest win rates in the game at high ascension. This is because people only pick it up in decks where they have Dead Branch synergy, which takes the card from being normally crap to being absolutely bonkers. Infinite Blades serves the exact same purpose. In most decks, it takes 5 turns to out-value an upgraded Blade Dance; and it takes 4 turns to out-value an upgraded Cloak n' Dagger not taking the block into account. It is just way too freaking slow to play in the vast majority of decks. The exceptions are the decks where a single shiv has so much synergy and power that you just pick up every single shiv card you see, including this really bad one, because the shivs have so much synergy that it manages to outweigh how freaking slow this card really is. And that's your relics breaking your run, not the Infinite Blades contributing anything in particular. It would be way better if you just got a Cloak n' Dagger or a Blade Dance instead, and you are settling for picking up an Infinite Blades. If you don't have that level of insane synergy going on, then it's just way too freaking slow to be worth anything of much value.

Well Laid Plans eats a draw and doesn't have an effect if you can play your whole hand. It's also significantly worse in decks that have a lot of draw and very thin decks. It's basically a curse in my play-style. The best case scenarios for me are that it's useful just because my deck is poorly constructed, or it's useful in the kind of fashion where it lets me keep my worst card out of 5 or 6 each turn.

I agree that spirelogs statistics don't necessarily prove that cards are good, I just looked them up out of curiosity and to see if they would back me up after I noticed what cards in your list I like.

You have a different style to me, I usually have pretty big decks, so the consistency from Well-Laid is more useful to me. And I usually have a defensive deck that takes down bosses in about 15 turns, so Infinite Blades pays for itself pretty well (I also like Cloak and Dagger, but not Blade Dance unless I have a ton of shiv synergy). That said, I'm designing more for the big fights than the little ones, where Blade Dance would probably be stronger and Infinite Blades is sometimes treated as a curse. (That could be 'cause I play non ascension).

Since we're not taking spirelogs data into account, what other reasons do you have for not giving Nightmare a go? (Actually, part of the reason I like Well-Laid is because it helps set up Nightmare, so that also explains that card). Have you gotten permanent Blur before? It makes certain fights pretty easy. I know with a small enough deck you can do it without Nightmare as long as you have Burst or enough Blurs. But that's not the only use of Nightmare. In quick fights I sometimes get it on the first turn and can clone Backstab which kills lots of things fast on turn 2. It can let you "switch gears" in some fights to stack up poison on a really tanky enemy even if your deck doesn't have much poison. It can help with combos (like with Concentrate). It can clone rare cards like After Image, Adrenaline etc.

Going to have find a better way* to post these, but here's my first successful spire-slaying!

Early on it became apparent I had the basis of a good lots of spells per turn deck. I only saw one Infinite Blades though and passed it up for something I can't remember. I was expecting to load up on them and go shiv crazy.
Thousand Cuts was responsible for a very large portion of my damage. After Image was responsible for most of my defense.
Everything else costs 0 and/or draws cards, grants block, or was in my deck before I nailed down my strategy. There's a couple of things in there that really shouldn't be.
Churning through my deck as fast as I did, (and withSecret Weapon+,) Predator+ or Mind beam+ happened most turns, despite having a 39 card deck.
I took 2+ hours, but I'm pretty sure that includes my supper break.

*Current way was to look it up on Steam, share to Facebook, open image in new tab, get url, post to imgur. I know it's on my PC somewhere, but not where. Probably higher res, too.

@flopfoot

It's very hard to find a way to justify skipping a turn to play Nightmare in order to play 3 copies of something next turn. Upgraded Backstab and a few of the powers are the only cards that come to mind that make the pay-off immediately worth it. Maybe. And for the powers this would have to be during a boss battle because you are effectively skipping two turns there. Which comes to the second problem with the card. Once you have a good target, you have to draw it in the same turn as Nightmare early enough to be useful too. The other strategy is to put 3 cards into your deck that will generate value over the course of the fight to the point where you don't mind thickening your deck, but that's even harder to argue since the only fight that long is the 3rd Act boss and the rest of the time you don't get that amount of time. Nightmare is just very expensive for what it does outside of a Snecko Eye build, because you need a target that gets you 6 mana worth of value the turn after to make up for playing Nightmare the turn before and then you need to draw both the target and nightmare.

I honestly believe that the Ironclad equivalent, which only costs 1 mana and does the copying immediately, is also something I will almost never pick, so Nightmare is really behind the curve.


@TPManW

Take a screenshot of your run history with F12. Then go to Steam, click on content, go to your screenshots, click on the screenshot so that it gets a lot bigger, right click on it, and click on copy link address. Then use img tags to post it on here.

Here we go

Beat the daily run today for my 2nd ever victory. Unfortunately, that doesn't give me the achievements. I think I even won a combat with 1 hp too.
After that I did a super tanky run with the Ironclad and got to the final boss. I would have taken out Donu if combust did damage to enemies first. Deca however was beyond my grasp entirely.

They removed achievements from dailies because people wrote "how to" guides for how to get Minimalist and Speed Climber on multiple dailies. Minimalist is supposed to be one of the hardest achievements in the game, so you can understand how well that went over.

It should also be noted that dailies, on average, are a lot easier than normal runs. A good demonstration of this is a youtuber named Northernlion who (for at least a while) won almost every daily on the Defect but couldn't get a normal win on the character.

The general consensus after a while has become that Apotheosis is mostly a noob trap unless you can upgrade it AND reliably get it on turn 1. Drawing it turn 1 basically means putting bottled lightning on Apotheosis or putting bottled lightning on a card that makes it very consistent to get Apotheosis. If you can do that, you can skip upgrading the rest of your deck. If you can't then you still have to upgrade the cards you really need to upgrade, and that basically means Apotheosis just ends up being slightly better than an upgraded Inflame + Footwork. That is not considered to be good enough to be worth the price in gold, so it's considered to be too low value for the cost associated with it in most situations (~200 gold + an upgrade).

The first time I heard the argument I thought people were just crazy, but as I play the game more.... they are probably right. It's generally not worth an upgrade and the cost of a relic to add damage/block to the cards in your deck that weren't important enough to upgrade. The only exception is in supremely fat decks you shouldn't be playing anyways except on some dailies.

Apotheosis makes the first two acts easier but isn't strong by the end

It's not even strong in Act II unless you had a bad Act I.

I can't seem to beat Ascension 11 on the Silent. I even just had a crazy run where I got 4 elites on the first floor .

It seems that everything is right with the world once again.