After playing it for over a year, I had to watch a strategy video last month to realize that you might want to keep a small deck and not always pick a card every time you can. Didn't even occur to me.

I'm terrible at strategizing. To this day I can't figure out anyone other than the Ironclad with that power that grows his strength every turn.

I played a lot of M:tG at various times in my life, and games like Magic teach you a lot about these concepts. I would have never thought about it has I not had that experience! No shame in learning about the meta game!

Deck-building board games are probably better teachers there. Deck-thinning is a useful strategy in mtg but it’s absolutely crucial to increase the power level & consistency of a deck in games like ascension or clank.

It's also interesting that there are deck-building games which remove deck-thinning as as strategy e.g. in mystic vale your deck has a fixed number of cards, you can only fill advancement slots in your base deck[0], and you can't remove advancements. You can also acquire "permanents" (the vale cards).

[0] every card has 0~1 slots filled from the base deck, and position matter, you can't put two advancements in slot 2 of a card

AIUI, the creators of Slay the Spire are very active in the Netrunner community, and play-tested it thoroughly with top Netrunner players. I haven't played it before but I think it plays closer to MtG than to deck builder board games.

It's a deckbuilding boardgame turned into a video game with a campaign. It is far, far closer to something like Star Realms, Thunderstone, Ascension, or Dominion (All deck building games that re-implemented Dominion's deck building ideas in different ways) than it is to MTG or Netrunner. Virtually every idea in Slay the Spire other than the rogue-like addition previously existed in these deck building games.

Maybe I don't play enough deckbuilders, but it seems like there was a decent amount of new concepts in here that didn't directly come from other games. Abilities like Innate, Retain, Ethereal, cards getting upgraded for all future encounters every time they're played, costs of the card being reduced based on something specific happening that encounter, the stances of the Watcher character in general, and all the cards surrounding that idea, The orb idea for the Defect in general and all cards revolving around that idea, cards giving you bonuses if it kills a character, sometimes permanently, etc.

Even something as basic as all the cards costing energy to spend and you have only a certain amount of energy every turn (that can be increased by other methods), forcing you to prioritize what to play, as opposed to just playing everything you draw and only the order matters, like in most deckbuilders, changes the feel quite a bit.

They were able to take advantage of the video game concept (allowing cards to morph within an encounter and over the course of multiple encounters) and put it to good effect. Technically you could do that with a board game with stickers or something, but it's a lot more effective here, and only permanent for a run as opposed to forever.

That being said, they did take a ton of ideas from existing games. It just feels a lot more inventive than most deckbuilding games I've played, where most of them feel like some combination of Ascension and Dominion, with little to differentiate it.

The Retain keyword is similar to the effects from Treasury or Mandarin in Dominion, where you put some card(s) back on top of your deck during clean up if you meet the condition. Treasury especially is also a cantrip, so it doesn't use up space in your hand on the next turn.

Innate of course doesn't have a precedent in Dominion, since you don't keep your deck around between games. Ethereal could - there's no technical reason you couldn't print a Dominion card with text like, "During clean up, trash this card if you would discard it from your hand". I don't think there are any such cards, and I suspect they'd be generally worse in Dominion than Ethereal is in StS. Actually, having a deck of cards using in junking attacks with that text separate from ruins and curses might be interesting - curses that trash themselves, so you could hand them out a lot more aggressively without destabilizing the entire game.

Dominion's traveler cards were Donald X's attempt to make cards that change during the game, though of course Slay the Spire can push that idea much further.

Artifacts and States are a little bit like the Watcher's stances, but less deck-defining. You generally don't build a deck around having a particular artifact or state, but you can use them to get a little extra juice.

I agree, limiting your plays each turn (either with mana or dominion's limited actions) does a lot to change the texture of a game. The Ascension family of deckbuilders where you can just slam your whole hand down every turn tend to leave me underwhelmed.

I don't mean to rag on StS for being unoriginal, quite the opposite, it's great.

My point was that it was an evolution of deckbuilding games in the vein of Dominion rather than CCGs in the vein of MTG.

I was a little hyperbolic in saying that virtually all of its ideas come from existing physical games, but the core gameplay itself does not stray far from its inspirations. Most of the gameplay elements you listed are present in mechanically identical forms in pre-existing games where possible (obviously the game being digital allows for mechanics that physical cards do not). Innate, Retain, Ethereal, upgraded cards (ex Pirate Ship), cost reduction and stances all exist just between Dominion and Thunderstone.

Not to be too pedantic but, Dominion also has an action economy, its just all actions (until later expansions) cost 1 resource. Another deckbuilding game, Mage Knight, also has an advanced resource-to-use-cards system and now that I reflect on it is probably the closest game to StS.

I'm not trying to argue that StS is un-inventive, they did a very good job of bringing rogue-like elements and persistent upgrades into the deckbuilding genre and a VERY, VERY good job at adding an addictive "one more run" feeling to the genre.

Fair enough. And it's been awhile since I played Dominion, I forgot about the ABC aspect of a Dominion turn and how that's kind of similar to energy points.

Now you're really making me want to check out Mage Knight. I was curious about it before, but maybe I should finally pick up a copy.

> Mage Knight

I hope you like playing games solo or have a group of friends just as excited about Mage Knight as you because it is a lot of rules with instructions that only make it harder to learn.

It's really not that much more complex than StS but you have to keep track or rules and perform game tasks (like refilling shops and playing out enemy encounters) that the video game would perform for you.

> It's really not that much more complex than StS but you have to keep track or rules and perform game tasks (like refilling shops and playing out enemy encounters) that the video game would perform for you.

That's really where digital games shine, tracking lots of small numbers, states, and actions which would be hell to do by hand. That's e.g. why hearthstone can have persistent damage while that'd be super annoying in MTG: you'd pretty much need a -0/-x die per creature which would get very old very fast.

*were

They left when StS took off, and Netrunner has since been discontinued (although there's still an active fan-run Tournament scene with fan-published cards).

Yeah, if nothing else, those games pretty much hammer into your head that all your starting cards are garbage and you should get rid of them, at the very least, at the soonest opportunity.

There's a couple of reasons you might want to hang on to them in Slay the Spire, depending on what events come up, but getting rid of them is pretty important in this game as well.

I am not very good at card/deck building games, but I assumed they wanted you to cull your deck when I noticed they make you use gold to do so. After realizing that, I started trying to keep a lean and focused deck. I only play casually, and I still haven't won, so my strategy still might not be good!

A lean deck can be very good by the end of the game, but the problem is getting to that point. On the harder difficulties it's often better to focus on choosing strong cards that help you now rather than worrying too much much about thinness.

So it's a good strategy still, it's just that most of the time you can improve your deck faster by adding good cards than by removing bad ones.

I figured the card removal service was just to remove the obviously bad cards that debuff you.

I thought that was meant to be used on curses (yes, I'm bad at the game).

It can be used on curses but usually you want to get rid of either the base deck or cards which don’t gel.

If you add powerful cards the power of the deck increases, but if you remove weak cards it also increases, and the consistency increases further: if you have 15 cards 10 of which are starter every hand will average 4 starter and 1 new card, but if you have 10 cards 5 of which are starter it’ll be split 3/2 ou 2/3 on average.

The basic cards are pretty bad. You can't play your full hand most of the time anyway, so cutting them makes it more likely that you'll draw the better cards.

This is also why Snecko Eye (the relic that gives +2 draw every turn and randomizes card cost) is arguably the best boss relic. Even if you only get to play one 3 cost card, it's more likely to be the best card in your deck.

> This is also why Snecko Eye (the relic that gives +2 draw every turn and randomizes card cost) is arguably the best boss relic. Even if you only get to play one 3 cost card, it's more likely to be the best card in your deck.

I can't agree with this. Snecko Eye is very strong, but playing a 3-cost card will cripple you. It's strong because you draw a lot of cheap cards -- the lesson of Snecko Eye is that playing several cards is better than playing one card, even if the cards you got to play were chosen randomly.

That's definitely part of it, but you'll still get the occasional hand full of 3-costs, and all of them not being completely awful is important.

Dropping your starter attack and defend cards after getting better alternatives is a good tip for new players, but the number one factor in winning in my experience is selecting the right card combos and synergies. Identify possible combos early and pick future cards to build on those strategies. If a card doesn't fit in your deck skip it. Sometimes you'll pick a combo card early and not come across any synergistic cards and lose or have to pivot strategies, it just happens. Having a smaller deck with only the cards you want will usually help though.

Aiming for synergies can be a trap, though. Sometimes the correct pick is a bad card that has anti-synergy with your current deck, because it solves an immediate problem. For example, at the start of a run you generally should pick any attack better than a strike (almost all of them) even over super powerful late-game scaling cards and try to kill the Elites to get relics and build power.

After the first few runs through the Spire, you'll generally know what you will be facing, and what you need to do is pick cards that cover your bases against those potential upcoming fights.

Good analysis. You're right. I'm no expert at the game, but killing elites is a great tip and not obvious to a new player.

All of my most successful winning decks have been built off of synergies though.

This depends on what you mean by success. If your aim is to end up steamrolling hard enemies with a broken deck and getting a large high score than synergies are worth going for. If your goal is to eek by with a win as often as possible there is too much variance in betting the farm on being offered certain cards in the future.

Indeed, best advice I can give for people having trouble is: do anything you need to do to survive Act 1 and kill 2-3 elites. After that you've got a lot more flexibility.

I would argue aiming for synergies is fundamentally wrong headed unless you're trying to moonshot with a lucky deck. There's way too much varience in expecting to get offered certain cards. That being said some synergies like silent poison probably worth gunning for... But that's mostly because poison cards are disperportionately strong.