Slay the Spire is a really hard game because you rarely get immediate feedback on your decisions. As human beings, we thrive on rapid feedback loops and can very quickly learn to do a task when they are present. It takes an entirely different sort of thinking to look back and say "all those attack cards I took in Act 1 just ended clogging my deck in Act 3!" when the two situations may be an hour and a half or more apart.

Another really challenging aspect to StS is that the immediate feedback you do get may be entirely unhelpful or even counterproductive. Taking all those attack cards in Act 1 can make your deck feel a lot more powerful... in Act 1. But essentially you've sacrificed the long-term viability of your deck for short term strength.

I found watching and reading a couple of good videos to establish some 'framework' about the game really helped me out here. Before I learned about the game, I had a similar win rate to you.

After learning about the game, however, the non ascension runs almost felt too easy. This is because I had misconceptions on how the game should be played: I found that the cards I thought were valuable were actually bad. With this new knowledge I could easily pick out the 'right play' and come out ahead in situations where I would have normally perished.

I've lost interest around ascension 10. But this experience really made me realise how much we stand on shoulders of giants for thinking about literally everything, from programming to an indie card game. In the essay, the author says he'd rather say he has "extended" win streak records rather than "broke" the win streak records and I think this captures my feeling exactly.

Could you recommend me some strategy resources? I'm new to the game but want to really understand the strategy

Go watch Jorbs play (the author). In particular his "over-explained" runs on YouTube are good for getting in-depth breakdowns.

There's a bit of an unavoidable learning curve initially in learning the cards in each deck, because so much of the strategy comes down to analysing what your deck can currently do, and what adding (or not adding) a card to it will change.

He's played close to 10000 hours, and has an obvious talent for games. I know a lot of StS players, and it typically takes people a few hundred hours to be ready for Ascension 20 kills (hardest difficulty). None of the players I know have even half the win-rate of someone like Jorbs. It's taken me over 300 hours to get to two characters on Ascension 19 and one on Ascension 17. I'm genuinely mediocre, but it's just a tough game.

Well, this guy was a #1-ranked MTG player, so it's not a fair comparison for most of us mortals. It took me hundreds of tries and some very good luck to beat A20.

Note well the qualification of the "#1-rank":

Around twenty years ago, as a teenager, I was building decks for Magic: the Gathering pro tours, and proudly reached #1 in the world in constructed rank and #3 in the world in limited rank on Magic: the Gathering Online.

So that's world number 1 in M:tG Online. From experience, M:tG Online is (was?) a less competitive game than the physical-cardboard game and I'm not even sure that even in the cardboard game DCI rankings (the "rank" in the article) is exactly correlated with being one of the top players at sanctioned tournaments, like Pro-Tours and World Championships, or their qualifying events. I think it's possible, oddly enough, to have a high rank in DCI points without being a pro. For example I seem to remember Friday Night Magic tournaments conferring DCI points for wins (and taking them away for losses). But it seems the whole system has been discontinued by Wizards of the Coast so I can't easily check how it works anymore (or check my own rank...).

I called it good at ascension 2 and uninstalled, doesn’t the novelty and enjoyment wear off long before you’d hit ascension 20? I guess this is maybe why I’ve never really been an expert at anything just pretty good.

> doesn’t the novelty and enjoyment wear off long before you’d hit ascension 20?

I don't think it's a problem at all that you didn't enjoy it after A2. Some folks do (like Jorbs or your comment's parent) and some don't.

If your line of questioning was more along the lines of why it didn't wear off, I can give my own anecdote. I found that the increase of difficulty makes the game more interesting to think about because you have to be much more methodical in how you craft your deck and play it. There are a lot of variables to manage and account for too.

I kind of feel like by A2 I’d have figured out where the optimizations are, and it’s just a matter of finding them, not sure if I’d have the energy to actually try them in game.

No, that's backwards. On low difficulty you can indeed force a strategy chosen in advance, but as the game gets more difficult you need to make choices that trade off the late-game power of your deck against the needs right now (so you can get to the late game at all)

To transliterate your comment into an equivalent context:

I feel like after 12 or so hours of chess I'd figure out how to not hang pieces. From there, how to find the best moves is just a question of dedicating energy into finding them in game.

I'm not sure why anyone plays more than 100 or so hours of chess. Doesn't it get boring?

Well, yeah. That’s exactly it. ;)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m impressed with people doing it, but I don’t think I can.

Until you've actually played at A20 it's hard to understand how different the game is. There are picks for cards, relics, shop purchases, etc, that are absolutely crucial to get an A20 heart kill that you would never even consider picking at A2.

You could always "cheat" and skip straight to A20 (I assume there is a way to do so, at least). I find the difference between low ascension and A20 to be rather large, so while it's true that optimal play at A20 will work at A2, I'm not sure I was capable of that when I was at A2.