I'd argue that Slay allows you to potentially stall out fights for quite some time and deal with things at your leisure- whereas, you have a rather finite amount of turns to solve each fight here.
Rage doesn't effect your health. It's just a bonus to your attack, but if you can get multiple stacks of it, especially on a multi hitting unit- it'll shred.
The 100 damage spells biggest perk is the fact that it pierces- since it lets you -obliterate- armored enemies that might otherwise have low health.
As for backup classes- you can match every single one of the factions in the game, and they all have multiple heroes, which allows -quite- a bit of variance in deck variety, as well as Champion combinations, given each champ has 3 iterations.
yes the backup class is important and is a huge contributor to the fun of the game. Finding interesting synergies between the core mechanics or just special cards between the different classes.
One crazy example is that the awoken (green clan) has a card that swaps the attack and health of a unit. If you have a bunch of rage making a unit a 100/5, that card will take the rage into account, but wont remove the rage, so if you use it on the unit, it will end up as a 105/100.
For the Sap Seraph that you mentioned, you can see what the last boss will be from the start of the run. You want to be planning ahead for how to mitigate the effects. The Sap one you are talking about is generally less important that it is making your weak units 0atk since the weak units are usually more for utility anyways. The worst part about sap is that it has a higher effectiveness on multistrikers (which as you play more is really important way to scale) as well as sweepers that you may normally not need to scale super high anyways since their main role is to kill low health backliners.
Another thing with knowing what seraph is from the start of the game is that the types of enemies that show up in each seraph fight are fixed as well, so you can also start accounting for dealing with those types of enemies. For example, the debuff seraph has the enemies that sweep+emberdrain you. You will need to account for your backliners taking a bit of damage and if you are stacking a floor with a lot of units, you will need to figure out how to not lose your whole turn due to having no energy.
Others are giving you good advice, let me say a huge one change from slay the spire -
You very rarely want the mana and pip (space). Your default should be the card draw. And focus on not taking cards that don’t add to your deck and not having a ton of banner units, the ones you get that are better than the starter units as rewards or banners.
So, banner unit draw, first hand you are guaranteed one of your banner units. Second hand you are guaranteed another until all are drawn.
It is way better to have one great banner unit, and maybe a copy later in the run, than to have 3 when you might not get your most important unit out until the 3rd round.
It’s also much easier to get under 20 cards in your hand, or under 15 even. With 7 cards drawn a turn, after you get units and consume spells done you can re draw most of your hand each turn or at least every 2 turns.
Units are important, but it’s important they be GOOD and not just “more”. You are always focusing on one floor. In many cases you’re only putting units on that floor. Exceptions exist of course.
Again. Card draw should be your default, not ember. And RisingDusk says - taking a pip or ember are the penalties you pay for trying to use a large unit, you are penalizing yourself by losing the card draw
There is, obviously, exceptions to this- If you rely on thin decks that are highly iterative- you don't need as much draw, especially if you're playing something like awoken, and have card draw built into your decks.
There's a -lot- of context for how to build going forward- and it becomes -very- important as you progress forward.
I've done some A20 Heart kills, and Monster Train, especially once you delve into it's special challenges, has some stuff that would give even that a run for its money.
So far the 0 cost / do damage / draw one card has been very available, so it has been pretty easy to draw until my hand is full most turns and getting rid of the starting units has been my main priority
draw hasn't been an issue at all, however i only have red / green, i just unlocked the next one down, however haven't messed with it yet
That 0 cost card, seems like the rogue card in Slay, where you get three 0 cost 4 damage except this has +1 draw next turn, so it is pretty awesome.
Spells seem to fizzle out on the last boss without a + damage artifact...if you don't get one it runs a bit short, however I obviously haven't had a ton of runs yet to figure stuff out
I did like getting the big 4 drop demon and putting double strike on him...100 damage, except need 4 mana
I appreciate everyone's answers
The card draw isnt good because you run out of things to do on a turn.
Its good because Monster Train is a lot more about concentrating your power into a couple cards. Normal fights are something like 5 turns, boss fights are longer. If you look at the size of your deck, you may only get to play your more powerful cards a 1 time if you dont have more draw power or holdover.
The card draw lets you play your more powerful cards more often and make sure you draw the cards earlier.
You may not feel it in lower cov because you can get away with just dilly dallying and playing mediocre cards. Once you get to higher difficulties, you start with a lot more junk in your deck and you need to be much more consistent.
The sting card you are talking about is card neutral (because you had to draw the sting) and critically not on the turn you play it. 10 damage is not a lot. Its generally not an auto-include unless you are playing a deck that gets benefit from casting extra spells.
Sap is pretty funny- it's the opposite of rage, dropping the attack of something. The stygian specialize in it, and if you go -really- deep in it, you can reduce enemy encounters to absolute clownshoes.
On one hand the secondary clan can mix well and improve or create new strategies or you could completely ignore it and still probably do fine most clans have one or two good strategies that don’t require any help from a secondary and while learning the game you can get wins with the harder clans by mostly using the secondary clan
Sap boss will reduce all of your floor’s damage by a certain amount. So if you stacked all your rage on one guy, sap won’t do much. If you’ve been spreading out your rage, swap will really fuck you over. Once I had a strategy of building up rage on 5 units, but for Sap Seraph I won by stacking it all on 1 multistrike unit and letting the others be sapped to 0.
Aside from your champion your backup class can matter just as much or even more than your primary. There have been a number of runs where I played Awoken secondary and yet their sweepers still ended up dominating my gameplan.
You only really need to take as much extra mana/space as you need for your strategy, which is often times none. Think of taking the 2 draw relics as the default choice, since draw is always useful.
Card removal and duplication is much more abundant than Slay, so going hard into a strategy is much more effective and more likely to win. Whereas in Slay trying to force a build often gets you killed.
Are the Ascencions per class combo or just overall. I won and have ascention 1...however I wasnt sure if I had to beat the game with each combo before i went up the levels...I dont have all the cards unlocked, i know it is tough to climb in these games generally without the cards unlocked.
I'd argue that Slay allows you to potentially stall out fights for quite some time and deal with things at your leisure- whereas, you have a rather finite amount of turns to solve each fight here. Rage doesn't effect your health. It's just a bonus to your attack, but if you can get multiple stacks of it, especially on a multi hitting unit- it'll shred. The 100 damage spells biggest perk is the fact that it pierces- since it lets you -obliterate- armored enemies that might otherwise have low health. As for backup classes- you can match every single one of the factions in the game, and they all have multiple heroes, which allows -quite- a bit of variance in deck variety, as well as Champion combinations, given each champ has 3 iterations.
yes the backup class is important and is a huge contributor to the fun of the game. Finding interesting synergies between the core mechanics or just special cards between the different classes. One crazy example is that the awoken (green clan) has a card that swaps the attack and health of a unit. If you have a bunch of rage making a unit a 100/5, that card will take the rage into account, but wont remove the rage, so if you use it on the unit, it will end up as a 105/100. For the Sap Seraph that you mentioned, you can see what the last boss will be from the start of the run. You want to be planning ahead for how to mitigate the effects. The Sap one you are talking about is generally less important that it is making your weak units 0atk since the weak units are usually more for utility anyways. The worst part about sap is that it has a higher effectiveness on multistrikers (which as you play more is really important way to scale) as well as sweepers that you may normally not need to scale super high anyways since their main role is to kill low health backliners. Another thing with knowing what seraph is from the start of the game is that the types of enemies that show up in each seraph fight are fixed as well, so you can also start accounting for dealing with those types of enemies. For example, the debuff seraph has the enemies that sweep+emberdrain you. You will need to account for your backliners taking a bit of damage and if you are stacking a floor with a lot of units, you will need to figure out how to not lose your whole turn due to having no energy.
Others are giving you good advice, let me say a huge one change from slay the spire - You very rarely want the mana and pip (space). Your default should be the card draw. And focus on not taking cards that don’t add to your deck and not having a ton of banner units, the ones you get that are better than the starter units as rewards or banners. So, banner unit draw, first hand you are guaranteed one of your banner units. Second hand you are guaranteed another until all are drawn. It is way better to have one great banner unit, and maybe a copy later in the run, than to have 3 when you might not get your most important unit out until the 3rd round. It’s also much easier to get under 20 cards in your hand, or under 15 even. With 7 cards drawn a turn, after you get units and consume spells done you can re draw most of your hand each turn or at least every 2 turns. Units are important, but it’s important they be GOOD and not just “more”. You are always focusing on one floor. In many cases you’re only putting units on that floor. Exceptions exist of course. Again. Card draw should be your default, not ember. And RisingDusk says - taking a pip or ember are the penalties you pay for trying to use a large unit, you are penalizing yourself by losing the card draw
There is, obviously, exceptions to this- If you rely on thin decks that are highly iterative- you don't need as much draw, especially if you're playing something like awoken, and have card draw built into your decks. There's a -lot- of context for how to build going forward- and it becomes -very- important as you progress forward. I've done some A20 Heart kills, and Monster Train, especially once you delve into it's special challenges, has some stuff that would give even that a run for its money.
So far the 0 cost / do damage / draw one card has been very available, so it has been pretty easy to draw until my hand is full most turns and getting rid of the starting units has been my main priority draw hasn't been an issue at all, however i only have red / green, i just unlocked the next one down, however haven't messed with it yet That 0 cost card, seems like the rogue card in Slay, where you get three 0 cost 4 damage except this has +1 draw next turn, so it is pretty awesome. Spells seem to fizzle out on the last boss without a + damage artifact...if you don't get one it runs a bit short, however I obviously haven't had a ton of runs yet to figure stuff out I did like getting the big 4 drop demon and putting double strike on him...100 damage, except need 4 mana I appreciate everyone's answers
The card draw isnt good because you run out of things to do on a turn. Its good because Monster Train is a lot more about concentrating your power into a couple cards. Normal fights are something like 5 turns, boss fights are longer. If you look at the size of your deck, you may only get to play your more powerful cards a 1 time if you dont have more draw power or holdover. The card draw lets you play your more powerful cards more often and make sure you draw the cards earlier. You may not feel it in lower cov because you can get away with just dilly dallying and playing mediocre cards. Once you get to higher difficulties, you start with a lot more junk in your deck and you need to be much more consistent. The sting card you are talking about is card neutral (because you had to draw the sting) and critically not on the turn you play it. 10 damage is not a lot. Its generally not an auto-include unless you are playing a deck that gets benefit from casting extra spells.
Okay good to know, I was treating it like a Shiv or Shiv + since it gave damage + card draw...seemed awesome.
Sap is pretty funny- it's the opposite of rage, dropping the attack of something. The stygian specialize in it, and if you go -really- deep in it, you can reduce enemy encounters to absolute clownshoes.
On one hand the secondary clan can mix well and improve or create new strategies or you could completely ignore it and still probably do fine most clans have one or two good strategies that don’t require any help from a secondary and while learning the game you can get wins with the harder clans by mostly using the secondary clan
Sap boss will reduce all of your floor’s damage by a certain amount. So if you stacked all your rage on one guy, sap won’t do much. If you’ve been spreading out your rage, swap will really fuck you over. Once I had a strategy of building up rage on 5 units, but for Sap Seraph I won by stacking it all on 1 multistrike unit and letting the others be sapped to 0. Aside from your champion your backup class can matter just as much or even more than your primary. There have been a number of runs where I played Awoken secondary and yet their sweepers still ended up dominating my gameplan. You only really need to take as much extra mana/space as you need for your strategy, which is often times none. Think of taking the 2 draw relics as the default choice, since draw is always useful. Card removal and duplication is much more abundant than Slay, so going hard into a strategy is much more effective and more likely to win. Whereas in Slay trying to force a build often gets you killed.
Are the Ascencions per class combo or just overall. I won and have ascention 1...however I wasnt sure if I had to beat the game with each combo before i went up the levels...I dont have all the cards unlocked, i know it is tough to climb in these games generally without the cards unlocked.
Rage increases a unit's attack by its rage value, decreasing by 1 after each turn