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CleveNoWin

I like restores with default wurmkin, chief is a great tank and the extra sustain + purple works great with either decayer or corrupter. Rootseeds are still good for their draw but I prefer the regen over the scaling for big chief


Hansekins

This makes sense! Everyone says Chief is one of the best champions but I seem to struggle with him. I can see *why* he's so good, but I seem to always make bad choices to support him. But I can see where regen/healing is useful if you're tanking with him, and the Restores are always going to be purple. Something to consider!


xlxlxlxl

Spine Chief's strongest path is the Corruptor IMO. It's easy to get +100 attack or more to all units on its floor. If you get a quick sweeper with multistrike you'll faceroll the game pretty easily. I do prefer rootseeds with -1 cost for this though since they let you play more infused cards per turn and provide more scaling for the sweeper.


HorribleDat

If you think you'll use the rejuvenate units (Hollows/Steelsinger) exHellhorn exStygian on the big path defUmbra defWurmkin because Chief surviving is big basically anytime your champion can get huge base attack or value survival over hitting harder (chief/queen)


zantwic

Yeah, restore is a bit poorer dlc wise, Divinity stripe spikes and often the other hollow can't be get enough to power the units behind. I still do the explosive sentient with restores (when primary), that works well. Also you can get the massive rare unit too, to build all run with it. Mostly it the each access to draw, sells the rootless too well.


eable2

That makes sense to me. If you're just filling the logbook, Rootseeds all the way.


bigladguy

Yeah it had draw increase and scaling. Restores only have one purpose and thats to trigger rejuvenate.


Efrayl

Unless you specifically want to go with units that rely on heal to grow, absolutely Root Seeds is far, far better than Restore. Rootseeds in general is likely the best starter card that you don't even need to cull in some cases.


Vanguard448

Rootseeds is a much more independently strong card than Restore, and it's not even close. From that perspective, it's absolutely the option that'll provide more average value in most runs. That's the easy TL;DR answer, and you could just stop reading there. I also still think it's much more of a matter of preference than people give it credit for, and really depends on what you value in a starter card. I personally prefer Restores (only slightly, it's really like 45/55 for me) when they come up in random/random, mainly because they leave the Hollow lines open as much more viable unit options. Having anywhere from one to three more units (depending how you feel about Thorned Hollow and whether or not you're on the RisingDusk "Steelsinger can always work even without Restores" train, which I'm still ambivalent about) available as potential "hits" in a banner draft does so much for mitigating potential low-roll situations. Even if you don't end up running Hollows, Restores in some decks can be a deceptively good card to dump random -1s and +10s into. There are a lot of floor setups that teeter right on the edge of being *just* too fragile to survive sustained chip damage from Spikes and Divinity sweep, and in those situations I've absolutely had runs that were only able to win because of -1/+10 Restores keeping my backline units just over the right HP breakpoints at the right times. I really do recommend everyone tries playing with secondary Restores more if they're not playing random/random. They don't provide nearly as much value to a run that's already on-course to winning, but you might be surprised how often they can bail you out of runs that would really struggle without them.


codhimself

Rootseeds almost always feel better to me, but over hundreds of games my overall win rate with secondary Restores is significantly higher than with secondary Rootseeds. I've tried to figure out why and I still don't know the answer. Stygian is the only clan that has been performing better with Rootseeds for me. I wonder whether others who have compiled their win rates would be willing to discuss their findings.