Hey, congrats on your first Heart win! Hope it's the first of many! I remember your upload of your first time trying this game. I'm excited for you! This game is so fun! :D

I know you're new, but 5 and a half hours for one run is WILD

gg very nice run! first heart kill is always awesome.

Congratulations!

Great run, glad i could be there for this one!

Even if they're 0 cost cards, draw is still quite good with snecko eye. If the first hit of the dual cast kills the target, then the second will go to another target, it doesn't actually "overflow" as such. Yeah, sometimes snecko eye just gives you an infinite as a gift. Congratulations on your first heart kill! I'm sure by now you must be perfectly aware of how awesome snecko eye is. It's just so much card draw. Now you need to think of how to approach the heart in future runs. You could decide whether to go for it on every run or chose depending on what happens in the run. I do the former, since that's just the way I like to play, and that doesn't really hinder ascension climbing since you get the next ascension just by killing the act 3 boss, even if you die in act 4.

NGL I loved orbs for how straight forward it can be, like no targeting enemies just slap the zap ball uwu

This game is about getting better and you are! Luckily there is always room to improve, even the best players dont win every time! Dont be afraid to lean into mechanics you understand and lose when you dont. The understanding will come with time. I am still bad (ascension 5) after 3 years and its still fun. If you ever get bored of the characters and relics, there are fantastic mods in the Steam Workshop. Most notably; The Packmaster, 100 Relics, and the Downfall mod where you get to play as the bosses.

Upgrading Sunder is generally a priority, since that makes the effect much easier to use. If you want to get your first win with Defect, Biased Cognition is your best bet. You should have seen how powerful it is on the Slavers elite fight. Echo Form is powerful, but you must have powerful things to do with it (upgrading Defragment, so you could double it and get 4 focus is one thing, and upgrading it would have been good in general as well).

Imo at 45:00 you should have gone with Astrolabe then transformed 2 strikes, and a defend

The tome event can give three different relics. The one you got is the one that's generally the weakest. After the act 2 boss I'd have taken Inserter, since you already had an energy relic, and there's the possibility of getting Consume (which combos very well with Inserter). Also, you really should be playing Biased Cognition more often. You really were struggling a lot. That was quite a memorable run. And don't be so down, I also forgot about Echo Form many, many times before getting used to it.

Wow, you're very analytical and for someone inexperienced your reasoning is really good! You're gonna be good at this game :D

I think you get surprised every time dualcast does twice as much damage as you were expecting. It might help to focus on the dual part of the card name, if the tooltip is saying 8 damage from evoking an orb with it, you're going to do 16 because the 8 happens twice. The message from kinnikiller has really good advice in it.

Yeah. The map gets weird sometimes. Something like that is the reason the impossible seed exists, as it is possible to have a forced fight with a burning elite super early, but the chances of something that extreme happening are incredibly low, let alone all the other conditions for the seed to be impossible (that's why I said 'the' impossible seed). I'd say your decision in the first Jaw Worm fight was the right one. Killing the enemy earlier is only a major benefit if doing so results in avoiding damage, and you would have taken more damage doing so in that fight. Aggression is fine, but you need to understand the enemies enough to know when you can afford to take your time. Jaw Worm's damage is fairly manageable overall, so no need to rush. In that Lagavulin fight, you could have stopped at 17 block instead of blocking one more time, as the enemy was attacking for 18, so you would have gained an extra lightning orb for the small cost of only 1 HP. But it's fine, since that was literally your first time using Static Discharge, that's understandable. Also, if you don't want to Rebound anything, just play it as your last card of the turn. And in the fight against the Hexaghost, you lost your buffer because of damage from the burn, which you could have blocked. I'd say your problems this time were avoiding too many elites in Act 1 and not removing enough Strikes. The fact that the burning elite you faced was Slavers was just icing on the cake (since they heavily punish decks that are too slow). Regardless, I think that was a nice learning experience.

Slowly making my way through this one. I was really rooting for you to bring back Melter with the hologram in the middle of act 2. You had several cards that would have been enough damage for the kill, but I think you overlooked how good Electrodynamics was even against 1 enemy. It would have channeled 2 lightning orbs for 16 damage and pushing the frost orb to the front, then you could have used ball lightning and had all 3 orbs slots with lightning orbs for 9 damage after you end turn.

Watching your videos has got me playing Spire again. I just finished up a low ascension heart kill today. Early in the video, I think it's safe to play dualcast, strike, defend - take 1. That should get the cultist to 12 health. If you draw 2 strikes you kill, if you only draw one, you get him to 6 health, full block & kill next turn. 3 cultists is quite a bit trickier to deal with, but a single cultist usually can't do more than a few points of damage to if you mostly block and take your time with that fight.

You look like Tammy 1 from Parks and Rec

The defect is definitely the most complicated character to learn! So much more math 😅 youre doing great!

Yeah, Defect can be a bit overwhelming at first haha But it's a pretty fun character once you get the hang of it!! Lots of potential for cool combos and synergies. Good luck, and have fun!

Ball Lightning is definitely one of those common cards that can serve as a nice backbone to the deck. You really learn to appreciate cards like that over hundreds of runs, since there aren't that many common cards, so you're fairly likely to see any one common card in whatever run you do, thus understanding them really improves your consistency. Also, whenever you have Hologram in hand, you should make a habit of checking your discard pile before making any planning. It pretty much serves as an extension to your hand at that point. But anyway, good job. Your deck wasn't doing anything specially powerful, but you had enough good stuff to deal with most things, and few enough starter cards to be able to play your good stuff pretty consistently. I wish you luck on your further Defect exploits, specially if you intend on going for act 4. Also, all three of the cards you unlocked are quite good in their own ways. Let's see whether you get one (or multiple) of them next run.

Fun video! Hopefully the backseating from the chat isnt too annoying for you.

You could have played the Self-Repair before killing the Hexaghost with Doublecast, but considering you were going to recover to max anyway, it didn't matter. Biased Cognition is really good. Most normal fights will be over before the focus loss ever becomes a real issue if you have at least a decent orb build, and in longer fights you can delay a little or find ways to prevent or remove the focus down debuff. Also, using Ball Lightning is basically the same as playing a Zap and an attack at the same time. It's just better. But anyway, nice job on your first Defect run. It's pretty overwhelming in the beginning, but soon enough you'll get the hang of playing as him.

congrats for new hero ^^

Just got past the agony of dealing with the fungi beasts. You had SO MUCH damage in the last 4 of your draw pile. You didn't need to feel bad at all about block, block, cleave - take 6, end the fight next turn. You were really agonizing over a lot of decisions knowing that enemies are going to be stronger. Like a few fights later, you could have full blocked the 3 sentries with Shrug it off Defend. You can always play shug before the strike, and if it draws something that changes your plans adapt. Otherwise, just play the last defend.

I was glad to see you ended up deciding to upgrade heavy blade at the 1st fire. I think that has to be the right choice with Brimstone. 1st round of combat it's 24 damage vs 20, and it just keeps going up by 4 points every combat round. If a combat lasts long enough to cycle the deck, a 2nd heavy blade attack is going to be brutal. I actually think the spot weakness upgrade is a bad one with brimstone. That's using a valuable upgrade slot to do something half as good as what happens automatically at the start of each turn.

Nice run - congrats on the Time Eater kill. Here's a trick you can use with distilled chaos. When you only have 3 cards in your draw pile, you know exactly what that potion will do. Although you do have to be careful with time eater to make sure you have 3 card plays available.

have a nice game ma'am..

In the first card reward, I'd probably take the Heavy Blade instead, specifically because of the Flex Potion. So I could use the Flex potion on the turn I got the Heavy Blade on the first elite fight to get through it easier (and then I'd be annoyed to see it on the very next card reward, showing I could have taken something else the first time). That's an example on how potions can be used aggressively to improve your situation, instead of simply using them for consistency, which is one of the things that will help improve your overall winning odds as you climb the ascensions. Makes it easier to not have to leave potions on the ground too. Since you got Brimstone, I think going after more elites in general would have been better, to take advantage of the added power. If you take Brimstone, you need to go all in or it's not worth it. And that Demon Form was kinda overkill, but you do you I guess. In that card library event, I would have taken Disarm, which is just a really good card with Brimstone, slowing down the enemy's scaling enough to help a lot. Sorry if I'm harping on it too much, but the cause of defeat this time was definitely being too conservative, thus not getting enough relics to give you the power needed for late game. But anyway, now you finally have Dead Branch. I'm wishing you good luck on your first Defect run. He can be a difficult character to use, but he's also really fun.

Well played! Exhuast decks are extremely strong. You just needed a Feel No Pain

I would love for you to play this game in ASMR style lol. Don't know if that's something you are comfortable with.

Sorry I had to leave before the end, but I'm so glad to see you pulled out the win! It was such a good run

Here's something you can do to try to regain health; instead of checking for 1 turn lethals, check for 2. Fighting the cultist, you saw you easily had a kill if you used whirlwind and left the bird at 4 health. The next question to ask is, if I block once before whirlwind, do I still kill next turn? You had 3 attack cards in a 4 card draw pile, so you would have killed easily and healed 5 on the fight. I think you could have even killed full blocking and only whirlwinding for 9 since you have Vajra, but that's the sort of thing you would want to double check with your calculator.

False, the best relic is obviously Boot xd. Usually exhausting a non-self exhausting status card like burn is better than exhausting a starter card. I don't know why you thought Clockwork Souvenir would hinder Orichalcum, it does not. You could have fought another elite after the Nemesis, given you were at almost full health. Overall, very nice run. It's cool to see you realize the power of Fiend Fire. But one aspect that can't be overlooked is the extra card draw gained from Runic Cube. It allowed you to get bigger Fiend Fires, but also put your strength gain into play easier, allowed you to get to other high-impact cards like Whirlwind faster, and simply gave you more options every turn. Had you not gotten the Cube, a good option would have been to lean into Evolve and grab some status-generating cards (and choosing Mark of Pain could have helped too, but that's always a tough decision to make if you don't have the Evolve bottled).

First of all, just gonna warn you that the very beginning of the run was cut off. Second, a fun fact: Did you know that Orrerry used to be a boss relic? It was a pretty bad one. Girya is quite good, the only character that struggles somewhat with making good use of it is the Defect. Everyone else loves it. Rage is indeed one way you can use to combo with Juggernaut, but it's a bit difficult, since Ironclad is more about doing single big hits than multiple small hits. You can do it using upgraded Body Slams/Angers along with a bunch of card draw but it's an uphill struggle. A more reliable method is Feel no Pain, which turns each exhausted card into block. This makes mass exhaust cards like Fiend Fire and specially Second Wind (which already gives block per exhausted card, so Feel no Pain makes it double dip) into huge block and damage. Add some status creating cards like Power Through so you always have fuel and it becomes reliable even on bosses. I have beaten Ascension 20 with a deck like that.

Just got to the point where you upgraded Power Through. I think one you start upgrading searing blow, you're committed. If you start upgrading other cards you're trying to do too many different things at once. After 2 upgrades, Searing Blow does 21 damage for 2 energy and Carnage did 20 for 2 energy without an upgrade. A 3 upgrade Searing blow does 27 damage, and upgraded carnage does 28. To make the Searing Blow better than carnage, it needs 4 upgrades, and it just keeps getting better with every upgade you give it. To get other cards upgraded, you probably want a copy of Armorments, or even better Apotheosis.

I'm watching another one of your runs. I'm still in act 1 and was going to give some things to think about with combust. In a 1 on 1 fight, you're paying 1 health for 5 damage a round, which can still be worth it. In a multi enemy fight, you're paying 1 health for 10, 15 or even more damage which is a lot stronger. When you were fighting the lice and played combust. I'd have double blocked instead of playing uppercut. The damage from combust will either kill the lice outright, or make then weak enough that you can kill them with attacks and not have to worry about their curl up. I'm really looking forward to how the upgraded Searing blow does as the run continues.

Medical Kit is one of those relics that's rarely more than merely "helpful", but when it is, it can often become crucial. Having cards that exhaust other cards is the usual way of dealing with the status cards created by things like Power Through, but the medical kit can do the same, for example. Also, I don't know if you noticed it, but Intangible reduces all damage to 1, including self-inflicted damage like Offering. The idea with Corruption is that you set up your deck so that you can kill the enemy before you run out of skills, which is helped by you being able to put all your energy into attacks and powers. It is extremely powerful, specially when combined with exhaust synergy stuff like Feel no Pain or Dark Embrace, as well as the famous combo, Dead Branch. But you haven't unlocked Dead Branch yet (it is part of the final Ironclad unlock), so... Even without Dead Branch, Corruption is incredibly powerful, though. As for Brimstone... It is even more absurdly powerful, but different from Corruption, the downside is actually insanely scary (while Corruption's downside is only mildy scary). You really need to have a deck that's well set up to take advantage of the strength scaling, otherwise it is straight up suicide. You were pretty close to one of the strongest strategies in the game. You had big strength scaling, along with Reaper to turn it into healing, but you didn't have Feed to increase your max hp to take full advantage of that. With enough Feeds, you can more or less ignore whatever the opponent is doing and let them wail on you while you scale strength, only to recover to full with a superpowered Reaper. You could have won with what you had, by taking better advantage of the Apparitions, but you ended up not managing well enough. It was a great run anyway.

When you were debating how much damage Thunderclap + Whirlwind did, you had just used that sequence of attacks against Lagavulin. That would have been enough to kill in 1 turn. 7 from the Thunderclap plus 1.5 x 16 damage for a total of 24 from the 2 energy Whirlwind against a vulnerable enemy. Grand total 31 damage and the kill.

For the Lagavulin fight, you could have let him keep sleeping, using only the Rampage on turn 1 to scale it further, and only waking him up on a better turn later. One nice thing Ironclad can do is using the Bash (which doesn't wake up by itself since it's only eight damage), then waiting until the next turn to wake up. You miss on one of the vulnerable turns, but you'll be able to put all three of your energy into attacks on the second vulnerable turn. You may not love Dark Embrace yet, but all Ironclad players eventually fall in love wih it. It can just draw so many cards... Specially given Ironclad usually has problems with card draw. The Dual Sentries event fight is pretty much a test of hubris. Many promising runs die to players underestimating the sheer aggression of those two. You really need to have a deck that's both powerful and fast to deal with them properly, or be willing to use potions. I think the problem was that your strategy didn't quite come together. You were trying to do a strength build and a block focused build at the same time, and ended up not doing either well enough.

Missed lethal in the first three fights, oof.

There's nothing quite like killing the Champ before the phase transition, so he doesn't even get the chance to use an execute attack. I still remember the first time I did it, which was using Defect. And ouch, Broken Crown with Prayer Wheel is sad. I'd have definitely taken Black Star there, though even Pandora's Box would be better, since you already had an energy boss relic. Good job on the win. And it's nice to see how much you're enjoying the game.

Searing Blow can be a ton of fun. I recently got one up to about 110 damage, that was like 13 upgrades. Not the greatest card usually but if you get it early on floor one and see like four campfires ahead you should try it out sometime.

So cool to see new people enjoying STS and its difficulty especially with how it makes you learn to take into account future possibilities and to stay flexible with your decisions, I know it drives some people away and I don't blame them but seeing you enjoying it is cool either way

You'll get lots of critique of your play, but I always find its more fun to figure it out on your own. Its a shame people told you Perfected Strike is a bad card. There are very few "bad" cards. Many are just niche on when its best to use them. Play however you want to play :)

You really should've upgraded armaments

For a status focused run like this one, having exhaust cards, specially mass exhaust ones like Sever Soul, along with cards that make status cards is the goal. Having Evolve (which you unlocked at the end of the run), or just a bunch of extra draw is also really important. Your issue was mostly the lack of exhaust and draw, but the strength focused part of the build managed to make up for it to a certain extent, until it wasn't enough. Generally I consider Fire Breathing to be a sort of supplement to help in fights with lots of statuses/multi enemy fights, having something else be my main focus, so the way you built your deck was sorta like that, only leaning a little more on the status direction.

I’ve played this game for 800 hours or so but I still love watching people learn the game, so sick to see people figure everything out for the first time :)

You are adorable. I remember learning this game. It's fun to watch someone discover this great game gradually for themselves. Enjoy. I'm a fan.

Limit Break is sooo good with demon form. You can pretty quickly get enough strength by continuously doubling it that even strikes can hit for 100+. When upgraded it doesn't exhaust. If I have any type of strength on ironclad,even if just by a relic, i always take limit Break. It's very strong. Headbutt works great with it so you can play it as much as possible. Add in a reaper for healing (which scales with strength too) and itll win runs even on a20 And being offered two, that is an insane deck if you had two!!! Good job on the run still though, you are learnong and improving 😊

The general rule for the three faces event in act 1 is if your deck can't currently beat the boss, transform a card, if it can you remove one and if you need an immediate boost in strength is when you upgrade. And yes, "scoured by flames" does mean Sentries. You need to remember that when enemies are vulnerable, your basic strikes deal 9. I've seen 2 times so far you could have killed instead of needing to block and wait for the next turn. You can press the right mouse button on cards in the card reward screen to see their upgrades, and that can help decide. Pummel is a good card for strength builds, since it is multi-hit. Not strong enough to deal with act 3? Sounds like you didn't fight enough elites on the first two acts XD. Honestly, I think the main problem this time was not enough removals, combined with maybe needing a tiny bit more focus on defense. You were also playing a bit too recklessly sometimes. It's okay to let the fight go on a bit longer if that helps you avoid damage. The three relics you unlocked are available to all characters. Prayer Wheel is amazing, making it far easier to create your build in addition to the extra cards allowing you to see rares more often. Omamori makes events that give you curses much better, as you can get the benefits without drawback... And Shovel exists. Shovel's main problem is just that you usually want to use your rest sites to upgrade, as that gives you more consistent value than random relics would. Sometimes Shovel pops off, though, and it's amazing to see.