Episode 70: Slay the Spire 2, Not What We Planned

DonaldPrevie: And I mean, in the first one, you can get broken, like absolutely, but it's kind of hard to do. And occasionally you run into a fight that just demolishes your brand of broken. ⁓ yeah. I'm going to raise my hand. Yeah. I mean, like I feel like I get like a, you know, an unstoppable run going. And then I get that one elite that just like has that one ability that just completely negates my whole building and just like take 20 damage a turn. Kremlin knob again. Welcome to the Cable Club. We're a video gaming podcast where three guys unlock tons of stuff and we're linking up to talk about the games you love and rank them. This is episode number 70. We're your hosts. I'm Steve. I'm Dan. And I'm Don. And today we're talking about Kingdom Hearts. So get ready to upload data from us to you. But first, boys, let's set the mood. In the year 2002, strange new concept was born. From the minds of Disney and Squaresoft came the left field idea. It was known as Kingdom Hearts. But 24 years later, we just got Slay the Spire 2. Something that's been burning in our hearts of desire for so long now, and it's finally here. Two new characters, a ton of new cards, new relics, enemies, events, mechanics, acts, all that. Climb the spire and discover the contents within. Learn of your past, your present, and your future. Strategize your deck and play your hands to optimization in this roguelike deck builder. The sequel to the one and only Slay the Spire. There's so much to unpack here, so buckle up and enjoy as we take this special opportunity to talk about this brand new sequel's release. Sorry, Kingdom Hearts. Maybe on our next turn. Good thing you've got retained. Yeah, I've been having such a good time with this game. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, and addicting. I'm surprised because you didn't get into the first one nearly as much. did. I did a little bit, but you guys took it to a whole new level. Like I kind of fell off. Yeah. And then I, you know, I, since you guys like stuck on it so long and I knew like Slay the Spire 2 was coming, I was like, you know what? I'm going to join this train because these guys really love this series. And yeah. And I've been having a lot of fun. I've been losing a lot, but having a lot of fun. It ascension 20 heart kill on all four characters in the first one. was so excited for this. sweaty. is pretty sweaty to kill the heart. Yeah. So for those of you who are coming, anticipating kingdom hearts, you know, I am sorry a little bit, but we have our own hobbies too. And slay the spire too was something that we knew was coming. I guess I didn't know it was going to hit us as hard as it did, but you know, reaching we play games for two weeks and talk about them. And by the time we had gotten through. About a week and a half all of us hadn't touched Kingdom Hearts yet because we were too busy being addicted to Slay the Spire 2 So a couple of reasons one we love Slay the Spire if you're a part of our discord You know, we have our own Slay the Spire channel in our discord in addition to the rest of the podcast stuff So if you're listening and you want to join and you want to talk about Slay the Spire with us in our community Now's a good time because it's ripping over there We want to make sure that we do a game like Kingdom Hearts Justice got a very dedicated fan base and you know want to make sure that we play that game are fresh and, ⁓ you know, ready to talk about it. What we're going to do is we're going to push Kingdom Hearts out to next episode. And that's actually going to slide our, our entire year schedule back a little bit. our league, our new indie game league, and today will be some practice for some indie game league will begin on April 10th. So Kingdom Hearts will be next episode in two weeks. And then the following episode, we will start the, ⁓ we'll start our indie game league this year. where we have a guest on who brings us a game and it's kind of like our game show. So we're going to rate all the games that guests bring us for the remainder of the year into cups. And then we're going to give out prizes and hold votes. And it's going to be a lot of fun, just like it was last year. You can go check out last year's award show, along with our backlog over on any channel you can find podcasts. If you want to find out what that's all about. I also wanted to mention that we've sort of soft launched merch. I've mentioned it a little bit in, in past episodes. Really, we're having a little bit of trouble with the vendor and I'm just trying to get it out there in a form that I'm happy with. You can find it in the description ⁓ of our newer episodes. That's really kind of the place that you can get there right now. We're working on it and we'll get it out there a little bit more publicly. If you do want to buy something, know that anything you buy has a roughly 20 % usually tilted in your favor donation to our Extra Life campaign. We signed up to work with Extra Life. We've always said that if we had a platform where we making any money at all, we'd want to do something charitable with it. Extra Life helps the Miracle Children's Network Hospital group, which has a local children's hospital pretty much everywhere across the US. So some of the money is going there. And then I can promise you, dear viewer, that if you buy something, at least for the foreseeable future, all of that money is going back into the cost of running this show. So it's a hobby for us. We're not breaking the bank with it, but it is costing a little bit of money to get this going for prizes, for websites, for all that other stuff. So. Just know that it is helping the show with your purchase. And that's what I have for announcements. So Dan, question of the week. Question of the week. I'm going to keep it on theme here. The question is who is playing the Sleigh of Spire? What is your favorite class so far and why? All right, boys. I'm curious about this one. Which ones are your guys' favorite? It's kind of rough. It's hard to say like a clear favorite because even the old... For those who are not as familiar with the first game, there are three characters in this game that returned from the old game. So the old game had only four characters and three of them returned. But with the addition of new cards and new mechanics and new everything, they almost kind of feel like new characters on their own. If they were in the previous game, they probably could have been called new characters and we'd barely know the difference. But that being said, think out of the five characters, I probably am most excited to play Necrobinder when I play it. I'm a, like a long time fan of Necromancers and games like Diablo. Like I like the whole like summon a minion mechanic and work with that. And it's cool that they got it to work this way in a card style. Yeah. The Necrobinder is really fun. really fun. They did such a good job with that, with that class. I think it's my favorite too, honestly. It's cause it's over 10. Like it's fun because it's strong. I just, I like the whole having Austin. strong hand. It sure is your strong hand. It wasn't the character I won with first, but I don't know, there's something about the Necrobinder, like the whole like building the shield with your Austin, your hand over time. And it also heals. Like, I mean, it's not a lot, but like it heals for one every turn. Two. It's basically one block every turn. Yeah. It's better than that because the block stays. Right. Yeah. It's one. Block every turn and barricade. Right. Yeah. The barricade part. I do enjoy the Necrobinder, but I'm going to have to say that I'm having the most fun with the Silent. ⁓ yeah? I don't know. Something about the new card Speedster is just so rewarding when you're like, you're playing acrobatics and you're drawing four cards here, prepared drawing two cards here. discarding cards that draw more cards like reflex or discarding cards that deal damage like ricochet or haze puts poison on or all of these cards that have the new mechanic or new keyworded mechanic sly. Whereas in the first game it was only two cards, but now they have somewhere I put something like 10 new cards that all it's like a whole new play style now for free on discard. Yeah, I'm having Just drawing tons of cards and playing a bunch of cards and there's no time eater to spoil my fun. So Yeah, the sound was my favorite in the first game. Yeah, but that whole ship spam Dude, I'll get into it. Yeah when we talk about the game, but don't worry We're gonna touch on each character at least for for a little bit I'm gonna try to keep it moving but I do want to touch on every character So let's just let's get the audience in here. I'm really excited Okay. Let's see here. Well, I see Antya. If I had to pick a favorite right now, I would say the Regent. It may be just because they are newer, but I like the different archetypes they have and the theme of the character. I would say he's the most interesting or like the hardest to play for sure. unique, I think. Like the whole like, yeah, the whole double resource thing, but like it makes his cards like really powerful, I feel. Yeah, I do want a card that deals 30 damage for one. energy point at the start of the game is kind of a big deal. do want to say there's that, that two resources part of that character is a weakness because you may consider it a strength, but I consider it a weakness because when you, even if you're amazing at the game, if your card rewards aren't showing you enough of your other resource, then all of the cards that you've picked up that cost that resource are now much, much worse. And you can't. Know what you're going to see in your card rewards. So it becomes really tight and difficult to navigate that class But I'm glad like is having fun with him. Yeah, I mean we should we should get into it but like it is a weakness because his cards are so powerful he has a zero cost card that that gives vulnerable and ⁓ and weaken like three each that and and does like 33 damage and it causes zero So yeah, it needs to cost the other resource, like, you know, you can't just hand a card like that out like candy. Yeah. So yeah, there is a catch. So, and that's, and that's his catch. I kind of wish his ability was, um, gain one of that resource every turn as opposed to have three at the start. I think that would make him a little bit more consistent. He may not need it. It is yet to be seen. I'm not ascension 10 yet. Yeah, anyway, what else? What else we got? All right, we got Hux here. He says, do really enjoy the Necrobinder so far. I feel like his strategies are strong individual archetypes, but also blend well together. I've had decks that do a combination of Doom, Souls, and Ostie in all work. I didn't frequently like only Ostie, only Doom, only Souls deck. So yeah, he really likes the Necrobinder himself. It's just a really fun class. was talking to another person in our discord, Doug, about a card called Blight Slash and it's eight damage and apply eight doom. And I was like, so if you get that card early, you pick that card because it's basically one for 16 damage, which is ridiculous. I was like, then later on, like there are cards that deal damage for debuffs, which is the doom. There's cards that kill if they, if you apply doom or block if you, if you apply doom or, know, like, I feel like everything about that card just works like early game, mid game, late game, and a lot of cards like it do, even though it's clearly meant to belong to like the doom archetype, you know, so if you have strength of any kind or you pick anything up like that, it's doing more doom. It's just like, I don't feel that synergy like that existed in the first game, but we'll, we'll get into that too. right. I got one more here. Chef dog. He had a bunch to say, but I'm just going to pick one that I feel like he liked the most. really liked some of the reworks and Sly is fun. They seem to have leaned heavily into a draw focused play style with many skills and abilities interacting with the card draw and discard. They also made some changes to shivs, but they still feel great and deliver that dopamine hit when you throw a bunch of them all at once. That was my favorite, the first game, just like the shiv spam. It is a dopamine hit. It is very good. I have to say it so I don't forget, but last night I was playing a silent run and I was doing the sly thing and Storm of Steel is so much better now than it was before. Cause you get to discard like four sly cards and do all their effects. So it's calculated gamble, but that's why they didn't let it repeat anymore. So you guys ready to shuffle up and deal? Get ready for a plan, plan some slay the spire. ⁓ hell yeah. Let's get in there. All right. Let's do it. So, Slay the Spire is a card game, a roguelike. I feel like it's from the era where roguelikes were not as popular. I feel like you can throw a digital stone and you will hit like nine roguelikes nowadays if you're on the Steam marketplace. But I think Slay the Spire was from kind of the burgeoning era of that, which was what? 2012, I think the first game came out. It's been a while. 2016? Yeah. 2016 or 17. So it's been out, it's been out for a while. Um, and it's a deck builder type of game. Uh, it's hard to really describe. There are some board games like it. If you've ever played something like legendary, that's very much like it. So you have a starter deck in this game. You pick a character, everybody's starter deck is mostly the same. There's some individual flavor with it. And then you, as you go through the game, you pick, add new cards. Sometimes you remove cards. Sometimes you make cards a little stronger and you try to get to the end of. three acts to win a quote unquote run. And at the end of each act, there's a very powerful foe, a boss, and you're really trying to go through each act and trying to optimize yourself to beat that boss at the end. If you die at any point during the spire, it's a rogue, rogue-like game. So the nature of that is you die and you go back to the beginning, your run's over and any progress you made during that run is gone. Which if you've for the uninitiated, that could sound pretty terrible, but When you get good at a game like Slay This Fire, a run could take you anywhere between like, I don't know, 20 minutes to maybe an hour for some of the longer runs. So it's not like a super long sit down epic adventure experience, but the game has lots of content and it escalates in difficulty as you win runs if you want. And there's just a lot of customizable options to make your, uh, you know, to raise the challenge or lower it or put it where you want. And this game even has multiplayer, which has its own set of runs and some extra cards in there and you can play with up to four people. And even if you don't know what you're doing, I'll tell you four people are going to massacre the spire for at least the first few difficulty levels. So you can have a good time with that. And that's kind of the basis of it. So it was developed by a company and I'm using that term very loosely called Megacrit. It is currently around 10 ish people or so the AI overview tells me when I Google it. This game was originally invented by two people who worked in the software industry, who I guess wanted to make video games. doesn't? Anthony Giavenetti and Casey Yano are the founders of Mega Crit. I believe according to their website, they only have three games in their catalog. A game called Dancing Duelists, which is also a card battling sort of game, a free deck building game and Slay the Spire 1 and Slay the Spire 2. Those are their three games. The Slay the Spire. Like specifically is a huge hit. think last weekend or whatever, when it just came out, like on Steam, there was like 300,000 concurrent, like players playing. There are streamers who I have never seen play a card game, like Mario maker streamers who are playing Sleigh of the Spire. Like this thing is, this thing is going off. It's popping off. It's going infinite. Pretty much. I've done so many infinite so far. I haven't done any infidels. I'm a noob, like a huge noob when it comes to these games, but I'm having a lot of fun. So, you know, we're gonna learn a lot from these two. We're not like sponsored by Mega Crit or anything, but I will mention that you can get this game on Steam and it's exclusively for PC right now. And before you buy it, you know, it is an early access title. There, there's like some filler art in the game. would imagine a lot of the experiences that we're having now are not going to last forever. You know, and we'll get into this during discussion. Some of the stuff might be overtuned or under tuned. know they iterated on the first game a lot, ⁓ over time and things changed. ⁓ so, know, just keep that in mind if, if, if you're going to buy it, but you know, once you have it, you own it. I know I'm, I know I bought it on PC and then the day it comes on mobile, I'm also going to buy it on mobile. Cause I'm a firm believer that the best mobile game every year for the last nine years has been Slay the Spire 1 on mobile. I didn't buy it for mobile, but I bought it for, I bought the first one for Steam for, well, my wife got it for mobile cause her computer has, is like a whatever. It's a mobile, it uses Google Play Store and we bought it on the Switch. So I bought it three times. The switch really. Yeah, because I didn't have it mobile. So to play it mobile, I played it on the switch. So neat. I kind of want to own a switch copy just to have a physical card. There is a physical. Yeah. I've also bought it on steam and mobile when, when it was new or when mobile came out, I bought it. I didn't play it much. I have no idea how many hours I put into slay the spire total. I'm sure I could find out it's a lot, but it's so good. Remember when it was just basically like paint drawings, like Microsoft paint drawings was like how it started, like nothing moved in the game. It was all just like still movements with just some, some animation. Like basically the characters didn't even move at first. Oh really? Yeah, we were playing it that, that long. My play time on the first one is 1135 hours, 18 minutes. Wow. So this is a little bit. more of a Steve question because Dan really wasn't that into it. you do you guys, so the problem with a sequel is that especially one that's still being played is that sometimes the sequel is not as good, but do you guys feel like this is a nice natural extension of the first game? I think so. Yeah, almost feels like the first game, honestly. It's kind of like an expansion pack, I feel like. But like, Again, this game also added animations and stuff for each of the characters. I think there's there's like, tack animations now and there's also a defend animation when you take hits and stuff. As far as like the card play and stuff, feel, obviously you guys would know more than I do, but it feels very similar to the first game. Yeah, I would say it's almost, like, it isn't too similar, but it's almost too similar. Like, it doesn't feel like it pushed a whole lot of boundaries so far. And that might just be because it's early access, it feels so much like the first game that you almost feel like you are just playing the first game with added stuff. almost feel like that's like a good formula though. It's like, don't fix what, what's not broken. Yeah. I'm not upset at all by the way. You know, took it that way. Like, yeah, basically like if it worked, just continue to do it, but like add. subtle things to make the game better. And honestly, I feel like a lot of gaming companies can learn a few things from Mega Crit. Final Fantasy, have to say, look what they did to my boy. Well, Final Fantasy has got a much longer legacy than Slay the Spire does right now. But I really have to hand it to them because Slay the Spire 1, at least, is a real feat of balance. And balance is a hard thing to find in video games in general. And if anyone has ever played a video game semi-seriously at all, you know exactly what I'm talking about. feel like the balance, like in Slay the Spire specifically, is like ridiculously hard because there's so many like changing variables with like the relics, the different cards, you know, the different characters. There's like so many moving pieces that like the fact that it all just comes together and then like as balanced as it is, is insane. And I mean, in the first one you can get broken. Like absolutely, but it's kind of hard to do and occasionally you run into a fight that just demolishes your brand of broken. yeah. I'm going to raise my hand. I mean, like I feel like I get like a, know, an unstoppable run going and then I get that one elite that just like has that one ability that just completely negates my whole building and just like take 20 damage a turn. Kremlin knob again. I've had that happen so many times in my runs where I was like, this is the run. And then I get that one elite that just destroys it. that's like, what's like so exciting about this is gonna watching it develop into what is eventually what I know is going to be like, probably one of the most perfectly balanced games I've ever played. So yeah, I'm just really, really excited. I hope they add at least one more character. I would assume they would. I think they will. They added a couple of characters to the, to the first one. I think, I mean, take away with a grain of salt when it comes from me, but like, think the watcher will probably come back. have a theory about that, but I think we'll get into it later. So the basic gameplay, we kind of went over that. So there are five characters. Do you guys just want to like go through the individual characters? Just like one by one. have iron clad who heals every turn with his personalized relic. does a lot of exhaust. Well, relics are items you get that give you passive bonuses. There's like in this game, there's like a hundred relics or something. Maybe more. Yeah, they're items like outside your deck. And what the Ironclad does a lot is he will build strength, which increases your attack damage, or he'll exhaust cards, which gets rid of them from your deck until your next combat. So you can make your deck small and do that kind of thing. Then you have the Silent who gains dexterity, is adds to your block. She discards a lot of cards, which is just like any other card game into your discard pile. And she has poison, which is like a damage over time effect. And she's, she's a good mix of offense and defense. Then you have the Regent who's one of the new classes. Like we said a little bit earlier, he manages two different types of energy, basically like mana and some cards cost. that and some cards cost you regular mana energy. And he has two main mechanics is that new star stuff and forge, which gives him a big weapon that stays around and it gets stronger every time you play a card with forge on it. uh, just so everybody knows the game is played off of a resource called energy. Yeah. And every card has an, has an energy cost. Sometimes it's zero, but generally speaking at the start of a run, can only play three energy per turn. So some costs, some cards cost one, two or three energy and some even cost five. But, ⁓ yeah. So if you, so the, the, the Regent, like Steve mentioned his whole gimmick is like, I'd say he's like pure offense. Like he's his, his cards are designed to deal a lot of damage, but he's so energy hungry. They had to give him a separate resource that you have to build up on the side. Yeah, the thing with that one is it doesn't like regenerate on its own. It's like you need cards to do it. Right. Which makes it like very tricky, I feel like. I think he's the trickiest class to play. think so. Yeah. Next we have the Necrobinder, the other new class. And this one's kind of all over the place. There's a lot going on. But to make it short and simple, you have a minion of your own for the first time. And it takes your damage for you until it's out of HP and then it'll come back and it'll get strong one HP stronger every turn. But you can buff it with HP raising cards and all that. But it also has doom, which is basically it's a counter for a max HP threshold. Once it reaches that max HP in doom. It will automatically kill whatever you have the doom on. So if the enemy had 10 HP and you have 10 doom on it at the end of his turn, it'll die. It's of like attacking the enemy health bar from both sides. Right. Like doom attacks it from the bottom and your regular attacks to bleed health from the top. And when they meet in the middle, the enemy dies. Yeah. And then the last thing that it does is it makes souls, which are obscenely broken. They draw two cards for free. It's crazy, but you have a ton of cards that do that. And then the last class is the defect is returning from the first one and the defect has a couple things that it does. It has these orbs, which is like a specific to defect. And there's like four or five, five different kinds now. Glass, lightning, ice, darkness, and this plasma back. don't think I've seen it. Yeah. Meteor strikes in the game. ⁓ And all those orbs do different things we'll get into that but it cycles through these orbs and it does all kinds of cool stuff like that But then it also has a zero cost card synergy huge pile of cards that all cost zero and and do things and then the last thing that it does really well is place tons of different powers and Powers are a type of card that give you a bonus for the rest of that combat when you play them So those are the five characters roughly shotgunned And when you start a run, think when you start your first run, you don't get any kind of bonus. But when you start a run. until you die. Yeah. Well. If you made it through the first like four runs without dying, you won't see Niao. Yeah. So Niao is like, I don't know how to describe him. It's like a giant whale. Basically. think he's a whale. Yeah. Looks like it. Yeah. Niao is the ancient of resurrection. Apparently. Go forth my minions into the world. Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. But I'll bring you back every time. And at the beginning of every run, Niao gives you a bonus to start with, some way to kind of give you an edge in the early game. He gives you choices and you kind of go from there. So you pick your character, you visit Niao and then you go on your run. But before I ask, Or before we start into that, did you guys win your first run? Cause I know how, I won my first five runs in a row. What? How? that's crazy. I ⁓ I learned the game. I learned roughly what's going on with ironclad who I'm like extremely proficient at. And then the silent who I'm also extremely proficient at. And by then the region was like really tough, but I ended up beating things up with my sword. That's insane. And then combined is so over tuned, it's hard to lose. Well, I found a way to do it. Trust me. Yeah. I don't think I lost until I got to region. So I cleared the silent and the, ⁓ and the ironclad first. think, I think I was like 15 runs in before I got my first win with the defect. I was probably that way the first time I played Slay the Spire. Yeah. There's nothing to be ashamed about your first. Yeah. No, no, the game is just hard. Like I feel like you just need to know a lot going into this game, which obviously, as we said before, it's like each run is a learning experience if you're new, you know, it's just like you just every, every new game, you know what to do, what not to do and just, and then sometimes you'll just get that run that just takes you all the way. Like earlier today, I had an ironclad run, which was my first win. It was like a a Vaal build, like a vulnerable build, which basically what that is, it's a debuff that makes us your cards just do more damage to the enemy. And I just had a lot of cards that catered to, you know, the vulnerable status. And then I also had two Pyres, which is absurdly broken. I'm su-. Viciousness? Is that the card? What does Pyre do? So it gives you, I think, unupgraded, it just gives you one energy for the rest of your turn. one extra energy and cost two. when you upgrade it, gives you an extra two energy per turn. What? And it costs, the cost stays the same, but I had two in my deck. So I was, once I had the two pyres online, I was, I had seven energy for every turn. And I was just like, it just got insane. Yeah. Pyres are rare. So yeah, I got one. I was like, ⁓ nice. And then I saw another one. was like, what dude, like I'm yoinking that shit. if you're a little lost, don't worry. There's a map. So when you enter a run, there's different nodes. So you'll go from node to node and you'll see there's a path. There's actually multiple paths to get to the boss at the top. So you can only really go up and the boss has a little icon. So when you become more familiar, you'll know what the boss is at the top and how to kind of go through the act appropriately to try to fight that boss. Once you've learned their gimmicks and stuff. That's why it's hard to win your first few runs because each act has three different bosses. And in this game, ⁓ I believe there's going to be an alternate act for acts one through three, at least one, but already there's an alternate act one that is out there and that alternate act one has three different bosses. So really like your act one could be one of six different bosses, right? So every run is going to be different. And the alternate acts have different enemies in them that behave differently too. So it really feels different. every single run. So you have normal encounters, which are just like normal fights, generally pretty winnable at base level. Until Act 2. Yeah. And then Act 2, they take the kid gloves off a little bit though. And for that, you'll get a new card and some gold and sometimes a potion. And we've mentioned cards and potions and relics. Relics are like passive bonuses and potions are, you can think of potions as like one use cards that sit at the top. Your screen and you can just chuck them whenever you need to some of them deal damage some of them buff you Yeah, some of them heal you ocean-shaped rock. Yeah, my favorite relic is the is is actually the the petrified toad that every Every combat you find a potion shaped rock. So a rock goes in your potion slot and you can just lob it for 15 You know what? I I have had cannon for that. It's actually the same rock Like he throws it and it hits the enemy and it bounces forward and as he goes through the map he picks it up again. You can pick up multiple though. ⁓ he finds another rock. He finds another one. ⁓ this is the point I want to say this before I forget but you're talking about how there are now there are multiple acts or multiple like alternate acts and I was going to say that I do hope that they make the beyond one of the alternate acts threes just so we can see that basically from the first game, the three final bosses in act three all countered something specific. So you had like tiny or stopped multiple plays of cards that you had the chosen one who stopped powers. And then you had a Dona Wendeka who if you don't scale properly will kill you. So your deck had to meet that check too. And so they were all three different problems at the end of the run. Whereas like this game's kind of missing like a time eater type enemy that'll stop you from just going infinite. So I do hope that they add those bosses in somewhere so that you don't have to rely on the. The extremely broken strategies every time. we should, we should talk about the bosses now actually, cause they, they. I kind of feel what you're saying, especially with the final bosses, because I feel like they're just damage sponges and the more damage you deal, the more proficient you are at taking them all down. Except for maybe the mutant one, the one that evolves three at a time. experiment is definitely the toughest of the three. Which one is that one again? He starts with one head and then he becomes two heads and then he becomes three heads. I don't think beaten him yet. Yeah. I guess we can just start with him. I don't think we're to go through every boss. So I think he's hard for the same reason that the first game is hard. So the in the first game, not only are there bosses that counter you, but there are like individual encounters that can really mess your day up. There's a, there's a relic and I think it's in this game too, called the runic pyramid. You get it from the start of an, what are they ancient events? Yeah. So they, ⁓ so It makes it so that you never discard your hand at the end of every turn in slay this fire. You discard your hand and draw five more cards. Right? So this makes us, you never discard your hand. So if you have a card that you want to play, but you can't play it now because the enemies are going to attack you or something, you need to do something else. You can just wait. It sounds great, but in the first game, there was a, an enemy called a sneko. And he would confuse you and randomize your costs. I remember that. And if you got like a cheap card, like a, like a strike, which just deals minimal damage and costs one, but it costs three because of the sneko confusing you. You're, you're not going to play it. Right. So, but it doesn't get discarded now. It sits in your hand and you have a maximum hand size. So the sneko, what ends up happening is if you pick the runic pyramid into sneko and you can't deal with him effectively, you just end up with a handful of three cost cards. Which takes up your whole card. Good news is. would be incredibly difficult to have both the Steco Eye and the Runic Pyramid. Yeah. they come from the same event. I have done that once and I learned really quickly why I should not ever do that again. But Steco lets you draw two extra cards a turn. That's like a soft lock. I actually had a soft lock. I just want to say this real quick before I forget. With the Ironclad, he has a card where like you can exhaust like the top of your deck and you can play it every turn. Yeah, I literally soft locked it because I got to a point where I had no cards, literally nothing. stop playing Havoc. I was like, I am never doing this again. Yeah, Havoc's pretty terrible. So this, this boss has three different forms and revives three different times. And it revives into, or it is and revives into three specific enemies from the first game that counter things that you would be doing. So the first one is. He gains strength every time you play a skill and I'd say skills and attacks, depending on your class are pretty common. that, that version or that, ⁓ iterationally is a hundred HP. Yeah. Which by the end of the game, you're going to mess them up pretty bad. And then he turns into book of stabbing, which was an act two elite in the first game. And every time the book of stabbing hits you, puts a wound in your deck, but also the book of stabbing scales every turn and. deals a lot of damage. Like it's a pretty heinous thing to run into in the first game. And then he turns into Nemesis, which is an elite from the act three in, in the first game and every other turn Nemesis is intangible, which means he can only take one damage from any damage source during the turns. It's to your tangible. Well, that, that he hits like a truck, like Nemesis just hauls off and hits you for 45 sometimes, which is a lot of damage. Your max health is like 80. So 45 is a lot. Unless you're the iron clad. Yeah, and you have to block So I think he's pretty well designed except maybe his first form could use a little bit more HP. But ⁓ stop I think he's pretty well to stop. We're not ascension 10 stop You don't know what's gonna happen Yeah, let's get more HP with a higher ascension. I just hate seeing my boy goblin knob get rolled over like that No, he deserves it But then like the other two are kind of, they just take damage and die. And by the time you're at act three, hopefully you're proficient in doing that. so like the queen does something interesting. She makes three of your five cards every turn all share a debuff that says you can only play one of them. And I think it's going to be harder at the higher ascension levels. Like maybe all five, you can only play one card a turn or something, unless you draw extra cards. So I think it's hard to, it's, hard, but I think we need to withhold judgment for now because I think bosses are going to be more difficult in the higher ascensions, but we're not there yet. Yeah. So take that with a, with a grain of salt and then, and, I'm not, and I'm not really complaining because a lot of times what would happen to me in the first game was that it'd be having a great deck that would have a great time and it would just maul everything. And then I'd run into like the time eater. at the end of the run who just hard countered everything I did. we actually gave him the nickname in our group, the Fun Eater. Cause just having a good time. He just stops you, slows you down. that's, that's what happens to me in like most of my runs. Cause I'm just not experienced as like you guys, but like I tend to build towards just one thing only and I'm finding out very quickly. Yeah. I'm finding out very quickly that that's not a viable way to play because You'll run into that one elite or that one boss that completely counters that one build that you're doing and it's GG. sometimes. it's like, yeah, well yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you can make it all the way, you know, if you get lucky. Right now there is no boss that counters the power spam of the defect. Who are just absurdly powerful. The defects a problem. The, and then I think the Like my favorite boss, I'm not going to talk about all of them, but I think my favorite one is probably the act two boss, the giant worm. So he puts a bunch of statuses in, in your deck and you're on a, you're on a clock. You'll die in five turns basically is his gimmick. And he has a bunch, he has a buttload of HP and you have to kill him. He hits kind of hard too. It's like for 28 ish damage every time. lost a few runs to him for sure. Yeah. And like, especially to his mechanic. Like where he like eats you if you like the I've had that happen a couple of times. I was playing the defect against him just yesterday and I had Ecoform up. So I was doubling his card and I was like, you are not going to eat me. ⁓ He gives you a card in, he gives you five copies of a card in your deck called like, what is it like? Escapes. I actually like the mechanic of that card because it's like, use it. And then obviously it goes in your discard pile, but if you that exact same one again, cost one extra to use it again. it feels like you're trying to get out of the sand pit, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's very well designed. I like it. What is that Star Wars thing called the Sarlacc? Yeah, that. Yeah. The sand pit thing. And you're basically fighting, fighting the Sarlacc. dude. Quests now. Yeah. So there's another type of node other than like, so there's, there's the basic encounter there's, and the second type is called events. So instead of fighting something, there's like a, I don't know, like a D and D style choice you'll make. Sometimes they can surprise you with an enemy in the event. Yeah. There can be some nonsense going on in there, but I actually like how they, how they structured it in, this game, because in the first game. You can walk away from a lot of events. Like it's like choice A is bad choice B's bad. I'll just leave with nothing. Thanks. But this one is like, ⁓ no, no. There's no walking away from this one. There's even one that's like, you have to be a ⁓ judge. You're the decider. Yeah. It says be the, your, your, option, your first option is be the decider. And then the second one is refuse. And then in red text below it, says you can't refuse. And if you hit it, it's like. If you refuse, you're going to die. one I hate is the event where it's like you're on the, ⁓ with a watery bridge or whatever, the, it's like, have to give up a car. Slippery bridge. hate it. ⁓ I actually love it. You get it. You get to remove it's worth its weight and blood. Yeah, but they always pick a card. want to keep it. And then it's like, rewrite the time. I'm already getting rid of all my strikes and defense. I don't need some to help me out. And by the time you get to something that like you want to remove, it's like lose. Lose 40 health. hate bridges. want to do the decider event, but have a fairy in the bottle or a lizard tail. you can just get killed and then, well, I want to see how it happens. Yeah. I wonder if it just ends, ends your run. wonder if that works. I don't think so, but it might. I don't know. The gambit. You guys remember that card? Gain 50 block, but if you take any unblocked damage at all, just die. that card doesn't exhaust. It's zero. So if you get the ability to clone it at the rest site, you could just play one every turn. Yeah. You just don't die. Let's yeah. So new to this game, Niao used to be the only ancient in the first game that you encounter. Now there's like five or six of them or something. And you encounter an ancient at the end of every. or at the beginning of every new act. And it's kind of like three choices and it's, I'd say it's a pretty substantial buff. that can be for sure. Yeah. So you get an opportunity to tilt your run in a particular direction from these things usually, and they, they give you pretty good buffs or sometimes just a really insane card or an insane upgrade to a card you already had like the, the ironclads famous bash, which is two for eight damage and and apply to vulnerable gets upgraded into a two deal 25 damage apply seven vulnerable. my God. What's the silence zero cost. What's it what's it called neutralize? Yeah. Neutralize gets upgraded to I forget what, but it's like 17 damage, 17 damage for zero and five week or something. Yeah. I got Oste's one, which was the Necro binders where it's like you deal damage. based on his current HP. But what the card does is basically turns it into his max HP. like, if you have like 80 max HP, he'll do that much in damage. one I think is fair. The other ones are like, whoa. Whoa. Like what's going on here? Surprisingly, that's not the most broken card ⁓ that exists in the, in the ⁓ Necro binder specifically, but the card. ⁓ What is it called? You gain strength equal to the vulnerable. There's another card that's one deal like 14 damage exhaust, double the vulnerable on the target. Dominate. That's what it was. It's good stuff. Cause you know, you're to hit for 21, right? Cause you're not going to play it naked. it molten fist? Molten fist. Oh yeah. Yeah. Doubles the bone. Right. And then you, then you dominate and you get like 30 strikes. It's like the new limit break. But Steve was saying something about quests that got us into this event type of conversation. So they added quests, but yeah, Steve, us, us what the quest is. quests, there's a couple of them. Basically you'll get a choice to take a, like a key or, or whatever, or you can choose to fight the guy or, you know, whatever it is. He gives you an option, but one of the options is a quest. And it gives you a curse, a temporary curse in your deck that in a future act, you can use this. It's like an item really, but it does nothing in your deck basically. Right. It's a, it's a basically a dead draw every time you draw it until you get to the position to use it for the, you know, the payoff basically. God damn it better be broken then. think one of them's like. 600 gold and one of them is a relic that Plays the at the start of your turn it plays the card or the attacker skill that you played last on your previous turn Is that the stone sword quest the history? No, the stone sword is another one, but this one is a history lesson. The stone sword is don't about the bird Yeah, the bird You can hatch him at our s site and you get a little little friend Yeah, but also an attack that zero deal 14 damage, which is pretty sweet. Yeah. And then the sword is, it's a dead relic until you beat five elites and then it becomes plus three strength relic. I had sword on my last, my last run. So yeah, there's probably more. just haven't seen them all yet. That's a, that's a really neat. mechanic. I really love the flavor of that and I hope we see more of them. It's really cool. And then elites are another type of node, which we've talked about a couple of times, basically just a stronger fight, but the reward is much greater. I would argue that the sub objective of slay the spire is to kill as many elites as possible because they give you, they always give you a relic, which is a passive buff. And I'd say more relics, more better generally. unless Unless you start a run and you get like the five relics that you absolutely need and, and you're busted. Like you just, you want relics. yeah. feel like two or more is a good number. Like for, for elites, if, if you can. Yeah. I try to take the path with max elites. If it's not pure suicide. Yeah. Sometimes you look at the path and it's nothing but fights and elites. And you're like, yeah, I could get five elites, but I'm probably not going to live. I feel like relics. are as impactful as the first game. It just feels like some of the cards are better now. But I think that might have to do with the fact that I've been playing on Ascension 20 in the first game for so long. So it's hard to gauge for me. Yeah. But, ⁓ you know, the, so the, the elites also are, there's a lot more normal fights. with their own mechanics, but there are, think three elites per act, generally speaking. ⁓ they all have mechanics that are similar to bosses. I'd say the second most, like the second most often you're going to die are probably two elites aside from act bosses. So, I mean, if you're going to take an elite fight, hopefully you've done enough runs. have a knowledge of which elites you might see and what they ask of you. Hardest act one elite. It's the statue. No dude. It's the eel. The four eels? No, the one big fat eel. Him? ⁓ He'll attack for like nine on one turn and then 27 on the next. Is that the one that goes intangible? Like every other turn? No, I'm trying to think of which eel. He's the red and yellow one. He's like, he's like blue with a bunch of eyeballs all over him. I think he's called the terror eel. He's in the underwater act one, not the normal one. familiar. I'm just trying to blank out. He gets stunned after his HP hits like 70. Yeah, but then he applies infinite vuln to you. 99 yeah, yeah But uh, where are my orange pellets when I needed them? The like early game to me and I don't know if this is true of slay the spire 2 as much as it is 1 but I'm operating off of that because I played 1 a lot longer to me in the early game you want to draft damage like your first three or so cards I'd say you want to just get some damage in your deck. Like if you kill things faster, you take less damage. Like that's, that's how it is. Kind of defensive. then later you start to pick up cards that embellish it. think you might be okay as the Necro binder taking some of the common defend cards because you have some in five Oste and he'll deal damage with unleash. So if you can block for most or play like Defy to give weakness, makes enemies deal less damage. You can build up Oste so high with defense cards and stall them out basically. But Dawn is right for the other four characters you want to be taking damage. the, and the elites all are going to ask different things of you. My feeling, and this is getting into the nitty gritty, the underwater act one is like the hardest act. Like because the eel. Has like 140 HP, which is totally ridiculous for a, for a act one elite, ⁓ in any of the games. And he, so he wants, and he, and he deals you a lot of damage. So you want to get rid of him fast because he gains strength, like every other turn or something like that. So he just keeps getting stronger and he has multi-attacks and he's like, you just want to down him fast. But then there's this other enemy, which is, I think he's called like the coral giant or something like that. ⁓ we can only do 20. Like you only has like 82 HP, but yeah, he can only take 20 damage per turn So he asks the opposite of you because he does hit kind of hard to he hits for like 16 18 19 Yeah, like sometimes it's 12 or 13. Sometimes it's 18 or 20. Yeah, so like you You can't just have damage you have to have defend cards Take both of those elites on but you don't want to draft too many defend cards because if you run into the eel He's gonna bulldoze you over. Yeah, you just need The front show piercing whales. So that's what I mean though. It's like you can't lean heavily into one direction because then you'll run into something like that. But then again, it's like how do people like always win when they when they play? It's like I feel like sometimes it's just like you get countered and then that's it. Like there's nothing you can do about it. So here's a good rule of thumb for new players. The first three. Normal fights that you do come out of what they call an easy pool and this is something that they don't tell you it just is The first three enemies you fight are gonna be easy All of the rest of the fights in the act are going to come from the normal pool or the hard pool basically So your first three spaces that you go to should be combats Okay to get cards that will prepare you for your act Yeah. And people, you might have the option of taking a bunch of events and then a shop. So in other words, like trying to avoid fights while events can make you stronger. The best way at the beginning of the game to get stronger is to upgrade that crappy common deck you, you, have like your deck is like strikes, which are, I don't think there's a worse attack than strike objectively. Like there are attacks that deal less damage than strike, but they typically have something else stapled to them that does something else. And there's defend and again, same boat. There's no block cards that are worse than defend. Objectively. So if you're trying to get rid of cards, what's like the most common way to go? Is it like to try to get rid of your strikes first? Or is it just kind of like on a given basis? Well, you're getting really far into the meta. And I think until people are really ascension 10 and start releasing guides and talking about it, I think it's hard to tell in the first game, like every class it was strikes except for the watcher because the watcher. Had a stance that could make her deal double damage and dealing 12 damage at the early part of the game repeatedly is really good and you'll run over even elites at that rate. So her, was getting rid of the defense because you basically didn't want to draw defense. You just want it to kill whatever, but all the other classes, surprisingly, including the ironclad, you know, it's pretty recommended that you get rid of strikes. Well, hell, mean, you could take a card like twin strike, which is Two times five, it's just for one energy compared to strike six for one. Like strike is so bad. It's basically a dead card later. Like if you're fighting the act three boss and you draw like three strikes, two defense, that hand is so bad. Like you're going to die. they, so in this game they made a, there's a relic called strike dummy, which I think in the first game was kind of rare, but in this one they made it common. So you encounter it. A lot more and strike dummy says any card with strike in its name deals three more damage So sometimes you pick that up the first time you find a relic and you're like, okay Nine damage for one is actually pretty good at this point in the game. Yeah a little bit then you're gonna want to start taking things like better block cards and removing your defense, but You still like I'd rather I Think that the scaling enemies in this game aren't as common Like I feel like they're not as common. So defending is still just like way better than attacking usually. the, in the first game, I think I can count on one hand, the number of encounters that don't have some level of inevitability on the enemy side. Meaning that like every encounter in Slay the Spire 1, the enemies get stronger as the turns go on. So you are disincentivized to play stall. But to Steve's point. The scaling in this game, at least at the levels that we're at, is not as rough on most of the enemies. Although I have noticed most enemies do gain strength. Yeah, I mean, but that's not as like, I don't know, it's just not as plentiful, it feels. But boy, did it feel good when you could get the Time Eater in a loop with the defect and just have so much focus that you just block everything he does because he can't scale unless you play cards. Yeah, well. ending your turn and letting him die. There's nothing he can do but flail. Wow. Focus. They've, nerfed it. How did they? No, it's really hard to get. How is it? used to be really easy in the first game. There's no bias cognition. don't think. Nope, there is. You can get it from an event and it's a full art card now. ⁓ okay. Well, basically the only one that I think I've seen that for, for permanency is like the focus potion and defrag, but defrags are rare now. Yeah. So. or defragment, but yeah. Interesting. Is it like a play style in this game now or is it kind of like not? Still, ⁓ they made it temporary, but they have one attack they stapled focus on too. That's pretty good. Well, yeah, but they've also replaced it with, what's that? think it's called like synchronize or something and it's, it's absurd. Yeah. Synchronize when it's upgraded, it doesn't exhaust and it's one energy. gain two focus for each unique orb that you have. So if you have three different orbs, you get six focus that turn and it's really powerful. Wow. Yeah, he was actually the first character I won with. So like, I had a lot of fun. had, I just like had a bunch of like a little bit of everything in there. And my main source of damage I think was like the claws card. I had like three, I had three of them in my deck, I believe. And I, on the final act, final boss, I had the claws doing up to like 50 something damage. I think we should do a little bit of the individual classes here and just talk about some of our runs. like the defect claw build is something I really always kind of enjoyed. And claw is a card that costs zero and deals three damage. It's pretty bad at first, but what it does is make every claw. in your deck deal two more damage. And it used to be if you upgraded it, had a base damage of five, but kept that two damage buff. Now, if you upgrade claw, it gives three more damage to all of your claws. like rare claw more. It's a big deal. Well, it actually like it scales pretty fast. Like you wouldn't think so. Yeah, it does. On bosses, especially if you have multiple claws, that damage builds really quickly. Multiple claws and they have a The defect has a card called all for one. It costs two. does like 12 damage or something. And it returns from your discard pile, all of the cards in it that costs zero back in your hand. So then you get all your claws back and you can. He's also got a lot of ways to draw cards. Like he just has a straight up for one energy draw four cards and you want to be doing stuff like that. you're running zero cards. He has scrape, which is fun. A one energy attack. that draws four cards and if any of them cost zero, you keep them and you discard the rest. So like there's ways of getting through your deck to those claws. they get rid of the power that says when you play a power, you draw a card? Yes. Yep. Heat sinks. Thank goodness. Are you serious? So they, they, gave them a card that gives them an energy every time you play a power and a lot of hours cost one or less. Some powers cost zero. So you're net gaining off that. Can you imagine if you had heat sinks too? You'd just go wild. ⁓ They could probably put heat sinks in. They just have to make it cost two. really liked lightning rod, is block and channel lightning. Yeah. It's just such one of those cool cards because it, it. Block it like blocks and attacks at the same time. And as much as I like thunderstrike or what it was it ball lightning. I don't know. I like the block into lightning. It's just, I like it. think I like more than I like. I like ball lightning. And I think it's specifically because this version of defect is, felt like in slay the spire one, you kind of wanted your orbs to stay for the most part, but this one is definitely about evoking those orbs. So the orbs are like little satellites that hover around him and they do stuff every turn. What do you guys think? We so many. And if you push one out, has another effect called evoking, which is generally a more powerful version of what it does. And you just constantly want to be cycling orbs with the defect in this game. Yeah. What do you guys think of a card, ⁓ modded from the defect? ⁓ yeah. Yeah. I felt like, cause I had that one in my deck when I won too. And I thought that was pretty good. What is it? One, one extra orb slot, one energy and draw one card and upgraded draw two cards, something like that. And ⁓ it costs by one. Yeah, exactly. It's hot. You know what was absurd on my last defect run? ⁓ I had an upgraded dual cast and I got the option on the final act to get one of the special cards. Have you guys encountered quad cast yet? Yes, but it didn't look good. I didn't, take ⁓ my God, dude. It was doing like 40 damage with focus. Wow. With one lightning orb. And then I would just didn't pick it. didn't I didn't have the build for it. Well, I was doing a zero cost build. So I would like I start with a lightning orb and then I would quad cast it and eventually I would all for one and get it back and then free zap into free quad cast was just so much damage. I really like glass, dude. I haven't messed with it yet. That's the only one right? Good. Yeah. So it starts at four damage and every time it It activates, it loses one of its own focus. But if you can evoke it, it always evokes for twice, whatever its value is, and it always hits all enemies. So like you can, if you like focus up and get like a five and you dual cast it, it's like 20 damage to all enemies, right? But then if you like quad, like out of just, and there's such good support for it. Like one of the cards is just like block and, and, and channel glass. And then another one is a power. And every turn you, you channel ⁓ a glass basically. You're pushing your orbs through and you're getting more glass and, and they're, and they're hitting at the end of every turn. it's just like chaos. It's just like complete chaos dealing area damage. It takes down the elites, like the big weird centipede thing. It takes down the weird eel things that duck and shield themselves when you hit them. AoE cards are definitely, feel like, are such good cards to just have sometimes. Yes, you should have a couple AoE cards because I think more than a couple in this game. Well, maybe in this game. Sometimes you'll fight one enemy and it doesn't really matter, but those cards come in clutch, especially the ill ⁓ mini-boss. Where we were just talking about where there's four of them. Then they're so good. There's that parasite boss that splits into four also. Yeah. Like they can actually save your run. those, those like AOE cards. That's exactly what we're trying to teach you is that you want to be prepared for everything. So like if you don't have an AOE attack and you're in the forest act one and you know that you could encounter that elite, you need front loaded damage and AOE damage or a way to exhaust multiple parasites. Like you need one of those three things for that elite. So when you see something, you should take it, even if it's not what you're going for. like anybody listening, if you're new to Slay the Spire, do not pitch and hole yourself into one strategy because it's going to fail. Yeah. Try to plan for the immediate, right? Like it's, it's a game about taking care of the threat coming up, not necessarily looking toward the long game. Occasionally you run into something ridiculous. have a question So the elites how many can you run into like how many different ones per act three three act? Okay, so so it's not that crazy like trying to like memorize all the elites because if there was like ten or something then you know Then it's like kind of crazy, but there's only three two Different alternate are there two acts for act two or is there just those sand? Yeah, it's just, there's, there's, there's only one act for two and three right now, but. there only four different kinds of acts right now? Yeah, four. Yep. But I can see in my unlocks that I have unlocked in an alternate act two, but it says it's coming soon. So there's definitely going to be an alternate act two. Yeah. So deal with the immediate when you play slay the spire. But sometimes you run into something ridiculous and you also have plan for the boss and it tells you what boss it is at the beginning of the act. yeah. The picture that you see. Yeah. And, and you want to path and plan things. Right. So like if you find a shop early on and you're picking from now's blessings, now might offer you gold. And you know, you're like, ⁓ if I take an early shop, I can pick my direction a lot faster. Right. You might, if he offers you enough gold, you can go to the shop and you can buy. cards, you can buy relics, right? But you get a swath of things to pick from as opposed to just pick one of three cards, right? So you get to see more options and shops always guarantee that there's a power, two attacks, two skills, three relics, three potions and two colorless cards. a chance to remove a card too, or you can pay to remove a card from your deck. we jump over to colorless cards for a second? In the first game, I felt like most colorless cards were ass. Like I got to entire Ascension 20s in the first game, like not using colorless cards consistently. was like a couple. Yeah. Dark, dark shackles and like master strategies. And the other ones were either hyper niche or just straight up bad. Like I'm thinking cards like. Secret attack were good. Okay. Panic button was good sometimes. So what are you getting at? Apotheosis was absurd. What are you getting at? Colorless cards now are really good on average. Okay. Like they like, think they're all like, they definitely heightened the power. Like there's a card called golden acts. That's like deal damage for every, every, card that you've played. So how does that work? Cause I noticed that that card didn't have like a, didn't have damage on it. So does it start from one? Okay. Yeah. But if you, if you have a build where you're playing a lot of cards and you see it, you're like, ⁓ yeah, I'm to pick that up. seems like it seems like it could be good with like a chef build on the silent. Definitely. Or just the defect in general. also appreciate that. It's a Sega Genesis reference, which puts it a tier higher in my book. It's the reference I needed. Scrawl is now a ⁓ colorless card. Yeah. Scrawl is ridiculous. What was it before? It was a watcher card. ⁓ okay. but it's upgraded cost zero fill your hand. Hand of greed is back. Hand of Greed was always okay. No, it was always great. It's a... It's solid. Well, the thing about it was like, if you could abuse it, then you could pay for so many things at the shop. I think shop relics were better in the first game. I find myself not like... All that interested in shop relics so far this game. mean, obviously yes, sometimes, the waffle can come in clutch sometimes. I've had that one before. Waffle is one of the waffle. Yeah. Lee's waffle. Yeah. I was like, ⁓ my God, I'd be at like 10 HP and I see that I'm like, Lee's waffle feels like full and gives you like 10 max HP. I had a multiplayer run, which I think Steve was on for, have you guys encountered clone yet? I have not. I haven't encountered it in a run, but I encountered it in the run that you were playing. unlike the first game in this game, there are enchants. So if you, might come on an event or one of those like starter events and it'll say, enchant a card in your deck with whatever it is. And you can read, you can read whatever it is. Sometimes it's more damage. Sometimes it's more blocks. Sometimes it's draw cards, whatever, you know. ⁓ but this particular enchant says whenever you. a go to a rest site, you can choose to clone and put a copy of that card in your deck. I was thinking that it just did it once. And I put it on a card called celestial spear, which is for the, um, region. It's one regular energy and one of his sub resource and it's deal like six damage. And then two more damage for every card in your deck that costs the star resource. And by that point, I had enough. was like a 25 point, uh, damage attack for one energy. So it was pretty solid, right? And I had no problem making stars. So I'm like, okay, fine. I'll clone that. I don't have anything better in the deck to clone. ⁓ Thinking that I'll just draw like a 30 damage, 30 or 40 damage attack once in a while. And that's pretty good, right? But what I didn't realize was that every time I cloned it, it put another copy of the card in the deck with clone on it. So I got real greedy, real fast. I was in this run. I was in this run. Yeah. okay. You were too. So yeah, I ended up with 88 cards in my deck. Yeah. when you had one with clone and then when you clone it, it makes two with clone. And then when you clone it, it makes four and then eight and then 16 and then 32. Yeah. I think I hit the 32 mark by the time the run was over. I remember like the final boss. You were smacking, I think for like 300 a piece. Yeah. 300 damage per. was so ridiculous. I was like, God damn. But there were, there were times I ran out of stars and then I would just draw five of those things. I'm like, guys, I got to skip this turn. Just take 45 on the chin from the box. I'm trying to think of what like the best card to clone is like neurosurge or like, uh, would pyre be a good one to do? There, think there's one per class. That's really good. So the Regent has the one that's like zero cost, forge five, draw one card, gain one energy. That like you could clone the crap out of that. You just keep cloning it. And then by the time you're done with whatever it is you're doing in that combat, you're just going to have like a 500 damage sword to smack them with. Yeah. The defects got the, the orb slot one. Right. The, the ironclad has a perfect strikes. I've actually seen somebody do it with perfect strike. The same thing as the, as the, as the spear, except for every card in your deck that says strike, gains power. Yeah. Perfected strike has to be the ironclad's best one. I think they all have something. It's, it's a really stupid effect. I wouldn't be surprised if they changed it so that the copies don't have clone anymore because it really gets out of hand. Very fast. Celestial Spear is a common card. Like in every run of the region, you're probably going to encounter one Celestial Spear at least. The, ⁓ the silence gotta be like Wraith Form or Adrenaline. It actually doesn't have Wraith Form in It is. It's a, it's a, ⁓ Full Art card. No kidding. It has another form. I forget what it is though. Serpent Form. What does it do? Whenever you play a card deal four damage to a random enemy, it's a three energy power. Yeah. As, they all are. ⁓ the forms. Yeah. So the, feel like we can't talk about everything because this is a deep game, but I do want to talk about multiplayer before we go. What do you guys think about the multiplayer? I feel like. At my opinion, it could just be like, you guys are gods. I don't know, but. I feel like it's a little under tuned for multiplayer. I get at least with four players. I don't know how it is with like three or two. But I two is two is fun, but so is four. Four's hilarious. Oh no, I had a blast multiplayer. It was such a good addition, but it was a little too easy with four players. I'm not going to lie. Well, I wonder if it gets much harder on the later Ascensions because multiplayer has its own level difficulty separate from your single player. So I'm assuming they should. Yeah, you rise in Ascension's and when you're in multiplayer, you can only play at the highest Ascension of the lowest Ascension level player. Yeah. So if we play multiplayer a lot together and we get to Ascension 10, it will probably be more difficult. Didn't they add cards? Everyone's going to have to pull their weight. Well, yeah, team cards. Yes. And they're all really good. Yeah. So. Hylas giving people extra energy. I could give people an oste. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. There's a card that's like some an eight for, for everybody exhaust. And I thought that meant like, I do eight times the number of players. No, it's everybody gets an oste. That's crazy. I know the run where you were the defect you're giving us like absurd defense every turn. Yeah. There's just like a power. That's like every time you gain defense on your turn, give half of it to everybody else. And you're like, all right. And then Hux, Hux found a card that was like, he takes double damage, but everybody else takes half. Tank? Yeah. And we, we also found out that if, if you play tank and someone else plays tank, then you both take normal damage and everybody else takes a quarter. Not bad. You could definitely save somebody if they're like low on HP or something. Well, he, so he got that card and then he just dedicated himself to block. Yeah. Basically. So he, you know, he still took damage, but not, not like, I mean, Here's, here's the thing. So they, they designed multiplayer, I think like really quickly, cause they just wanted to get it out. But the only thing that's different about the encounters in multiplayer is that all the enemies have X times HP to the number of players. So if the first enemy you run into in a normal run has like 30, if you play four, four player multiplayer, it'll have 120 HP, but it's, and, and, and it's attacks will hit all of your party members, but It does the same amount of damage it would do in a normal run. So the enemies in the early ascensions at least scale like one plus one equals two, but one plus one player is not two. One plus one player is at least four. because like you can vulnerable or you can weaken for, for each other. Like that's, and that's something like every class does, let alone all the other synergistic crap that, you know, the class can do together if you do things in an order. Well, that's the thing too. Like the more players you have, like just the more options that just open up, you know, it's four players. So it's like, you can almost just basically covered like basically anything. And we are not playing optimally. We just go crazy on it and, and we win. we're not like most turns we're not even talking. ⁓ yeah. And then we were also bringing people in the discord like, ⁓ I'm a first time player. Like even me included, like I'm not very good. And we were just steamrolling cause you got like. I mean, I was pulling my weight half of the time, but like you guys just, you know, you just knew everything and ⁓ you had a really cracked Necro binder. ⁓ with the, with the re perform. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was, it was good. I was defective basically just dirtled. of the coolest parts is like, when you get down to the wire on some things and you're like, okay, well I don't have a block card, so I really need somebody to weaken this turn. And then somebody has it or like you can throw potions at each other. Yeah. Yeah. You can kind of take care of each other a little bit. We don't know what happens when you die. I've never had anyone die on a multiplayer run. Yeah. Mending at the camp sites. Yeah. So you heal other players. The campsite nodes let you either, either improve your deck or heal. Generally speaking, it's better to improve your deck, but in multiplayer, you can also mend, which is you can either heal, heal yourself. upgrade your deck or heal another player. And if you're just out of good cards to upgrade and you don't need health, like you just helped that other player out. Like Dan saved me because I was damage dealer. Like, but I, I had to take damage on the chin if I didn't kill whatever it was that, that we were fighting. So Dan healed me a couple of times in a fireplace to keep me alive. And then I shellacked the final boss. It was a men's well spent. Exactly. I did a multiplayer run two nights ago on Wednesday night with ⁓ four players and I ended up going infinite. But my rule of thumb now with infinites and multiplayer is that I'll do the loop like a couple of times, but then I'll stop and then I'll play my turns normally after that. Just so I don't take away all the fun from somebody else. It's a little buggy, you know, and I think this kind of leads into the, to the early access. So I was playing a card called tyranny, which is every turn, draw another, draw an extra card, but exhaust a card from your hand. And it would take so long to load up that, that like choice to exhaust that your guys, you guys would already have ended turn and I'm sitting there trying to figure out what card that I'm, that I'm going to exhaust. Just like finishing that I made the mistake of playing two of them and it had two separate animations and I was like, oh my God, this takes so long. Like what's Don doing over there? Yeah. There's just like cards flying everywhere and potion rocks soaring through the air. And yeah, the other thing that really makes multiplayer strong is that when you encounter a treasure chest with a relic, Oh yeah. You run, you, you just have to take whatever's in there, but on a multiplayer run. There are four relics to pick from and you can talk, talk to each other and like pick whatever relics are best for your run, is so strong. But if you disagree with another player and you both want it, there's actually a built in rock paper, scissors system that one person. It's skimp. You should be able to pick which option you want. After, after the rock paper, scissors. No, you should be able to pick rock paper scissors. Doesn't your guy do it automatically? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. You should be able to pick. ⁓ I see what you're saying. Like you can actually pick like scissors or rock or paper. For everybody else who has to watch that, I'm fine with it. It's exciting to watch your friends laugh on discord with rock paper scissors. What's your problem? I actually think that, I think that would be a good change, honestly. If somebody got mad and they just wanted to sandbag it and not pick something. Like we've had some people maybe do well then all the other three people spam the ping button. like that you can draw on the map. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We had fun with that to say the least. Well, not everything has really good applications. It makes it a lot easier to see things on the map. Like you circle other elites, or if you know that you want to shop, you can circle one and then draw backwards a path that looks good. It's nice to have. Yeah. Yeah, I was being a mega troll with it. Sometimes where it's like your own version of Vegeta. I was being a mega troll with it. like there would be paths where like, think Don and Steve would be like, no, I think this path would be better. It would like divide. So like, you can actually pick which path you want to go on and it'll actually roll like between you. Yeah. Yeah. Between all the characters and whoever it lands on is the path you'll take. sometimes I would scribble out that one path. Like completely. it also covers like the players under it too. So you can't like see anything under it. then everybody knows which way you're going. Just instead of your icon, they see one giant scribble. No, basically what I was doing is like, no, I don't want to go here. So I would scribble it out just to be an ass. I'm surprised the multiplayer works as well as it does though. Like all the stuff, you know, functioning in and out of spaces and shops and everything else. And it just, it all kind of works. Yeah. fun. I would not have imagined how Slay This Pyr could have been multiplayer before we actually played it. I'm actually curious how it is on higher ascension levels. Like that's where it seems like it would be really fun. Shit boys. I'm surprised we're not playing multiplayer right now. ⁓ well, maybe we are. Yeah, no, it was, it's good fun. Like I said, like base difficulty, I feel like it's way too easy on multiplayer, but like I could definitely see like, I don't know, like ascension five or higher, definitely be some. where you have to actually think about what you're doing. ascension levels in this are no joke. I feel like the ascension levels may be like one through 15 on the first game. think we're pretty easy breezy, kind of hard to lose. And then it got, eventually it all compounded on you. I think by like 15 or 16 because events got weaker, you got less gold, shops got more expensive and Like all those little leads have are more plentiful. Enemies have more health. Enemies deal more damage. Bosses have more health. Bosses deal more damage. Have more challenging move sets. Yep. Like yeah. then ascension 20 at three double boss, double boss. ⁓ my God. you don't get to see one of them. You don't know which you don't know. That's right. You don't know which one it is. Just going to plan for all of them. Yep. like I said, the top of the show I have. a heart kill on Ascension 20 on all four. I've double bossed it up. so there's an Act 4 in the first game where you have to give up certain advantages to gain keys to get into Act 4 and you kill the heart of the spire, which is like an extra super boss at the end. This game does not have that yet, but I actually remember that. Yeah, where it was like a red, blue and green key or something like that. Yeah. You had to skip a relic from a chest. had to skip a relic from, or you had to beat ⁓ extra hard elite and you had to skip a beneficial option at the rest site. Wow. Insane. They actually like ramp it up. Damn. Ascension 20 is no joke. It's a much different ball game. Here I'm struggling on the normal difficulty in the second game. I can only imagine with all those like handicaps. I think one of the devs said something like Ascension like seven or eight was meant to be like perfectly balanced. Is when they were, that's like when you would have called it like normal mode. So 20 is like cracked. you can win 20, you're pretty good at Slay the Spire. Yeah. I will say that I'm consistently winning, but I win probably like one of three or four runs. this one appears to have 10. So I can go under. ⁓ I think it's like the library or whatever, and you can see how many ascension levels per character that you've done. And there's 50 and there's five characters. So I'm assuming there's only 10 ascension levels, but the ascension levels in this are harder. I feel like they're almost like a couple of the previous game combined, which I think I'm okay with. I don't feel like. A lot of the ascension levels early on in the first Slay the Spire were very impactful. So yeah, I think that's, you know, it's certainly not the whole game. There's a lot to enjoy, but I feel like we covered a lot of it. Maybe we'll do another episode. There's lore now. I don't know if you guys have gone to the timeline and actually read the things that you unlock, but does that cool like lore of Slay the Spire? It feels like a bunch of gibberish. It makes a little bit of sense. All I know, I'm until I unlock and I need to climb it. until I unlock all of it. Then I'll just read it. Like, I don't like having all the events all scrambled up. What is the ironclad? he like some kind of like, I don't know. It seems like he's some kind of So the ironclad is from a clan of nomads or whatever, but he himself, I don't think this one is actually, what is it? The original one sold his soul to a devil. But I don't think this one is that way. I don't know. Oh, I don't know. does seem like a thrall to barely talk. Yeah. Yeah. Like he's been revived or something like, like, like Dan said, like a thrall. Yeah. Well, something that the, whatever the, the arbiter says up at the top, something made me think that he didn't sell, this one hasn't sold his soul because it's a different ironclad. It's not the same one from the first game. I think he has sold his soul because he calls him devil. maybe he maybe he did. I might have it backwards, but yeah, something about it. Maybe he's Dracula. Maybe. I mean, he does bite. He doesn't train any HP anymore. They got rid of Reaper. Feeds still bites. Yeah, but that's cannibalism. I guess drinking blood is counts as cannibalism. So I mean, there's animals. mean, and fish that he bites and stuff. Yeah. He's not eating people. Sometimes he is. So I'm thinking like, far as people go, the cultists, right? There's like not a lot of people in it's also the knights. Yeah, but they're like spirits almost. They're weird. Well, in the first game there was like thieves, which are definitely people. Yeah. Yeah. Actual people. I don't, I don't think the knights are always spirits. There's like that, the, there's like the, black knight who wants to take the key. I'm pretty sure that's just a normal guy. He's very large. Are you sure he's a normal person? He's like three times the size of you. I think very argue if it talks and shows intelligence, it's mostly a person and probably not something you should eat. Right. Yeah. But why it just feels bad. Yeah, but no, it feels good to raise your max HP. It does. Yeah. But it is, is horrifying. 300. Yeah, I've had it. It's fun. There's a, there's an achievement in the first game, Dan, where you have to use feed on Donu. Oh, cause he's a donut. Cause he's a donut. You have to kill him with feed. And it was like the hardest thing for me to get because you have to wait for yourself to draw that card and those two scale every other turn. They buff each other. Yeah, you don't want to hang around. Yeah, so it was a tough one for me to get. And feed's rare, so you're not even guaranteed to get feed and then you're not even guaranteed to get Dona Wendeka at the end of the right. Yeah. Yeah. Damn. Yeah. Yeah, that was an There's a lot of variables there. Yeah, it is. So yeah, you know, I think this game is definitely worth playing and worth checking out. guys want to get into art? $25? Yeah, $25. Do you want to get into art review of it? Sure. Before we do that, let's go to get our plugs in. So if you like what you hear and you want to support our show, the best way to do that is subscribing on the podcast platform of your choice. really makes us feel better about this whole operation and helps us get the word out there. For some reason, the algorithm hates us, but I think I'm okay with that. It's okay. I don't want to be liked by the fake friend AI algorithm. It's not a real friend and it can't hurt you. But if you don't hate us, know, sub subscribe and maybe ⁓ spread the word a little bit. for us, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at the moment because we're pretty social media illiterate. Or you can also find us on discord as well and get 24 hour access to all of us and message us and play multiplayer, slay the spire. So with that, we'll get into our host rating and review. So I want to treat this because it's an early access game, not fair to actually like give it the rating scale that you usually do. But I also wanted to practice a little bit for our upcoming, our upcoming. Indie game league. Yeah. I'm just losing my words tonight. So I wanted to hear each of your like kind of final roundabout thoughts about it, but also we're going to have four cups this year. Poker ball, great ball, ultra ball and master ball. Current state, not withstanding or withstanding, whatever you feel about it. What cup do you think this will end up, this would end up in if we were putting it in the league? I think it to me, easy master ball. You know, it's just like, I feel like even in early access, it can only go up from here. And like with the first game, they basically just made, know, with Slay the Spire too, they just basically made an enhanced version of that. And it shows like, you know, they didn't try anything ridiculous or anything out of the box. They basically had a formula. that worked and they stuck with it. And, you know, they added multiplayer, which is great, you know, like, even though it's a little on the easy side, you know, if you have four players, it's such a good time. Like, I don't know, it's just the amount of hours you could spend in this game, no runs the same, like easy master ball for sure. And the numbers just do not lie like this. I've been playing it on Steam and I've been watching like how many people have been playing it and it's you know, hit over 300,000 players, like just playing it on Steam. So that right there tells you like how popular this series has just gotten. Like, because the first game was so good that, you know, people who haven't even played the first game are jumping on the second game to play. It's just a good time, honestly. mean, I don't have a lot to say other than what we've already said. As far as like where I think the game is going. I haven't played like a whole bunch of indie games, but you know, this, ⁓ this one speaks to me closer because of my history with magic, the gathering, you know, it's like, ⁓ it's almost like a single player magic, gathering type game. have. Man and you play cards, but you get to kind of target your spells at whatever you want and kind of block. you know, it's just, it's such a cool. Idea, and I'm glad that they made the sequel. I'm excited to play more of it. I would You know with lack of experience in the indie game scene. I put it in Master Ball easily But like who knows what we're running to I know like for example we have some people bringing for some pretty pretty strong contenders and You know if you're looking at the indie scene as a whole. It's like you got silk song you got You know clear obscure expedition 33 you got all kinds of games that have made huge waves in video game history basically. So it's exciting to see what's going to be coming up, what viewers are going to pick for us to play. But as far as I could tell, you know, with the amount that I love the first one, I would put this in Master Ball easy. is not going to be the last time I ask this, but I've, I have played a lot of indie games. I definitely had a period where I was playing like almost exclusively indie games before I got into my like retro life. And I'm kind of tilting back now that we're, you know, going back in that direction a bit, but like I've played, and I've played a lot of roguelikes and I've put a lot of hours into quite a few, just looking down my list. I've got some like skull, which is like a, like a side scroller hack and slash type of roguelike. Hades is one that. comes to mind that not only is it a really addictive gameplay loop, it is very well produced. Everything from its artistic direction to its voice acting, it's won a ton of awards. Actually, the first video game ever to win Hugo Award was Hades, which is an award usually given to sci-fi fiction. It's pretty great. ⁓ You know, obviously there's newer games that I haven't gotten to yet, but like sea of stars is so amazing. Right. But even still, like I've already put 30 hours into this latest one. I think I'm the same and like every, every chance I get, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Cause my wife's just going to like come down on me eventually about it. But like, I'm just like every, every chance I get, I'm like turning on my rock ally and I'm sneaking in like a couple of rooms and stuff. And I'm just, it's all adding up. Like it's so good. So yeah, and I think it's what Steve said about card games. I'm a long time card game player too with Steve. I played Yu-Gi-Oh, I played Magic, I played in tournaments, I collected the cards, I got, played Hearthstone for many, many, many, many years. I played Magic the Gathering Arena for a time and you know, I quit all that eventually and But Sleigh the Spire has just stuck around and it scratches that itch, that card game itch. It's so good. I haven't found another game quite like it. So I found other card games like Rogue Book and there's another one called like Heroes of Arcania, I think its name is. And it's similar, but it's not the same. And it's not, in my opinion, as well developed as Slay the Spire is either one of those games. So yeah, for me, this would be a master ball entry right now, but I am curious to see how it goes. And I'm not gonna. You know, we're obviously not going to rank it, but I will check in with you guys periodically and ask, Hey, any of these indie games better than slay the spot? You know, so I think that'll be a cool little thing for us to do. Nobody can pick it because we reviewed it. Yep. So, know, so today gets the cable club stamp of approval. Highly, highly, highly recommended. Even in its early access state, it's 25 bucks. I know that's a little steep in indie game prices. ⁓ but I think that these mega crit guys deserve every bit of it. They delayed this game. It was supposed to come out last year. They delayed it because it wasn't, it wasn't at the level they wanted it to be. They went back and they balanced some stuff. And I mean, yeah, there's some imbalance crap in this game, but I think that so there's remarkably little of it given, know, I like to say this game needed more time in the oven. I don't think it's fair, but we'll see how it crisps up. Yeah. And especially with all like the, the, the moving pieces and stuff, like all the relics, all the cards, all the potions. It's just like, I'm surprised it's as balanced as it is to be honest with you. Yeah. And we've had a couple of crashes here and there, but it's remarkably stable to despite all the crap that's going on. Unless you're a chef, Doug, then just happens. Yeah. The, only crash that I've encountered was multiplayer and where, disconnected. That was it. Yeah. That was it. So yeah. That's where we are. we don't have to pick a game at the end of this episode because we owe somebody a game who won the random winter backlog pick. So we still have to play Kingdom Hearts, which we were supposed to do this episode on. So join us in two weeks where we talk about Kingdom Hearts, which actually is, I think, up there for me and Steve in terms of what probably one of our favorite games of all time. Maybe like top 30, top 40 games. I'd say somewhere up there. somewhere in there. Maybe we played a lot of it. And lot of our friends in high school played a lot of it and we played a lot of it with our friends in high school. so anyway, it'll be fun to go back and revisit that. But before we go, I'd like to say that our theme song is done by Cubby, Seahorse Dreams. It's pretty awesome. Go check out his bandcamp, throw him a few bucks like we did. His music is available to be used for projects like these. It's really cool of them to do that. And then our social media, ⁓ coordinator is Alicia, Steve's wife. It's hard to keep up with all this stuff and she helps out when she can, which is great. And this podcast is produced and all of the artwork and stuff for it is done by one of the three of us. So aren't we three talented guys? So pretty great. And, uh, of course I want to thank the listeners, uh, who have stuck with us. So we really appreciate you guys, uh, particularly the ones who hang out with us in discord, cause just makes it more fun for us. So. Looking forward to more ahead, for now guys, game over. Game over. Game over. What happens when you die and slay this fire? It's like desecrated. Yeah. Or you make it to the top and it says, ⁓ made it to the top? Question mark. I've heard that a lot.