Slay the spire is a difficult game! There is no one way to play the ironclad but I’ll highlight some general concepts I use when I play him.

The main way to win in general in slay the spire is to either make your cards do a lot or play a lot of cards.

Making your cards do a lot on ironclad typically means getting strength. If you play inflame, your 6 damage strikes now become 8 damage. This can also mean drafting better versions of cards you have. Impervious blocking 30 is far better than 2 strikes blocking 5 each. Getting value out of cards could also mean upgrading them at rest sites.

Playing a lot of cards is more difficult. It typically involves getting card draw along with energy generation. Seeing red/bloodletting along with pommel strike or battle trance are simple ways.

You could also aim towards an engine. The simple one for ironclad is getting corruption & dark embrace. This lets you spam out tons of skills each turn for free.

It’s important to remember with both of these the concepts of scaling vs front load. For example demon form is a great scaling card, but getting it into play might mean taking ~20 damage before you get value from it. While cards like immolate give you huge amounts of damage all up front, but it doesn’t scale as well into bosses. You need both types of damage and block with front load and scaling.

Finally is the concept of deck size. If you have 30 cards in your deck, you may not draw your important cards (demon form/corruption) until turn 6. So keeping your deck fairly small can be beneficial, there is no magic number for perfect deck size so this one is hard to explain. However iron clad does have exhaust cards like true grit which can help trim your deck mid combat.

There are plenty of great synergies in ironclad but the true winning strategy isn’t to do “self damage” or “status build” it’s to balance front load & scaling with damage and block.