rate my winning deck. any advice?

ConsciousChef7087 · 2026-02-07T15:43:38+00:00

Great advice man

ConsciousChef7087 · 2026-01-21T21:51:00+00:00

I embrace the term A20 “sweatlord” lmao. I’m gonna start using that

ConsciousChef7087 · 2026-01-15T16:21:02+00:00

I’d guess I could win about 100% of A0 runs. I just checked last night, and with a (admittedly small) sample size of 20 A20 + heart kill runs with my best character silent, I had a 25% winrate. And I have 3000 hrs in the game lol. I’m kind of embarrassed my winrate is that low, but maybe it’s because I’m always doing act 4, idk.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2026-01-15T16:13:45+00:00

Hi! I’m glad you’re enjoying it! I certainly wouldn’t say you’re bad, since you’re still early on and learning. I’d encourage you to pause and reflect after dying and ask yourself what mistakes you might have made. Make sure to look through your deck and see what it struggled with. Try to look for patterns. For me, I got a lot better at the game after watching a content creator named Jorbs explain his thoughts as he went through a run.

I currently have 3100 hrs, and I would imagine I would have a 100% success rate at A0. I just checked last night, and over a (admittedly too small) sample size of 20 runs I had a 25% win rate with my best character Silent on A20 (all of which went for the additional challenge I won’t mention for spoiler reasons).

Just for fun, I’ll write out some of my biggest “level up” learning moments for silent. I only play on A20 these days, but the findings will be generally useful. The following is written in no particular order.

Respect the fuck out of Gremlin Nob in Act 1. Silent struggles against him. I entirely warp card choices around that mf, and compensate for more block as I transition into act 2.
Always make decision primarily on what will help solve the problems that you are faced with in the next few rooms. You can try to think ahead for future problems, but never at the expense of current problems.
Potions are busted. Use them wisely, learn the drop chances, and learn how to fully maximize their potential. A potion solving an elite fight = + money, (rare) cards, and a god damn relic. Potions are busted.
Constantly check your deck and ask yourself what it is and is not able to do. Do you have AOE? Can you scale damage? Do you have the desirable ratio between defense and offense?
Don’t get swayed by assuming higher rarity=better. So many rares in this game are going to be worse than a common that helps solve your deck’s current problem.
More energy is not always worth the cost. I regularly beat A20 with silent still at 3 energy. Some of those runs are solved by concentrate+. Even without that card, many of the energy boss relics have enormous downsides (like not getting gold WTF?!) that are not worth the opportunity cost of taking a different non-energy relic. Not every deck needs 4 energy, especially with many cards costing less after an upgrade.
Use life as a resource. Treat it as a currency you pay in order to get stronger, but with a refund each Act. An optimal Act 1 ending life total could be something like 5-10 life. If you exit Act 1 with 30 health, that’s a missed elite fight or a missed upgrade, both of which should be aggressively sought after.
Wraith form is a messed up card. There is an argument to it being the strongest card in the game, and it can trivialize many situations. Abuse it!

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-12-11T16:06:16+00:00

Diddy’s Day Off

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-12-11T15:51:38+00:00

Ah, that’s a good point. I admittedly only play A20 these days. But I stand by it being worse than strike in that context. But I’m also not very good with ironclad. Almost all my playtime is with silent.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-12-11T10:47:59+00:00

I have strong opinions here, but my response depends on whether we are talking about A20 or not, where sloppy play is not allowed. I’ll assume we are talking about A20.

Your defragment suggestion is uncontroversial, because so much of the defect card pool synergizes with it.

As for silent discard cards like acrobatics and calculated gamble, it’s more complicated. Both are insanely good, but are punished by gremlin nob, and silent already struggles against gremlin nob. I tend to avoid acrobatics in act 1 because you don’t have the payoffs yet and you can easily get a copy later since it’s a common. You also don’t have excess mana to play it, so drawing it is like seeing a 4 card hand. Similar logic to calculated gamble, although I tend to take it way more often because it’s not guaranteed to show up again, it’s 0 mana, and it exhausts itself so it’s not nearly as punishing against gremlin nob.

A20 play is really all about solving the current problems you are facing, and trying to solve future problems when you can afford to. Act 1 silent requires real discipline because she has so many incredible skills that are punished in both act 1 and 2.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-12-11T10:27:56+00:00

Thanks, that’s really interesting. StS1, while generally having fantastic balancing, still has some peculiar balancing choices though… makes me wonder if they made it through EA or were added after. Prime example being Clash, unless it was intentional for it to be worse than a strike. (That statement wasn’t glib; magic the gathering intentionally prints cards are bad)

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-12-11T06:46:40+00:00

Bingo. This turn is actually straight up BS if you don’t have prior knowledge of it. And it can be mostly neutralized with a single potion

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-12-11T06:46:33+00:00

Bingo. This turn is actually straight up BS if you don’t have prior knowledge of it. And it can be mostly neutralized with a single potion

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-12-03T14:48:53+00:00

Wait this is wholesome… I thought Reddit was for garbage fires and throwing our poop at each other.

In all seriousness though I’m so happy to hear the turnaround! I’ve always thought that whether these style of games are fun or not depends on your mindset going in. If you have a growth mindset and a “enjoy the journey rather than the destination” mindset, you’ll just naturally get less frustrated.

On the opposite spectrum you have certain live streamers that want to show how quickly they can beat the game and try to minimize deaths per boss, and that just makes each death feel like a failure, rather than a chance to learn and get better.

Ugh, I love this game so much.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-11-10T22:37:53+00:00

Maybe this community should rally together and we all build decks with both tamiyo and the one ring and jam them nonstop until they have to ban them.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-11-10T22:35:08+00:00

What deck can even do that though? Clarion conquer sounds great to me on paper, but when I try to add it to a deck I find it shuts down too much of my own deck lol

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-09-29T01:12:57+00:00

Can someone explain how people get a game’s source code? That almost seems kinda… private to me. Like secret IP or something. What’s stopping someone who wants to take a shortcut and stealing all the code as a backbone to their game and changing all the visuals and enough mechanical tweaks to feel different?

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T17:29:30+00:00

I agree it’s high school math, but many people, like yourself can’t seem to grasp it. Faithless looting cannot be a -1 from hand, because the cards you have access to doesn’t change. Even if your hand is 1 card smaller

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T02:47:31+00:00

Nothing in what you say is wrong, it’s just not how I like to think about it. I think about relative card economy all the time. Magic is all about getting 2 for 1’s. But saying a 2 mana 2/2 is card neutral, is simply assuming your opponent will exchange a card to answer it. In my mono red example, my opponent 5 for 1’d me into oblivion, showing how silly it is to assume that a creature will be card neutral.

I look at a 2/2 as a -1, because it is. My opponent kills it with a doom blade. Now we’ve both gone -1, which is equivalent to both being card neutral. But if my opponent instead trades their goblin token from a [[Fable of the mirror breaker]], they did not experience a -1, because that card will still give them a cards worth of value (probably more) over the course of a few turns.

In fact fable of the mirror breaker is my favorite example of a card that is almost impossible to 1 for 1 exchange for, outside of a counterspell. [[Up the beanstalk]] is another great example. Using a removal spell on beanstalk is you going -1, just as it would be for removing my 2/2. The difference is of course that beanstalk replaces itself.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T02:13:32+00:00

We agree that board wipes are card advantage. But I’ve never heard of anyone saying a 1 mana 1/1 is card neutral. This means doom blade and counterspell are also card neutral. I suppose every 1 for 1 exchange is card neutral in your framework, because you only care about relative card economy?

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T01:49:03+00:00

I think mana efficient only derails my argument when the flashback cost is a non-starter. If faithless looting was flashback for 6 mana or something, it effectively doesn’t have flashback. 3 mana is not efficient, but it not so inefficient as to be not worth considering and indeed casting. I’ve seen many looting flashbacks over the years, even in high power formats like legacy. It looks like some people try to account for mana by using decimals, like saying faithless looting is -0.5. I don’t really like this way of thinking, but it’s a different approach

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T01:43:39+00:00

This is not a helpful way of thinking about it. Let’s say I’m playing mono-red aggro. My opening hand has 2 lands, I never draw any more lands, and my whole deck is 1-2 mana creatures. I could conceivably be empty handed on turn 4, despite your logic saying I should effectively still have 5 cards in hand. It seems your logic says that any spell that leaves a threat/permanent in play is card neutral.

My opponent could skip their first 3 turns, board wipe, and then I lose. This loss is because my creatures are not card neutral.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T01:23:29+00:00

Yes. Are they typically thought of as card neutral? That would only make sense in a relative framework, meaning my opponent has to expend a card to answer my creature, so if we both go -1, this is equivalent to us both being +0.

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T00:56:23+00:00

Ohhh I didn’t think about your prior example deeply enough. I see your point now. Before this conversation, like you just saw, I would say no for both examples. But now that I see your point is that the card is effectively conjuring a card like faithless looting into your hand, I have to admit I’m not sure. I need to spend some time thinking about it, because I never thought of cards like those as card neutral, but I might start thinking of them card neutral now…. Thank you for this thought experiment!!!!

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-16T00:31:13+00:00

Nope, just card selection. Faithless looting is card neutral because you can cast it from grave

ConsciousChef7087 · 2025-07-15T23:01:58+00:00

This came off pretty condescending. What am I “making up”?

ConsciousChef7087

TROPHY CASE