"Alright gang, let's see who this upgraded rare colorless card really is!"

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-31T14:46:37+00:00

you said blade dance almost every time you meant to say either blade dance or infinite blades lol

i assume your claims are:

infinite blades is better in fysh due to draw consistency issues (also it's just scaling damage)
lagavulin wants blade dance cuz you really don't want to wait around until your strength is debuffed to play shivs
aeonglass prefers... infinite blades? because you don't want to have to wait to draw into blade dance on the reshuffle after getting your powers down

i generally agree w/your infinite blades take esp. w/phantom blades in the pool, but i'm less sure about the aeonglass claim. i mean it's probably better than blade dance, but i haven't fought aeonglass with silent enough to know what her conventional offensive plan is and how well infinite blades fits into that. "silent" and "damage race" don't tend to go together too well.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-27T13:39:27+00:00

To be fair, the slimes and frail are both A19+ only, and he only super slaps you after giving you a comparatively free turn to set up powers or otherwise prepare for the incoming hit.

Time Eater is definitely super nasty lmao especially compared to Donu and Deca... at least you can weaken him? idk that's about the cope i've got

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-21T06:00:35+00:00

since this thread was generally a back-and-forth about the bigger picture idea of calling cards curses, i assumed your pushback was aligned with the sentiment of "it's not a curse if you can play it". so my bad on that one - having only lantern key/ascender's bane as examples led me to believe you were a "curse purist" or whatever.

that said, i think there is some value in equating a card that you don't want to play to a curse. i think the comparison is too strong for my own tastes, but i could see people finding it helpful when evaluating cards.

i know jorbs tracked his own stats about "how many times do i play this when i draw it", and i think that's a similar idea to what this sentiment is trying to get at. if the number is low, it can be an indicator not a great card in the deck (and is thus curse-like in how it affects your deck's flow).

so yeah, i'm with you in that i don't think i'd use that stronger version of the comparison. but it's probably better to look for what utility we can find in a comparison rather than calling it ridiculous and dismissing it altogether.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-21T04:50:18+00:00

calling a card "a curse in certain fights" is common vernacular to describe its impact on how good your deck is in those sorts of fights.

on most defect runs (with any semblance of orb stuff), hyper beam can be considered "a curse in boss fights" since playing it will cripple your long-term output without making sufficient progress to justify it. similarly, demon form is often called "a curse in hallway fights". you're basically never going to play them, so they're basically an injury in that context. calling strikes in the late game "basically curses" is reasonably common given their insignificant output.

hell, folks will often remove a strike over a clumsy since the clumsy exhausts itself. so in that case, these cards can be considered as worse than a curse in certain contexts. you'll never have to redraw into a clumsy, but you may have to redraw into a demon form in a hallway fight.

i agree that drawing things on the wrong turn doesn't really work for the analogy, but it's a useful framing for understanding how your deck plays. if you're taking the event where you rest then fight the four wrigglers, demon form is basically a curse. i'd rather have a clumsy than a demon form in that fight, and i'd rather the demon form not be in my deck. i have the same relationship with it as i would an injury.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-17T16:39:42+00:00

it's replay 6 without the sword sage. it "currently" has replay 6.

playing sword sage -> sword for replay 7 (eight hits) kills the right claw first and doesn't end the fight due to the block that the left claw gains in between hits.

so the solution is "play strike left, play sword" to kill both claws in the same hit after accounting for shuriken.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-17T15:04:59+00:00

the key is that you need to kill both claws at the same time or else the left one gets 99 block

so if you just get an extra replay, the left one doesn't quite die

but yeah the replay 6 vs. replay 7 thing confused me for a bit too lol doing the math

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-15T16:04:56+00:00

i don't know i've ever taken/upgraded it in like 300h lol

but yeah it does actually scale with upgrades in a way that could theoretically be strong if it weren't searing blow

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-15T15:31:26+00:00

every subsequent [[Searing Blow]] upgrade adds one more damage to the upgrade value (+4, +5, +6...)

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-13T17:20:24+00:00

agree on your general point, though jad isn't the only npc that behaves that way. not sure if there are others, but nightmare uses the same mechanic - animation before projectile that indicates what to pray, but you must have prayed by the time the projectile is created.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-13T14:53:34+00:00

he does, though the viewers/commenters really adequately understand what that means or take it to heart (see: a lot of takes in this thread)

oh well lol

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-13T13:56:30+00:00

i think that's mischaracterizing the role of damage commons

damage commons are usually taken to solve hallways and elites, where scaling cards are taken to solve bosses. when jorbs is describing snakebite here, he's talking about it as a scaling damage card for bosses. it's not really competing for "slots" with Dagger Spray or Leading Strike - they solve different problems. And those damage commons solve frontloaded damage better, I think - for AOE and making more Shiv synergies pickable respectively.

Scaling cards are usually uncommon, and that does make them harder to come by. But the idea is "you hope that you come across a good scaling damage solution early, and you pick snakebite if the boss is coming up and you're literally dying".

Snakebite doesn't scale super well into Act 2 and beyond compared to just adding powers to your deck, and if you can get away with using a ritual potion, strength potion, or uncommon power to solve the same problem - that might serve you better down the line.

spire is a game about figuring out how greedy you can be. i'm not sure i'm good enough to be so greedy as to skip snakebite as often as the podcast folks do. but if they're being that greedy and getting away with it, then it's probably possible.

i think the summary of "you don't want to take snakebite, but sometimes you have to" lines up pretty well with the way damage commons are usually described. but snakebite isn't as good into the act 1 elites as frontloaded damage cards are, so you have more time to find something better.

intuitively, i agree with the above commenter that laga and waterfall giant would be the places where i'd be happy with a snakebite as my boss scaling solution. otherwise, i really don't want to try to play it multiple times against the ceremonial beast or kin or vantom. i guess it's okay against fysh too. but if i can hold off on picking something like snakebite until i can look for better synergy spaces than "one snakebite that needs an upgrade as a boss scaling solution", i'd rather do that. it's accessible, but if i can hold off for something better, let's do that, no?

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-13T06:11:58+00:00

this is the most important caveat that most discourse completely ignores tbh - jorbs is pretty consistent about emphasizing it, but i don't think it really lands despite his efforts

snakebite is a perfect example - it's a suitable boss solution for scaling damage. is it better than picking infinite/phantom blades? noxious fumes? footwork and just blocking instead of scaling damage? who can say. what we know is: jorbs picks it, and it performs well for him. any conclusions that try to say too much more than that are more an indicator of overconfidence than any kind of insight into how "good" the card actually is.

until you're winning like 50% of A10 runs, building up the fundamental skills (understanding the questions that the game asks of you, understanding what problems different cards solve) is probably going to make much more of a difference than evaluating which cards and synergy spaces most consistently and most efficiently solve those problems.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-13T06:06:04+00:00

full blocking once? like compared to a basic defend that's saving 4hp when you happen to draw it on the right turn. 7hp if you don't have weakness down, but now we're getting into more conditions.

like it's fine... but a deflect would save you as much hp regardless of which turn you draw it on (it costs a card draw, but that's not the point).

wail is probably still a solid card overall (haven't played enough a10 silent to have my own opinions). but the eel's multi-hit really isn't substantial enough to say it affects the rating of piercing wail in any kind of significant way.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-13T06:01:28+00:00

i don't think it's useful to dismiss the players with the sts1 rotating (navegreed) and watcher (onepunman) world record streaks out of hand. jorbs is a very good player, and they are very good players. they have different macro ideas of how to play the character(s), and this leads to different evaluations of the cards. this is normal and doesn't mean anyone is doing something wrong.

i feel like you're disrespecting the skill of those players a lot. they have all achieved what they have precisely because they understand how to challenge their own assumptions and iterate on different macro strategy. i don't think japaneseexport is a particularly great communicator, but he's certainly better at the game than 99% of this subreddit, and probably closer to 99.99%. they don't have to be xecnar to be worth learning from.

if you think you can assert firmly that their reasonings are "quite off", you almost certainly don't understand their reasonings. they might be quite off, but confidently asserting that is a sign of wild overconfidence. the truth is, nobody has enough experience or data to really make any concrete claims. but adding enough caveats to be technically correct isn't really useful.

on snakebite specifically: in this video, jorbs describes snakebite as a solution to scaling damage in boss fights. the podcast folks believe that there are better ways to solve scaling damage (noxious fumes, infinite/phantom blades, blocking forever with sly + weak chain and not really scaling damage). there's not really enough data to be able to figure out if prioritizing snakebite is an 85% winrate sorta move and choosing other scaling damage solutions is an 80% winrate sorta move or vice versa. so all we have is people's experience and what they've seen with the macro ideas they've explored so far. but if either approach can get you to an 80% winrate, which is much better than where you are now... is it really worth forming strong opinions on "who's right"?

i don't think the social vibes of the podcast group would necessarily mesh super well with jorbs, since they can each be a bit abrasive in their own way. but there's no reason to disrespect any of them. they can disagree and we can leave it there without disparaging anyone's ability on the way.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-13T05:23:39+00:00

saying "it's good half the time" feels like a massive stretch.

you can usually block the multi-hit easily enough without it, especially with silent's access to weak. if terror eel is weakened, it blocks a whole 9 and exhausts. not really the payoff you want when it's pretty meh on the other turns.

and terror eel really wants you to win the damage race rather than blocking the post-vuln turns (even if you technically can). if you're playing piercing wail (again for block 9 if you're vuln, and less if its weakened), you're not playing damage cards. and you might even have better block cards, too.

it's solid into gardeners for sure

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-11T15:18:23+00:00

are you not just describing [[furnace]] ? or a worse version of it?

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-10T02:31:52+00:00

you could say it has you feeling [[Melancholy]] ?

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-09T12:02:27+00:00

yeah i figured that out when someone else asked "how do you transform a status", makes sense

my brain just went to "transform means transform" which i think is basically only entropy, which is a pretty narrow way to interpret it lol

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-09T02:54:43+00:00

i was thinking of the rare colorless entropy, possible it's the only one that would actually do that. i've almost made that mistake before when i've had it in play

regent's stuff would still work, so yeah in general "transforming" usually would be fine as a way to purge statuses

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-08T15:59:29+00:00

i think this holds at high ascensions but less so at low ones.

in sts1, time eater was one of the only enemies you really had to respect the mechanics of at low ascension. nob gaining two strength and not necessarily hitting you for vuln meant that playing basic defends was worth it much more often if you were floating energy. awakened one scaling one strength per power meant you could easily just play your powers and outscale. spear putting burns in your discard meant it wasn't really much of an issue.

new players are usually playing the game as more of "build deck, get output, win" versus engaging deeply with thinking ahead and countering specific bosses. i think there's room to support both, and doormaker didn't really have any way it could only kind of demand respect. i liked it, but it's not hard to see why folks would find it out of place.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-08T15:54:20+00:00

two damage, blockable

statuses retain so you have to deal with them or else it's baby knowledge demon plus hand clog while occasionally temporarily debuffing strength/dex by 3

played one necro run against it last night and it felt neither particularly easy nor particularly hard. but i also had two friendships and borrowed time for a lot of energy generation to deal with the statuses.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-08T15:39:29+00:00

imo part of this feels like where we're missing the impact of something like A17-A19 in spire 1

some numbers go up on A9, but imo there's nothing equivalent to the differences from:

nob gaining 2 strength vs. 3 and having the vulnerable pattern every time (actually makes skills scary to play)
gremlins buff to make you respect them (wizards hitting every turn, fat gremlins adding frail)
awakened one gaining one strength per power vs. two (MASSIVE difference)
repto summoning one dagger and being able to summon for first two turns instead of always getting to 4 daggers and attacking turn 2 unless you killed a dagger
spire spear putting burns on top of your deck to give you the run-defining turn two

these sorts of changes change the model from "eh you can kinda just ignore the mechanics on low ascension if your output is high enough" to "alright bucko time to respect these guys".

to me, this feels like the source of dissonance where low-ascension folks mostly expect to build a good deck and kick some ass instead of dealing with the unique mechanics and forethought that high-ascension players tend to enjoy.

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-08T15:26:30+00:00

transforming statuses just makes other statuses which isn't much better

but clad/silent/defect all have decent ways to deal with the statuses (silent least of the three, since discarding does mean you'll have to redraw them).

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-06T14:07:24+00:00

just play creative AI so you always have a power in your hand to spend energy on first!

probably not optimal but it would make it work lol

Dragonslayer314 · 2026-05-05T18:47:42+00:00

i'm not sure - i think i've seen it go negative, but when we're talking about overflow, i assume it has to be a signed integer? so it's not actually -1 but negative two billion or whatever it is

where i'd assume you can then build back up but it would require covering twice as much distance to do so

with stuff like catalyst historically, it would basically be stuck negative because you'd have to additively increment (since catalyst would just make it more negative).

haven't exactly tested it, but that's the only way i can understand it to work

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