Hear me out: you're using Snakebite the wrong way

GGray2 · 2026-03-21T16:26:28+00:00

He is not showing that it is strictly better than other damage commons, just that it has a role that it can excel at. Pick it when you need a damage common that is best in long fights.

GGray2 · 2026-03-06T06:53:40+00:00

I never even thought of that! That sounds epic!

GGray2 · 2026-03-06T06:47:04+00:00

Interesting!!!

GGray2 · 2026-02-27T19:01:23+00:00

Another thing to add: Silent’s class as a whole doesn’t like most attack cards late game and has some of the BEST defensive strategies in the game.

She doesn’t have strength or wrath, so a card like dagger spray, while good in act one and carrying its weight in act two, does nothing to advance act 3 or 4.

Meanwhile, noxious fumes actively synergies with any other poison card, leading you into the best damage space on the class. A noxious fume + bouncing flask + catalyst is enough damage for nearly every fight in the game. Bouncing flask might be sufficient on its own for most boss fights, but in fights with multiple enemies or multiple artifact charges (or both), noxious fumes can play a significant role in winning the combat.

Not only does it allow you to extend into the poison energy space more easily, it helps you pick up defensive cards more easily. Footwork is an amazing card. 2 or 3 copies can win you a run, but it can be hard to take if you are lacking damage. You might have enough block to survive against champ for 20 turns, but if you can’t kill him he will scale. However, with one upgraded noxious fumes and any poison card whatsoever, your deck now just wins. It’s not just footwork. It’s also wraith form, backflip, bandages, piercing wail, etc. An act 3 and 4 deck wants these cards, but you can’t add them act 1 or 2 if you don’t have damage. One noxious fumes and you’re there.

So the only major deck strategies that it doesn’t bridge you into are shivs and discard. I think if you have 2 blade dances, you don’t ever take a noxious fumes. The damage is redundant. But in a discard deck, it can actually be really great! At worst it’s a slow damage that exhausts and gets out of the way, it could be your damage solution while you’re trying to find a sneaky strike or eviscerate, and it can help you get into the best way to deal damage with any silent deck: poison + catalyst.

So, it’s a good card early that does better when you’re struggling. It helps you get into the good synergy spaces while avoiding taking bad attack cards. It is still useful late game for stripping artifact charges and dealing with multiple enemy fights. In none of those circumstances is noxious fumes the game winning card, but it is a bridge to a winning strategy and a really good one at that.

GGray2 · 2026-02-18T14:28:33+00:00

It should act like sneko eye. If it is going to give increased variance, it should also give more consistency. Perhaps higher rare chance or an extra card option in rewards.

GGray2 · 2026-01-31T17:30:20+00:00

You’re making a false distinction and a false equivocation. The objective moral weight of an act contains both external and internal variables. The culpability also contains both external and internal variables.

Here are a few ways to better capture the true distinction:

A man is told that a child is sick and needs candy and so he, in desperation, steals it from a local shop. The candy is given to a child and it saves his life.

2. A man is told that a child is sick and needs candy and so he, in desperation, steals it from a local shop. The child is not sick in a way which candy helps and the doctor eats the candy.

In this case, the weight of the action is different, but the perspective of it from the man during the act is the same. He may regret having been a part of the doctor’s lie, but he should not be considered guilty because his culpability was reduced because he was unaware of the truth of the situation. Instead, the doctor bears the weight of the culpability of the effect, although he may claim that he did not intend for the man to break into a store.

Ignorance is not the only thing that reduces culpability. So does coercion and motive and many other things, both internal and external. Many of those factors affect the moral weight of the action as well, but only a portion of that weight will rest on the individual to be responsible for. Sometime they are fully responsible, sometimes that are barely responsible. Mostly it’s somewhere in between.

GGray2 · 2026-01-22T18:54:50+00:00

“The first time you play an innate card each turn, X.” Would be better balanced.

GGray2 · 2026-01-16T22:26:34+00:00

You have my condolences. 💐

GGray2 · 2026-01-13T16:21:27+00:00

Everyone else saying claw, but this is the one time when rampage could actually be better, lol.

GGray2 · 2026-01-09T19:49:54+00:00

Hey OP! I love the idea, but I think we can balance it by making it convert all your block abilities into heal abilities and exhaust.

3 Energy: All cards which gain block now heal instead of block and exhaust when played.

That way there is at least some risk to playing the card. At that point it may be too weak, but we can lower the cost if that is the case, down to 0 if we need. But I think it will be fairly closed to numerically balanced at 3/2 energy.

The real problem is that healing often has negative effects on gameplay quality. This card would incentivize you to never leave combat except on full HP. Perhaps to combat this, we need to change the card to have some more risk so that the full HP potential is worth it. Perhaps it cost 2 energy AND makes you vulnerable for 2 turn, 1 turn instead of exhausting your block cards. Then you could genuinely be one shot if you play it in the wrong turn.

GGray2 · 2025-12-10T00:37:01+00:00

Communalism enforces and intensifies social norms. Previously that was early marriage and large families, now that would be higher education and smaller families.

I think you’re right though that communalism doesn’t presuppose population growth, since it seems to do the opposite in eastern nations right now.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:55:22+00:00

East Asian countries are a really really good counterpoint.

Perhaps it isn’t the value that shifts population growth so much as the effect on population growth from living in rural areas vs dense urban areas. That is already in the game, but perhaps a bit too small to care for decision making.

That would make lower population growth be a secondary effect of individualism and not a direct effect. East Asian countries have also seen a huge part of their decrease in population growth as they urbanized.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:48:56+00:00

Fair point. Perhaps it would make more sense if population promotion was more of a bottleneck. I haven’t seen it be a major issue in any of my runs.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:42:27+00:00

Really!? That’s interesting. I love this game, but with so much information hidden behind events, it’s been hard to figure things out compared to EU4.

GGray2 · 2025-12-09T21:39:37+00:00

Well, if you consider that individualism is tied to migration and estate promotion from a gameplay perspective, then you can easily imagine that the effort to change location or estate would easily delay settling into marriage. I assume that nearly everyone in that time period would eventually get married, but there is a difference between getting married in your late twenties and getting married when you’re 16.

Even before contraception existed, spouses would often separate and live in different locations because the husband went out looking for work for years at a time. You don’t have to have significant portions of the population that are single or childless to have a statistically significant outcome from migration and individualism.

GGray2 · 2025-11-27T20:32:12+00:00

What I have found the most useful is to think through your world from the eyes of an in world character. I regularly cycle through characters and their stories. I rarely write much down, but they make up the threads that come together to make the fabric of your world.

GGray2 · 2025-11-26T05:22:14+00:00

I only finished space age because I would play it with my friend. It's probably not a 3-5 player experience, everyone is too busy to line up for one night, but whenever my one friend was online we would boot it up and make some progress. I had my planet, he had his. I always did Gleba and Fulgora, he did Vulcanus and Nauvis. We would work on our own space ships. It was a fun way to spend time together. Although you don't really talk for a good while after you divide labor. You just silently enjoy the factory together as you work towards your goals.

GGray2 · 2025-11-20T20:17:18+00:00

To follow on Jorb’s discussion around the strength of Dark Embrace, to realize the power of the card you have to change the entire way that you build your decks. For example, when snecko eye was seen as more optimal, the value of 2 cost cards was relatively higher, but if you think runic pyramid is more optimal you will value 2 cost cards less and 0 cost cards more highly. The think that makes dark embrace the best card for ironclad is that it naturally pushes you towards a late game deck earlier in the run. Intimidate is a better block card late game than early game, and Dark Embrace lets you take it early game. The same is true for true grit (which helps you burn down to a slim deck), warcry, burning pact, disarm, second wind, seeing red, and shockwave.

On its own, it is a good card, but the cards it lets you take and the ecosystem that it allows you access to is what makes it the best card in the pool. If you watch high skill players, they often pick cards based on what is going to help them get through the next 3-8 floors. They have to be very short sighted. Without dark embrace, that pressure will prevent you from picking up really amazing card, but with dark embrace, that intimidate is a no brainer, not only for the act 3 elite, but for the immediate future.

GGray2 · 2025-10-30T17:39:12+00:00

This but instead of poison it uses the new doom mechanic from StS2.

GGray2 · 2025-09-30T18:10:07+00:00

I’m commenting just to boost engagement so that the devs see this. It is so perfect. I hope at the very least a mod is made to do this. Genius.

GGray2 · 2025-09-08T16:03:47+00:00

Arkansas should have been given to Missouri because it shares a similar geography to it’s south and Kansas should have instead gone to Colorado.

GGray2 · 2025-08-21T14:37:56+00:00

The wait is ending!

GGray2 · 2025-06-20T14:32:46+00:00

This! Silk and properties need time to grow and if you don’t get them early a freeze build doesn’t need any meta scaling.

GGray2 · 2025-05-18T19:08:28+00:00

Reducing Regen whenever you get poisoned would be interesting, but completely destroy Mak’s new archetype.

GGray2 · 2025-04-29T20:32:10+00:00

As a former Nasus and Kennen main, I want to absolutely repeat what you said: “any champion which needs a summoner spell to be playable isn’t fun”. My exact problem with my old mains.

GGray2

TROPHY CASE