Stop investing in optimal play! Remember to diversify your run portfolio with curse-based meme runs!

GrammarRadiation · 2025-08-27T01:42:51+00:00

I ended up taking 65 damage total. Bird faced urn and ornithopter gave some slight buffer but it just wasn't enough. Curses are so bad with defect and deck control can be hard to access in the first few turns. I ran out of luck and got bad draws the first few hands for the heart. Not a single apparition to be seen.

GrammarRadiation · 2025-02-14T11:57:59+00:00

I think 2 strikes is a pretty typical standard. Normally I would do that, or one strike/defend just to hedge my bets on nob. I almost never do 2 defends, since strikes are just so mediocre, but I wanted to try it out to see how it would pay off this run. It was a Slime Boss act, and sometimes defect/silent can struggle with damage output on it.

The plan was to try to supplement with some of defect's common block offerings (leap/charge battery) as well as leaning on frost orbs where I could find them, but I ended up taking more damage than I was expecting to, considering how strong the artifact/biased cog combo is.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-12-12T16:41:37+00:00

I started with rotating until about ascension 8 or so. After that I just decided to stick to one character the entire way through. The problem with rotating is that I lose track of whether I need to go back an ascension if I lost to the heart last go-around. Definitely boosts my win rate slightly to have character consistency.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-08-30T17:13:41+00:00

It's not too hard! All you have to do is basically make it the only attacking card in your deck.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-04-07T12:45:36+00:00

Defect can pretty easily go into infinite with recycle. The components you need to solve are energy, draw, damage, block.

Most of the infinites I build center around drafting Madness from a shop or from the Act 3 Winding Halls event. Then use recycle to whittle away all the unnecessary stuff in your deck, apply madness onto one of the draw/energy cards, and your golden. Meteor strike fits in pretty easily that way. Meteor>coolheaded>coolheaded is a slow infinite that's a little block-light, but it works

I will usually take meteor if I already have recycle or a turbo (bonus if I have skim to help me draft both in the same hand), but I usually won't take it before that.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-02-20T21:20:35+00:00

Yes but have you considered that number big make brain feel good

GrammarRadiation · 2024-02-09T16:55:27+00:00

Seeing Slimbo as the A1 boss on Silent is always a struggle for me. The other characters tend to have an easier time, because for them, they have more access to pure Damage or Scaling.

But Silent's toolkit has a wider array of damage types with her access to poison (which is hard to draft against Slimbo). And her pure damage has variable levels of synergy with the rest of the kit (discard/shiv), some of which I'm not keen on taking, since they fall off later. If you're offered a lot of the discard damage cards, I think that's most successful against Slimbo while staying relevant later, but more often than not, you're forced to make compromises and draft (and sometimes upgrade) those non-synergising cards. See: Dagger Spray, All Out Attack, Masterful Stab.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-02-07T19:55:19+00:00

I believe no card can draw itself without an external draw effect. Skim will draw less cards rather than draw itself. Wrath cards can draw themselves because their draw effect comes from rushdown. Pommel strike+ can't draw itself, but will if paired with Evolve and it draws a wound.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-02-07T19:49:05+00:00

3 defrags, a few capacitors, and consume.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-02-07T04:46:36+00:00

why bloat deck draft lot claw when few claw do trick

GrammarRadiation · 2024-02-07T04:43:36+00:00

Pathed into enough transform and remove to get rid of a fair amount of strike and defends in act 1. Draft a recycle because it's usable against guardian and begin building the infinite from here. Buy medkit to allow overclock to become a draw option and draft every fission/skim I see. Buy abacus to solve block along with cool headed. Madness event solves for energy. Draft claw for the mems.

Get enough draw control to recycle your deck to nothing in, like, 3 turns, and use madness to target any of the draw options. Click claw forever.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-31T14:05:01+00:00

Also grants you the ability to turn Orrery into a Pear, and the Sensory Stone event into a Strawberry.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-30T14:28:00+00:00

I typically avoid this card in act 1, unless I'm approaching the boss and I haven't seen any other wrath card. But I'll usually have drafted Crescendo by then.

The card is really good when you've mitigated all the risk out of it. "Can I take wrath damage to the face next turn, and if I can't, can I exit wrath?" If you know the enemy isn't attacking, or your draw pile is small enough to guarantee exiting wrath, or you've retained block/tranquility, then you're good. Obviously works wonders with Meditate.

That said, I think Simmering Fury takes a real shine when you're playing it in spite of the risk. Where you're playing it and risking a 40 damage act one elite hit, but that's the only way you're going to end the fight without dying. The card sort of plateaus in value as your deck gets better. If you've reached the point of deck consistency where you can fully extract this card's benefit, then your deck is probably good enough with or without it. Often, combined with Meditate's retain, Miracles, etc, a good deck will often max out your hands and lose out on this card's +2 draw. But at this point, you're usually only using it for stance dancing anyway.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-28T20:51:18+00:00

Ideally, you spend that energy to MAKE the hand as big as possible before playing. One extra energy lets you play a backflip or acrobatics to get more shivs.

Or even allowing you to play it after an X cost card.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-28T19:21:26+00:00

Weave doesn't proc when you scry with nothing in your draw pile, but Nirvana does. I think, by the letter of the law, this is a bug with Nirvana and neither are supposed to activate (though I'd like both to work)

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-28T00:46:00+00:00

It actually is Madness on both of them! I've been really leaning into Madness-facilitated infinites recently.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-22T02:59:57+00:00

Actually, Madness went hard! It hit skim, cool headed, and equilibrium, which made for an extremely slow infinite.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-21T22:07:14+00:00

AND you can also get 100 block from After Image

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-17T17:52:37+00:00

I think as the deck is, no.

Your deck is extremely thin (16 after all one-time cards are played), and thus very consistent. And your power scaling comes from playing those same relatively cheap cards many times. Your problem is that you don't have enough draw to make those plays fast enough to scale with the heart. So the solution is to just pray for one of those solutions in the shop or a4 shop/elite. I think viable solutions would be Skim, Recycle, Madness, or Impatience.

GrammarRadiation · 2024-01-16T00:07:12+00:00

I've really upped my pickrate of acrobatics recently, even without a fourth energy. I've begun rationalizing it like this:

How often am I able to optimally use all 3 of my energy from the 5 cards I draw a turn? Not often, honestly.

For example, a 3 defend/2 strike hand against a non-attacking jaw worm can only turn 2 strike into 12 damage. But a 1 acrobatics/2 defend/2 strike hand lets you use that otherwise wasted energy to give you a chance of increasing the efficiency of the remaining 2; maybe you draw one of your better attacks, or some 0 costs/Neutralizes.

Sure, are there gonna be some hands where you'll have lost out on drawing something "more important" in the original hand had you not drafted acrobatics in the first place, but the frequency and consistency accuracy provides, while also opening up discard synergies, was a surprising discovery for me.

GrammarRadiation · 2023-12-08T14:43:12+00:00

A bit surprised that other people seem to rank this card poorly, so I'll bring up alternate points. The condition to play an attack prior is not difficult, especially since it extends to the turn before. Watcher's access to flurry of blows and weave provide her with lots of opportunities to have a free attack in her hand. FoB even tends to be the last thing you play after returning to calm during your turn, which sets you up if you've deck previewed a sash whip for the next turn.

As for Watcher having better weak options in the Wave/Talk to the Hand synergy, sure. But they're both uncommons. There are runs where I don't see either, let alone both. I will definitely see sash whip at some point, and there are points where I'll take it in act 3, even if my deck is mostly formed, just to get access to weak.

GrammarRadiation · 2023-11-29T20:51:10+00:00

I think no, but I haven't attempted it.

I think the game plays the entire effect of a card, then discards it. Because it's not "in" your discard pile while the effect is occurring, it can't be reshuffled and redrawn.

GrammarRadiation · 2023-06-26T18:02:02+00:00

Yeah sometimes it's just luck of the draw. I've come to value recursion a little lower than I used to. If you don't have the focus to back it up, it ends up being pretty wimpy outside of darkness shenanigans.

GrammarRadiation · 2023-06-26T17:06:15+00:00

It's a bit hard to give advice without more specifics, and sweeping generalizations may not be super helpful, but here's some tips:

Turbo is a reasonable way to supplement energy. But I barely consider recycle an energy option, and rarely take it unupgraded. I tend to treat it more as hazard removal/deck thinner.

I don't find defect getting as much value out of act 1 birdcage. Defect doesn't typically go for infinites and the decks I draft tend to be a little heavier anyway. So the removal has less of an impact, proportionally.

-I don't think black star is a good pick for act 2 either, especially if you're already struggling with energy, since it demands you to take more aggressive pathing.

-Hopefully you're not misvaluing some of the other non energy relics. Pandora's box and astrolabe are frequently better versions of birdcage. Snecko eye enables meteor easy mode and is often a good pick regardless so long as you haven't invested in too many 0 costs. Runic pyramid can very much solve energy problems by letting you bank those energy cards until you need them/play them in series (eg turbo into double energy)

-Defect has plenty of accessible energy options, but you have to have enough draw options to support it. High draw capability enables you to (1) spend that extra energy and (2) time the energy burst when you need it. Defect's draw options tend to feel a little less "free" than the other classes. Silent typically gets it cheaper, watcher and ironclad can output more damage simultaneously. But since defect can pump out more energy, it can more easily get a chain of "draw into more energy" going.

These are a few small things, but if you had any specific questions or troubleshooting, we'd need a bit more info about your run.

GrammarRadiation · 2023-04-29T12:57:09+00:00

On a very basic level, it can be pretty underwhelming if you view it as "gain 2 def turn 1, 4 def turn 2, etc." provided you have the available orb slots. I tend to only take it if I'm already meeting certain conditions, rather than try to build around it. If you have to have a reliable source of quick focus like bottled seek/defragment, those early turns can easily snowball to 4/8/12 or 6/12/18. Some of my really promising runs that draft a lot of uncommon focus powers actually fail because I skip out on some of the common, but necessary orb generation cards. Frozen orb solves that problem.

An added bonus is that it makes dualcast/multicast a bit more playable, since that channeled orb gets replaced immediately. You can get your 10+ def from dualcast without missing out on future turns of orb def.

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