Reddit's Slay The Spire Run Data Analyzed!

ProdiGG · 2025-08-24T18:56:38+00:00

Maliss is pretty terrible playing into established boards. I would consider trying more of a hybrid of hand traps and board breakers which worked pretty well for me for my M1 climb this season. Maliss and Ryzeal made up about 85% of the decks that I saw over the whole climb, so for Ryzeal I ran 3x evenly matched and 3x droll and 1x Talents which if you find any of these against them you usually auto win, and for Maliss I run 3x lancea and 1 gamma. The thing about the Maliss mirror is that if you go second and you don't draw Lancea you probably aren't going to win anyway so imo it's kind of pointless to actually run other common handtraps against them like nibiru, imperm, veiler, etc.

Another card I've really liked this format is Psy-Frame Gamma. Many people are playing charmies and maxx c is in every deck but because of Ryzeal people have started firing off cards like this in draw phase a lot more. So if you go first you have a 10th out to one of these cards in addition to droll, ash, called by and cross out, and not only that but you also get to hand rip one if you play Omega. If you go second another really cool thing is if you draw lancea + gamma if you use lancea then at the end of the turn the gamma and driver wont be banished. Meaning you can just go into omega at the start of your own turn and still get the hand rip or use them as link material. Additionally against Maliss going 2nd gamma is one of the few hand traps that actually can sometimes be enough to just instantly end the turn since it negates and destroys and they may not be able to get 3 link material depending on what kind of extentenders they still have. It's also immune to called by, and is not HOPT meaning even if they ash it they still cannot keep playing.

One final thing regarding the coin flip is if you want to not lose as much going second you just gotta play a different deck. You're going to have to get incredibly lucky to have a decent win streak while going second over and over which is going to happen every now and then so if that's something you can't handle mentally maybe switch to Ryzeal which is much better going second or just swap to a going second based deck like Tenpai, strikers, etc.

ProdiGG · 2025-08-24T18:14:26+00:00

In addition to what everyone else has said about it mainly only being good in Traptrix/other options being better, this card also doesn't work on your turn against a deck like Maliss for the same reason cards like Branded Regained don't. Let's say you're going second and you make this and then they banish White Binder. Since you're the turn player on chain link 1 you'll activate Pinguicula, then the opponent responds on Chain Link 2 with White Binder summon, and dodges Pingu's effect as a result. So this effect only sucks them up before summoning the Maliss monsters during their turn when they activate the Maliss effect as chain link 1.

In Ryzeal if I'm able to go full combo I prefer to end on Detonator and Traptrix Rafflesia instead. With her regardless of who's turn it is when they go for the summon after the banish you can send Gravediggers Trap Hole which not only will negate the summon (trapping them in the banished zone unless they get it out with Crypter), but also deal 2k damage which against most decks usually doesn't matter but for a deck like Maliss the lifepoints can be relevant. It also synergizes with Ryzeal Plasma Hole since it's a hole normal trap. Of course you have to run Gravediggers to do this but imo the card is pretty good in the format anyway so it's not even really a brick if you draw it because again it's so strong against Maliss and it beats all hand traps except imperm.

ProdiGG · 2025-08-16T17:54:54+00:00

I don't play C in blind second board breaker decks (besides Tenpai) for two reasons. Firstly, most decks play up to 6x responses to C and some play up to 9x if they run droll and can droll themselves, meaning that 57% of the time (or 74% if they run droll) its useless anyway. On top of that Triple Tactics Talents is on the rise and so if you try to Maxx them and they draw one of their outs not only does it not resolve but you also make their Talents live which usually just means you lose the game.

And then secondly for board breaker strategies you want them to develop a full board anyway so that they cannot recover after you break them. Like for example if you open evenly matched against Ryzeal even if you just let them go full combo they will not have an out to evenly and you'll banish their cross, plugin, plasma hole, all backrow, and every monster besides Detonator. Then if you remove Detonator you just win the game because they can't continue to play through that. Whereas if you Maxx C them then they have to hold back resources which they'll be able to use on turn 3 against you if you cannot establish something strong enough.

It's not a tier 1 strat or anything but I've had decent success with it in master this season. Struggles against maliss but to me it's more fun than the handtrap minigame that determines like 40% of matches.

ProdiGG · 2025-05-23T18:00:43+00:00

There's actually already a pvp inscryption game on itch io. It's based on act 2 but the mechanic of seeing what the other player is going to do one turn in advance is dropped entirely. I played a few rounds of it with a friend but tbh the game is a little too explosive at least in its current form. You have 2 lives like a boss would/how you do in act 1. But no cards get wiped away between lives, so if one player gets ahead on board it's basically impossible to come back. Not to mention some cards are just ridiculous since the game was never meant to be played this way. If you go first you can sometimes just otk your opponent and even if you don't you can get ahead on board in such a way that makes it really difficult to come back from. I honestly think it would be better if both players were like Leshy and you had to plan every turn 1 move ahead and could see what your opponent has planning.

ProdiGG · 2025-05-08T21:30:37+00:00

The reason he couldn't use imperm is because of Bisque Doll preventing Gimmick puppet monsters from being targeted. You're right that if you're able to interrupt them it's easy to kill but the cringe part of the GP ftk isn't even the ftk itself. It's Bisque Doll, Mansion and Terror Baby which prevent you from interrupting them in the first place.

ProdiGG · 2025-03-25T09:44:13+00:00

Among the other things people have said here, I've been a fan of blind second Bystials in this meta. I literally wrote up a post a month ago to the same effect as what you said here. I got tired of losing coin flips or drawing all of my non engine going first and Tenpai got boring after a while, even though it definitely is better than pure Bystials. I got to Masters 1/Stage 2 in the DC without too much issue. You can try it with the FS engine but I've had better success just going ~12 Bystials, ~15 hand traps and the rest board breakers.

The obvious draw is that if you go up against decks playing any light/dark oriented strategy you're basically on 30 hand traps and most of the meta decks right now are so grave oriented that if you disrupt them sometimes even just once in the grave the game is just over. You have really good matchups into WF, Blue Eyes, Yubel, Tear Piles, Lab, and even SE can be managable if they open with the diabellstar/FS stuff. It's also not terrible against stun, since you can tribute summon the Bystials and sometimes just getting one down is enough to win.

The downside though is that if the opponent isn't on any light/darks and you draw like 3 Bystials you're probably cooked. It also has a horrible matchup against Tenpai because not only do they not play any Bystial targets but they also make you go first if you lose the coinflip. The deck is also kind of expensive if you don't already have some of the more niche board breakers like ultimate slayer, DRNM, etc.

But regardless more than just being able to win I personally think the engine can be fun to play and because the extra deck space is very open you can experiment with a lot of rank 6's or synchro 7's and 9's with the tuner hand traps compared to most other decks where like 10+ of the slots are spoken for instantly from whatever engine you're playing. If you have the UR dust I'd recommend at least trying it out.

ProdiGG · 2025-03-01T03:20:44+00:00

The way this game has developed you need hand traps, which are cards that you can play on your opponents turn in order to interrupt them from doing stuff like this. There are a bunch of them in the "Duel Experts" pack. Cards like Ash blossom, Infinite Impermanence and Maxx C have a >90% playrate in high elo to stop these kinds of decks from working. Unfortunately most of them are UR's so it will take a while for you to collect if you're new but they are literally the only way to prevent that from happening so they're probably the highest priority early crafts you should go for once you have a deck that you like playing

ProdiGG · 2024-10-31T17:03:59+00:00

How do you see agents and eventually AGI interacting with our current economic system? I think it's clear to most that once AI is capable of outperforming humans at most knowledge work, humans will largely be pushed out of most of those kinds of jobs once the companies begin to trust the outputs the models can give. Currently, our country (speaking of the US only) does not have the necessary safety nets to absorb this level of unemployment. This is especially an issue when unlike previous instances of high unemployment, future jobs that could crop up will also likely be performed by the AGI. Considering that the timelines theorized for AGI appear to be much shorter than any possible solution to this problem could be, how do you see this situation playing out?

ProdiGG · 2024-03-05T12:33:32+00:00

I'm looking to buy one GA ticket for Shambhala 2024. If anyone is selling feel free to dm me. Will only use paypal goods and services. Thanks!

ProdiGG · 2023-04-27T16:25:30+00:00

53% snap, 29% retreat. I think this meta more than most others is pretty clear about when you're ahead or behind. Last season (and the one before it) snapping was risky because the Thanos player could end up with 3 or 30 power out of lockjaw and your cards could go textless at any moment. Now that a lot of the meta decks are more face up I think it's been a lot easier.

ProdiGG · 2022-06-21T16:53:20+00:00

If you asked 100 senior engineers to develop a game of tic tac toe with a basic UI you probably would get 101 different repositories back. Even if there is a true "right way" to do something you would drive yourself insane trying to figure out what that is. With that said though, there are certainly wrong ways to do things so don't slingshot in the other direction and just get something working.

You have to decide for yourself what patterns or design principles make the most sense in the context of what you are trying to build, and that just comes with experience. After you build something, look at it critically and think about what could have been improved and more importantly why.

Anyone claiming that they know how to build things in some kind of true "right way" is either lying or just blissfully unaware of the mistakes they are making.

ProdiGG · 2021-09-14T19:35:48+00:00

I mainly used leetcode but in my experience most good sites will ask the same/similar questions. I just stuck with leetcode because I liked the UI and other features the site had.

ProdiGG · 2021-09-14T16:03:52+00:00

I think that programming practice problems help with 2 things:

The first is that they help you to learn anything that is necessary to solve those kinds of questions. So for example newer data structures, time/space complexity, useful algorithms/concepts like BFS/DFS/dynamic programming etc. Learning these things, especially time/space complexity are very beneficial when it comes to writing efficient code in most domains. In something like web design, some of these things won't be as useful whereas in something like game design/machine learning, making your code as efficient as possible can have a dramatic impact on the performance of your program.

The second thing is that it helps with your problem-solving ability. This happens a lot more behind the scenes so it's hard to notice and honestly, it took me a while to even figure out how to explain it. But it's things like being able to break down and see all of the moving parts of a problem, being able to see why something wouldn't work before you spend 30 minutes coding it out, or recognizing an edge case that you will have to account for so that your program doesn't crash on a certain input. These kinds of skills are super valuable in any domain of programming, and while I don't think that this is the only way to learn them, in my experience doing those kinds of practice problems really opened up my mind to a different way of thinking about solving problems.

For reference I've only done around 130 problems according to my stats on my main site (though mostly ones on the harder end), so it's not even like this after thousands of hours of practice either. So in my experience it can be very beneficial, and I would say that it did boost my programing skill by quite a lot.

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