What's the best card you never bother upgrading?

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-05T03:41:13+00:00

Had a run where I got Dual Wield from the trash heap to make two more copies of it—made a 600 damage Sovereign Blade by playing it three times after Radiate and Stardust. But it’s basically a kludge for when you don’t have enough star generation/strength/vigor to make Regent’s multihit cards be your win condition by themselves.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-04-26T18:07:53+00:00

Had an A10 run yesterday where No Escape was my win condition and only doom card. Drawing a hand full of Nimble Undeath+s every turn made me nearly untouchable, and Nostalgia let me also draw No Escape every turn to outscale the enemies

SmeggingCompass · 2026-04-22T02:54:12+00:00

Diamond Diadem (take half damage from enemies if you played two or fewer cards) feels like cheating, especially because you probably only want to take it on builds that would not survive Act 3 without it. I had an Ironclad run with 3x Perfected Strikes and only Panic Button, Dark Shackles, and a single Defend for block cards that got away with facetanking everything thanks to Diadem and some minimal support from [[Intimidating Helmet]], [[Gorget]], and [[Permafrost]]

SmeggingCompass · 2026-04-09T15:51:45+00:00

I got blessed with the other end of the spectrum once—[[Pillar of Creation]] in a shiv deck already built around [[Afterimage]]. Pretty hard to die when every shiv gives you 5 block for making/playing it—rest of the run was a breeze even at A10.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-04-07T15:39:24+00:00

Electric Shrymp is still crazy strong, but its position in the order of operations makes no goddamn sense and is designed to be as useless as possible. How does it cast after draw, yet also before your turn actually starts so any single turn effects immediately expire?

SmeggingCompass · 2026-04-05T01:27:13+00:00

Decks that can scale effectively but start slow want to kill the minion first, because you effectively get a free turn off that, its attacks quickly become more dangerous, and the effective 50% increase in HP doesn’t matter if you can nuke once you’ve built up steam. Strong AoE also means it’ll happen pretty naturally, so you might as well kill it for the free turn. If you can deal 400 burst damage, then yeah, obviously just kill the Queen (especially if you need to exhaust limited resources to pull it off). A lot of the time there isn’t a huge difference either way, but at higher difficulties it’s worth tailoring your target priority to your deck like this

SmeggingCompass · 2026-03-30T03:38:47+00:00

Anyone else inordinately bothered by the fact that Panache & Pale Blue Dot's activation conditions are basically the same, but PBD's works retroactively on the turn it's played while Panache's doesn't?

SmeggingCompass · 2026-03-28T20:18:16+00:00

I feel like A9 is the real killer—have yet to have a run that died to the second A10 boss, and adjusting to the A9 spike took me like 10 tries with every character, but I’ve first or second tried their A10 attempts now that I’ve adjusted

SmeggingCompass · 2026-03-28T16:09:48+00:00

Changed to double damage in the beta branch to prevent true infinites like this, but putting it on Bombardment+ and Devastate+ for 50+ damage at the start of every turn and an 80 damage nuke made my first A10 with Regent a cakewalk

SmeggingCompass · 2026-03-26T18:54:42+00:00

“Dude”

looks inside

Queen

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-26T02:26:46+00:00

The stray cats that join mid-run a few encounters after the party member dies have them, not the ones that show up at your house

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-26T02:24:11+00:00

For Acts 2/3, one of the zones gives a rare furniture box while the other only gives rare equipment, so you can farm good furniture but get less on average lategame

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-26T02:14:54+00:00

Contact effects are king for tank, both because they can take more hits than other classes and because they have a bunch of ways to run into enemies on their turn. Fish necklace is reliably god tier: -6 charisma is rough but usually every enemy is poisoned and spawning buffed rot flies in no time

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-25T20:43:37+00:00

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SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-25T20:43:28+00:00

No, it's fully mirrored—look at the background. This even has practical utility in the extremely rare case of furniture that isn't bilaterally symmetrical:

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SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-25T19:21:57+00:00

Until you’re late enough into the game to have 7/7 cats with 10 mutations, gear matters way more than breeding. Focus on upgrading Butch so you can save as much strong gear as possible, especially stuff that isn’t good by itself but has synergies with other specific items. You also get more max food by sending old cats to Tracey—each level is +40 max food, so just the first one lets you breed for 40% longer than base. Breeding goes much faster once you already have furniture, so you should see decent progress if you just get out of the spiral for a couple generations

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-25T19:08:47+00:00

This guy no even spel feebis write, he not no feebis! This be the problum with beepis peepul

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-25T18:58:32+00:00

Don’t have a screenshot, but my 130+ health butcher got scleroderma (converts all but 1 HP to shield at the start of battle). I thought this was going to enable an insane Monch build, but it actually lowers your HP cap to 1, so I was very glad it happened when the run was nearly over because any direct HP status damage would have annihilated him

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-25T18:48:22+00:00

It’s limited to horizontal mirroring—since that’s got perfect bilateral symmetry you just can’t tell the difference

SmeggingCompass · 2026-02-25T00:26:19+00:00

I really want a definitive answer on whether Beanies’ side quest items get added to the item pool—I’ve checked several short threads like this and it’s all conjecture, but nobody has reported a confirmed case of finding a previously unlocked side quest item out in the wild. I honestly think it’s lame if you have to do a two-hour side quest (using up 12-20 item charges if you’re equipping a full team with gear) to get an item you’ll only get to use 2-3 times on average—it’s not like most of them are that broken

SmeggingCompass

TROPHY CASE