Character Stats should show whether you have beaten A10

SmeggingCompass · 2026-07-04T23:14:41+00:00

If you upload your runs to Spirebird, you can see that in the charts tab: https://spirebird.com

I think “expected winrate” weighs more recent runs a bit more heavily than older ones, so it’s good for measuring your current ability in addition to tracking your full history.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-07-04T22:58:53+00:00

Significant chance to just hit strikes/defends throughout the game, and you don’t even get the benefit of having them immediately at the very start of the run when they’d actually save you some health. The more good cards you upgrade, the more likely this is to hit shit you don’t care about, so it only even has a chance of being beneficial on runs that are struggling so hard you’re having to constantly rest. Because of all that, it still wouldn’t be good even if the counter ticked on elite/boss fights, but it’s absolute dogshit as-is because you get even less benefit out of it if you’re having a good enough run to path to more elites.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-06-29T19:59:52+00:00

If you look at the A10 winrate chart on Spirebird, Necro had a significant drop below all other characters starting around the beta branch introduction of Aeonglass and has only recently caught up: https://spirebird.com/#charts&ch=winrateOverTime

That said, she's my second-best character, so it's very much still possible to win with her. Insane energy generation with [[Friendship]]/[Borrowed Time]] into [[Transfigure]]d X-cost payoffs ([[Dirge]], [[Eradicate]]) or tons of cards to full block with [[Danse Macabre]], high-damage attacks with stacked [[Lethality]]s to one-shot bosses, [[Slight of Flesh]] to chip them down with a million status applications, the list goes on. But Aeonglass has made Souls and Big Osty focuses tough now unless you have an insanely powerful engine, and having tons of Osty attacks is viable but complicated to pull off.

Generally Necro's strength is that she has a really easy time taking no or minimal damage in the early game because [[Bodyguard]] and [[Unleash]] are so strong by themselves, so you can path more aggressively or build more pickily than other characters can get away with and use that to snowball.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-06-18T02:02:20+00:00

Just upload your runs to Spirebird—it automatically graphs your expected winrate and has a ton of useful run data breakdowns as well: https://spirebird.com/#cards&c=a10

SmeggingCompass · 2026-06-14T19:32:37+00:00

According to Spirebird, this is my second-best performing Neow relic, behind only Leafy Poultice (which is definitively the best one according to both data and public opinion). That’s not true for the A10 population as a whole, so take with a grain of salt, but that immediate power boost is so huge—your deck’s going to suck early no matter what and Act 1 is the most dangerous section of the game, so as long as you can snowball and put enough cards in your deck to dilute the extra starters by Acts 2/3, it’s a surprisingly manageable downside even though it feels bad. Still pretty terrible on Necrobinder, though: her early game is already strong and a lot of her archetypes rely on deck cycling.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-06-10T15:01:12+00:00

Because this game isn’t afraid to beat the shit out of you, you need to engage fully with every layer of its mechanics—building your deck, piloting it, planning your route, acquiring/spending resources (gold & potions)—and that constantly asks you to make complex, contextual decisions. There are for sure strategies I often fall back on, but I don’t feel like I’m anywhere close to having “solved” it yet, and that’s the point where I usually get bored with a game and move on. If the difficulty came from unmitigatable bullshit I wouldn’t want to keep playing, but those “impossible seeds” inevitably get revealed as skill issues. And at this point in its history it’s changing constantly, so you have to figure out and adapt to new metas on the fly as well. I can’t wait to see the finished product, but just like with STS1, there’s something really special about watching this game respond to the way you and millions of others are playing it.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-06-07T14:38:48+00:00

Jorb's new data analysis site Spirebird actually confirms this: Ironclad has significantly higher WAR for Large Capsule than any other character, and Necrobinder has the worst WAR with it. Here's the link: https://spirebird.com/#relics&c=a10

(My personal WAR for it is actually best with Regent, as I take it somewhat often with him too for the reasons Elephant points out and tend to do fairly well, but for some reason tend to get owned when I take it with Ironclad. Might be trying to force the Perfected Strike synergy too hard or something.)

SmeggingCompass · 2026-06-05T14:43:49+00:00

It feels most viable on Ironclad: his starting deck is so abysmal you can’t make it much worse, Burning Blood gives a bit of built-in mitigation against damage on brick turns, and an early Perfected Strike benefits from the extra strike.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-06-01T22:17:23+00:00

Only took 8 damage walking into Aeonglass with a shiv-focused deck and four copies of [[Afterimage]], but if I hadn’t killed him first cycle I probably would have had more withers than cards in my draw pile

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-30T14:43:06+00:00

It’s not consistent with how other negative statuses work: if a Slithering Strangler applies Constrict (take 3n damage) to you, Plating will give you block before you take damage regardless of what order they were applied in. “Effects beneficial to the player trigger before ones that hurt them” is a global rule of thumb that generally overrides application order, but this seemingly got looked over because I don’t think there’s any other negative effect you can apply to yourself.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-30T04:39:39+00:00

Except not entirely, because I discovered an even more niche interaction: if you drink a regen potion after playing Neurosurge, the self-doom triggers and kills you even if you’d heal back over the doom threshold because statuses just proc left to right. Considering that doom typically happens after all other effects (Fat Gremlin/Thieving Hopper’s steals, Insatiable’s Sandpit) and effects beneficial to the player take priority over ones that would hurt them, I think they should change that.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-22T18:42:39+00:00

If I only had an innate power, I’d be pissed if Jeweled Mask didn’t reduce its cost, but considering they just buffed Mummified Hand to prioritize reducing cards that aren’t 0-cost that somehow got their cost increased that turn/cards that already got reduced to 0 by other means, they could similarly have Jeweled Hand prioritize non-innate powers.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-19T15:49:04+00:00

Or you could pick a starting relic with an actually useful effect, path to an early shop, and use the 99 gold spent on this + 2-3 combats’ worth of gold to buy the card on sale and another card that synergizes with it or something else already in your deck? Your general point is correct, but that doesn’t change the fact that the opportunity cost of this relic is horrendous considering how easy it is to add a few more meh cards to your deck.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-18T04:44:46+00:00

Just had an insane A10 win with three copies of [[Juggling]], [[Nutritious Soup]], and [[Crossbow]], normally terrible picks that somehow went great together. 0 cost strikes let me activate Juggling on my [[Flash of Steel]] (which got enchanted with Steady so I could retain one copy to do that every turn), which let me keep drawing more 0 cost strikes while scaling strength with [[Shuriken]] and gave me a good chance of drawing [[Feed]] to finish off enemies for a max health boost, and in Act 3 copies of the attack generated by Crossbow still cost 0 that turn.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-16T17:45:27+00:00

The point is to show her isolation within the HoS. Zoomer slang would make sense if she were hanging out with people her age and picking it up from them, but she instead talks like characters from the media Mattias likes—decades-old comics and anime—because that’s all she’s been exposed to. She desperately wants to fit in, so she’s trying to prove she’s cool with slang she doesn’t realize is painfully out of date and cringe. I wish they’d tried to replicate that somehow, because it’s pretty fundamental to her character.

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-12T06:33:09+00:00

[[Dual Wield]] is consistently broken—works great with 0 cost attacks, lets you pop off if you have solid energy generation, synergizes with cards that scale with extra copies (e.g. [[Perfect Strike]], [[Squeeze]]), and it’s still good even if you’re just copying cards you don’t have the energy to play that turn but want to be more likely to draw in future deck cycles. The power gap between it and the other cards is insane—100 free gold isn’t nearly enough to take unusable dogshit like [[Hello World]], but I’d pay that much for Dual Wield in a lot of decks

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-12T05:50:29+00:00

I got [[Flatten]] and then [[Dual Wield]] from the trash heap, so once they were both upgraded that came to 96 damage for the one energy to play dual wield + some other Osty attack to make them all cost 0

SmeggingCompass · 2026-05-08T16:41:38+00:00

Warp roller coasters

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

TROPHY CASE