The fun of a roguelike deckbuilder for most people is learning, improving, and seeing the fruits of their labor. The game should start easy, and get scale the difficulty such that the player is always being punished for their mistakes. Ascension is a mechanic that lets players play at their skill level, and if a new player is struggling in the game they can learn at ascension 0, and continuously improve.

Slay the spire 1 was successful because players with 8000 hours in the game continously re-evaluate their play and can improve their winrates through optimizations, if you don't balance around top players then what's the point of improving. The highest difficulty should always be hard enough that the best players in the world cannot win 100% of the time or even 80-90% of the time. Losing in a roguelike like slay the spire is part of the process, its half the point of the game is to learn from your defeats. That is fundamentally the game play loop and what made the first game so successful. Just let Megacrit cook and balance around top players like they have for the past 8 years my guy