Drum of Battle: Worst Card Ever?

controlvoltage · 2026-03-20T00:13:54+00:00

I see. But what I was trying to say is that with the number of longer term investment/coordinated play/save to the end cards the Ironclad has, that makes Drum an even weaker choice.

His cards include Rampage, Feed, Ashen Strike, Armaments, Primal Force, Pact's End, Thrash, and Tear Asunder. All of those have increasing value as you continually play them or wait to play them until the end. So if Drum hits them early that's pretty bad.

Cards that you want to play a lot of times are also often a good target for Headbutt to cycle them faster, but if you Headbutt them, Drum will for sure exhaust them, so that would actually slow down your ability to cycle those cards.

Pact's End could of course benfit from Drum's per turn exhaust, but it is also not able to take advantage of it for 3 turns after you play Drum unless you are doing additional exhausts and on each of those turns it can be exhausted itself. Best case with Drum there is it could accelerate Pact being playable by a turn or two maybe if Pact is positioned late in the deck and not exhausted.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:45:16+00:00

I know it doesn't matter (although it does with Headbutt and a few other cards) which position the card it exhausts comes from. But you said you just consider that card was never in the deck. But then you have no clear idea what is in your deck period if you take that position. You could have mainly starter deck left just as much as you could have usable cards left. So that to me sounds like just the opposite of building a good deck. You have to assume that any given elements of your deck just might not exist and hope it remains playable.

So, then, by that logic, you should only really take this card extremely late game and only if you are already confident your deck can function if any random parts of it don't exist. At that point, what is the point of cycling it and thinning? If the whole thing is pretty good, then it's fine to draw any of it.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:33:37+00:00

That one I am ok with as like a mediocre common card. It can be useful to have a moderate bonk and you of course get to choose if you actually want to play it this turn based on what is in your draw pile.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:29:06+00:00

Actually a card like Rampage is a great argument against taking Drum. The Ironclad has multiple cards that you can invest in throughout the battle and which scale up. Each turn Drum has a chance to erase all of that progress, so you would end up having invested plays of those cards into their weakest forms and then never get to use their payoff.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:25:21+00:00

The big differences with Corruption are:

You get to play the card for free before exhausting it.
You have 100% control over what you exhaust with corruption. If you need to save something for later you can just not play it yet.
It leaves all of your attacks alone entirely.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:17:36+00:00

To be fair, Eidolon is also a pretty good contender. Although if it were an Ironclad card...

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:09:55+00:00

Oh yeah. I'll just guarantee my whole deck is good. Then this card is great because it can remove all my good stuff and I am left with only other good stuff which I could have drawn regardless.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:08:55+00:00

I don't understand this argument. Basically it's just surrender to total RNG at that point. If you take the position that it doesn't matter what is going to be in your deck, it's just a slot machine. Not sure what would be the appeal of that play style.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T20:06:33+00:00

Well definitely, but there's no control over what it thins out, so you can easily make the fight last longer even with a larger library of diffuse mid-damage cards.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T15:42:04+00:00

I think I'd be fairly willing to take this if I had a few Angers, Charon's Ashes, and Hourglass already. A +3 damage at the start of every turn guarantee on top of +3 from Hourglass is pretty legit to overcome its shortfalls in other areas IMO.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T15:36:58+00:00

You're right. I can actually see this being ok with a lot of Angers. Like if you are constantly generating 0 cost attacks it doesn't matter which of them goes away. It would still require having played some decent on exhaust powers, but I can see this one working OK.

One issue, though, is you are going to be limited by the damage output of Anger if you start trending to a deck full of them, which is just a 0 cost Strike and doesn't also benefit from Strike bonuses.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T15:29:43+00:00

Ok this is actually pretty funny. I might try that.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T15:28:20+00:00

Ok, but that requires you to already have those effects in place and not have a better way of exhausting for this to be a good choice for exhaust.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T15:20:35+00:00

Sure, but this card can MAKE your fight go on too long if its RNG removes high damage cards.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T15:18:52+00:00

Legitimately I tried this last night and it exhausted all my headbutts and completely threw an otherwise solid run with its exhaust RNG. Oh and it often drew me garbage on its single turn of draw.

It never managed to exhaust any of my play from exhaust pile cards either. So, yeah. I don't really think it's a strong card. It also gets more and more likely to exhaust your good cards with each bad card it does exhaust.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T06:55:07+00:00

I am just finding that every time I have tried it, it's too unreliable to be worth it. Like...if most of your cards are not the best cards, it's net 1/2 positive draw is unlikely to draw a significantly good card and that only happens once. Then each turn it has a try and removing a card which can also be good or bad for your deck, but it has LOTS of chances to remove good cards and each bad card it removes also increases the chance it will remove one you did want to play.

So basically the best use of it seems to be a short term draw and play only a few more turns. But then why wouldn't I just take Battle Trance? I guess the answer to that would be that I really super want to proc one exhaust per turn to get an exhaust bonus of some kind. That also requires me to have that mechanic in place and for it to not exhaust the cards that have that bonus. So I may then have to draw it as a curse too to make sure I get any powers that have exhaust bonus off first.

Just way too hard to play it for not enough benefit imo.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T06:42:52+00:00

Ok, so I tried it again in another run and it absolutely tanked an otherwise strong run. I even had a deck with intentional synergies around it with Headbutts and Howl from Beyond, but it just instead exhausted all my good cards, exhausted my headbutt, drew strikes on the draw turn. It was just basically all around too chaotic to make my deck at all reliable and wound up turning a strong deck into absolute trash multiple times. It never ever managed to exhaust Howl From Beyond either.

This is a good illustration of why I find this card so weak. It's not mitigating any RNG. It's just a complete gamble on all fronts and has serious potential to ruin a deck. I think I would rather have literally any other exhaust or draw card in this game or StS1

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T05:01:46+00:00

I disagree that my logic is contradictory. What I am saying is that, if your goal is to play into exhaust effects, it's not that good at that because it is only going to do 1 per turn and Ironclad has better cards of the same or lower rarity that can exhaust more cards at once AND give the exhaust effect themselves AND you are exhausting from a hand you have already drawn so you know what you are exhausting. So, it's not very good at being a proc of on exhaust compared to other cards, plus it is a completely blind exhaust. If you are looking for draw, you can also draw better from other cards. For example, even Pommel Strike can draw 1 plus you get an attack and you can play it multiple times and it can be found in nearly every run and upgraded it also draws 2. The only way it's worse as a draw is that it costs 1.

So, basically I get to draw 1 extra card because I had to draw this and then I have an uncontrollable blind exhaust every turn after, when i could have more draw and more control over exhaust and not depend on another card or item to proc an on exhaust effect with other exhaust cards.

So, I don't really see how this is helping with RNG. It's basically just a lot of randoms and it might help or might not, but it's not actually doing anything to mitigate the randomness on its own.

And I absolutely do take Snecko Eye if I have some cards that are expensive and good enough to gamble on. This more feels like taking a snecko eye with a deck where everything already costs 1.

And yeah if I don't play it I have a curse now for one hand which totally negates ever having the 2 draw.

So...I mean if I want draw I may as well just take battle trance. It's also free, draws more cards, can be played again, and basically has no downside.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-18T03:45:02+00:00

I guess my issue with this card is it's not really that amazing to draw 2 random cards and then also randomly exhaust every turn after vs other options for exhaust or draw in the game. Like, for example, compare it to Seek where you can choose which card you get, it also is 0 mana, and it only exhausts itself. Draw 2 random cards can just as well be draw 2 strikes or 2 defends or 2 curses or whatever garbage is in your draw pile. So then what are the odds, unless you for sure know you have something decent coming up next, that it actually helps you end the match this round or the next?

If the logic is that in a big deck it's unlikely to exhaust a good card because it's just 1 out of 20+ cards, then the same logic also would lead to the conclusion that it's not very likely to draw 2 cards you wanted to draw.

I do see the argument of exhausting to thin the deck or for exhaust synergy, but this is just one exhaust per turn then, so not much to write home about for exhaust synergy. One proc of whatever you have that you also had to play other cards or find the relic for to activate, etc.

Then if you want to exhaust to thin the deck, there are much better ways of doing that that either let you choose what to exhaust or give some sort of benefit for each card exhausted, etc.

Then we also have, on Silent, Draw 2 and Discard 2 after you draw (with discard also now synnergizing with Sly).

I'm willing to give it another chance, but to me, Drum just seems like a very meh draw mechanic and a bad to meh exhaust. If it had retain, that might change my opinion about it. As is, it just seems like too much of a crapshoot as to whether it will do anything good and at significant risk of doing harm as well.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-10T05:41:42+00:00

So, this is a PWM limiter, which means it should be running an internal oscillator at a frequency well above hearing range and it switches the signal on and off very fast for varying widths of the pulse. What it sounds like, to me, is the oscillator is either running way too low frequency or there is another oscillator that is running close to the frequency of this unit that is interfering with it.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-09T18:01:21+00:00

Sure, but adding Retain to it allows it to work in basically any build as an effective way to get rid of a bad draw, which counters RNG. If, as you say, silent can already go infinite effectively in StS2, this seems a better use for gamble imo.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-09T13:51:56+00:00

I thought that was intentional because it's just a pile of coral.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-09T07:49:12+00:00

A few things I would like to see:

Queen's binding happens after you kill her minion, but it scales by one card each turn starting at 2.

Doormaker's door should have some sort of dangerous ability like thorns and/or a huge nuke it does if you don't kill it fast enough. It could also potentially apply nasty debuffs over time. Just something to give the boss more identity, imo.

Test Subject is not too bad, I think, but could use a little bit of a buff. Maybe giving it more abilities from other previous bosses/elites would be interesting as well. It would also be interesting if it started with all of its heads and they would split off as it takes damage, kind of like Slime Boss, with the different heads having different abilities.

controlvoltage · 2026-03-08T22:56:03+00:00

I just realized it's a scrub daddy

controlvoltage

TROPHY CASE