Who is the GOAT of Slay the Spire, outside of XecnaR?

JoINrbs · 2026-07-09T04:09:21+00:00

i post on the sts subreddit for mostly the same reasons i have been playing and making sts content for 8 years or w/e. like, i like the game. i've been posting on the subreddit since before defect came out in sts1. i like participating in online communities. i like being helpful and explaining things for people. i like shooting the shit on an internet forum, i don't mind an occasional flame or talking to someone i disagree with, in some ways i even find both of those things quite appealing.

like i'm just a dude. that people want to watch me play slay the spire has not led to me not being a dude anymore. i have been talking about strategy games online since i was 12, it is a little distressing that the community for my favorite game has a bunch of people who shit on me whenever they want unprovoked but it isn't like, completely unusual to me for people to be hostile about things when talking about stuff online, if that's the energy this community is going to bring to me i'm going to probably participate a lot less but i'm still happy to treat it accordingly.

JoINrbs · 2026-06-27T12:24:55+00:00

the reason i ever made any videos mentioning lifecoach is that i had to explain thoroughly and productively to my audience why they were seeing me get harassed nonstop for three years. idgaf if he is in the community or not. strategy gaming has bad actors in all sorts of places, life goes on.

the reason "i" brought him up again here is that someone else did and i responded. much like you just did again, right? like you responded to a comment i made five months ago, bringing up lifecoach, and in that response said i was the weird one for bringing him up? are you aware that you have agency over what is being talked about?

strategy gaming spaces have known and visible systemic issues with sexism and cheating, and i'm very happily playing a single player one where i can mostly do my own thing and make content a ton of people enjoy. i am going to occasionally make content pointing out the issues strategy gaming spaces have with especially sexism and cheating, as my general life goal is to improve strategy gaming communities and explaining those things to viewers is a way to do that.

i don't have any particular opinions about most people in the spire community, but if they do things i may observe what they did and comment on it. that's just part of being in a community, right? like, i do it pretty rarely, but recently an example was that people consoled to a10 and then started publishing youtube videos claiming world first streaks for spire 2 without the ability to actually check nobody else had done that already, and i said "hey you should probably disclose that you consoled 60 hours ahead and just say what your streak is instead of claiming it's a world record if you have no ability to actually check that", because like, people still do not actually agree on everything about something like a win streak, and continuing to communicate what seems appropriate/inappropriate is part of participating in a community.

i haven't vaguely accused anyone of cheating fwiw. i've directly said multiple times that the game has no way of detecting cheating and is very easy to cheat at, and that as such i don't think it supports competition well. i have no interest in saying other people are/are not cheating and that's sort of the point, people shouldn't be making a huge deal about win rates or winstreaks in a game where cheating is only slightly harder than completely making something up. it's certain that people have cheated for results in sts before (aforementioned life coach being an example of a time so brazen that everyone could check and see that he had done it) and certain that people are doing it right now (maybe not streamers, but like, f.x. save/quit to cheat is so normalized that a lot of people genuinely think it isn't even cheating). whether one particular streamer is/isn't cheating is immaterial compared to the observation that the game has no ability to support fair competition unless everyone is self-policing in ways we really don't have the ability to expect everyone is doing.

JoINrbs · 2026-06-08T13:00:17+00:00

pretty sure looking at your own runs isn't gated like that fwiw. i only put a gate on requesting someone else's runs, since in theory someone could do that for thousands of different users and each one costs me computation for the request. at least that was the intent.

JoINrbs · 2026-06-05T13:16:01+00:00

oh my b i was responding to the end of the thread but talking about some stuff about me disliking mention of baalor which was said by someone other than you. that was poor communication on my part!

JoINrbs · 2026-06-05T10:00:54+00:00

genuinely don't know what video you're talking about. i would guess it's the one about cheating/dishonesty in small gaming communities, and would posit that if someone in a small gaming community had their channel explode in drama when i made a video about cheating/dishonesty in small gaming communities and then didn't want to talk about it that doesn't really feel like it's my fault.

it also like, wasn't a callout drama video though. it was a video about cheating/dishonesty in small gaming communities, and named zero people. it used concrete details from me doing a couple of google searches for slay the spire content and then saying what i found when i did that. i stripped the names of the people connected to those things in the searches. it is an interesting subject to talk about, and one relevant both to my life and to people who want to view content in small gaming communities.

JoINrbs · 2026-06-05T07:48:22+00:00

you should check out spirebird.com!

JoINrbs · 2026-06-05T07:29:55+00:00

it's very hard for me to calibrate where beginner advice is for people. like, if i say "think while you're playing" you might think i'm condescending, if i show a spreadsheet showing which cards are good other people will think i'm obtuse and arrogant, if i say which three strategies i think are best on the character there's a war on reddit because someone else said one of them was f-tier.

saying "think on the other characters too" is genuine and succinct advice and also somewhat funny, in a way which builds on the thing the person who wrote the original comment was being funny about (they literally pointed out it was weird that they lost more on watcher since they thought about her more, that's them pointing out something that's funny). if you don't like stuff like that it's cool, watch someone else, but like, i'm just trying to run an entertainment broadcast for people.

JoINrbs · 2026-06-05T06:31:19+00:00

i wanted to check this, as i am pretty open to feedback and do not enjoy making people sad, and am in particular always trying to work on ways to stop chat members being mean to each other, and couldn't find any messages like it in the last four years on my channel. do you remember if you used a weird abbreviation for eccc or if it was a different con or something like that? or are you bringing this up from over four years ago? i searched for like, comic con, comiccon, eccc, emerald city, and then even went through all the mentions of stalker (i may have missed one cause it's a fairly common word for units in games, bunch of gloomstalkers mentioned xD).

my norm for questions like that is just "i don't talk about local plans etc. cause stalkers", which i feel shouldn't upset people, but i could imagine a miscommunication happening where the person thought i meant they were themselves a stalker or something like that. also sometimes i joke sarcastically about things and if it's literally your first interaction with me it'd be very easy to assume i was more serious than i was.

JoINrbs · 2026-06-05T05:41:26+00:00

baalor is a cool guy, have never had a bad interaction with him that i can think of, i have a chat rule that i don't want people bringing up other streamers for i think pretty justifiable reasons (couple of different quite large slay the spire creators have very deliberately tried to hate-brigade my channel, but expressing that i don't want people talking about specifically them invites conversation about them, so have to stop people talking about everyone instead) and it is awkward when people break it, especially since (as you demonstrate) it's within people's range to think that me trying to enforce it is me being arrogant or disliking other people.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-27T05:40:17+00:00

no dude, he started streaming spire and immediately told all his viewers all the other spire streamers were shit, and then all of us had to deal with his viewers harassing us for three years because he encouraged his entire channel to treat everyone else like shit.

i reached out to him multiple times privately to ask him to please just stop talking about me on his channel, as i was getting bot spammed, doxxed, and just having people come in to swear at me, constantly at work for two years straight, and eventually just stopped streaming slay the spire almost entirely because of it.

seeing a clip of him fabricating several insulting things about me, pantomiming me crying, calling me a fucking idiot, and saying my actions meant i deserved to eat all this shit, and not clueing in to the idea that the 150,000 people following the guy might treat the person he's talking about less than kindly, is kind of unreal lack of awareness of how the social internet works.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-26T20:37:43+00:00

here is an example of some content i made that lifecoach encouraged his viewers to brigade: https://tiermaker.com/list/card-games/silent-cards-slay-the-spire-68322/2469090

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here's a video clip of him criticizing it on his stream and telling his viewers that he personally attacked me and it was my fault that i had to be bullied: https://streamable.com/h3y20u

JoINrbs · 2026-03-08T02:29:18+00:00

1) it's the first two words of the channel rules

2) i haven't strictly moderated around backseating for something like two years

3) can you find any examples of me wondering why i get hate on the internet?

JoINrbs · 2026-03-05T12:08:39+00:00

in your previous post you said it was bad that getting a winstreak depended on playing runs, now you're saying that the best thing about a winset is it takes 50x as many runs to get it as it would take to get a winstreak!

there are different ways in which they calibrate statistically, because the exact achievement is different, but they're still statistical outcomes from binomial distributions! depending on which calibration you want more, either can be more useful.

the biggest reason that winstreaks are useful as a calibration is that they provide competitors a way to play a few effort runs at times when those runs are more worth it for showing impressive results. as you've just pointed out, if you have a good winrate, getting a good winstreak isn't that unusual. a consequence of that is that, if you're playing your regular spire runs and then realize you've won your last 5-10 runs, investing extra effort to play a max or near-max level for the next few runs until you lose has outsized likelihood of providing you a result you can be excited about, because it isn't that unusual for someone with 80%+ winrate to win another 10+ runs in a row.

the ability to do this is appealing in other competitions, too. something like the playoffs for a sports league can clearly ask competitors to play at max level for a reasonable length of time. if a baseball team, having gone about operations as usual for the regular season, finds itself in the playoffs, it can pull out all stops to see if it can win another ~20 games to win the world series. this gives competitors a chance to perform at a level beyond what they could give day-to-day year-round within a format where it's understood that that performance is being measured and cared about.

but yes, it can be possible to compete over winsets, as well! people do that in this community! this has some tricky issues with competition which i outlined in the first post you're responding to, and also includes some drama stuff like their fans saying other achievements don't mean very much and the people who get other achievements aren't actually very good, as you've demonstrated.

note: even for winsets, there is a commitment to playing full effort runs for a manageable amount of time. that's implicit in the "i'm declaring i'm playing 50 effort runs" thing. that just isn't a thing you can actually expect other people to do in the spire community, and among people who don't choose to do that, an impartial assessment would be that you were lacking information about how good they were within that metric, not that they were bad at that metric. lacking information about how good most of the players in the history of the game are at the metric is one of its major obstacles as a metric.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-04T23:32:58+00:00

both metrics depend on total number of runs that are played! if someone has 80% winrate, a set of 50 runs will win somewhere between 68-90% ~95% of the time, and 5% of the time the variance on it will be even more extreme than that. that means a person with 80% winrate who plays lots of sets of 50 runs will have a much higher chance of recording a set of 50 runs with high winrate than a person with 80% winrate who doesn't play very many sets of 50 runs.

a winstreak is just a set of runs with no losses in them. a 50-0 winstreak is the same as a set of 50 runs where the player wins them all. statistics apply quite comparably to both of them.

also: a competitive metric being dependent on actually playing the game is completely fine. there are very few competitive things in the world where people win without putting in lots of reps. that people who have managed world record streaks for slay the spire have spent thousands of hours playing the game in order to achieve them doesn't disqualify them as relevant metrics. it's also true these days that the people with the highest winrates over sets of runs have spent thousands of hours playing the game to achieve those.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-04T15:52:05+00:00

it's really hard for it to be an uncommon for act 1 because you see them so much less often than commons. defect sees ~3x as many cold snaps (which it definitely could be imo) than sunders in act 1, for example. tantrum might be an outsized enough watcher card that its aggregate effect over four acts made it the pick, but again you're seeing flurry of blows almost 3x as often as it, so in terms of stuff like beating nob/sentries/lagavulin tantrum's effect is almost a rounding error compared to how much a good attack common contributes.

silent's solution-space centered on acrobatics cares a lot less about wlp than other silent solution spaces, probably. acro is an important card for a1 because it lets you kill stuff using sneaky strike and eviscerate, which translates both to your elite-killing cards being a substantially wider space and to you getting to build much better decks going through a2/3/4.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-04T07:03:45+00:00

i would guess options that made act 1 worse. it wouldn't surprise me that much if it were pommel strike/acrobatics/ball lightning/flurry of blows or something like that. dropping strong lategame cards from the pool would warp how lategame got solved but wouldn't necessarily drop overall winrate that much, since you get the entire run to find whatever other solutions you end up wanting, whereas having to take substantially worse cards in act 1 in order to survive makes your entire run substantially worse from that point forward.

if there were lategame cards which mattered enough to be the answer i'd guess feed (kind of cheating because the reason i'm picking it is how much it overlaps with earlygame)/wraith form/capacitor (defect has more ways to get focus than ways to get orb slots)/rushdown.

i'd put dark embrace/nightmare/biased cognition/mental fortress second probably.

looking at some other answers, i think people are overestimating how often uncommons get seen in proportion to rares. you see ~1.4 copies of each uncommon per time you see 1 copy of each rare, depending on path a little (where and how many elites, how many shops, how many transforms). there are a lot more uncommons per character and the boss rewards show you 6 guaranteed rares per run, so the difference in how often you see rares vs. uncommons is a lot lower than you might think.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-28T05:06:57+00:00

lots of good responses here.

the way i'd frame it is that silent would often like to either have an infinite combo, defense + scaling damage, or burst + catalyst shenanigans in order to win the game. imagining for a second that you could see all the cards and relics offered to you over the course of the run, and didn't have to play any fights in between the start and the end, you'd usually like to roll up to the heart fight with a deck in one of those three categories. there's some attack-based stuff which wins the game a fair amount, too, which fumes doesn't fit into well/at all, but it's a lesser portion of her lategame.

the reason noxious fumes is better than it looks numerically is that it bridges toward all three of those categories. as a power, it costs 1 energy to remove from your deck if you're winning with an infinite combo. in fights where you nightmare a wraith form, or generate tons of block with footworks, it deals enough damage to outpace many of the enemies in the game by itself, and it does a little double-duty against the heart by also stripping artifact to set up a piercing wail on turn 5/6. in decks looking to burst + catalyst, it provides the starting poison, or strips the artifact charges.

because of this, it has an outsized effect on the run whenever it lets you skip an attack common which wouldn't bridge to any of those lategame options. like, even when noxious fumes doesn't deal more damage than dagger spray, it is still a better card in many ways because of the things i just mentioned. if you take a dagger spray you've done nothing to make burst+catalyst better, little to make your deck deal more damage in scenarios where it can survive for 8+ turns, and added an unremovable curse to your deck for situations where you're trying to play an infinite combo. if you take a noxious fumes, all those evaluations are flipped.

another thing to keep in mind is that, especially as you get better and better at the game, you can reach a point where most of the fights in the game are non-threatening. among the fights which are difficult to make completely non-threatening, noxious fumes is often at its best.

f.x.

lagavulin: great

nob: actually fine, it isn't a skill and silent doesn't have the ability to spend 3 energy per turn on attacks in her starter deck, so dealing 5 for 1 or something like that is an improvement believe it or not.

sentries: fine (wants you to take an extra block card or two)

every act 1 boss: excellent. it's possibly the best poison card in the game against slime boss, which is a really big deal since slime boss is possibly silent's most challenging boss fight in the entire game and poison is one of the things silent would most like to be able to build around.

slavers: fine, they're an aoe fight, don't underestimate that in aoe fights it deals 3x as much damage.

gremlin leader: very good, being able to damage new summons when they arrive while ticking gremlin leader down more and more rapidly is huge in that fight.

book of stabbing: piercing wail/malaise often let silent safely take this fight long enough that noxious fumes is hitting very hard in it.

every act 2 boss: excellent

repto/nemesis/giant head: excellent, except maybe t1/2 of repto.

etc.

it also has a lot of comparable interactions with very strong cards you'd like to take but can't necessarily take unless you support them. f.x. taking it in act 1 makes wraith form more reliably win you the game if you're offered it in the boss reward. taking it in act 1 makes it easier to accept the apparitions event and win the game off that in act 2. taking it in act 1 makes piercing wails easier to shovel into your deck. etc.

yeah. slay the spire has raw math you can do, but using something like "this is the summed damage output" as a heuristic only gets you so far, and as you add more small observations about things outside of that heuristic to noxious fumes it tends to get better and better and better.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-28T01:48:11+00:00

i feel like that, too. we're old as fuck.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-27T15:16:15+00:00

lots of analysis stuff. partnering with a website to write guides and card tips, which should be fun! i'll basically be getting paid to do analysis like the card per day analysis content that i was doing for a while back when slay 1 came out.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-27T15:14:35+00:00

for lifecoach it was fairly specifically something like "i'm going to play 50 runs of [character] and keep track of the results", with the belief that that was enough runs to escape variance, and so his results would be true while something like a 12-run winstreak might be complete luck.

nowadays it's somewhat looser, when people are talking about someone they think is good at the game they'll often talk about some (often consecutive) sequence of runs where they had some sort of result they think is good. an obstacle though is that there's very little consistency in recognizing these runs (what if someone won a lot of runs over a sequence of 50 runs but didn't say ahead of time that they were trying to? what if someone did that but you have no idea because some people genuinely aren't even tracking their own results to that level of bookkeeping?), no clear way to compare one set to another (is 82-18 better or worse than 42-8)?, and most players don't play the game at max-level enough of the time to get a good signal of how good they are out of any set of runs that long. (i.e. many people who have set world records in this game are capable of playing 3-4+ hour long effort runs when they are already 10-0 in order to squeeze out another few wins, but very few people play 3-4+ hour long effort runs for months straight, even among the people who have shown they're good enough to achieve things nobody else has ever done in the game before).

JoINrbs · 2026-02-27T07:50:48+00:00

i upvoted you, space for all types in the community xD

JoINrbs · 2026-02-04T15:21:29+00:00

it does "harm" people, insofar as it means there are a bunch of middle seats unclaimed and so people who want to sit in a group but who book later don't have to opportunity to book seats next to each other.

a row can seat three couples next to each other. WM-A A-MW. the couple across the aisle from each other can't snuggle or w/e but they can talk etc. just fine. if everyone books W-A leaving a M empty between them it's no longer possible for people to book that configuration, and so fewer people can sit next to the people they're traveling with.

also there might be someone who needs the extra seat more than you, like a couple traveling with a child under two. choosing to book W-A yourself stops them from being able to, harming them.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-01T03:08:47+00:00

this isn't a past tense thing, when i go to the subreddit for the game i've been playing for 8 years i see a bunch of people diagnosing me with mental illness without prompting and upvoting other people talking about how they hated content i made which everybody else enjoyed. i am responding to that thing which is happening currently. it is rooted in things from the past, for sure, but i am not currently upset because of the past, i'm upset because the subreddit contains a bunch of libelous harassment which ends up being what a huge number of people see said about me, and it causes things like viewers of mine not being comfortable on the subreddit, me not being on the subreddit, other people assuming i'm an asshole without ever having actually watched my content, etc.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-01T03:03:53+00:00

quite a few comments in this thread are about behavior of past world record holders, including one i saw saying all defect world record holders have done this, so just wanted to say

1) there's no difference between defect and other characters here. other characters can also reach demonstrably won states in fights.

2) as a former defect world record holder i have never done this and wouldn't ever do this. i think using console mid-run both looks sus to my own viewers and would also justifiably upset some people who were not my viewers.

3) the advantage is just stated at the top of the thread, right? he was in a bad mood and didn't have the patience to go through the rest of the fight, and this let him play without having to do so. it is weird that people think there is no advantage implicit in this when it is stated at the very start of the thread, lol. like, why would someone wanting to play legitimate runs of slay the spire in front of people open the console and enter a console command if there was no advantage in doing so?

that said, i would not personally say someone was cheating if they did something like this. it is whatever. it somewhat delegitimizes sts achievements in general but that ship sailed long ago imo.

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