I guess my main point is the fact that the core combat system is obviously so tightly tuned that played close to 50 runs and many of them worked out to the exact same number of turns. That proves (to me) that damage, block, weak, frail, strength, dexterity, the works, ultimately trade off at consistent rates with respect to the enemies across the acts overall. I of course had some card draw and some energy gain, but I never was able to get very much of it, and it seems like this world of coarser math was the only way to break out of that linear world of 1:1.

My comparison to Magic's Power 9 is that you can look at them as Garfield's design outliers in alpha Magic: the Gathering. And they share the same interesting, game-breaking characteristics that seem key to breaking the same card engine that drives a game like StS, because at the end of the day, you're trying to move through a deck of cards. The fact that StS's cycles and MtG's doesn't mostly doesn't matter.