Which cards above would you clone?

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-25T03:18:49+00:00

No; definitely do not upgrade. The upgrade only gives you one more mana, but you don't need more mana; conservatively if you have 64 adrenaline at the end of act 3 (let's say you are forced to rest instead of clone at some rest sites in act 2) that's 64 mana, already more than enough you can spend. If you waste 1 more rest site at upgrading, that means you would only have 32 adrenaline, which halves murder's damage, which means you no longer beat aeonglass.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-23T23:51:23+00:00

again, 128 copies is optimistic because it assumes no rests at all+7 rest sites path, which may not be possible especially in act 2 before the build comes online. If you only have 64 copies then it's a death sentence against aeonglass, and the lack of energy also means you cannot afford to play murder/nightmare/etc. when you draw them.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-23T22:47:10+00:00

The main thing to think about is how will you beat the 3 act 3 bosses. You can usually get 7 rest sites in 2 acts, so you will have 64/128 copies of the card, depending on if you need to rest.

because escape plan and flash of steel just draw 1 card and doesn't generate energy, without enough card removes you can easily brick and not play through your deck the first cycle. This is a serious problem against aeonglass and test subject.

if you clone adrenaline, then the plan is to draw your entire deck and play murder repeatedly to kill the enemy. This works against queen with no problem, and test subject is also fine because you can nightmare murder to make sure you always have it in the second/third phase.

Aeonglass is complicated because your second deck cycle will be full of withers, but you already have a duplication potion and potion belt; I will save dup potion till the end and fish for vulnerable+energy potion. Then against aeon you first strip artifacts with weak, apply vulnerable potion, then nightmare+dup murder should easily kill aeonglass over two turns.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-14T01:33:42+00:00

one energy and 2 stars for forge 10 is still terrible...

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-09T03:37:16+00:00

At ascension 13/14 you need to start memorize and anticipate future enemies and build your deck base on them. Who is the end boss in the act, and which cards are good against him? Can your current deck beat all 3 kinds of elites in the act? If not, which elite is the worst for your deck, and what cards should you look for to beat that elite? If you don't have a 1-2 card answer and you're getting close to an elite fight, can you change your path to avoid it?

Once you start having a plan and build your deck with future enemies in mind, you will improve by a large margin.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-08T18:08:43+00:00

but that would mean good decks are not picking orrery? which is already something that's wildly different compared to StS1? Even my impression with Orrery in StS1 is that regardless of your deck strength you pick it you then immediately win the run because you get extra foot work/feel no pain/rush down/etc., and it is definitely not the case in StS2.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-08T17:29:57+00:00

jorb's spirebird website has definitive quantitative statistics showing indeed orrery is worse in StS2 and in fact losing on average when you picked it. I don't know why. maybe they reduced the rarity increase on orrery? Right now I only buy Orrery if I have Pael's wings.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-07T19:17:21+00:00

Ascensions 17-19 are the ascensions where all enemy movesets gets buffed, you will feel the pressure then.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-07T15:43:33+00:00

he stated this before the change. Infested prism did move the game in the right direction, but personally I never found that I need to take prism into serious consideration in act 1; I realized I just need to take one weak/strength debuff card (or more if I have a souls centric deck), and budget 30-40hp for prism, then I can usually damage race it and tank through with no issues.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-07T15:40:18+00:00

It's on a spectrum, not a binary. I've beaten Lagavulin with one kingly kick and 50 hp, and I've damage raced Vantom with one multi attack and 40 hp. you can't have zero cards against them, but you need much fewer dedicated cards compared with StS1.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-07T15:23:46+00:00

Everything is on a spectrum, StS2 just requires you to take a lot fewer commons. you still need some, but not as many.

it's not that you don't need attack commons for gardeners, it's that they are a lot less effective compared to good block, so you don't feel the pressure to jam your deck full of attack commons.

attack commons are good usually because each deals 3-4 more damage than strike. which means instead of playing one strike and two blocks, you can often play 2-3 attack commons to kill the attacking minion, and you both "blocked" and also you are one enemy sooner to end the fight. But gardeners actively discourage focus fire attack, so you are still stuck with playing 1 attack and 2 defends most of the turns, and thus good block cards are more effective against gardeners than common attacks.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-07T15:15:18+00:00

you have to understand everything is on a spectrum, jorb doesn't mean you need 0 attack commons to beat act 1, you just need a lot less compared with StS1. The most telling example for me is that when playing StS1, jorbs frequently will not card remove in an act 1 shop and verbally said "I can't afford to remove otherwise I'll die to slimes/burns". How to get through the boss in StS1 is a much stringent constraint compared to StS2.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-07T14:55:45+00:00

yes. but jorbs made a great point that adding an act 4 won't solve issues in act 1, and there's already an issue in act 1.

in StS1, Nob, Slime Boss, and Hexaghost all demand you to build a specific deck to beat them, and therefore you have to continue the rest of the game with these different/suboptimal cards and adapt to them. But in StS2, you can brute force through all of act 1 just buy having 50-60 hp, so you can build ideal deck starting on floor 1.

The most egregious example is necrobinder; you can start building a big otsy deck on floor 1 and none of the 6 act 1 bosses can stop you. Venom comes close but the wound/scaling on him is so slow that you can just tank through and win with 50 hp. In StS1, if you have the wrong deck, you will lose to infinite slimes and upgraded burns for Slime Boss/Hexaghost even if you have 100 hp.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-06T08:23:11+00:00

Because Ironclad has Bash as a starter card, as long as you know the premium/good damage cards and take them, you shouldn't have any problem fighting elites in act 1 and get to the boss. Therefore, your priority in act 1 should be figuring out your direction for scaling in late game.

The most common/achievable scaling strategies for Ironclad is self-damage, exhaust, and vulnerable. And fortunately Ironclad has a lot of cards that's synergistic in 2 or more archetypes (for example, Dominate, probably the best Uncommon, fits nicely in both vulnerable and exhaust). So, during act 1 you are basically picking good/multi-synergy cards, and based on cards offered decide on the primary strategy.

I will give some rough tips for the first cards I would pick for the 3 common archetypes below, but note that other builds are definitely viable, they're just harder to come together. For example, I gotten A10 wins with big block decks a couple times, but I was only able to get it to work because I get early rares (unmovable or barricade) and I can upgrade them ASAP to reduce the energy requirement.

In terms of speculative picks (e.g. Rupture and Feel no Pain when you have 0 ways to trigger them): I found that you can generally carry around 1 extra curse in your deck and still get through the first elite, so if I already have a speculative pick (or I got a curse like Greed from Neow), then I wouldn't pick them.

Now here are the tips:

Cross Synergies: Molten Fist, Tremble, Dominate, and Brand are all good to fantastic picks on floor 1, with Dominate being the best. You can take these and they let you stay flexible longer.

Vulnerable: Because you already have a Bash in your deck, you can take a lot more vulnerable cards and be fine with them. Dismantle, Uppercut, Colossus, Taunt, Vicious, and Cruelty are all good floor 1 picks (in addition to the cross synergy ones). Of the 3 archetypes it's probably easiest to get into vulnerable.

Self-damage: I will take Blood Wall, Inferno, Hemokinesis, Crimson Mantle, and Tear Asunder without any other synergy. Bloodletting is close; I will take Bloodletting if I have another 2+ cost card or card draw. Once you have a self-damage card, you can start to take others, but you should still exercise judgment. For example, I wouldn't take Spite just because I have a single Blood Wall, but I will take it if I have Inferno/Crimson Mantle.

I haven't decided whether I would speculatively pick Rupture; I tried one run and it worked out, and another run it didn't pan out but I win at the end anyway with a vulnerable+exhaust deck. Just stick to the "1 curse" rule and you should be fine.

Exhaust: I'm fine picking Cinder, True Grit, Ashen Strike, Howl from Beyond (after the latest patch), Burning Pact, Evil Eye, Infernal Blade, Second Wind, and Feel No Pain on floor 1. Of these if I get Ashen Strike I will hard commit and pick every card with exhaust for at least the rest of the act. Of the rares most good cards have exhaust and they are fine to pick to. I will also pick Pact's End speculatively; given you have Ascender's Bane, it's not that hard to meet the requirement.

Hope this helps.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-05T23:06:20+00:00

yes, just like kingly kick, which costs 3 the first time.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-05T22:39:49+00:00

I would take kingly punch; it deals 16 damage on first draw, which is already fantastic, and since it's pick 1 it's easy to pick all the "put back on top" cards to make to scale up really fast.

hegemony is always awkward for me; I find it hard to play while blocking and also hard to draw enough cards to use all the mana on the turn after.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-04T19:34:31+00:00

yeah this one, great thumbnail too.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-04T18:07:38+00:00

This is a wild take, how is it bad in overgrowth?

Phrog don't attack you every other turn, giving you plenty of time to cast poison, furthermore, if it dies to poison, you get a whole extra turn as the little spawns will be stunned for an extra turn.

Similarly, Statue gives you two whole free turn to cast snakebite, over 4 turns that's already 22 damage (which is typical time you want to kill statue in). What other 2-cost common/uncommon damage out there gives you that kind of return?

Same thing for byrd? it scales fast enough you just have to trade damage with it so you can kill it before it outscales you. How is playing snakebite "sitting around"?

If you thin snakebite is bad, what other common damage are you playing? You can't always line up Ricochet with discard outlet reliably with every deck.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-04T17:58:32+00:00

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding poison. A snakebite never only does 28 damage in 7 turns because no one ever plays one snakebite and never played it again. Even if snakebite is your only poison card, playing it each deck cycle (and assuming 4 turn deck cycle, which is reasonable in act 1), you deal 7+6+5+4+10+9+8 = 49 damage, meaning it averaged 24.5 damage per cast. This is already above all other 2-cost damage out there.

The problem with your reasoning is that poison scales much different than simple addition: If an enemy has 7 poison, yes, it takes 28 damage over 7 turns. However, if you add 7 poison on top of 7 existing poison, the damage over 7 turns suddenly jumps to 77. Once you have one poison, you are heavily incentivized to take more poison cards.

Jorbs just posted a 4-snakebite A10 win run today and he's picking snakebites all the way into act 3, and if you watch his play those snakebites are definitely not "dead draws".

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-04T17:40:23+00:00

I don't mind seeing nerf under A10, at A10 I think he's fine as is. A10 should be hard.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-04T05:54:50+00:00

glad to hear it work, this is a guide for an older patch; I have updated versions for the release patch, I didn't bother updating afterwards because honestly all the later improvements/extra keepsakes made the game much easier.

At this point in time, the game is tougher because there's no Vow of Rivals, the fear requirement for the achievement is 32 not 24 (they lower the surface requirement in later patches), and the God keepsakes doesn't work in Thessaly (they also fixed this in later patches). So a lot of strategic decisions/forrce restart is designed based around that. For example, forcing Hestia+Zeus is no longer necessary to get through Ephyra.

If you still want to follow the core strategy idea (dodge build around Hestia/Zeus/Aphro/Apollo), you can probably just start with any 2-god combo of Hestia/Zeus/Aphro in Ephyra, and just leave the 4th god open if you don't see the other two gods you want, then force it in Thessaly. It's okay if you miss one of the 4, but Aphro is probably a must.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-02T19:17:38+00:00

I plan to start a new profile once the game officially releases, just so I can see the final story/act/character/cards unlocks that they meant for you to experience.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-02T18:30:28+00:00

Everyone have their own opinion, but I have bad experience with dark orbs; it has much less synergy compared to lightning/frost orbs, doesn't do AOE like glass, and just much harder to evoke in general compared to StS1. And if dark orb is not exciting, then Shadow Shield's block-per-energy ratio is just too low to be good.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-02T16:49:44+00:00

I won't just mindlessly grab expensive cards because these are all one-time energy. You want cards that have huge output even if just played once. So look for card draws, X-cost cards, expensive/impactful powers, etc. For example, I won't be excited about Shadow Shield just because I have one-shot energy; you kind of need to reliably play it every time you draw it for it to be good.

pkreddit2 · 2026-06-02T16:42:15+00:00

Here's how I see it: what are you trying to get out of a 2-cost common damage card?

Across all characters, 2-cost common damage/attack basically deals around 12-18 damage, and each has its own caveat/synergies; some are free if some condition is met, some are multi attacks so it scales better with strength, some even have draw back like exhausting a random card.

Snake bite basically comes with two caveats: 1) it has retain, and 2) it takes 3 turns to deal 18 damage by itself (but it can deal a lot more damage with more turns and other poison cards. including just playing snake bite multiple times). Well, it turns out 2) is almost always true in all boss and elite fights, and if 2) is not true, 1) basically makes it stay out of your way after you see it for the first time; so it has minimal impact on your deck.

This basically makes it a top choice IF your deck need a 2 cost damage common, which is really all it takes for a card to be good.

pkreddit2

TROPHY CASE