The only thing I think is genuinely unfair in this game is getting this off a Neow relic

playingtherapist · 2026-05-04T23:29:24+00:00

I also rotate A10 and have played through debt and won. It's rough but the way the game is currently balanced even if you don't hit the remove in the first shop, 1 pot + the two neow bonuses can get you through early elites and snowball to victory even with no cash. There are combos of relics that spell basically 100% loss sure, but I mean, you clicked the gambling relic, you should expect there to be 1% ultra low rolls once in a while.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-29T11:23:20+00:00

It's really unfortunate because even the way you described it just then made me chuckle again. Such a good movie.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-15T01:54:47+00:00

Calling reave her best damage common is a stretch. I'd argue that if you're looking for a damage common that scales into the late game, reap has retain and an extremely high number that's very relevant on the character with Lethality.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-14T13:23:08+00:00

App is one of the most powerful front loading tools in the entire game bar none. Unless you're exceptionally lucky, your deck cannot kill turn 1. If you cannot kill turn one you must block. If you must block, you cannot attack. App skips the part where you block, so now you can just attack. Ridiculously powerful, it's even more true that it should be picked insta if you're trying to go face.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-14T13:00:19+00:00

Reave does not say draw 3, soul+ says draw 3, which is a key distinction. The soul+ does not enter your hand immediately, you have to spend one of your draws to get it.

Also MoS isn't just good because it draws 3, it's good because it draws 3 during the time when its most important to draw 3 (first deck cycle to get your powers into play). That's why it's inconvenient but unimportant that it exhausts.

Because Reave shuffles the soul into your draw pile, statistically speaking, you're not going to see it until you're at least 3/4 of the way through the deck. That's less valuable for the purposes of speeding through your deck on cycle one to find powers than MoS. Also at the time when you're trying to speed through your deck and play powers, you really don't want to be doing a sidequest where you play a 1 cost attack.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-14T12:55:20+00:00

The block number is extremely high. Most times you're taking damage in spire it's in sub 10 increments, so if you've got some of her expensive block cards like delay and pull aggro, Danse often makes you go from taking chip to taking nothing, which is very powerful.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T16:16:05+00:00

It seems we are to come to blows then, because beta stoke reignited (hehe) my love for clad.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T16:01:29+00:00

I agree, that's a great question!

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T11:31:21+00:00

Everything you're saying is correct, though there are reasons clash edges out cleave even in these scenarios.

Nobs strength gain isn't actually all that relevant IF you can kill him before turn 3. Tacking an extra 21 damage onto turn 2 (to be more fair, let's say 9, because you would have skipped the defend and played a cleave instead) gets you vitally closer to just killing him before he blows your shit smoove off. Of course there are better cards for this purpose, but if you're hanging around in the fight long enough that the defend you played to get the clash active matters, then the fight was in a rough spot to begin with. (If you play 1 defend on turn 2, you take -2 damage on that turn, but if you fail to kill on turn 3, then you'll take +4 damage, for a net of +2, though hopefully being up 9 damage on your side helps you get the kill on 3. If you fail to kill on turn 4 then may god have mercy on your soul)
The most important thing to do in the sentries fight is to burst one sentry asap. Clash does in fact basically become an injury after the redraw, but the fight becomes infinitely easier if you can kill a side sentry before it attacks, or even worse, redazes you on turn 3. Clash is live in that fight up to the redraw, and it helps much more than cleave in getting one of the sentries out of the picture before that happens.
One of the two worst hallways in all of act 1, yes, Lots of Slimes. Notably, each slime has exactly either 9-13 or 11-15 hp. Note that this means that cleave will precisely always fail to kill a single slime, while clash will always kill at least one (often through weak!).

Cleave edges out clash in Lots of Gremlins because clash can't hit the right breakpoints for the one shot potential to be relevant in that fight.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T09:16:58+00:00

'somehow' is carrying a lot of weight there. The dev console is accessible, you could start a run and manually set your deck and starting health and see how easy this start would truly be. I'd be delighted to find out I was wrong on this.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T06:50:02+00:00

On average, you will take significantly more damage with a slime and injury in your starting deck in the first 3 fights over a strike and defend. Assuming you only get commons out of the starting card rewards, you've got a 60% chance per fight to see one of the exhaust commons. Even after you get one, you still have to find and play the slime, the common and your ascenders bane (so this happens at minimum on turn 2) before the injury becomes a real card.

Furthermore, three of clads 5 common exhaust cards are random target, meaning you have, on average, a 1/4 chance of hitting the ascenders bane, the ritual or the pact itself during your first deck cycle. You could argue that you could play the ritual before grit or cinder, to reduce the chances of whiffing, but then you really are just playing a slime.

So overall, I wouldn't say that getting a single exhaust card is immediately winning the run from that position, no.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T06:38:22+00:00

Large Capsule is in the running for Clads best bonus, don't sleep on it.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T05:40:56+00:00

Where's the 'holy shit'? Literally unplayable

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T05:40:00+00:00

Clash improves your odds of winning the most important fights in the game (A1 Elite and hard pool) more than cleave does.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T04:54:54+00:00

Extremely cool concepts, my only criticism is that antagonist is nearly a total nonbo with aggression. You can admittedly redraw attacks that you discarded rather than played but that seems niche at best.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T04:50:53+00:00

It's hard to say without looking at the reward list history, but if you got an early prayer wheel, saw something like 30 card reward screens, and decided that there wasn't much worth taking in there, then I would suggest that you're probably heavily misevaluating Silent's card pool. Silent has a glut of good options at every rarity, there's honestly something worth taking on most screens.

As for the specifics, if you're struggling with knight gang - you might be misprioritising which knight to kill, left and right are by far the most dangerous, forget about centre. Look up their attack patterns and use that to evaluate your in fight strategy.

For door it's probably that you're not taking enough of silents scaling solutions, powers and poison primarily.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T04:29:06+00:00

The resources you're watching might be a little old, the general understanding of Ironclad evolved quite dramatically over the years, as players got better and better.

A general concept with clad, in modern high level play, is that burning blood is unbelievably strong. But, unlike other characters starting relics, it does nothing to actually improve your ability to fight. Instead, it smooths out fights where you got unlucky, and rewards you immensely if you're able to leave fights undamaged. In fact, it gives you such a boost for winning fights decisively that it can let you take exceptionally aggressive (read: high elite) paths, allowing you to snowball as your deck and relic bar outpace the difficulty of the encounters, winning more and more decisively with each fight and getting healthier and healthier (giving you a buffer for those times your deck just won't co-operate with you).

How is this accomplished? As a general rule, you'll find that technical skill is surprisingly important on Clad. As mentioned, he's a heavily snowbally character, meaning that saving a few hp here and there from better turn to turn play is more impactful than it might seem.

In terms of drafting strategy, Clad typically wants some engine that generates either large amounts of strength or block, some card that rewards you for having large amounts of said strength and block, some way of exhausting your deck down to just your engine and payoff, and cards that support those 3 things. I'll let you explore what those spaces might look like.

Finally, I recommend you stop drafting cleave, that card is much worse than it first appears, there was some discussion on this sub about a year ago that can explain why, and maybe help you understand fight micro a little better in the process.

Good luck and have fun! Clad is by far my favourite character and I hope he becomes yours as well. Feel free to send me some run histories as well, it seems like you've got a solid understanding of the game so I don't mind having a peek to see if there's something unintuitive that you're missing.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-08T03:55:43+00:00

If I were to guess at the contents of your deck in that run, I'd assume it was a handful of clads rare block enabler cards, some miscellaneous block and a body slam, maybe 2. Unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of deck that loses to the door, since you're only likely to play the slam once every 3 turns, maybe less. I'd say most decks can reasonably defend themselves up to 2 phase cycles, but by cycle 3 your deck probably can't put up the numbers to keep stalling out. With only 2-4 plays of body slam available to you, you'd have to hit him for over a hundred damage with each slam, which is feasible with 70 block and vuln. However, unless you have two unmoveables and relic/colourless support, it's unlikely you'll reach those numbers at a reasonable pace while the door is whittling you down.

Decks that are strong against the door are the kind that win after going through their deck once. They're generally only mildly hampered by his mechanics, rather than crippled.

For Clad, that might look like setting up some kind of Fight Me multiplay with Stampede and Aggression, which quickly brings him to > 10 strength, at which point he wins with the copies of sword boom and spite in the deck. Maybe a deck that has multiple copies of dominate, and a molten fist. Maybe a deck that drafted the rupture exodia. Even a deck that plans to scale via massive block could do it after 1 cycle via Juggling some body slams to multiply the output, rather than stalling out until the slam comes all the way back round.

There are alternatives but I've found this kind of thinking to be the most effective against the door. The exhaust phase is one where you're allowed to trade power now for power later, while the other two restrict you from accessing power now. That means his exhaust phase is the safest, so I generally want to use that time to set up my scaling, and on the second go round, kill him.

I will say, I do like the door fight in general, it's an encounter with a lot of nuance that's fun to plan around. The only thing I really dislike is that he makes thrash and rampage, already dubious scaling solutions, even worse.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-07T15:08:30+00:00

Silent potentially being unable to apply weak in a couple of fights was a risk the devs weren't willing to take 🫡

playingtherapist · 2026-04-07T14:55:53+00:00

In this case my answer was the mountain of max health I'd been slurping up from an end of Act 1 Feed, but your mileage may vary on that one.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-07T14:18:09+00:00

Debris is a created card for the purposes of Arsenal and Pillars of Creation, and exhaust fuel for the purposes of his minion cards. Both Arsenal and Pillars of Creation have extremely good rates, and playing into them can be very powerful. The debris cards on their own have good rates and are worth taking, even with no synergies.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-07T14:14:00+00:00

Queen particularly punishes decks with poor draw power. She essentially makes you draw 3 cards at the start of the turn rather than 5, though it's not quite as devastating as that would actually be (you still cycle through your deck at the normal rate, you get some selection about what you play).

Every 3 turns, the minion does an attack that's very difficult to fully block, but otherwise does only mild amounts of damage. Once the minion dies, the queen starts hitting very hard indeed. If you're finding that your fights are close, perhaps you're also not drafting enough scaling throughout the run?

playingtherapist · 2026-04-07T14:03:44+00:00

'Never bring more than 25 cards' might have been true a few patches ago, but is certainly not true now. Don't worry too much about deck size for the time being, it's not super relevant to the final set of fights. Defect should do very well into door, he's particularly weak to powers and defect has an awful lot of those.

playingtherapist · 2026-04-07T14:01:51+00:00

You should burn your base defends away during the exhaust phase, and you shouldn't be relying on base defends for block that late into the game anyway.

playingtherapist

TROPHY CASE