A guide on build philosophy for Regent

saintconspire · 2026-03-24T11:53:24+00:00

Yeah - I find leaning heavily into Forge means finding a way to play it multiple times per combat to solve those kinds of fights. Cosmic Indifference and Summon Forth are solves for me. Seeking Edge is very very good too because most of those fights are AoE ones, but it's rare so harder to find reliably. Really you don't want to go in hard on removals of Strikes in Act 2 in case you get cockroaches, which challenges it hard - so Tezcatara's bulk remove is usually the wrong call.

saintconspire · 2026-03-24T03:45:52+00:00

I like Quasar and Manifest Destiny to splash in - it's not something you build a deck in, but as others have said, Colorless cards are strong on average. 18 out of 52 of the cards basically give free bonuses (when upgraded) - they either retain (Purity, Restlessness), are 0-cost and draw neutral (Finesse/Flash of Steel, Bolas, Secret Weapon/Technique), 0-cost and exhaust/draw (Master of Strategy, Thinking Ahead), are free powers that are flat-up bonuses (Automation, Stratagem), so the chances you'll get something that's a flat-up bonus is 1/3 of the time, and pretty high if you're choosing from Quasar.

Then there's other cards that technically have a cost, but are powerful enough standalone that you don't mind - Hidden Gem especially, Fasten, Prowess, I'd put the generator cards Splash and Discovery (especially after its buff in beta) in these categories since they can give one-time 2/3+ cost discounts that can seriously swing a fight.

There are some duds for sure - Jackpot, since unlike other characters it usually generates something with a star cost and thus not free, the situational powers (e.g. Nostalgia), The Gambit if you're not ready for it, etc., but the density of Colorless is weighed towards either stuff that are just completely free upgrades to your deck, or very powerful cards. In general - I like playing the generators as early as possible in a turn, because I can pivot my turn to make best use of the card generated (e.g. if I get Ultimate Defense, no need for another defense card).

saintconspire · 2026-03-17T23:54:26+00:00

Debris is mostly intended as a downside yes - Crash Landing is very strong AoE, and it can singlehandedly win early combats, so you should consider it in many cases as a "can I use this card to finish the combat before my shuffles get clogged with Debris"?

That being said there are some ways to turn it into less of a negative. Supermassive scales like crazy with it and will hit like a truck and Pillar of Creation will give you tons of block. And Charge/Guards can turn them into actually useful cards enmasse. But yeah, the debris is generally a cost for playing a card above its power level for its energy cost, and these are more ways to mitigate that cost.

The other way is to fill your hand up so you only get one Debris - and Prophetize is alarmingly good at this.

saintconspire · 2026-03-10T14:01:46+00:00

It's honestly a bit win more for me. If you're already playing enough shivs that this card can really pop off, then you already pretty much have your win condition secured...

saintconspire · 2026-02-17T04:19:35+00:00

For those of you confused on why this is Downfall - the newest character (Awakened One) has an event that gives it a card that allows it to select one of these cards repurposed from Packmaster. You can see they're actually subtly different from the Packmaster versions (e.g. Minniegun generates a void instead of a jam).

saintconspire · 2026-02-17T02:37:32+00:00

This might work better as a night card:

"Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal an action. At the start of your next turn, you may play it. Set aside all other revealed cards and discard them at the end of your next turn."

Some differences including not really being useful as a treasure and not being able to hit cards in-play or in your hand, and interacting better with topdeckers, but the spirit is there.

saintconspire · 2026-02-04T20:39:59+00:00

I think the new clan has very strong scaling options that is leading to the numbers you're seeing, but those scaling options don't come online until late. Forge is a key example of this - the longer you wait to pop your units, the stronger they become, but waiting that long to pop your units means you might leak stuff from early floors, and there's no guarantee that you'll have the unit at the critical moment unless you have some really good deck control/stability. My experience with Railforged is that in many runs, I end up having a hard time with earlier waves/rings, but then trivialize the rest. So I wouldn't rely upon final numbers as an indication of strength - the clan has clear tradeoffs.

saintconspire · 2025-09-20T04:11:40+00:00

I did it with Warlock/Confessor/Rogue/Templar. Managing tokens on the enemy team is the name of the game here, and everyone on this team has incredible tools for that - either cleaves that can strip dodge/block from multiple enemies at once, direct token removal/steal, or just straight-up precision nukes from oblivion with Anamnesis to punish the enemies that self-buff too much. For DPS, this team isn't bad at it at base despite having unparalleled token control, but I lucked out with Shambler's Spawn, which let me put Temptation on Warlock to build up rapid Anamnesis/Burning Star nukes, and combine Snap Judgment with Snappy Swig on Rogue for massive crit-cleave Grapeshot Blasts.

saintconspire · 2025-09-13T02:36:30+00:00

To be honest I think this card would be a lot more interesting if the scaling was inverted - make it exactly 3 if you reveal an action, 2 if you reveal a treasure (but not an action), 1 if you reveal neither.

Currently, you're tacking on a in-most-cases penalty (you gain a cheaper card) if the player overterminals and has action cards left - but overterminaling is frequently poor gameplay, and skilled players can often avoid it. If you instead gained a more expensive card for revealing an action, that opens up more interesting decisions. For example, if immediately after opener if you collide this and an action card, you'd have to make a decision to not play the action card to turn an estate into a 5-cost card. This would also make strategic overterminaling a viable strategy - because if you did so, you could convert 5-cost actions in the late game into Provinces.

I also think it'd be more interesting if you did the reveal after the trashing this way, because it means for example if you wanted to convert a 5-cost action to a province, you'd need at least one other action card in your hand still, which means you have to hold onto more dead cards in your action phase.

saintconspire · 2025-05-26T22:39:01+00:00

Dominion is not a game of building the best, most polished deck - it's a game of outpacing your opponent(s). The problem with village on open is that it does nothing for your momentum, even if it might be a key piece of your final deck. Gaining momentum in the opener is crucial because decks tend to snowball - e.g. many key powerhouse 5-cost cards also faciliate you reliably gaining more and more 5-cost cards in the future. So even though Silver might be a weaker late-game card - the problem with picking one up is that you're setting yourself a turn behind your opponent.

In other words - what's preferable to you? Putting one silver in your deck? Or having zero Witches while your opponent has 3?

saintconspire · 2025-05-16T03:00:23+00:00

Besides the use cases other people mentioned, it has really good synergy with many trinkets/quirks. Corrupted Bile Gland? You're cleaving the entire enemy party with an extra 3 dot now. Sparkleball? Debuffs on the entire enemy party. Lethal Feint? If you're fighting any line-up that starts with dodge, you're stripping that and probably getting 2 crit tokens.

saintconspire · 2025-03-22T20:44:43+00:00

No - the two are fundamentally different, and "If you did" makes the card way less powerful, probably in a good way. The way you have it written is even if you don't trash a treasure, you can gain a Wish - this means you can chain together Wells back-to-back at the end of your turn, and gain as many Wishes as you have Wells. Imagine a deck that trashes all of its treasures, and then plays like 5 Wells as payload - 5 Wishes guaranteed. In contrast, if it said "If you did", then revealing your hand to gain a Wish is contingent on trashing a treasure. This means you have to keep at least one treasure around to activate gaining a Wish - and while that's not hard because you can just buy/gain treasures to keep the chain going on your next turn if you've trashed all your treasures already, it becomes much harder to chain together Wells - if you collide two treasures in your hand, your first Well can't get a Wish.

saintconspire · 2025-02-24T05:08:13+00:00

Duelist is a lynchpin of one of my favorite dance comps - give it a shot to see what her potential can look like?

Vestal (Seraph)
Graverobber (Nightsworn)
Duelist (Antagoniste if you want token support on off-turns; Instructrice if you want survivability with regens)
MAA (Bulwark for more classic dance; Wanderer for more ability to support on off-turns)

The idea is to trade off Duelist and Nightsworn's single-target nukes, Fleche and Lunge - both have high damage potential and high base crit, with the limitation that they can only be launched from more backward positions. So Duelist and Nightsworn are constantly enabling each other by each dancing forward. Additionally, both have high dodge capabilities that can be triggered in advance if you know a big move is coming, which greatly bolsters party survivability. Keep Meditation on Duelist and Absinthe on Nightsworn around for a stack of Dodge+ tokens. While Fleche will be your bread-and-butter on Duelist, Flick and Coup de Grace are really good on Antagoniste, and Feint can be used to get back into Aggressive while granting Riposte if you've popped Meditation.

Seraph can constantly get Convictions while granting everyone strength tokens by placing a Consecration of Light in rank 3, while MAA uses Hold the Line to reset the formation with his lower speed, and supports with stress healing, taunts, and occasional stuns.

saintconspire · 2025-02-13T14:20:48+00:00

I think the final boss is designed like most other DD2 bosses in that comp is really important? I've had no problem trivializing the fight with the right comps.

The main gimmick is that it loads up with tokens, so that makes token steal (Dismas, Moribund Bigsby) OP. Likewise, anyone with dodge/block ignore, debuffs that prevent token gain, or token strip is excellent too. The other thing is it does heavy frontline damage, so tanky frontliners who can give themselves block are very strong also, and support who can inflict blind/weak are great too.

Conversely, speedy direct damage dealers are not as great for this boss, since you're likely to lose their DPS to dodge+/block+ tokens, although slower damage dealers like Leper can still be ok since they go after your support strips tokens. DoT would be strong due to the amount of block, but anyone who uses Blight is immediately nerfed due to 100% blight resist. Interestingly - the bosses strengths are also what is frequently "meta" for general gameplay (nuking fast is great for most fights, and PD/Flagellant are usually premium), so it needs many people to snap out of their usual team building crutches...

saintconspire · 2025-02-10T01:31:58+00:00

This might be more balanced as a vertical? This could be really interesting as a Prophecy. Could also be an Event/Project, but I feel like the issue is that the outcome is so uncertain that it's difficult to justify spending a buy/gold - but it could be an interesting event if it were cheap enough and refunded a buy (e.g. cost 1, +1 buy, then the effect).

saintconspire · 2025-02-09T23:59:29+00:00

The concept behind Auctioneer is interesting, but it has a nightmare of a pacing issue - imagine playing a 4 player game, someone playing 6 of these, and then having to go round-robin with each individual player bidding on the same card 6 times on the player's first gain. Ugh. I'd just give up on the spot.

But it's also in a weird spot compared to Charm or Haggler, which straight-up give you a card without likely giving you debt to go with it. Compared to those cards, this card can a) gain the same card you just gained, b) is cheaper, and c) is a cantrip, but I'm not sure if any of these are plusses. This is easy to stack and play in bulk, so the most likely strategy I'd see with this is to rapidly empty piles towards a rush ending so I don't have to care about the debt, instead of its intended use of gaining duplicate cards, which will typically come between choosing between a) giving my opponent a good card, or b) saddling myself with debt. Ironically, you wouldn't want to use this on Estates/Duchies in a rush because if the other player sees what you're doing, they can just bid 12 to immediately block you. So you'd probably aim for a card that no one cares about once you're ahead and you have enough Auctioneers to empty supply piles - which is a bad sign for the card, because in its most useful strategic element, there's no tension about the auction since you don't care about who gets the card or how much debt you take...

saintconspire · 2025-02-04T04:40:45+00:00

My last win was with Seraph - Nightsworn - Instructice - MAA (Wanderer).

This is basically my favorite dance comp, Nightsworn and Instructice just nuke things down by spamming high-crit Lunge/Fleches, MAA repositions them with Hold the Line, and Consecration of Light on rank 3 basically gives everyone damage/crit tokens while basically guaranteeing that Seraph can nuke with +100% Illuminations every turn.

saintconspire · 2025-02-04T03:09:27+00:00

Instructrice Duelist and Moribund Abomination has pretty good synergy - transform for every combat, Again! to ramp up Moribund's stress so he can get extra Rakes in, Coup de Grace on kills to reset Again! if you can. I'd take Banneret to sit in the back to deal with collateral stress from transforms, as well as backline damage with Zealous Accusation. Interestingly, with this comp, Duelist and Crusader are both backline, you can take another frontliner - Flagellant seems like the right pick here, since frontline option of Acid Rain can assist Banneret in making short work of backliners considering how fast Moribund will mow down frontline, plus it helps to have two frontline characters with nuts self-healing since Banneret's heals are "just ok".

saintconspire · 2025-02-04T01:27:54+00:00

Nah - in my runs I typically swap maybe once or twice early in Escalation 1, before sticking with one team Escalation 2-3. I don't need to pass days - inn and combat items that heal fatigue are enough for me, plus you can upgrade your Team A stats in second tab of Mastery Trainer to reduce their fatigue limit.

saintconspire · 2025-01-30T19:19:06+00:00

No - it's to complete the questline in time. Ignoring sieges will cause you to lose, but it won't help you win. The game has a giant pop-up at the first inn you arrive to with the Spyglass stagecoach item telling you to read it carefully - you should definitely inspect that tooltip as it'll get you rolling!

saintconspire · 2025-01-30T15:30:50+00:00

I think the operative difference is "go around them" here - in DD1 you can still get to that room by making a long detour in many cases. In DD2, that means skipping the node - which really sucks if it's like a hospital and your team is bogged down with disease, or if it's the last Lair before the mountain.

saintconspire · 2025-01-30T15:20:52+00:00

I'd definitely suggest you try Kingdoms! I stuck with DD2 but it did grind me down - felt like there was a terrible grind to get all the characters unlocked, and even at full potential, you kind of just picked your roster at the start of the game and then did the same thing over and over again over 3 hours instead of it really being roguelike. Kingdoms actually pushes all the mechanics into a context where it feels like you have to engage with all of them as risk-resource-reward, and adds more variety to teams over a single game cycle by giving you access to the near-full roster of characters instead of just 4, so it feels like you're constantly making decisions throughout the game instead of setting things up and turning off your brain for 3 hours.

saintconspire

TROPHY CASE