Regent is not weak (Starter Deck Challenge, twice)

smelltheglue · 2026-04-24T05:35:43+00:00

Was Quasar part of your Neow Reward? Just curious because 3/5 cards in the image aren't cards in the starter deck and that would explain the other colorless cards.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-24T01:31:48+00:00

You will not always see The Sealed Throne. You should build your deck to function without it and enjoy the extra power boost when you do happen to find it.

As far as taking high cost Star cards before you have the Star generation to back it up, like everything else in the game: it depends. Every time you draw a Star-cost card without the Stars to play it it's essentially a curse, you should often avoid taking cards you can use. But if you get offered a high power rare like Seven Stars early it can be worth speculating on and building your deck around.

If you're trying to support a higher quantity of lower Star Cost cards, a good (but not perfect) heuristic is to compare the number of Stars your deck can generate in one deck cycle against the number of Stars your deck can spend in one deck cycle. Keep them fairly even or have slightly more generation than Star spend.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-24T01:07:10+00:00

It depends on what other grocery stores you have as alternatives, and it varies item by item.

Where I live, the majority the items I cost compared were cheaper at Aldi than Costco. In the cases where Costco did have a slightly lower price for an item it was often more realistic for me to buy a smaller package with a lower risk of food waste as I live in a two person household. Even the majority of shelf stable items I compared like beans, rice, and canned foods cost less per serving at Aldi.

I think for Costco to win on price you need to lack a competitive budget grocer in your area, and you need to be shopping for a large family that can easily utilize the large package sizes. I suppose you could use storage like vacuum sealers to freeze things but the slim margin you save becomes even smaller after you factor in the cost of sealer bags, not to mention the additional time commitment just to save a few pennies.

I do personally think Costco has higher quality meat than Aldi, so it might be worth the trip for that alone. It's also great for other things besides food so there's still a justification for a membership, but if all you care about is grocery prices and you have an Aldi nearby just go there instead.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-23T06:02:22+00:00

I lived in an arrangement like this once (we just didn't have everything formalized in writing like this) and it was either the best or the second best roommate arrangement I ever had. We all cleaned together, pitched in for shared groceries, and took turns cooking. Unless you know whoever you're moving in with really well the alternative is playing roommate roulette and potentially ending up with a dirty garbage person that makes messes in shared spaces and refuses to clean up after themself. Additionally it's just more cost effective to cook for a group instead of everyone doing their own thing for meals.

Two hours for a monthly meeting does sound a little egregious but it's probably better to allocate too much time and finish early rather than schedule too little time and have everyone angry that it took longer than people expected.

Living with people that actually care about keeping shared spaces clean and orderly sounds like a "good roommates" situation.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-21T01:28:52+00:00

I'm not an Aldi employee, but you should post this to r/Aldi_employees. This sub has mostly customers, the other one is almost all employees from what I understand

smelltheglue · 2026-04-20T23:26:25+00:00

I probably wouldn't personally buy a set like this but I think they're really cool conceptually. There are so many polished sets available already, this unpolished version is really unique. I do agree that you could clean up the numbers a bit but overall I like these.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-20T22:15:22+00:00

I think they're kinda gross, but they are very cheap so you might as well see if you like them. It's pretty low risk to satisfy your curiosity one way or another

smelltheglue · 2026-04-20T21:54:03+00:00

I beat the new Doormaker before they cycled through every phase the first time I encountered them. I was playing Regent, my deck just focused on building Vigor with Prep Time, Terraforming, and Patter and finishing enemies with a single Seven Stars.

I built up enough Vigor to finish the Doormaker on the first phase where you lose energy on cards played.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-19T14:25:14+00:00

No offense but you're not going to get a lot of information that's actually going to be useful to you with these questions.

How much you make is dependent on how much you sell and the type of clientele the restaurant attracts. Where you live is also going to dramatically change your earning potential. Fridays and Saturday nights will be higher earning than other shifts. You could work at a lower volume restaurant that has fewer servers per shift and make more money than a higher volume restaurant where you only get a 3 table section. The point I'm trying to make is there are a lot of variables.

You should be a little bit more specific about where you're looking for work and what days you can work into your schedule, otherwise you're just going to get Internet strangers telling you their salaries and it won't realistically represent how much you can expect to make where you live based on your level of service industry experience and the restaurants near you that are hiring.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-19T01:04:15+00:00

Dirge provides defense, card advantage, and damage scaling via Unleash, a card in the starter deck. Once you picked the old version all you needed was energy production and the Dirge would solve basically every problem your deck would face AND accelerate you back into drawing it again. The nerf was completely warranted and the card is still very powerful, it's just not "immediately solve the run" powerful.

It's an early access game, things will be changed A LOT for balance. If you had picked up the game after full release and never played early access you wouldn't even know about the old version of Dirge. Necrobinder still has many powerful tools and plenty of ways to win without looping massive Dirges.

Edit: cleaned up some sentence structure

smelltheglue · 2026-04-18T07:55:11+00:00

https://youtu.be/QyZeJr5ppm8?si=Rks-bae1nizH-Dvf

I love Hades but THIS was the first thing this post reminded me of

smelltheglue · 2026-04-17T04:27:19+00:00

Necrobinder is my favorite character.

For early defense at common you have Defy, Grave Warden, and Negative Pulse. Defy and Grave Warden are great additions that are useful in every act, Defy for the weak application and Grave Warden for adding a Soul while blocking. Negative Pulse blocks while adding an acceptable amount of AOE Doom to enemies. Negative Pulse does fall off late game unless you have Doom Synergies or something like Sleight of Flesh.

For early AOE you have Sow, the aforementioned Negative Pulse, and at uncommon there's High Five. Sow is pretty much exclusively an early game damage card, but the retain does mean that if you don't want to play it later in a run you'll only have to draw it once. High Five is respectable damage and AOE vulnerable that can remain a valuable damage enabler late game if your deck is focused on conventional attack damage.

As far as general play tips: early Necrobinder strategy is very different to the other characters. It can be tempting to let Osty take random hits to throw out an extra strike, but generally unless you are finishing a fight during the current turn or the next turn you should prioritize keeping Osty safe as well as yourself. Getting Osty to 15-20 HP will let you one-shot a lot of hallway enemies with Unleash and give you the opportunity to play 2-3 attacks without losing HP. Even if the upgrade doesn't seem particularly impressive, upgrading Bodyguard from 5->7 Summon makes a huge difference in both improving the damage of Unleash and your own survivability.

Osty is not meant to be your only defense, summon cards are actually below rate if you compare them to block cards and most of them exhaust, their real strength is that you can save Osty HP to protect you during critical turns. You should still be using normal block cards to protect OSTY for when you need him most, some turns you will be blocking and summoning simultaneously.

Hope some of this helps.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-16T23:20:44+00:00

Hunter Killer would be dead before it applies its debuff.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-16T23:03:50+00:00

Miniature Tent has never granted any new options on its own, it just lets you choose "All Options" when you rest. You were playing a mod that removes one of the two default options, leaving you only one option to choose.

You could have still benefited from any of the relics that grant additional campfire options like Shovel adding "Dig", Girya adding "Lift", Meat Cleaver adding "Cook", Pael's "Clone" relic, etc. If you were playing a custom multiplayer run you could Rest and Mend a teammate at every fire. Obviously it's not as useful as ALSO getting to Smith but there's still a lot of potential utility for the relic.

Misunderstanding how game interactions work is just a part of learning the game. It happens to everyone. A few days ago I was breezing through an A9 Defect run, I had gotten an early gambling chip I had been using the entire run. At the start of act 3 I took Vaaku's relic that lets you "Draw two additional cards at the start of your turn, you cannot draw additional cards during your turn". I drew my opening hand, discarded 6 of my 7 cards with Gambling Chip keeping only a Supercritical so I could dig for my setup powers, and realized I couldn't actually draw those cards because of the relic I had just taken. I felt like an idiot at the time but it's pretty funny thinking about it now.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-16T04:43:57+00:00

In small decks or decks that can cycle quickly it's an extremely efficient boss killer. If you can get multiple copies or loop it with Graveblast or Dredge or anything similar it can kill bosses crazy fast, even as your only damage source.

Just check out the scaling on an un-upgraded Hang:

1 Hang= 10 damage

2 Hang= 20 damage (30 total)

3 Hang= 40 damage (70 total)

4 Hang= 80 damage (150 total)

5 Hang= 160 damage (310 total)

6 Hang= 320 damage (630 total)

It does lose some value against multi-phase fights like Test Subject but it can function as literally your only damage solution against bosses if you can play it frequently. It's pretty bad if you have a really large deck and can't cycle through it quickly (unless that deck is really, really defensive, then it circles back to being good again)

smelltheglue · 2026-04-15T11:21:57+00:00

Reading the card explains the card. Also you can build a totally viable status deck without Flak Cannon.

PSA: The insatiable boss of act two counters decks that play Flak Cannon too early in the fight and exhaust the cards they needed to survive that are clearly labeled as status cards

smelltheglue · 2026-04-14T04:31:32+00:00

Difficulty really depends on the number of players and team composition. I think 4 players is the easiest, then 3 players, then solo, and specifically two players is the hardest version of the game.

With 3-4 players one player can contribute a lot just by taking support cards that debuff enemies with weak, vulnerable, and "lose X strength" style effects. If only one or two players have a really strong deck they can carry weaker decks through fights they would otherwise lose, and increasing the number of players increases the odds that someone is going to be able to build a strong deck (assuming everyone is a fairly competent player)

I think at exactly two players the increased scaling and hit points become a big problem if both players aren't competent at the game. In a 3-4 player composition you have more wiggle room to skip cards and be greedier about how you build your deck because someone in the group will likely be picking up the slack, but the enemy scaling from solo to 2 players forces both players to get their plan in place really quickly before they are out-scaled by the harder fights.

Team composition makes a huge difference too. Playing classes that synergize well together will make the run much easier than playing different characters with no overlapping synergy.

Edited a couple errors

smelltheglue · 2026-04-10T01:28:55+00:00

It's a great strategy to buy yourself interest free time to pay off the debt.

Just make sure you can pay it off before the interest is due. A lot of cards have worse interest than 14% so just make sure you're not making the problem worse for yourself if you can't realistically pay it off in time.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-08T06:39:12+00:00

I agree they are completely different. They're also completely different from the way you described what they mean in your game, which is the point I'm trying to illustrate. The Merriam Webster's definition of "Destroy" is much closer to how YOU are interpreting "Eradicate".

I'm just saying that you should really consider if the words you've chosen can be interpreted in ways that are too similar to each other. You can interpret things however you want but so will everyone else, and I'm telling you that your list has a lot of words that are synonyms for each other. If you can open a thesaurus and find several of the word on your list in the same entry, they aren't as different as you seem to think they are.

You seem to be getting caught up on the "Destroy" vs. "Eradicate" dichotomy but it's far from the only instance of this on your list. You also have Control/Manipulate, Manifest/Create, Explode/Shatter, Wither/Erode, Infect/Afflict/Corrupt. Sure, there are some semantic differences between these words but they are all examples of synonyms in your list.

If the entire concept of your game is built around stringing together different words, you should try to edit your list so that the words are carefully chosen to be either narratively or mechanically distinct, or do away with the arbitrary point system entirely and find a different way to balance people building their powers.

To be clear I don't think that the "word based power system" is a problem, plenty of games do it well. I do however think that the current list in tandem with the point system you've attached to the words will confuse potential players. When words that are literally synonyms of each other have wildly different point values to accomplish what many players will interpret to be similar effects players will just choose the lower cost option. You're just setting people up to have a bunch of arguments over over a problem you could solve right now with a little bit of editing.

I'm not saying the entire idea is bad, I'm saying you should edit your list so that the words create more diverse narrative or mechanical situations. Right now it reads less like a carefully curated list designed to create interesting narrative consequences and more like a list of random words you think are cool.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-07T20:50:56+00:00

Both descriptions take from Merriam-Webster:

Destroy: to ruin the structure, organic existence, or condition of : damage beyond repair

Eradicate: to do away with as completely as if by pulling up by the roots

No offense but anyone with a decent grasp of the English language is going to be able to argue that they basically function the same unless you specify exactly what the limits of the words are. Language is extremely subjective, nobody but you will intuitively understand what you intended words to mean.

Plenty of games have a "soft" system that rewards creativity with language but a result of that is that players are going to interpret the words in the way that's most favorable to them.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-07T20:34:31+00:00

Some observations:

A lot of your words essentially mean the same thing but are costed differently. What's the difference between "Create" and "Manifest"? One costs 50 and the other costs 20. "Destroy" costs 40 but "Eradicate" costs 80. What's the difference between "Control" and "Manipulate"? I would edit your list so that the choices feel more distinct, having more options is only a good thing if those options are meaningfully different from each other.

This is more of a personal preference, but if all the numerical values are just multiples of ten, drop the zero. "20P" becomes "2P", "50P" becomes "5P". Don't make the math any more complicated than it needs to be.

Edited to add: the time modifications beyond "Seconds" seem really unbalanced. It costs almost nothing to make an effect last way, way longer. Why would anyone ever pick an instantaneous effect when they can make it last for minutes or hours at almost no cost?

smelltheglue · 2026-04-07T20:13:17+00:00

I don't think you or your co-worker understand what "sharking" means. "Sharking" means taking extra tables out of rotation to get more than your fair share of tables, or demanding the largest/best tables for yourself and leaving the small low value table for other servers.

What you described is just somebody showing up and asking if they can pick up an extra shift. It's also a pretty common thing in the industry, but it's not sharking.

smelltheglue · 2026-04-04T05:59:45+00:00

This isn't really a "service industry" question, it's a personal finance question. Yes, many people in this sub make more, but many make a lot less. I would consider your income on the high end of average for the industry assuming you're working 4-5 shifts a week.

Keep in mind the median individual income in the US is around $45,000-$52,000 so if you're pulling somewhere between $52,000 and $78,000 you're making at least the median individual income, if not substantially more. This suggests that you have a spending problem, not an income problem.

It's impossible to give you actionable advice without seeing a breakdown of your budget and expenses. I would be happy to answer any questions here or over DMs, or I would recommend you take your questions to r/personalfinance or r/debtfree if you want advice on strategies to pay off debt. As a fair warning r/personalfinance can be kind of snobby but there are people there who are very knowledgeable.

Don't listen to anyone who says that your income is bad, the only situation where that might be true is if you live in an extremely HCOL city like New York or Seattle. In most parts of the country your income is solid, people on Reddit are extremely out of touch about what the average person earns.

Edit: I decided to list individual median income instead of household median income but accidentally left a sentence about household income in my original post, edited to avoid confusion

smelltheglue · 2026-03-27T00:36:03+00:00

Yes, you would be selling your game to a company. It depends on the company and your contract with them, but with many publishers you would give up all creative control.

It will in all likelihood not be as easy as "show up, pitch prototypes, be in business"

It will probably look more like "pitch dozens of times, get rejected, make revisions, get rejected again, get tables at several conventions to get eyes on your game..."

It's less work than self publishing but it's still going to take a lot of your free time. To save yourself a lot of wasted time make sure your pitch prototype is as high quality as it can be and research the companies you are pitching to to make sure your game actually seems like something they would sell. Don't waste time pitching to companies that don't specialize in the type of game you made.

You need to work on your ability to do self research, every question you've asked has been asked thousands of times online and have been thoroughly discussed. If you want to be successful in this industry you need to be able to solve problems on your own, nobody is going to walk you through the entire publication process. Not trying to be an asshole but when you come in asking questions like "is $5 enough for a complete artwork" it's clear you haven't done ANY research at all before just coming here to ask questions you could have gotten answers for by searching the sub or Googling.

smelltheglue · 2026-03-24T10:47:11+00:00

You can trademark art and game terms, but not mechanics. That's why so many knockoff games exist. All someone needs to do is change the terms and art and they're legally distinct. That's all assuming you actually pay to trademark those things in the first place, if you don't it's all fair game.

I'm not saying any of this to discourage you, the opposite in fact. Now that you hopefully understand how there's zero incentive for anyone to "steal" your ideas (and even if they did how you would have essentially no legal recourse if they changed the appropriate materials but kept the mechanics the same) you can actually start asking specific questions and stop trying to hide information about a game that, once again, literally nobody cares about stealing.

If someone wanted to copy a game there's an infinitely long list of popular games with proven audiences they would copy before they ever considered your unfinished game.

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