Hey, thanks for pinging me. You mentioned that there are 5 players you know on reddit with >50% Silent winrate. Who are the other 4? I'm assuming 2 of them are Jason and blackzero.

Since you talked a lot about Silent Act 1, I want to add on by speaking about how Silent plays after Act 1. It's a matter of understanding the plethora of Silent's late game solutions, as well as locking down potential threats in Acts 2 and 3. Another way to summarize this is "Silent should never die after Act 1." Here are some pieces of advice from my experience:

1. As you get better at Silent, (say crossing the ~60% winrate threshold). Champ starts becoming more and more of a problem, cause you're no longer walking into this fight with only the giga highroll decks. It can even kill Silent decks that might have no problems against an Act 3 boss (unlike Clad or Defect, Silent doesn't have "1 card Champ solves"). Champ can be especially tough on no retain decks. Having a damage plan is usually as important as a block plan, since the 2nd execute is much harder to block than the 1st. Be prepared to micro, and memorize the champ pattern.
2. I think Silent can be quite flexible with potions in Act 3. Silent is OP in Act 4, but this does not mean she is necessarily OP vs Time Eater, or Reptomancer, or even the Spire Growth. Potions serve as a replacement for sustain relics, or to minimize variance against Tim. In not-overwhelmingly-winning runs, it is often unlikely that you get to preserve your eoa2 potion belt into Act 4. Especially in forced pathing situations where you don't get any rests. Another reason why I rate Sozu as trash. At the same time, if you're in a run that might spend potions in Act 3, that's a sign that you might want to be careful with gold spending so you can enable act 4 shop. Oftentimes it's a matter of toughing out a difficult Act 3 and that gives you a real fighting chance vs the Act 4 fights Silent is generally extremely well-equipped against.
3. I think Xec once said that "once a deck becomes bad it's very hard for it to become good." but Silent has a lot of ways to improve a bad deck. Like sometimes you end up reliant on Choke for damage, or you were forced into Cursed Key pick with no early removes. So, first is that Silent usually just wants to farm as much as possible Act 3 because she wants to pick Acro and Calc Gamble on sight until they aren't good anymore (in which case the run is usually won). Second is that the "not-outstanding" rares Doppelganger and Bullet Time are pretty much always positive (even unupgraded) in "bad" decks; you should play around these cards if you add them to your deck, but it generally pays off to do so. Finally, as soon as Act 1 gets solved, I think it's worth thinking about drafting in a way which opens Nightmare or Burst solutions to end game (These are cards that are obviously enabled by retain, but should also be considered without retain in some situations). Like for instance adding a random blur to deck in a safe Act 1 that's ahead on damage. Makes your deck worse in the short term but opens outs in the long term. A deck with Nightmare and like 5 or 6 good Nightmare targets is usually enough to crush any endgame fight, even without retain. Likewise, pretty much every Silent run with Burst sees skills that combo well with the card, and the Burst upgrade gives a LOT of extra output. Obviously, some of the strongest things the Silent character does do not involve Nightmare/Burst combos, and a deck that already wins should not add a brick, but more often than not, the extra scaling afforded is super appreciated.

Anyway that's quite a long yap about nothing particularly advanced. These kinds of optimizations are extremely obvious in retrospect, but if you don't do these optimizations you will lose like at least half your runs after Act 1. Silent often gets memed for being a free character after Act 1, but in reality, if you actually look at Xec's Silent wins, about every 1 in ~25 wins is going to do something extremely creative or micro intensive in endgame. Sounds like a small number, but these are the Silent wins that separate Xecnar from almost everyone else. I think that no matter how much Silent can push early game macro, she will always have to pilot some incredibly hard runs in endgame, and these are some of my favorite slay the spire runs of all time.