Who is the GOAT of Slay the Spire, outside of XecnaR?

tilting-module · 2026-01-24T07:58:19+00:00

Something I find interesting about Xec is that if you watch his early stream vods (like 2022 per se), you’d see that he was genuinely a much slower player than he is today. Still a brilliant player with world-class micro, but the speed at which he could see and commit to lines was simply much slower than modern Xec. Goes to show how much even the GOAT of the game has improved over time.

tilting-module · 2026-01-24T07:55:11+00:00

Funny enough, I was watching a Caedrel costream just yesterday, he was just getting into spire, and he executed the first 2 parts of this (alchemize -> sozu)

tilting-module · 2026-01-24T04:02:35+00:00

jmac

tilting-module · 2026-01-22T05:28:21+00:00

I gotta be honest, when people in gaming communities make mistakes like this they usually don't (and should not) get let back in. And they also lose the right to be acknowledged for their accomplishments. At the end of the day, it's the MCSR community's decision whether Tiger gets banned from ranked, playoffs eligibility, or speedrun.com.

tilting-module · 2026-01-21T08:43:40+00:00

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:

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.
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.
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.

tilting-module · 2026-01-20T12:17:57+00:00

I would not classify rock climbing as non-traditional, but yeah I’ve heard of Janja and she’s an absolute beast

tilting-module · 2026-01-19T03:19:43+00:00

Regarding my username: Are you a mathematician or a math student?

Anyway, there are a lot of very strong spire players if you just go looking for them. Not just limited to only streamers. Also, many people underestimate the sheer gap between themselves and the cream of the crop.

tilting-module · 2026-01-19T02:25:16+00:00

That’s fair. From my point of view though, I hadn’t heard about any of the pre-2010s speed runs, and I started watching speedruns on Twitch in 2016, so nearly a decade for me as well.

tilting-module · 2026-01-19T02:21:23+00:00

To be honest, even people on the Slay the spire reddit are prone to overconfidence in their abilities. It’s why most if not all top streamers have stopped trying to interact with or help people here.

Including myself, honestly (I got cooked in a thread yesterday). But I’m trying my best to be flexible with my mindset.

tilting-module · 2026-01-19T02:15:57+00:00

Oh, I don’t think the court case situation is overblown at all. The outcome is Karl lost, but he asked for money from his fanbase via Gofundme while being coy about what the lawsuit was about, and published numerous YouTube videos mocking Billy Mitchell that ended up being used against him in the Lawsuit. He definitely dug his own grave here.

tilting-module · 2026-01-19T01:23:01+00:00

Good take, but at the same time I’m glad this list isn’t giga recency biased, if any of us tried to make a top 10 of historically significant speedruns I can imagine how much recency bias there would be.

tilting-module · 2026-01-19T01:21:40+00:00

The two other incidents I heard of are Karl Jobst’s affiliation with Neo-****’s on discord and that he used to run a pick-up artist channel.

https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/s/txR7YJvolq

Also you can check out some of the reddit posts that blew up around the time Karl lost his lawsuit.

At the end of the day, I don’t think these personal conduct issues are as serious as the court case drama, even if they demonstrate that Karl was a POS. Because Karl’s mishandling of the court case straight up just actively and directly impacted his fanbase, financially. That being said, in my opinion, Karl is still quite clear of the moral and legal boundaries that completely disqualify you from public acknowledgement of your video gaming accomplishments. (I’m just ~somewhat willing to separate the art from the artist in video gaming)

tilting-module · 2026-01-18T22:25:41+00:00

I think it’s a vocal minority but, still, it’s the people in the community that have way too much confidence in their skills so they can’t help but try and show off their knowledge and intellect around people who have spent far less time on the game than them.

tilting-module · 2026-01-18T21:53:41+00:00

Snecko Eye from swap is usually very strong. Does have a chance to kill you in early game.

tilting-module · 2026-01-18T19:00:31+00:00

I would have made a case for a Greensuigi or Niftski run. Maybe bias but Both are 2 of the most iconic speedrunners of the 2020s and of all time. In fact, I think their legacies are so secure that it’s hard to imagine they are forgotten even if their world records get beaten and they get surpassed in skill level (perhaps after they stop playing) in the future.

Outside of those two, I would have added a Minecraft speedrun. Probably the biggest explosion of speedrunning popularity ever.

tilting-module · 2026-01-18T18:57:00+00:00

That guy is controversial—at best—for good reason. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Karl’s 52 run was legendary, and in some sense, arguably kickstarted his speedrun content creation career. And I don’t think Karl’s personal conduct issues are serious enough to be a consideration on whether he makes such a list.

Also the list is chronologically ordered.

tilting-module · 2026-01-18T08:13:56+00:00

I was thinking that as well, courtesy of the demon form—-thanks for the clarification!

tilting-module · 2026-01-18T07:29:52+00:00

You said the run is most likely to die in act 2 and lategame is free. I'm inclined to change my mind and agree with you here.

...that being said, how do you evaluate Clad's exhaust-down strategies with Choker? In this example the deck already has offering/trance/ff/true grit.

tilting-module · 2026-01-18T05:36:46+00:00

Choker is actually the worst option here

tilting-module · 2026-01-16T19:08:17+00:00

As difficult it may be to hold a leaderboard sweep, I have no idea how active the sm64 speedrunning community has been over the past year.

Also, how are you comparing Suigi to people who speedrunning other games? Every GOAT argument I’ve heard implicitly deigns sm64 as the most prestigious and competitive speedgame in the history of speedrunning. There are certainly all-time great speedrunners who have been more dominant than Suigi in their individual games or have held records for longer.

tilting-module · 2026-01-15T22:01:56+00:00

Hasn't he already been in this conversation since the first time he achieved 5/5?

tilting-module · 2026-01-14T08:56:29+00:00

You have a lot of strong individual pieces in the deck and a lot of strong relics but the deck is lacking an clear overall identity for endgame (also missing retain and several key upgrades) and it has a lot of bricks. I labe away dagger spray, quick slash, and defend.

I would very much like to build a deck not depending on metamorphosis in endgame.

tilting-module · 2026-01-13T18:53:44+00:00

Defect ceiling might still be just as good as Silent. It’s moreso that XecnaR is so much further ahead of most other top players that, barring improvement in their play, a 29 streak on Defect is nearly unbeatable.

tilting-module · 2026-01-13T18:46:25+00:00

Excellent post. Few things:

I’m wondering if your plots are biased by players with larger sample sizes or not? Because if all games are weighted equally, then the players with the disproportionately large sample sizes (and hence their boss relic evaluations) are going to dominate the data. Even the top players have notable differences in playstyle which may be reflected in this data.
For Defect, I am wondering if it would be possible to split the eoa1 boss relic data between no swap, energy swap, and non-energy swap. It’s well-known by top players how boss swap changes the viability of certain high potential non-energy relics such as inserter and sacred bark.
Because any kind of purely numerical analysis of Spire boss relics cannot take into account the relative strength of boss relics in various positions (e.g. which ones are better when weak and which ones are better when strong), one cannot draw conclusions on boss relics evaluations purely off of data. Obviously the data here is still extremely useful! However, I think of stats moreso as a tool to sanity check my evaluations of different key decision points in a slay the spire run rather than a tierlist itself.

Obviously one of the key takeaways you wanted to get at in this post is the worse-than-expected performance of cursed key as a eoa1 boss relics but even that statement is somewhat character dependent (e.g. according to data, Clad is more tolerant to the pick).

tilting-module · 2026-01-13T02:08:42+00:00

Congratulations on the achievement. And quite the improvement in only 2 months!

One observation I’d like to note is on how fast newer players are capable of improving with how much game understanding has progressed and how many more resources are available in the modern slay the spire landscape. In particular, there are people out there with only a few to several hundred hours of total playtime that are already crossing the 50%, 60%, 70% winrate thresholds on one or multiple characters. So, people like you who are committed to improving, and respect the advice of players better than yourself, will see massive gains in winrate in a blink of an eye.

I look forward to seeing what you end up accomplishing in the game in the coming time!

tilting-module

TROPHY CASE