Transcript for:
The Watcher Guide - Slay the Spire Ascension 20

hey hey there youtube baylor here and today i'm talking about the watcher diving into a run here on ascension 20 in which i attempt to break down the basics of what is the watcher how do you play the watcher how do you develop a deck of cards and turn it into a successful run of slay the spire with this purple lady that's gonna be the the goal of this video i'm gonna have a pretty long dialogue at the start here as i look at our starting bonuses and the opening map break down some of the basics of the character and some important decision making in terms of pathing and then as we start progressing through the run i'll try to break down each of the decisions that i'm making as best i can to help you figure out how to evaluate things in your own spire evaluation is definitely the name of the game the watcher is here to evaluate to the spire and that's what you need to do in order to be successful at spire in general can't simply give you a list of good cards and bad cards although check out my watch or tier list for something like that because in slay the spire cards are always contextual they're good for some circumstances but not others and no card is universally useful here so the watcher is the fourth character available in slay the spire you have to have completed at least one run with the other characters to unlock her and she is i would say the most mechanically complex at least in terms of starting out of all of the four characters this is mostly due to her stance change mechanic that is present in her starting deck like the other characters the watcher starts with some strikes and defends which do a decent amount of damage but there's also this eruption and this vigilance steel nine and a wrath and gain eight block intercom wrath makes you both deal and receive double damage and is one of the core things that watcher can use to optimize her damage successful play on watcher is all about stacking bonuses so to speak it's all about playing powerful cards with a multiplier from wrath stance or setting up turns where you can gain a bunch of additional energy from calm generally speaking watcher is looking to enter wrath and then deal a bunch of burst damage with her other attacks in order to strike down her foes understanding how to improve or scale your starting deck partially requires an understanding of what the starting deck is capable of with 10 permanent cards four strikes four defends and two other starter cards uh you draw through all of the cards in the stack in two turns since you draw five cards per turn by default in slay the spire i would describe this as a cycle time so to speak how many turns does it take to draw every card in the deck one time it's kind of an important metric and your starting deck starts with a very small cycle time with only 10 cards you see every card on average once every two turns and so by default uh you're going to be drawing the eruption and vigilance quite a bit using the vigilance to block on turns when enemies are attacking and looking for openings where you can play your eruption and then finish off foes with the strikes to improve upon this starting deck we need to either improve the cycle time by reducing the number of cards or by adding cards that draw cards or we need to add cards with higher numeric values on them than the cards that we have currently cards that do more damage than strike cards that block more than defend another metric we can look at with the starting deck here is damage per turn um or amount of damage that we can do in an x number of turns two or three and that starts out pretty high for the watcher the watcher has the highest starting damage of any of the three characters thanks to this eruption able to double her strikes and make them do 12 damage watchers best damage over two turns is playing eruption then four strikes in wrath stance so nine plus 48 57 damage or a maximum potential of a little bit more than 25 per turn and that's that's very good at the start of the run so again we're going to look for ways to improve on that number as we want to as we progress through this fire spire is a deck building roguelite game and the roguelite is the tricky part here the format of slay the spire means that your abilities to improve on your deck of cards are limited you only get a certain number of resources a certain number of opportunities before you're forced to combat enemies of great power the boss is at the end of the act it can be a real challenge for us here [Music] what the starting bonus i'm gonna take looking at the map in act one before you even pick a starting bonus you are allowed to look at the map by the way by clicking on the map button and i highly recommend doing so for your map layout and the path that you'll take along it can really shape your play very dramatically your primary goal in each act of slave aspire is to improve the strength of your deck of cards and improve the strength of your character there's a lot of different ways to do that we can add new cards to the deck we can upgrade cards that we already have we can remove cards that we have and we can also get relics and potions relics are gotten by purchasing them at shops you get one guaranteed in the middle of each act in a treasure chest you might find them randomly in event rooms and they're guaranteed to dropped by elites the different nodes of map in slave aspire all offer you different kinds of rewards and achieving the right mixture or achieving the right order of rewards is essential to getting a run of slave spire off the ground basic combats these enemy nodes are the simplest and most common obstacle in the spire but they are not to be underestimated for their rewards are significant every enemy gives you one card reward three cards at random as well as a chance for a potion drop and an average of 15 gold the gold doesn't seem like much either but it does add up as you defeat multiple of them right at the start of the run card rewards are extremely important as one of the best ways to improve the starting deck for each character is to add non-starter cards to it those cards are more powerful than strikes and defense and can be upgraded for even better effects event rooms can be all sorts of things uh the contents of an event room in slay the spire change as you visit them but it the possibilities are an event uh which are specific to the act and can contain all sorts of things highly recommend the spire wiki as a source for the breakdown on what every single possible event can be these also have a chance to be a fight can randomly be a merchant can randomly be a treasure but they can't contain elite combats except for certain events which mimic elites the most likely things that you're going to get from events are card removals or upgrades sometimes money or relics but it's extremely unlikely that event rooms offer you card rewards unless the event room contains a combat to that end i highly discourage taking large numbers of event rooms especially early in act one and if your current strategy enslave the spire is visit as many unknown rooms as possible then i regret to inform you that you're probably doing yourself a disservice because visiting lots and lots of event rooms will not get you all that much strength in terms of your character the most valuable nodes um generally speaking are rest sites which are either a heal or an upgrade as your character desires the fact that you get an option here is huge sometimes you need one sometimes you need the other and elite rooms which are like combats but more difficult and significantly more rewarding you get a higher rarity card reward [Music] um i think it's like a seven percent higher chance for rare cards from elites than versus combats you also get a twice as much money as a regular fight and most importantly of all you get a relic relics go up here by the relic bar and accumulating relics over the course of your run is one of the best ways to get stronger and it looks like we're gonna be having quite a few of those because i can't exactly avoid elites all that easily early on here if you're playing on ascension one or higher it is sometimes inevitable that early elites occur that you can't reasonably avoid so dealing with them is one of your top priorities and it's one of your top desires anyway uh elites especially in act 1 are comparatively easy to defeat and are extremely rewarding okay i think i've talked enough that i can at least explain what our what our good path options are here so with with the most rewarding nodes being elite nodes and rest site nodes we can spot the quote unquote most rewarding path aka the path that gives us the most improvement to our deck over the course of the act um and that's probably going to involve either elite fire elite here or fire elite fire here although that can't visit the burning elite so we fight an elite here get an upgrade fight an elite and then if we can bop these two elites as well that would be ideal that goes through four elites which is a really ambitious act one and not something that you'll often see succeed i would say so with that being the most rewarding path is that the most smart path generally speaking i wouldn't say so now watcher is definitely more capable than the other characters at defeating elites early in act one and i think one of the best ways to get a watcher run started especially is to get just a couple of relics the elites of act 1 are well there's three different elites that you can fight the gremlin knob the lagavulin and the centuries but the answer to all of them is rather similar you need damage all three of these fights will get worse for the player over time so the smallest number of turns that you can win in is the goal for each of the act one elites there are much safer paths paths that don't get into too many combats but these paths don't improve our deck enough for example what if we take no elites we just move up this path here take a couple of combats get some events upgrade more events upgrade event upgrade this will get a number of cards added in a few upgrades but we'll end up with no relics and relatively few gold which is gonna ultimately cost us in act two and act 3. all of the enemies in the spire will get stronger and stronger over time so we have to make sure that we're continually improving our own power or will fall behind and falling behind in a rogue light especially slay the spire is a rough time that can lead to a lost run pretty quickly so i think what we want to do is probably go maybe three combats here to start get some card rewards quickly um and prepare for this first elite which is going to be tough but i think is manageable for the watcher so in terms of starting bonus what does that mean we should take we get to either transform a card we can turn i would generally speaking advocate transforming or removing defends first on watcher the bonus damage from wrath means that strikes are a lot more valuable than they are on the other characters and watcher really needs to be able to do good damage in order to succeed well one of the quickest ways to dunk a watcher run is to lower the damage output of the starting deck by adding too many block cards or too many setup cards and you'll find that it's it's very much possible to go down in performance from where you start watcher-wise our first three enemies having one health i could maybe get this elite for one hit point if we go through two shops generally speaking as lament is not a bad option you'll be offered this a lot if you die in act one during your runs we could trade all of our money for a random rare relic i think that's kind of powerful too or we can swap our starting relic for a random boss relic honestly all of these are pretty good if i were to ranked choice these ranking them from best to worst i would say best is probably either rare relic or transform second best is boss swap and the last would be one hit point enemies i'm actually not sure what between transform and random rare relic would be but i'm definitely inclined to transform one of our starting defense and see how that lets us evolve from here will give us a little bit of direction initially and can be an improvement in your first few combats but again transform and defend not a strike here equal probability of all other cards that the watcher has we get a wish to start oh my that is not a card i would have wanted to hold on to but we might be able to do some stuff with that for three energy this could either be plated armor strength or money kind of a deadweight card a lot of the time but wishes strength lies in its flexibility you get to wish for whatever it is you need whether that's this fight or next and something that i think we could do with that is wish for money in these opening fights and then have a decent amount of cash going into the shop so i think that's what i'll try to do but i have to say this is a bit of an awkward and unusual start for us that's for sure that's for sure that said wish is something that we would call scaling so to speak a card that allows us to improve the output of the deck on future turns and permanent strength gain is absolutely a way to do that [Music] the big problem with wish of course is the three cost let's start here [Music] so now that we're actually in combat with our watcher it's time to talk about how watcher usually wins fights watcher is all about the setup setting up a good turn that she can capitalize on later and rarely is that more true than with wish involved i think watchers generally speaking about kind of throwing out chip damage and banking energy with calm waiting for your wrath to come along and looking for an opportunity to play it since vigilance blocks perfectly for eight we definitely want to use that and we should also strike one of these lice maybe even both of them using the miracle of course our starting mirror our starting relic on the watcher is the pure water this gives us one energy on a turn of our choice it's a card that retains each turn so we get to hold on to it and we'll find that retained keyword on a lot of other watcher cards as well it's one of the sort of directions the watcher can go in we definitely want to strike this front-most laos first this laos is buffing which means it's guaranteed to attack us on the next turn a pretty common rule amongst slave aspire enemies is that they cannot do the same thing either two times in a row or can't do the same thing three times in a row usually two in a row is the limit for attacks um sorry at most once in a row for stuff like buffs and debuffs at most twice in a row for things like attacks again general rule the specifics of each enemy are a little different sometimes and there are exceptions to every rule inspire every single one so i i think i will break both their block that way we can kill each of them with a single attack next turn and if we can find a good opportunity to play our wish that would be even better strike here kills one defend defend prevents us from taking any damage we can loop back around try to get wish into play um it'll attack me next turn i don't think i'm gonna be able to play wish with how this has worked out [Music] hold on i'll try i wish i wait wait wait oh i've done it money and all without taking damage generally speaking in slave aspire when you're in a combat your goal is to progress through that combat while losing as few health as possible health is the only well health and potions are the only resource that is preserved between combats the state of your deck all the exhaust status of your cards all of that is reset between each combat so it's only the amount of damage you take that ultimately matters in each fight so three options here sanctity crush joints and sand of time i'm gonna rank and skip of course actually skip is the fourth option and one that should never be ignored because skipping cards is absolutely sometimes the best thing to do adding a bad card to your deck is going to really cost you because cards that aren't helpful if you draw them instead of the cards that are helpful you're gonna have a bad time and every card that you add to the deck means one more card that you have to draw through each combat so of these options sanctity this is block and then it says if the last card played was a skill draw two sanctity improves what i would describe as our cycle time change it reduces how the number of turns it takes to draw through the entire deck because it draws cards itself and it also improves our quote-unquote block density the number of block cards in the deck divided by the number of total cards in the dac gives you your block density block density is something that is i think an important thing to keep an eye on in a run of slay the spire if your block density is too low then your average hand won't contain any block cards and you won't be able to block any attacks if your block density is too high then you may draw hands that are only block cards and be unable to do any damage against your foes so adding block cards early can be part of a problem if your block density goes too high you're in real trouble and as aforementioned here in act one especially with elites coming up damage is our top priority we do have two damage options crush joints is eight damage and can apply vulnerable vulnerable is a status effect that makes enemies take more attack damage which is multiplicative with the bonus damage from wrath can be very nice on the watcher or sands of time big 20 damage card but gets cheaper each time it's retained so it's all about holding onto sands of time then playing it for massive damage a few turns later i want one of the two damage cards truth be told i have a difficult time to choosing between the two i think the wish and the sands of time are a little difficult to play together but not impossible at this moment i would probably put crush joints and sands in time of as my top one and two cards if i was only offered one of these two damage cards i would pick whichever one i was offered skip is my third choice and sanctity is my fourth choice here early in the run we don't have the energy to support drawing cards with sanctity the block density increase is not meaningful i think the sanctity would be a detriment to add but the other two are good i'll take the crush joints we'll just get some added vulnerable some no nonsense the cheaper option by far and we'll uh we'll make use of it that way so cultist cultists will attack us every turn after turn one getting stronger and stronger but the gimmick of this enemy is that you have kind of a free turn one which is our opportunity to get in big damage with eruption um our draw pile looks a little questionable we may not be able to play this wish but what we should do here is eruption and strike for 24 damage bringing the enemy to low health quickly damage is the one common element in every combat that you have to deal with in slave spire every single enemy requires you to deal damage to kill them in order to win the fight and progress so all winning strategies enslave the supplier have to involve a damage plan that can uh that can kill enemies there is one notable exception in the transient however the transient is easiest to defeat by doing damage to them so i think that rule still applies all right we're not gonna wish in that fight i don't see any reasonable way to avoid getting hit or a lot of damage in order to gain the money but we should still have enough to um [Music] to be able to buy something valuable at the shop another interesting set of three of watchers commons fleuria blows a very common one this is a zero cost attack but it comes back to your hand whenever you change stances change stance means going from no stance to wrath or calm going from comma or wrath to the other or going from calm or wrath to no stance exiting your stance is also a stance change any of those will cause flurry of blows to come back it's also a very nice card alongside the wish as strength makes this card hit quite a bit harder prostrate here is a little bit of free block and it gives us mantra towards watcher's third stance which is divinity you need ten mantra to enter divinity but if you do so you get triple damage and three energy divinity is one way to kind of scale up your watcher deck or develop the watcher deck as i'm picking cards i've kind of got a couple of possible branches for for ways that we can develop here at on the watcher at the start we simply want improved blocks and attacks but from there we're looking to incorporate either things like retain cards that stay in our hand at the end of turn which can allow us to accumulate cards in our hand to get more than more than the base five per turn we can scry which lets us look at the cards in the draw pile potentially discarding them some scrying can reduce the cycle time of your deck and can help you ensure that the cards in that you're drawing next turn are the cards that you in fact need we can also improve our deck by adding more sources of energy or card draw [Music] pressure points is a bit of an odd card out here pressure points is a damage dealing skill applies a status effect called mark pressure points is the only card that uses this status effect which makes it a little bit of a meme unfortunately um pressure points only interacts with it with other copies of pressure points if you get three or four copies it can be effective but otherwise it's not my personal ranking for this card reward one flurry of blows two skip three prostrate four pressure points i think is my rank i would skip over either of these two at the moment as we just need to ensure we're doing enough damage to get through the next few fights and the elite i'll be taking this flurry of blows our third opponent is the jaw worm nothing we can really do here except take some damage and deal a little bit lowering jawahar himself at least we didn't draw the eruption on turn one do i dare wish for money might be more reasonable to brush joints and strike we could do eight plus nine plus nine with vulnerable here which is almost all of the damage required and then we can defeat the joe worm next turn or i can wish for money let me play the vigilance defend next turn try to kill later given that we're about to go into a shop i think that extra little bit of cash might make a big difference here so even though this could cost me some health i'm gonna choose to wish uh let's see here is this lethal quick so two quick tips for watcher play in general one every turn look at your draw pile and consider what you're going to be drawing on your next turn two take a deep long look at the cards in your hand and make sure it's not possible to kill your opponents on this turn it's very tempting to just block here with vigilance defend but we can do better if eruption crush joints and strike gets a kill and it's gonna be nine plus sixteen plus eighteen that does kill [Music] eruption puts us into wrath stance making our other attacks do double damage 16 plus 12 is actually perfectly 28 but if we use the miracle we can even apply vulnerable with the crush joints and strike as well so we ended up greeting pretty comfortably there getting our money's worth now we have another good potion a blessing of the forge and some spicy choices i like these options bowling bash it's one enemy really hard depending on how many enemies are in combat so if there are three enemies this deals 21 damage to one of them really good way to just snipe one foe out of many prey gives this mantra more steps towards divinity and also puts in insight zero cost draw two with retain into the draw pile insights are very useful for controlling your deck shuffles on watcher and do provide a little bit of uh i guess you could call it card draw card advantage or conclude hits all enemies really hard but then ends your turn which is definitely awkward i'm gonna go for a no-nonsense bowling bash here um with my rank choice being bowling bash one conclude two skip three pray for bowling bash one conclude two skip three pray four are my my ranked choices here i'll be taking that bowling bash we're also gonna be taking our 202 gold into the store now and the options here are intriguing deeply intriguing to me [Music] so lots of things available in a shop shops are one of the major resource nodes of slavespire and knowing exactly what to do at each shop is pretty tough there's always three relics for sale five cards from your character here at the top two colorless cards cards that are not specific to your character's class three potions and the almighty card removal [Music] there's some pretty sweet stuff here i like bag of preparation because it gives us more card draw on turn one [Music] which can get us a little bit a little bit of a head start art of war gives us energy if we play no attacks on our turn a little bit awkward with well we have a lot of attacks so it's pretty hard not to play attacks but it's nice after playing wish or orange pellets allowing us to remove debuffs by playing a power attack and a skill in the same turn i like orange pellets a lot overall but i think a bag of prep is quite no nonsense here of the three relics i think my preferred order would be bag of prep pellets art of war but this is a pretty close one they're all very good in their own rights orange pellets and fasting pair together very nicely and if you could afford both of them i would recommend it strongly but it's not within our price range here card removals are also extremely good removing a card is a very very powerful thing at any time in slave aspire removing a starting card reduces your next cycle time means that you're able to draw through all your cards with one fewer draw required it also means that you're more likely to see the powerful or upgraded cards that are not the card that you removed but the bank of prep is two additional draw instantly and that can be pretty good i'm also thinking about this just lucky as it's on sale and we can afford it alongside the bag of prep of the cards that are here i would say conclude is pretty good adds significant area damage to this deck just lucky is decent it adds a little bit of damage a little bit of block a little bit of scry halt is a decent block but we don't have enough wrath stance to make it reliable you have to draw the halt when you're in wrath which is tough to do collect is the card i would least like to add here collect is an energy generator but it takes multiple turns and overall really doesn't do its job all that well it certainly would not improve our deck's ability to fight right now what collect does is trade some energy this turn for more energy on future turns and here in act one we really want to be making stuff happen on turn one turn two and turn three collect is not conductive to that conducive [Music] so i think my personal choice is going to be the bank of prep and the just lucky here giving us an extra zero cost card that we might draw on turn one a free attack that can scale up with the wish and a way to find the flurry of blows as well [Music] now that we've hit five additional cards to the starting deck it starts to become less beneficial to add additional unupgraded oh dear unupgraded common cards to this deck as we'll end up kind of achieving a peak density of cards each additional card you add also makes it more and more difficult to draw any particular card so there's definitely a practical limit to how large a deck should get in slay the spire all right this is a pretty terrifying encounter we've rolled john worm attacking for 12 on turn one with backup but i think thanks to this bowling bash we have enough damage here and the flurry of blows thank you banker preparation eruption does nine on its own that would make bowling mash then deal 28 and flurry blows will deal eight we also get the flurry blows back if you play flurry first so nine plus 28 plus 12 49 damage that's a ko in fact i can even play the flurry here so that's our turn then flurry eruption flurry bowling bash i could miracle and strike to do another 12 here that turn really showing off why offensive cards first on watcher can be so impactful to your run i'm going to hold on to um this miracle here to try to play wish with it looks like that's a no unless i want to take five i don't want to take five okay we find a fruit juice giving us five max hp as well as uh three more common cards just lucky pressure points and consecrates i think i would rank consecrate highest then skip than just lucky then pressure points here consecrate gives us some free area damage and has a pretty good upgrade upgrading all of it's upgrading the damage to each enemy substantially can help us out with the three centuries fight too i think this is just barely better than skipping skipping is actually a completely acceptable choice here as well but i think that pressure points is a big trap okay i'll take the consecrate just one more free area damage attack again these are all going to scale really well with strengths from wish if we start wishing for power going into this elite fight quite frankly these potions are very strong in terms of their ability to prevent damage i haven't talked about potions a whole lot but let's do that now on ascension 20 you only get two potion slots to work with and potions will drop occasionally from enemies potions are one time very powerful effects that if used properly can make a huge difference in your slay this fire run generally speaking when i pick up potions i kind of have a use case in mind for them this blessing of the forge and the explosive potion offer the ability to significantly improve our damage for one fight and my use case for these potions is absolutely kill the elites of act 1 so that we can get lots of relics both of these could save us quite a bit of health in an upcoming fight whereas this fruit juice is five health now and forever which is good but i really need these resources to be able to get through these upcoming elite fights which means i might actually leave this fruit juice on the ground very unusual choice here i think normally you would see me discord a potion to pick up and then drink this fruit juice for the five health but right now i want to make sure that i have these in hand for this fight so that i can kill it more easily okay with that said i'm going to leave fruit juice on the ground and we're going to go into our first elite fight here it is the gremlin knob from the mob is very much a test of damage output a test that we are going to pass unfortunately we didn't find our eruption here on turn one but we did find a whole lot of other stuff that can do very good damage and i think this might be a great turn to use our blessing of the forge letting us upgrade all of the cards in this hand all three strikes the consecrate the just lucky and the miracle so that we can find a killing line next turn perhaps let's do that every single one of these attack cards gets plus three damage which means we get to do a whole heck of a lot bringing knob all the way down to 46 health i'll discard both the flurry and the strike to maximize the chance that i draw eruption next turn and that should hopefully allow us to kill the grumla knob on the following turn i think so vigilance crush joints flurry of blows miracle eruption flurry of blows bowling bash how much damage is that we do eight from crush joints plus six from the flurry plus 13 from eruption plus 12 from the flurry plus 21 from bowling bash we can deal actually 60 damage with this hand and that's more than enough to immediately kill the grunla knob we could eruption before crush joints we miss out on four damage from eruption and two damage from flurry so it's six damage versus yeah i should do two more damage if i crush joints when in wrath stance actually we'll do it this way then oh actually no i can't play the crush joints afterwards this is the order i have to do this in okay joints flurry we're using the miracle to get the energy for this don't forget we get two more energy upon leaving calm stance here picking up a smiling mask for cheaper card removals at shops smiling mask is really really nice here and three more cards three more tech cards another bowling bash signature move which can only be played if it's the only attack in our hand it's a pretty challenging card to play though this deck could do a decent job of it or follow-up which is free if you previously played an attack i think we've got enough zero cost attacks that my ranked choice ends up being skip is the first priority here follow up at two bowling bash at three signature move at four well maybe not at force the signature move you'd have a hard time making it work here that's that's what i'll say if you were to make a signature move work what you want is relatively few attack cards having access to lots of card removals can really make that work um and good energy generation we're going to start skipping cards we do not want the deck to become too large what we want to do is get a card upgraded at this rest site and proceed into our second elite fight generally speaking on watcher one of the best first cards to upgrade is eruption making it cost one instead of two lets you play more damage cards on the turn that you play the eruption or lets you eruption and vigilance in the same turn both of those things are very very good when choosing an upgrade in slay the spire it can be a little overwhelming you've got so many different options and every card gets a different bonus strikes and defends get plus three to their number the vigilance gets plus four block the wish boosts all of its different effects crush joints is a little bit more damage in one turn of vulnerable flurry at plus two bowling bash gets three per hit my advice when thinking about what upgrades to get in slay the spire is i kind of break them down into a few categories first are flat uh our damage upgrades anything that improves the damage of a card when i look at these upgrades i look at the flat amount of damage that's upgraded so it's not a percentage comparison or anything um strike goes from six to nine that's a fifty percent improvement whereas crush joints goes from eight to ten that's a 25 improvement don't worry about those percentage numbers because what you're carrying is actually about the the sheer points of damage so two plus two on crush joints plus three on strike and that bonus is then multiplied if you get multiple targets so consecrate is three damage just like the strike but it's three damage to all enemies which makes the consecrate upgrade way better than the strike upgrade and i could say the same of the bowling bash bowling bash upgrade is better than strike upgrade because this bonus may be applied multiple times energy upgrades are also extremely valuable anytime you can make a card cost less if the card is a power or a card that exhausts then you'll only be able to play it one time so that's a one-time energy discount those are still pretty good but what's really juicy are cards that don't exhaust cards that can be used multiple times and have an energy discount and that's definitely the case for eruption it's why eruption is one of the best upgrades here of the cards we currently have i'd say our three best upgrades are eruption consecrate and probably crush joints for the extra one vulnerable turn which is a big deal prioritizing extra turns of debuff i think is a really good idea for your upgrades generally speaking and that crush joints upgrade will uh probably follow shortly all right we get the lagavulin this time this enemy sleeps for up to three turns allowing us the chance to perhaps wish for something and given my current situation i'll probably just wish for strength here so that we can easily defeat this fool which is right on top too now of course i could simply play eruption and do a lot of damage this turn but let's let sleeping eggs lie and go ahead and play wish here to become almighty gain three strength i think that's what we're looking for then we'll let them sleep for one more turn on this turn they wake up no matter what so on this turn we should attack no matter what with everything we've got [Music] could also could have also wished for the plated armor doing less damage but getting [Music] more block per turn out of the deal i think we'll find that the bonus damage helps a lot here all of these low cost attacks are so much deadlier with a little bit of strength to them for example three blows now doing 14 damage consecrate doing 16 so on and so forth um i think i can get a kill next turn if i discard this defend actually yeah this is gonna be enough to kill so we take 10 on this turn but then on the next turn we're able to defeat the leg of lynn before we take another bop for 20. [Music] okay and that was pretty comfortable get the dark stone purift giving us max health if we're cursed i wouldn't say that relic's probably gonna get a whole lot of use but it's something that we can consider as we progress further not every relic is always going to be useful to you sometimes just getting a lot of them so you have a couple that are really impactful is good what a ridiculous card award we're offered by the way this is a tough choice rush down is a power powers are put into play and stay that way so is devotion for the record rushdown says whenever we enter wrath draw two additional cards card draw a very difficult thing to come by inspire usually and a very powerful thing when you can get your hands on lots of it rushdown is watcher's probably best card draw card being a reusable way to get some cards drawn and really contributing to what i like to call the stance dance of the watcher where switching back and forth between wrath and calm or wrath and some other source stance becomes fuel for a whole bunch of different powers and such [Music] wheel kick pretty good damage also a source of card draw but we have to be willing to pay the energy price which i think is rather difficult with this wish already if you're in wrath and you play another card that says wrath and you do not draw a card you must actually enter wrath stance from a non-wrath source in order to get the bonus here last option devotion two mantra per turn so five turns after playing devotion that's a long wait we enter divinity getting triple damage for one turn i think my choice here would be rush down one devotion two wheel kick three and skip four all of these cards are pretty good card draw especially useful when you have zero cost cards in your deck is being able to draw those zero cost cards multiple times really starts to become powerful we'll pick up this rush down and be pretty happy with it rushdown is a card that also has an energy reduction upgrade although since it's power this is also only a one-time energy reduction compared to the multi-time energy reduction of the eruption since our health is still high i think we can continue to fight elites here we get an excellent relic out of this chest the captain's wheel gives us 18 block at the start of turn three uh which is crucially useful against the elites of act one but will be very good against a whole myriad of opponents too as we get closer to the boss i should talk a little bit about bosses in slay this fire and kind of our decision making as we go towards them each act has three possible bosses that you can face in act one the possibilities are the hexagons the slime boss and the guardian this is the hexagons who is essentially a damage race you have to defeat this boss in nine turns or you're gonna take a lot of damage so having consistent damage output is king for hexagons um we have to make sure as we go through that we're picking cards that will continue to improve our damage output the wish and the crush joints especially are really going to help with this for that fight bosses generally speaking are a test of your deck's ability to quote unquote scale here in the spire community you have this term scaling which usually refers to anything that makes your deck do more damage or produce more block on later turns so a great example of quote-unquote scaling is wish here giving us strength to make all of our attacks do more damage you could also consider crush joints to be quote-unquote scaling because applying vulnerable causes any further attacks played to do even more damage so you're able to multiply the value there and effective multiplication these actually stack with each other too so for example wish adds three points of base damage to an attack flurry blows goes from four to seven that modified 7 is then what gets used to calculate damage with wrath and with vulnerable so if we're in wrath that 7 goes to 14 and then add 50 to that becomes 21 damage from fleuria blows with three strength in wrath and vulnerable all these stacking bonuses are really the core of successful watcher a lot of the time [Music] wow that is a mighty spicy set of gremlins we just got two sneaky grimlins attacking us for 10 on turn one and the mad gremlin attacking for five this is definitely a good use case for the explosive potion but so is this fight so if there's a way we can get through without using our potion that'd be great [Music] i'm not convinced that there is currently though [Music] we take 10 damage if i triple defend actually not quite 10 we take 8 damage if i look to block here um i'll probably just use the potion here oh that's true the potion also lets me wish for money i like that actually yeah yeah we'll use it 10 damage to all enemies is very very efficient here take that strike next turn this wizard's gonna attack us on turn three so we have a little while to deal with them whereas the mad gremlin will keep attacking each turn this is definitely a fight where having two defense of a deck results in harsh punishments if you can't do enough damage to kill all of the gremlins and the wizard quickly um your ability to block you know 20 damage per turn is is not going to be there but with our myriad out of attacks even though eruption was low in the deck we have no problem there three more commons lots of common cards seen this act and that's okay two sources of scrye third eye is block and scry 3 whereas cut through fate is damage and scry 2 draw one both are pretty similar in the amount of cards that they let you see and then of course another bowling bash i love scry on watcher being able to look at the draw pile really really helps in a lot of situations [Music] question is do we want the cut through fate or the third eye my rank choice is gonna be third iron cut through fader one and two i'm not sure which one's better skip is number three bowling bash is the fourth option here we do not want another bowling bash with the current attacks that we have but third eye and cutter fate both reduce your quote unquote cycle time since you're able to discard cards you don't want with scry or status cards they make you draw through the deck more quickly we need more damage for hexagons so i think i'm inclined to take the cut or fade over the third eye but this is a pretty close choice if we were fighting the guardian boss i would choose the third eye here all the time so this is a great example of a card where the a card reward where the outcome of which one i think is best is really dependent on our ability to overcome the next visible challenge and the challenge that we can see says please do more damage [Music] sentries with plus strength a little scary but here's our bowling bash to do really good damage on turn one would have been really nice to draw eruption this turn but even so i can do some serious stuff here centuries fight is a deceptively threatening one in early act one they don't do a whole lot of damage on their own but the fact that there's three of them and the fact that they add stinky dazed cards this swirly move adds three days to our discard pile which is going to mess with our ability to draw actually good cards pretty substantially i am gonna play rush down here with a miracle i'll defend for five maybe should have kept the miracle strike one fewer time oh good success in the centuries fight usually involves killing one or more of them really quickly otherwise the fight can get out of control very unlikely that i can do 40 damage i can do eruption than vigilance or vigilance than eruption when i enter wrath i'm going to draw two more cards that's guaranteed at least one damage card also important to keep in mind next turn we gain 18 block which makes ending our turn in wrath actually pretty attractive so i think it's best to tank some damage here let's go vigilance then eruption that brings this to 24 which is pretty spooky but we'll block for 13 take 11. do some good damage there oh actually prob wasn't supposed to attack this one supposed to keep attacking this one all right what's on top of the deck wish i don't want a draw wish but thank you 14 plus 8 is 22. [Music] we're attacking this one the one that's going to be attacking me next turn as i want to make sure it dies before it's able to hit me okay there we go and the next turn we draw eruption which kills all told we didn't take that much damage here which is good considering that i had to use the explosive potion against the gremlins pick up a tory which reduces unblocked attack damage from five to one that can be very nice against hexagons uh or against any other multi-attacking enemy hmm [Music] nirvana bowling bash protect nirvana is another example of what i would call a scaling card giving us block whenever we scry so that would add three additional block to the cut through fates and to the just lucky essentially six block per deck cycle is a way to look at this um given that it takes us four turns to draw those six uh to draw those cards you can say that the nirvana is about three block per turn actually no um six block four turns one and a half block per turn excuse me and that is a pretty sad deal you need more than that to make it worthwhile now the nirvana could become better later it gets a little bit better with an upgrade but generally speaking i find that this specific card is pretty below the curve another another copy of bowling bash or protect which is a big beefy block card that stays in your hand actually not the world's worst protect i think it just adds a little bit of block consistency a little bit of block density the deck doesn't have a lot of block in it so in act two we're gonna really struggle defensively uh which i think is fairly common for acts where you fight hexaghost as your boss my rank choice here is i think skip first protect second bowling bash third nirvana fourth so the protect is okay but i think i'd rather skip and keep our overall card count low even though our health is relatively low i'm going to continue to upgrade cards here with crush joints being next on the docket as i'm fairly confident now that we have a fairly well developed deck of cards and a lot of relics that we should be able to defeat this elite without much trouble especially with aid from our captain's wheel block proof card scribe i like that idea for nirvana or card scribe really good turn one here you're always happy to see eruption turn one against the knob one two three cost of attacks i want to play [Music] hmm our ideal is simply killing gremlin knob on turn two which i think with triple damage is going to be doable here that's the hope anyway oh yeah i have to play a skill so yes i'm playing the miracle see let's go rush down eruption [Music] good choice double or triple i mean triple counting for twice from wrath and then one and a half from vulnerable that makes triple strike doing here 18 damage which is six times three [Music] and we're easily able to defeat him with energy to spare no less before taking any hit at all [Music] that lets us get a blood vial two health per combat will slowly but surely um help us out here starting to build power through the collective effect of all of these different relics get a very unusual set of card rewards here just lucky again conjure blade which puts an expunger this is an x-cost card into the draw pile expunger is all about paying a lot of energy to create a powerful sword and then playing that powerful sword over and over again expunger doesn't exhaust so the idea is to make like a nine times five and then play it a bunch of times for conjure blade to be good you need lots of scry and lots of energy i don't think we quite have what we would need or weave which returns to our hand whenever we scry comes back with just lucky and cut through fate kind of a nice little compliment to the flurry of blows i think a weave could be reasonable here especially with our strength i like weave more than i like nirvana generally speaking yeah let's take one weave let's take weave here [Music] and now for everyone's favorite game is this lethal can we kill this poor man on turn one with what i have drawn here the play would be eruption then bowling bash strike weave that's nine plus thirteen seventeen nine plus thirty four no not a kill what i could kill if this was flurry blows if we just block with eruption then we'll take five damage which tory actually reduces all the way down to one which is really really nice rushdown could potentially get us there if we drew consecrate flurry or just lucky i think simply taking one this turn is quite nice vigilance although i won't be able to enter wrath next turn that's okay this is fine we'll even keep the miracle for now just take a little bit progress to the next turn 10 13 to do better than that um do i have one energy or two left just did miracle crush joints fate so i have two strike plus strike is nine plus nine not quite a kill here so let's discard both of these for all the final card which is flurry of blows oh but we've so we do have a kill right about weave there [Music] yes okay i gotta remember that i have that weave a little bit of a blunder there three more cards another prostrate card reality which creates a retaining attack or another protects my personal rank choice here skip is first then carve reality then protect then prostrate with the following deck i think we have enough damage cards that i don't feel compelled to add another all right going into our boss before each boss there's always a rest site i personally i think it's a good idea to evaluate do you have enough health to fight the boss is your deck going to be able to match up against it um with the current health total that you have or do you need to rest in order to gain more health to defeat the boss sometimes an upgrade is better than arrest even if you're in a pretty precarious position because gaining a numerical advantage can save a ton ton ton of health in certain fights hexagons is certainly no exception this particular boss is fairly easy on low health they have an attack on turn two that scales with our current hit points and with the 29 health it's going to be relatively low the tori will also further reduce their attack damage here so i think we're quite confident upgrading a card right now but if you don't have an exact knowledge of how your deck lines up you may be better off resting against the boss as general rule one of your best ways to win a slave spire run is to make it to the next act and worry about from there so what upgrade helps is most against hexagons do i think plus one strength could be a really big deal but i think we could also benefit from improving our scry by upgrading the cuts for fate or maybe even upgrading our block on vigilance but let's upgrade the wish this will be more strength for hexagons and more money if we are able to play it in later fights not that we've managed to play it too many times but here and there we have and luckily enough we even draw it on turn one so i'm just gonna go ahead and do that we're gonna wish for almighty and gain four points of strength making all of these attacks do four more damage keep this defend on top to block next turn we know we're getting attacked and i'll keep the miracle in hands okay not too bad relatively good draw order in fact [Music] some free attacks in there [Music] so three by six this is reduced essentially to one by six by the tory at least the ones that get through our block so i'll take four if i play the bowling bash whereas if i play the defend i'll take two thirteen block yeah so two damage to deal 11 to hexagons let's do the damage you said this fight is a damage race so it's rather important here that we do the damage all right crush joints i need to play the miracle to make you work so what's happening here thank you for the captain's wheel and then it's a six by two attack on this turn [Music] hmm awkward is how i would describe this we draw two cards if i play eruption but being in wrath doubles the attack damage dealt by our enemy if i don't draw a block card off this eruption then i would die [Music] immediately [Music] and if i if i don't play the eruption then i don't get to go into wrath hmm so i can risk it all by playing eruption or i can go strike strike crush joints here just do some damage take 14 here two from this burn in our hand and then some from our opponents tori only reduces damage that's five or less so this is just over the threshold and i won't be able to reduce it at all [Music] okay i'm not going to play this eruption although it was probably the correct choice were you just lucky were on top i would have barely lose [Music] discard that we want to find eruption again soon but note that thanks to four strength we're actually doing pretty good damage here oh man this is a bad time to draw vigilance uh i might die next turn [Music] let's do it as follows back all those things strike go to nine [Music] vigilance i'm deeply concerned i need to do every point of damage i can get but we might be dead here [Music] um is that enough damage to kill 25 plus some oh and weave comes back actually hold on so we can do eight plus eight plus eleven plus fourteen plus nine fifty fifty no one's short okay so that means cut their fate needs to find any attack or any playable skill and yes we need to weave first because cut through fate will make it return to our hands hey we drew an attack and eruption at that so we are successfully through the hexagons fight as we're able to find a kill here we could even block with the vigilance i was a little close for comfort but we're through it gg we're offered alpha brilliance and devotion three of watchers rare cards rare cards are a little odd for this character many of them are kind of complicated cards with a lot of setup required in order to have some kind of payoff for example alpha alpha shuffles a beta which then shuffles an omega omega is a three cost power that says deal 50 damage to all enemies every turn alpha can be really good if and really only if you're able to draw and play enough cards to get the omega effect in play quickly in most combats it's just dead weight and can really slow you down brilliance offers pretty good base damage that gets significantly higher if you have any mantra generation something that we've repeatedly refused on this run and we'll probably continue to do so um or devotion as a source of mantra my personal ordering here probably skip first brilliance second devotion third alpha fourth these are useful enough rares in their own right but aren't really synergistic with what we're doing at the moment we're looking for stuff that says draw cards we're looking stuff that says scry and we're looking for things that say either enter column stance or enter wrath stance but none of this says any of that so we're skipping all of it lastly we have to choose one of three boss relics boss relics are one of the most difficult decisions in any run of slay the spire and very much define how your deck continues to develop many of the boss relics have a downside in addition to an upside but some of them like the holy water and violet lotus here to watcher specific boss relics uh don't have a downside so our choices are holy water three miracles instead of one makes it a lot more easy to use this crush joints makes it a lot more easy to play the wish because we can have six energy on turn one but it's once the miracles are gone they're gone ridic dome is energy every turn but we can no longer see what the enemy is doing i'm not gonna do an over explained don't run i'm just gonna be very honest that said dome's energy every turn can be pretty useful here lotus gives you extra energy when you leave calm i think lotus gets better and better the more cards that enter com you have currently we only have one so my rank choice here is probably holy water first runic dome second violet lotus third as this is only going to be one extra energy every 19 cards so one energy every four turns three or four turns ridic dome is one energy every turn and holy water is up to three energy on turn one but it's just three energy flat per combat a lot of fights aren't going to make it a full three turns so i think the holy water is an excellent upgrade to our starting relic here all right now we're into act two in act two just like act one the priority is to get our deck as strong as possible the rules are mostly the same we still want to visit elite nodes and rest site nodes however the events available in unknown rooms have now changed and generally speaking i think the event pool is a lot better in act two and act three a lot of really powerful things that you can find in these rooms we also have a chance for upgraded cards from our regular foes and of course we're now going to face act 2 combats act 2 really steps up the enemy's strength and enemies will do either a lot more damage very quickly and they'll also usually have quite a bit more health a lot of foes in act 2 have around 100 hit points so being able to do a hundred damage very quickly is one of the quickest ways to make it through this act there's also very scary elites in this act that threaten the player with multiple foes or with lots of damage immediately with things that we're a little scared of okay let's just keep going here what does our path then want to be i think we'd like to hit at least one store because we have the smiling mask hitting multiple shops might be a reasonable idea these are the only stores in the act though so i probably want to go to one or both of these which means starting in either the middle or the right half of the act pretty scared of an early elite combat kind of like the idea of going a rest night rest sites into elite and a couple card removals i think that feels pretty comfortable that'll let us upgrade a couple more cards maybe the rush down maybe the vigilance maybe the cut-through fates something like that how do you feel about events versus combats right now combats are card rewards and money whereas events are chance for card removals chance for unusual effects like bites and such [Music] maybe then i'll take two events and two combats along the way to that first fire she has three combats two events that feels like a reasonable distribution we could go heavier on the combat actually we can't do better than that can we if i want to go to this fire it has to be two events okay let's just do that a shelled parasite with its stinky 21 damage on turn one this could definitely be the time to make use of a potion here as our hand of relatively cheap cards really doesn't do a whole lot against this opponents yeah welcome to act two no kidding [Music] all right i'll use a miracle and then we're going to drink this colorless potion looking for either card draw or enemy damage reduction i think dark shackles will do just fine bringing this 21 down to a 12. then i can block for seven and take only one with tori perfect also want to bust through the defense layers of this opponents with our attacks here just lucky discard the bowling bash i don't really want to draw that next turn these again okay and we're able to take only one here we also actually didn't need the energy from that miracle but i had to play it to get room in hand that was quite right this is a bit better uh we have flurry in the discard too right that's correct question is can i kill here vigilance flurry eruption crush joints flurry strike strike how much damage is that four plus nine [Music] plus twenty well and then everything's triple 12 18 18. all told that's 81 damage that's a kill that is a kill [Music] let's use the miracle to activate the crush joints though [Music] unfortunately i'm not able to play the wish that's okay i would be if i had kept the extra the extra miracle from turn one but someone forgot to do that that's all right so as scary as that shield parasite was we ended up taking only one damage there thanks to careful deliberation some block options here three different defense choices and given that the deck is pretty low on defense at the moment i actually quite like that evaluate puts an insight into the draw pile for a little bit of extra draw mental fortress will be blocked whenever we change stances or third eye is more scry and a little bit of flat block hey hey everyone did you know that you can now support me directly on youtube by getting a channel membership for as low as five bucks a month you'll get all access to perks like custom badges and emojis to use in comments and discounts on the merch store all while helping support me and this channel to do what i love every day just click the join button below to get started now back to the video evaluating third eye are adding kind of more of the same or cards that just kind of do some stuff without upgrades on them they're not bad but i think we can do better here as this deck progresses we're still looking for more stance changing cards to add getting block whenever we do so is going to be one of the greatest ways for this deck to put on scale into our late game able to capitalize on what we're already trying to do enter wrath and draw cards with that by adding some block as well i think that's going to be very very good here so let's pick up this mental fortress overall ranking here mental fortress first third i second skip third evaluate fourth would be my choice give me that [Music] and we said we wanted two events and three combats it's chosen is going to debuff us with stinky stinky hex which causes us to add a status card to the draw pile [Music] any time we play a non-attack card however i do so much damage on turn one we're actually able to just outright kill but what about my wish hold on what about that wish okay i'll wait one more turn i don't like it that much hey there we go so we're able back to get our money here by waiting a couple of turns that was good cool crescendo alpha flurry we've seen most of these before the only one we haven't seen is crescendo a retaining wrath entry we want more stance changes we have an eruption sorry we have a a rush down and a mental fortress already so more ways to get into wrath is pretty good and given that this is the first wrath card we've seen i think i'm gonna take it my pranked choice here is gonna be crescendo first skip second flurry third alpha fourth that alpha definitely does not help this deck and would very much get in the way in most fights something to think about as we go through the act though how do we eventually defeat the champ at the end of the act champ is going to require us to do lots of damage in a kind of brief period of time um after we get an initial phase of powering up so as long as we can i think just with the strength gain of wish we'll probably be fine against champ i'm taking this crescendo and i'll swap the next dirty potion or this swift potion for draw 3. i don't have a lot of block cards in the deck so i don't think dexterity which adds a flat amount of block per block card is all that useful the joust we must bet on the fate of this joust a man trying to avenge his pet can bet on the murderer of his pets for a higher likelihood chance to win money or take the long shot for the high payout on the owner the average payout is slightly higher for the owner here but you're more likely to get a return with a murderer i like the kind of you get a valid reason to pick either one in this event i for one am a noodles betting man what do we get we lost the bet but at least we weren't gouged by a lance oh well i still think i want to avoid early elites so though we're actually not that bad at them been little while since the last noodles win oh man parasite is back and angrier than ever hello mr parasites see eruption bowling bash flurry weave is not gonna cut it here i think i should use the swift potion [Music] otherwise or the block potion we could also use that but i can't play eruption if i don't swift potion so i'm going to swift potion but in order to draw three cards you must make room in hand here you can only have 10 cards in hand at one time let's go miracle little fortress and play the flurry i'd like to kill the parasite on turn one okay we got vigilance that is a little helpful i guess i can wrath do a bunch of damage and then end with vigilance using a miracle that seems pretty good something like eruption here then bowling bash here weave here flurry here play the miracle to cut through fate that seems good or do we actually have the kill i think with the weave and the cut-through fader i might have the kill here [Music] let's create his welcomes eat actually no i need the bowling bash and the strike to get the kill otherwise we're off or wait no not off there we go all that pretty acceptable no chance of wishing for money though as we have to finish off the fungi beast or take a ton of damage here so we'll just bop it okay pretty comfortable fights we're offered fasting prey plus and follow-up intriguing pray plus is a lot of mantra i think this could have been a really interesting mantra run potentially my rank choice here i think skip first pray fasting follow-up this is a tough one it's a really tough one strength index makes our attack and block cards a lot more effective but the reduced energy per turn is a real problem if you're only got three base i think i'll be skipping these cards even the free upgrade on the prey okay and we're gonna go this way grab our some grab some upgrades all right we get to a store cheap card removals thanks to the smiling mask here also a bevy of cards on offer i particularly like empty fists letting us exit our stance something we're lacking at the moment is the ability to do that card wise i like the empty fist i'm okay with another crescendo but i don't think we need to i don't think the like water the perseverance are very good but the reach heaven's okay [Music] guaranteed damage on turn one with dramatic entrance could be interesting since we have the additional card draw of the bag of preparation but i don't think it's that good watchers x cost cards in general aren't that good which makes chemical x fairly less valuable here bronze scales makes us do some damage back and that's pretty pretty decent passive damage i think bronze scales is generally a pretty good purchase we're definitely going to remove a card and that card is going to be i think a strike at this point we've gotten enough additional damage cards that we're no longer relying on the strikes for damage so let's start losing those [Music] so we have at least oh this was a secret shop we have two more shops coming up this act potentially i'm just gonna save our money for those as i don't think any of the things in this shop are that amazing not even this empty fist um and we're gonna try to keep keep our hands on the resource for [Music] now many good upgrades that's all right okay so two upgrades i think rushdown is a very good upgrade making that free could argue the same for crescendo i think adding additional damage to all enemies would consecrate matters quite a bit and i think upgrading the mental fortress for two more block per stance change is also good our next priority is defeating the elites of act 2 which are often multi-enemy fights and do require a lot of damage output so i really like the idea of upgrading consecrate here let's do that get our area damage boosted ah the good old knight and mystic a classic two enemy fights these two test your ability to prioritize targets partially the knight in front has high health and blocks for the mystic frequently whereas the mystic will periodically buff strength of both of these as well as heal them generally speaking i consider the night the centurion to be the priority target that frontline are there if the mystic is killed the centurion will become angry and do a times 3 attack [Music] we're going to [Music] that said we might want to consider killing the mystic here on turn 1 because we can prevent her nine damage attack and end in wrath stance with the goal then being to kill the centurion on the following turn the shrimps on his helmet huh kind of shrimpy there's a serpent kind of looks like the sneko on the armor but i don't know about those eye holes see so we do 9 29 29 21 exactly 50 okay [Music] go for the mystic first [Music] i have to do a lot of damage next turn that seems really unlikely actually i've made a mistake actually wait have i because i can wish for four points of strength here which makes this plus eight sixteen plus 20 68 [Music] what's this okay yeah yeah that's a kill go flurry weave just lucky brings the flurry back or the sorry the weave back and then strike will kill with miracle that was close here's that nasty times three attack we were talking about by the way for killing the mystic first but ultimately able to prevent all the damage there were offered another upgraded crush joints which could help keep our vulnerable applied wouldn't consider such a card without a free upgrade on it there's also a follow-up and a halt my ranking for these cards i think crush joints one skip two halt three follow-up four and i'll be taking this upgraded second copy of crush joints we also get to upgrade one more card here before our first elite fight i think the upgrade to cut through fate just lucky bowling bash or men actually no let's get these energy upgrades done now let's start with the rush down and then get crescendo upgraded too that can help us preserve our miracles from the holy water in our mid act chest there is a boat thingy we are a double boat giving us block on turn two now in addition to turn three guaranteed free block is very very helpful in giving you i guess you could call it tempo giving you one time bonuses that you can capitalize on to get ahead of the curve in various combats that's how i tend to look at one-time energy reductions too like making crescendo cheaper gives you this one-time burst which could be really really powerful if effectively utilized all right we need to survive this elite fight to get to the shop our first elite is the three slavers one of the most dreaded encounters here in act two and for good reason look at that damage output on turn one 34 combined damage from these nerds that's scary fortunately we have some allies in this fight and i think first and foremost is gonna be wish for strength here to make our consecrate do big damage to make our flurry do big damage and then we can employ the block potion and these defends to block a little bit but we absolutely positively need to make these nerds die wait wish first slam generally speaking my targeting priority in this fight the back guy first this one can inflict vulnerable upon you which is very very very deadly the middle one adds wounds every turn and the front one weakens you the middle and front can be either or in terms of their priority but it's almost always take the red guy in the back first almost always so currently i take one seven fourteen zero one fourteen i go to twenty two block think 12. i'm gonna keep two miracles use a little bit of damage from tory here there's that stinky entangle entangle is absolutely not allowed the status effect prevents us from playing attack cards on our turn which is notably most of our cards so we have to kill this slaver before that occurs or else [Music] weaving the discard no and i'm guaranteed getting wrath next turn so let's use these two miracles to play the vigilance and get my flurry back when would you wish for armor armor wish can be useful in long drawn-out fights um such as the awakened one is a good time for wishing for armor i tend to think [Music] but i think armor is probably what i wish for least often all things considered [Music] get meat on the bone a beautiful reward they're healing us if we're below half after a combat we're offered an omniscience of pressure points and a follow-up plus omniscience is another kind of late game scaling card you get to choose any one card in the draw pile play it twice where an omniscience is best is when used to duplicate a big expensive card like this wish um or our mental fortress or a rush down just any kind of power is usually a good target it can also be a really good way to play a powerful damage card in the draw pile two times such as ragnarok or sands of time not taking the pressure points here follow-up's okay i think my ordering here is omniscience one follow-up two skip three pressure points four the upgrade on that follow-up makes it better than the others we've seen okay we get to a shop to buy stuff here thing that really stands out to me is inner peace a way to enter calm something we desperately need i think there's maybe an argument for this wave of the hand too as it can apply weaken to all enemies something that watcher really likes for her later game and we definitely want to remove cards with our smiling mask other things that are okay here smasher strategy although it's very expensive is a ton of free card draw which is very powerful if you omniscience the wish yes you can pick two different effects so you can wish for strength and armor or you can wish for the same thing twice the only thing you can't wish for is more wishes alrighty here what do i want to do relic wise acabeco makes her first attack each combat do more damage most powerful with attacks that either hit multiple times or attacks that hit all enemies [Music] it's okay here fish's money per card we add need to add a lot of cards to justify the fish so i don't think we're gonna be doing that or the cauldron which gives us five potions to look at it's not too bad i for one am taking this inner piece and i am removing another strike card and what am i doing from here i can opt for another upgrade instead of the second shop yeah let's add this wave of the hand as well we're starting to build out a defensive plan for the later game as you get into the later combats of slay the spire becomes less and less possible to win them in a single turn with lots of damage and so you need to have a comprehensive plan for mitigating enemy attacks weaken and powers that block can all really contribute to this do i want to buy one potion for safety's sake i think blessing of the forge is a very good potion allowing us to upgrade everything in our hand for one fight let's do that i'll buy that as a bit of an insurance policy and i think the flex potion could be pretty good too snekko is going to be our next fight excellent crescendo instantly go ham on this nerd looking for more as much damage as we can do on turn one realistically neko confuses us making our cards a random cost which can be a little awkward but could be really good here for example allowing me to omniscience playing wish twice and wishing for gold two times for plus sixty dollars that's pretty sweet i'm gonna take one damage to do that then we'll just finish the fight easy peasy like oh man i should have gone divinity this rod and two prey pluses [Music] so a couple unupgraded attacks and the prey order here i think is skip first then sans then pray then conclude we really don't need attacks like this at this moment uh the weave and the flurry are really doing a lot of the work with just the strength we're able to get [Music] we're skipping these all right i got enough money that actually going to the shop is technically viable but we'll instead take the upgrade here i think we should upgrade our mental fortress for more block per stance change and then our second elite fight is going to be against the gremlin leader leader is a particularly challenging fight in act two slay the spire [Music] drum leader starts with two minions on the field and then [Music] summons additional ones over time can be particularly problematic you can win grim leader fight either by doing just a ton of damage to the leader immediately or by constantly picking off the minions forcing the leader to re-summon this looks like a turn where i can do a ton of damage immediately if i use this blessing of the forge to upgrade all these cards um it's gonna be a lot of damage let's just say that check this out holding bash deals 30 times three kabonk and i do want to draw a wish so hold on oh i didn't that's fine all right they're upgraded that's why it's like why did that not work so confused [Music] no attacks in the draw pile which is a little confusing here um this will work i think hopefully we draw a damage card next turn we do as the deck is full of them okay it was almost a little sketchy we pick up the vajra plus one strength means all of our attacks do one more damage and that'll help a lot when it comes to tackling our later game we're also offered a protect that says plus on it which is a lot better than the other protects we've seen 16 block with retain i think that's just barely good enough for me to include it here [Music] my rank choice being protect 1 skip 2 evaluate 3 bowling bash four alright i think we have plenty of strength for the champ especially if i can use the omniscience to play wish twice uh our last upgrade before the champ is going to be what here crescendo upgrade to make it free is really nice we could also make our flurry or weave do a little bit more damage we could make our omniscience cheaper so that's easier to play we could make our we wave at the hand apply too weak instead of one although i think one is probably sufficient for now let's get that one time energy upgrade on the crescendo rather than the omniscience i think that's my choice here and yes we do get omniscience on turn one which we can use to wish two times and i think the easiest way to beat champ is just wish for strength two times he is going to be very dead if i do that [Music] so let's do that good turn for the energy potion actually [Music] strength and strength become a nine strength watcher and then i have enough energy to crush joints and mental fortress we don't want to enter wrath just yet the champ here is a two-phase fight with him changing his behavior when he drops below half health during the first phase of the fight the champ gloats at you constantly taunting you and just kind of messing around because you're not considered as serious opponents but when you drop him below half health he will purge all of his debuffs and enrage attacking with the deadly times to execute attack which is very scary our goal is to lower him close to half but not actually bring him below half until we're ready to outright kill him [Music] hopefully protect his here [Music] we just protect crush joints i could also crescendo try to draw to that vigilance but it's going to be 54 damage if i enter wrath let's not do that just yet [Music] okay i think now is the time when we're ready to go ham here playing our crescendo to enter wrath doubling our damage and with nine strength all of our attacks do pretty enormous hits 48 off of that cut through fate for example we'll find that champ doesn't really get to live a whole lot now does he [Music] okay then our damage output is absolutely sufficient to get through our ax2 boss [Music] i think some more broadly useful rares here blasphemy puts us into divinity makes us die on the following turn blasphemy's all about getting a one-time spike of power using it to end the fight decisively and not having there be a next turn that's the secret is if you win the fight by killing the enemies there isn't a next turn and you don't die scrawl is just lots of crowd draw draw cards until your hand is full one of the best cards draw wise in the game or another wish allowing us to potentially gain more strength or get more money my ranked choice here personally i think would be scroll first i don't really like this blasphemy that much scroll then wish then skipped and blasphemy i think with a scroll being my uh preferred choice and some wonderful options boss relic wise two choices for gaining more energy either the coffee dripper or the fusion hammer both give us extra energy every turn but both come with a downside either we cannot rest for health at rest sites or we cannot smith for upgrades at rest sites either of these are fine right now there's not a whole lot of upgrades that are hugely important for the stack at this point but i also think that we're highly likely to avoid needing to rest because we're healing with the meat on the bone and the blood vial relics often when i'm figuring out whether i can take coffee dripper or not my first thing that i do is i look at the relics that i have available to me and try to determine whether or not i have healing since the deck is fairly expensive and we've got good card draw more energy per turn would definitely help a lot when it comes to tackling the later game [Music] the other option is the sacred bark making potions more effective don't generally like sacred bark that much unless i have more than two potion slots or some other reason to want this like maybe a specifically good potion that's true we also have guaranteed block on turn two and turn three as well as guaran additional draw on turn one making all three of our first three turns um boosted by some relic or another that's pretty good and i think that'll also help make this coffee tripper a nice and easy pick up here but the idea is that with more energy per turn we can play more of our cards draw more cards get more stuff done and that's going to allow us to tackle the greatly renewed and powerful challenges here in act 3. in act 3 the rules of foes again shift act 3 is all about long drawn-out battles against enemies that get significantly more powerful over time usually so in act 3 having both a really good damage plan and some kind of longevity and block plan is essential you really do have to have a coordinated and fully functioning deck of cards at this point and we've managed to get there pretty well we've gotten rid of half of our starter cards we have a lot of upgraded cards we have a few sources of card draw and we have a lot of good relics that are helping us out and it really is all of these things combined that are keeping us alive if we didn't have all these relics from fighting the elites in earlier acts we would be in tough shape here if we didn't have all of these upgraded cards we would be in tough shape here [Music] so here in our final acts because i want to take this run to act four and fight the heart we still want to get as strong as possible if your run is not going to the heart not going to act 4 then i usually advocate for simply reaching the boss with as much health as possible avoiding unnecessary elite fights where you can and keeping your resource high but if you're looking to have tackle the corrupt heart in act four as i am you're gonna need to do better than that and you must take advantage of the opportunity to fight elites in act three act three elites are no joke they are tough mean sons of guns who hit really hard or add lots of statuses to your deck we have most of a functional deck of cards at this point i think the question of question mark rooms versus [Music] combats has been swung in favor of question mark rooms here at act 3 is there a lot of good events in act 3 and because we care less about card rewards at this point um there's a particularly good outcome we could get if we find a particular event in these first three question marks so i'm going to start out here and take three events along the way to what might be our first shop so let's start here [Music] deck really wants to talk to the hand i i think a talk to the hand could definitely be one of the good ways to scale from here but in terms of blocking we can also get there with another mental fortress plus or [Music] maybe a few more defensive relics all right wishes in my hand i'm just gonna wish for money here [Music] nothing to omniscience these shapes in early act three are one of the easier fights to deal with they're not too bad although the spiker can really make you question your sanity if you've got a block light deck they can be really awkward [Music] get 10 block will they'll take seven damage back when i strike the spiker so play the consecrate that way spiker gets more and more spikes as time goes on so focusing on them quickly is kind of important here [Music] giraffe [Music] beautiful give me that weave again yeah this deck does want to talk to the hand because we're playing so many attack cards doesn't get offered to talk to the hand though gets offered a halt consecrate and third eye third eye is takeable still as we have a lot of use for scry but it's not incredible here i think i'm gonna go skip first third eye second hulk third consecrate fourth is my priorities here that's the plan we'll skip okay three events along the way to the shop we want to be able to take advantage of all of these elites here in the left half of the act fighting maybe three of them also visiting several shops to get easy card removals with a smiling mask our first event is glowing tesseract offering us colorless cards in exchange for health you'll almost always see me pay 10 health to look at three colorless cards that's because colorless cards are really good especially here in act three a lot of them are just free card draw which can be really nice and the 10 health penalty isn't too much most the time [Music] lots of zero cost cards in the colorless pool as well which can be very good i really like some of the options that i'm seeing here let's see panacea that's interesting lots of free attack stuff hmm so secret weapon lets us pull any attack from the draw pile put it into our hand could be a really nice way to find eruption um or a way to get weave or flurry early or a way to find crush joints i think this is a really good card so we'll pick up a secret weapon here over swift strike and dramatic entrance hand agreed could be a way to earn yet more money although not necessarily one that we need impatience can be card draw only if we can empty the hand of attacks which sounds pretty difficult to do given how many we usually have this might be a skip and a greed's okay don't really like mind blast doesn't do that much damage for two energy currently this is we have 26 cards in deck we draw seven of them on turn ones so this would be innate deal 20 for two cost it's not that good how about gain one artifact that can block a debuff which could be a debuff from the heart or from any other enemy that inflicts it like the time eater we can also block our own debuff if we find a card like fasting from the shop [Music] metamorphosis can also make zero cost attacks which can be very nice but it's all up to luck what exactly you get i think i'll take this panacea just a one time one artifact we're gonna skip this card reward and i'd say this is actually relatively low in terms of the rewards that we got oh we do yes i was hoping we'd see this event specifically because we have some sweet options here mind bloom is one of the most powerful events in the game exclusive to act three and always offers you three choices i am war you fight a boss from act one which is pretty easy at this point in the game to get some money and a rare relic and a card reward that's pretty good almost always a good positive but some of the other options might be better i am awake upgrades every single card in your deck and that is so powerful i really can't overstate it upgrading every card you have um if you're getting more than 10 card upgrades is super super powerful but being completely unable to heal is a serious downside lastly 999 gold that's a ton of money in exchange for being cursed with two normality curses in order for this option to be appealing you have to be able to get rid of those curses pretty quickly otherwise they're going to seriously weigh you down we have some seriously cool incentive for this final option here there are two stores right in front of us that we could remove the two curses at or 50 gold each with smiling masks so those two normalities go away for only 100 gold and i have 899 gold left also i have the dark stone purif relic so i'm going gonna gain 12 max health in addition to 999 gold and two normalities that i can remove that's pretty sweet that said we could simply take the additional rare relic and remove two starter cards here thin the deck out further but i think this is a clear time where the 999 gold option really shines because of the presence of immediate stores here and because of the 12 health from the dark stone puree app that's actually why i went this way was for the chance we'd see this specific event and get this specific outcome can it really be this easy [Music] and then i get a third store holy moly chat the ridiculosity is out of control here [Music] just out of control [Music] like really out of control um and there's some really good things i can do in the store [Music] really good things i can do in the store [Music] holy moly so first and foremost we remove one normality that always happens [Music] other things that are here tantrum i think is a really good wrath entry with how many points of strength we can get does really good damage hitting multiple times and puts itself into the draw pile [Music] tranquility could be another source of calm i think that's okay [Music] study puts insights into our draw pile of return that's kind of a scaling card draw over time that's all right but i wouldn't call it amazing here apotheosis upgrades all cards in our deck for the rest of combat just a temporary one-time [Music] well i just a one-time upgrade but we get to use it every fight there's also bottle lightning here which lets us have any skill start in our opening hand and i think what's super super super super super strong here is taking this apotheosis and putting it in the bottle lightning for the low low price of about 500 gold here that means we'll be able to play apotheosis immediately on turn one but also most importantly of all it actually upgrades all three miracles from our holy water which means we'll have three two energy miracles in our opening hand every single combat that's a lot of free energy that's a lot of momentum that we can take advantage of that's a lot of stuff we can do we are super gonna buy apotheosis and put in the bottle other good bottle target is the omniscience as we could then on turn one duplicate wish or duplicate one of our powers but i think it's not as good as getting those miracles upgraded i think i might buy this tranquility and the tantrum too i am buying tantrum gonna be a tranquility plus yeah i want it okay and we will go to two more shops that was most of our money now for the second store where we'll get rid of the second normality in this shop we're offered another rush down for more card draw we're offered a lesson learned which could permanently upgrade cards in our deck although with the apotheosis bottle there's no need to upgrade anything ever again [Music] relic wise bird face turn heals us whenever we play a power don't have that many powers but a little bit of healing goes a long way pen nib could double the damage of every 10th attack we play that's very powerful in general or sling of courage two strength during elite fights that would help me very easily kill the remaining elites this run [Music] definitely gonna buy i think both the sling of courage and the pen dip here and then we still have one more shop coming up [Music] do i want that rush down [Music] yes yes a second rush down will round out the card draw in a big way i think i'm gonna upgrade this bottled apotheosis this is the last upgrade we need to have any other upgrades are basically useless from here [Music] another wish potion belt for more potion slots i will buy one last card removal taking out this strike [Music] do i add another wish yeah let's go double wish that sounds really entertaining actually [Music] could also take the strange spoon making cards that exhaust such as which return to play half the time notably letting us keep our upgraded miracles too which is kind of interesting [Music] you could also save the omniscience let's go wish and i'll keep the rest of our money we've got one more shop coming up in act four and it's definitely elite fighting time i cannot wait we got so much stronger since the last time we were in a combat i cannot wait to see what this deck now does to our unfortunate foes [Music] where giant head is not gonna know what hit him here upgrade everything [Music] do you hear me everything okay but i need to block got any of that block that works kind of actually no no it doesn't no block all right you know what [Music] inner peace [Music] doubling inner peace puts us in calm with the first cast then draws four with the seconds [Music] and then scroll will draw until our hand is full again [Music] that's actually pretty good we get to play rush down rush down secret weapon for eruption kind of a weird turn though and i want the pen nib on eight so the first attack i play after eruption next turn will get double damage plus wrath so like triple damage [Music] oh actually tantrum excuse me not eruption and we draw four cards when we enter rap a hundred damage strike hold on we can draw even more cards here here's the power of the stance dance didn't get any attack cards well with brush down if we enter wrath again we can draw four more cards playing the crescendo does that but if we're already in wrath we can't enter wrath again but we can enter calm with tranquility and then interact with the crescendo drawing four more cards and playing tantrum for 57 times four got him we get a mango bringing us up to 94 max health here we just got tons of max elf and a few floors we're also offered another omniscience omnisciences work with each other with two omnisciences you can omni omni to begin playing more cards for free it's a great inclusion here my ranking overall omniscience first i think then cut through fate skip evaluates wish for more wishes it's happening what's in this chest korea that would be insane allowing us to lift for strength permanently instead of resting at rest sites however if we want to go to act four we have to take the blue key now as this is our last chance so the gyria will not be taken all right repto man sir repton answers a pretty scary opponent constantly summoning daggers this is one of the biggest um damage checks in act 3. if you cannot do any damage to repton answer she can attack you for a hundred damage on turn two think about that for a second a hundred damage can you block for a hundred no no you can't nobody can [Music] nobody [Music] so that means usually the quickest way to win this fight is just hitting the repto really hard in the face [Music] which is nice we've got that [Music] ah let's go eruption then miracle then crush joints then play these cards now draw nine beautiful [Music] so with omniscience i can omni for the other omni we could play wish twice for money and then i can kill with what double consecrates double bowling bash oh consecrates in my hands got it see yeah let's wish [Music] or no it's supposed to be omniscient it's not wish excuse me i'll wish for money kill those daggers [Music] omniscience and wish look so close okay in that case i'll try to draw the other wish the old fashioned way [Music] no it's fine we win the fight and get a teardrop locket starting combat in calm stance we're offered a third rush down which could be okay i think three is probably a few too many usually two rush towns is about the right number it's also another source of weaken in this sash whip my rank choice here i think would be skip first rush down second sash whip third for the weekend sanctity last the card draws okay but [Music] since we have that apotheosis on turn one there's no need for rest sites let's take events and combats through the rest of the act here still in the easy fights good [Music] i see a block with this keep all these cards in hand these guys are pretty hey here we go so here's the actual way to do this omniscience for omniscience targeting wish targeting wish so i wish for money i wish for money wish for money i wish for money and now we're rich draw some cards draw some more cards and now i'm gonna bonk this guy [Music] and this is definitely the the cumulative weight of all of our relics and all of the upgrades that we've gotten really starting to hammer home and destroy the spire oh man i like my options here two cards that say calm on them ignore the free upgrade on the inner piece because we have that bottled apotheosis all of our cards are essentially upgraded meditate gives us two cards from the discard pile putting them back into hand really good way to get vigilance and eruption together but inner peace could be more card draw [Music] and then skip and evaluate are my least two preferred choices here but either meditate or inner peace is great i'll go with the meditate meditate allows me to fetch any card i wish from the discard pile that's great stuff also guess what i'm wishing for money we also get to completely block this with our artifacts how cute [Music] i'm gonna discard that rush down so that i can use the meditate to get it back into my hand here too [Music] we've definitely reached a point where this is uh gotten a little bit uh degenerative in terms of our deck build and i think that's totally okay a lot of times that's what your spyron is trying to do is trying to achieve some kind of shenanigans that you can use to obliterate your foes not quite in the style of monster train but pretty close [Music] i want a pen of this tantrum but it goes back in the draw pile so maybe just throw it again yeah in fact i can tantrum and then use secret weapon to get tantrum back into my hands [Music] beautiful another card that can exit our stance which i think is pretty valuable as we would like some more ways to get out of wrath or calm never saw an empty mind this run which is card draw and stance exiting but i do like empty body here seven block exit our stance [Music] this is close to the last card we're gonna add to the stack i mean we don't get many more options from here but at this point we have what should be pretty functional for the eight gig for the late game we have a damage plan that revolves around gaining strength and then multiplying that strength with both wrath and vulnerable and we have a defensive plan that involves using wave of the hands and mental fortress to accumulate block and weaken here let's take an event over a combat we're just gonna speed this up a little bit as we go to the end these three darklings all have to die on the same turn i can absolutely oblige them [Music] should be pretty easy let's draw some more cards the decent draw i should be able to kill them all on turn one here interesting well i can't omniscience my wishes if they're just in my hand now can i suppose i can play them all normal style sure [Music] 22 okay let's wish one more actually no let's just end this fight i don't need to play that wish another third eye consecrate or empty body i could reasonably take one third eye just for a little bit more scry and one last block card this is almost assuredly the last card i add to the deck bringing us to a nice 35 overall cards liquid bronze could be rather nice for our heart fight as it does three damage back whenever we're attacked that's probably more useful than the bottled miracle as i have so much energy on turn one already secret weapon for tantrum so many enemies were just able to kill kind of easily on turn one now [Music] it is kind of unfair [Music] look at that only 23 health left on turn one just go for an easy easy kill now on turn two [Music] money again not not exactly typical gameplay at this point but it's pretty spicy could take this cut through fate but i just took the third eye so we got our sky card we don't need any more okay since we're playing on ascension 20 we now have to defeat two bosses here at the end of the of act three which is going to be a very big test of how well this matches up against the late game eater is kind of a consistency check this guy will debuff us constantly lowering our card draw per turn as well as adding slimes to our deck that can make it really difficult for us to get the cards in hand that we need on any given moment time meter also has a time limit or a time warp ability every time we play 12 cards our turn is ended so we have to not play cards that do relatively little damage anything that does 10 or less damage or blocks for 5 or less is barely worth playing here because the boss will gain power so often times it against time eater especially it can be worth it to just end your turn once there's no longer anything productive you can do and cease playing additional cards this is really not where i wanted to see both wishes appear i was hoping to omniscience at least one of them but we can play them now choosing to gain some mixture of pleated armor and or strength could even wish twice for plated armor here but i think we should wish for some strength to give us the damage we need to defeat the time eater let's also take a look at the top five cards the deck consecrate tantrum omniscience ascenders vein eruption we'll lose the consecrate the ascenders brain of the eruption keep tantrum omniscience for next turn [Music] this brings me to 32 block and then eight plated armor would get me to 40. so we're not able to really meaningfully block that much either way i think what i'm going to do is wish for strength two times the simplest and easiest way to end our boss fights from here [Music] i want this to be what mental fortress miracle protect the problem with that is that i leave the timer on nine uh 11 cards which is not acceptable here what we could do is play a full 12 by employing the colorless potion or i can opt not to play some of these cards i think i'll play the full 12. we can buy a new potion pretty easily with our filthy filthy filthy amount of money so i will add this thinking ahead i guess put the omni back on top we knew that the top card was omni too know that you know put the tantrum on top and then go miracle protects take a bit of a wall up here but we have health to spare 94 of it to be precise [Music] and i think we have an overall pretty good turn here [Music] since we can exit wrap let's enter wrap [Music] let's do some damage and draw a ton of cards [Music] don't forget every tenth attack is doubled in damage with the pen nib we'd love to double this tantrum here bonus points if i can crush joints i can so that's gonna be 72 damage times four gg [Music] it's all about that damage multiplication a very core truth to watcher runs pen nib and strength and wrath and vulnerable all of these are multiplicative with each other or all of these stack with each other in a way that makes very big numbers as you can see beautiful simply beautiful secret weapon for cut-through phase because this hand does not do a lot only able to block for 16 out of 24 here against donu and deca this is all about i guess i would call this a momentum based fight these two attack every single turn and every two turns their strength goes up so the damage per turn that you face here just gets stronger and stronger and stronger however this deck is able to put out such high output numbers that i think we're gonna just thrive here especially if i go scrying and find like rush down vigilance is fine too [Music] lose the crush joints keep the wish [Music] defend vigilance is a almost a full block we'll block for 20 take one with tori could play eruption for 20 damage but only if i'm willing to use a miracle i am not so i'll just take one here go to the next turn double wishes are again here intriguing i am more inclined to go one set of armor this time and one set of strength just because of how the block lines up on this turn this three block brings me to 17 17 plus eight is 25 yes yes so i'll wish for armor here not sure what's left of omniscience but we'll find it [Music] so here i'm gonna wish for eight play drummer eight block per turn although it goes down by one whenever we take damage [Music] our damage is gonna be focused on donu first here donu buffs the strength of both of these creatures whereas deca blocks and adds dazed to your discard pile so they represent different threats um usually i advise that you should go for donu first if your deck is good at damage and deca first if your deck is good at blocking but that's an oversimplification of it we're going to rush down gonna omniscience for the other omniscience i'll double mental fortress and then i'll double i guess tantrum sure that sounds good [Music] it'll also gain 12 block but we'll delete our tantrum in the process [Music] it's also randomly targeted so we end up hitting deca here by accident and i'm okay with that [Music] all right i believe the hand will apply weakened to them this we're really starting to get into the filthy disgusting territory for this deck now [Music] scribe doesn't bring back the thingy but we can keep blocking here 100 block can you block for 100 we also applied tons of weak into both of them here and we should be able to finish one or more of them off this turn [Music] that [Music] top of the draw pile crush joint secret weapon wave of the hand sure actually we'll again get back eruption this is gone very well [Music] i just have a lot of damage to kill with here okay beautiful this run has absolutely gotten very very strong i mean duplicate copies of rushdown duplicate copies of wish really helping us tackle the late game very very easily been loaded up so that's the end of a normal run of slave aspire but because we grabbed all three keys red blue and green we had to go here to act four where we also face the corrupt heart of the spire none of these upgrades matter in the slightest thanks to bottle apotheosis i can't rest so i guess i'll just upgrade panacea [Music] none of the matter none of them matter and we have good money for this final shop courtesy of those wishes some beautiful things on sale here another mental fortress for more blankitude an empty mind for card draw and stance exiting there's ice cream here allowing us to conserve energy between turns i think that's pretty good and would go great alongside nunchaku giving us energy every 10 attacks played the only thing that i think is not that good here is toolbox giving us one of three random colors cards on turn one that's not because toolbox is bad but rather because we already have ten cards in our opening hand five base plus two from bag of preparation plus three from holy water is a full hand of cards you cannot add another hand a card to that hand so the toolbox must come at the expense of another card therefore i don't think it's very good but i do like this ice cream i do like the nunchaku i do like a card remove i do like some of these potions strength potion is the simplest no-nonsense way to get where we're going but i think the liquid memories could do a good job too and the entropic brew could just be a lot of potions let's start here manchaku ice cream remove defend [Music] and i could afford some combination of fortress strength potion empty minds i'm gonna do it without the second mental fortress although this is probably quite helpful um i'm gonna try to do without relying on my omnisciences to get me there and our high max elf and i will take the strength potion [Music] yeah we'll leave this one out but it's a pretty decent second mental fortress [Music] all right on to the final challenges of this run then we have one elite the spire spear and spire shield fight to get through these two are awfully spicy they have relatively low total health just 300 combined between the two of them but their damage output is massively threatening starting on turn two this guy will add two burns directly on top of the draw pile and then from there we're going to have a tough time easiest way bar none to deal with sparring spire spear and spire shield is to kill them on turn one with overwhelming offense if that's available to you and trust me it is available to us right now but there's a few other options too double both wishes we can gain so many points of strength here but i think what i might want to do is double wish for strength and double rush down so that i draw four cards off tantrum let's do that so omni for omni double this wish double this rush down but we do lose out on gold 28 damage four times tough life mr spire spear it's a really tough life [Music] all right well that's the spire spear and the spider shields [Music] um normally this fight is a lot tougher but if your watcher has a really good offense then heck you've got it sorted we pick up a shuriken giving us strength for playing three attacks and we could pick up one of these cards i think the like water could help a little bit um but the collected alpha are probably detrimental even with the ice cream this is trading a card draw for some energy okay i'll skip these three i think thorns potion liquid bron uh sorry liquid bronze and strength potion are our best options for the heart this will do good damage back when we're attacked and a little bit more strength goes a long way in that fight too if we're lucky we'll see our panacea early but uh overall i think we're just in excellent excellent excellent shape for this fight that said heart is pretty dang difficult this boss has the highest health of any boss in slave spire as well as the invincible buff meaning the heart can only lose 200 damage per turn that means even if i do as much damage as possible we have to survive four turns of attacks from the hearts and the heart has some very rude attacks that are gonna make that rather challenging [Music] we'll be drinking both of our potions here for two strength and the thorns we also take damage whenever we play a card against heart which makes card spam strategies rather difficult in this fight we'll have to deliberately take some damage here and there starting with uh two damage for playing apotheosis for my let's play vigilance here get these miracles in play [Music] let's go live vulnerable rush down and now i'll draw taking two more okay one of our wishes is in hand [Music] it's a good time for empty body still no wrath source but that's okay [Music] just the sheer number of cards we're able to draw in turn one is very very helpful here if we can get these powers set up everything's gonna be good [Music] so let's find out what's on top of the deck here's panacea that'll block vulnerable that's hugely important i'm not gonna play this actually rushdown will draw cards four cards so actually i will play that tantrum [Music] and i need to make sure i have four spaces in my hand to actually draw cards with it's easier said than done better [Music] defend then tantrum oh i might have wanted to wish for strength i should do that now i don't know what i'm drawing into is the thing i don't know if i want to play omniscience instead of this wish so i'm gonna hold off on actually playing wish for the moments secret weapon also did not get to double mental fortress [Music] this definitely gets played this definitely gets played [Music] weapon am i secretly drawing [Music] larry [Music] i have to take some more damage here but i think this is worth it we go blurry tranquility flurry eruption here we go finally we got on omniscience so i can omniscience for omniscience double two cards in the draw pile that's going to be double wish it's happening honestly i don't think we need to wish for strength twice because we can't do more than 200 damage per turn to the heart so let's omni omni double wish double [Music] what whatever card i pick is gonna get destroyed i guess i'll lose the inner peace that also gets me more draw right now so four strength and al eight plated armor it's gonna make this wave of the hand more relevant too [Music] and then meditate is the last card in the draw pile i don't think that that's what i wanted but that is now where we are [Music] so i think i stopped here [Music] oh wait oh shoot made a terrible mistake oh good meditate it was like the five statuses go into the uh draw pile with only one card in the draw pile um there was a chance that i actually just drew all five statuses but we still would have lived even in that case as it stands we can significantly mitigate this turn by going protect and then meditate i won't completely block the heart's damage it's still going to be 33 and we'll block for actually we will fully block it good i'll get back tantrum and i guess the other wish question mark definitely not gonna be a four-turn heart fight because i was unable to do any damage this turn actually give me back vigilance [Music] any reason for not playing the slime there yes with the ice cream uh we get to keep that energy for something else but there was some argument for getting rid of it there i think yeah shouldn't matter one way or the other now we're just kind of executing on what we know here doing as much damage as possible each turn [Music] and blocking where we can [Music] also scribe give me a better turn next turn [Music] here i'll get rid of the slimes [Music] [Music] and then all i have to do is draw that again yeah especially with pendant so let's just set up pendant pen nib tantrum to kill next turn the bonus strength for good measure [Music] 114 by four gg hey there if you enjoyed that video watch this one next and before you go join us on twitch and watch live i'm there five days a week playing slay the spire answering questions and chilling with the community click the link in the description to follow right now tata for now