[Music] what's up nerds and welcome to this brief guide to slaying the spire my name is ina beta i'm an avid player who's beaten the game on the hardest difficulty many times over and i regularly stream runs with the nerd squad my community on twitch at the time this video was made i've logged over 1100 hours in the game and during that time viewers have asked me over and over to dive into what i think are the most important aspects to becoming a better player and conquering the spire whether you're brand new to slay the spire or have some hours in the game already our hope is that these tips and strategies will empower you to take the leap and try the game yourself or simply improve on what you already know and before we jump in i'm excited to announce we're doing a giveaway to celebrate our first slay the spire guide all you have to do to enter is make sure you subscribe to the channel and let us know down in the comments what's your favorite class and why if you're new to the game just say which class looks the most interesting we'll randomly choose one lucky winner from the comments and send them this awesome spire slayers pin set from the fan gamer merch store the winner will be chosen on december 20th 2020 and all they have to do to collect the prize is connect with me over discord for shipping info and without further ado here are 10 things i wish i knew when i first tried to slay the spire [Music] number one it all depends i want to kick things off by shattering a common misconception and hammering home a very important point about slay the spire everything in this game is situational our brains are designed to seek out patterns and commonalities we're often trained to look for the best things in video games i think we jump into the spire and wonder the same things what's the best class what are the best cards the best relics the easiest bosses so on and so forth in fact i get these questions live on stream all the time and i always answer with well it depends and i urge you to keep that in mind throughout the rest of this entire guide while it's possible to draw some commonalities and rules of thumb i would argue that there are no best easiest most powerfuls or anything like that simply put this game is about understanding your current situation and adapting to it embrace that crisis of choice as options are always changing throughout your run and you're constantly forced to make decisions based on current factors such as available pathing current hp the class you're playing at least you've already fought at least you want to fight down the line the boss that'll waste you at the end of the act not to mention every card relic and event you're presented with as you ascend the spire instead i'd recommend you focus on other more productive lines of thinking like what kind of synergy exists in my current cards and relics or what do i need to survive elite fights in this act the answers to these questions and more importantly learning to find the quickest and best answers to them is going to serve you a lot better and shape you into a hard inspire slayer [Music] number two considering different paths now that we've touched on the importance of adaptation and decision making let's apply that to pathing so the spire is like a dungeon crawler in a lot of ways and the path you choose all depends on a variety of factors that you have to constantly evaluate as you work your way through here are some basic rules of thumb that i wish i thought about when i first started out as you begin act one try to find a path that includes exactly three normal fights and preferably a rest say for a spicy upgrade before the first elite you plan to fight ideally your path should have at least two elites and the later in the act these elites are the better as you'll have more time to build your deck and prepare for them additionally if one of these paths includes an empowered elite if you're going for the heart kill or has an option for a third elite fight that's a definite bonus preferably you want a rest sight before each elite in order to heal if needed and for a valuable card upgrade if not now shops in act 1 can be rather underwhelming due to early lack of gold so try to find one as late in the act as possible that said there are one or more elites on your chosen path that are early and there's a store before them consider going to that store and picking up a potion or two to get you through those fights more safely after these considerations try to have a good mix of normal fights and unknown floors for more gold card rewards and hopefully some beneficial events now act two and three path evaluations are much more situational and depend greatly on many factors like the decky built through the previous act the boss relic you just picked up and the amount of money you have to name a few so it's really hard to provide a quick general rule for pathing in those acts but applying this strong general strategy for act one should help ensure you see a later act more often okay we did it you did it that wasn't me you did it number three embrace elite fights when you're starting out in slay the spire it can be really tempting to avoid elite fights which are represented by the skull markers along the map after all they tend to be more difficult this game's already plenty challenging right while this evaluation seems to make sense there are some really important reasons why you shouldn't skip over elite fights and why doing so actually hurts you in the long run first of all elites are probably your best source of relics throughout a run and relics gain from elites are almost always going to do something beneficial for your run in some way also compared to many normal fights elites are more predictable in both the pool you can choose from it's literally the same three fights each act and the ai within the fight while normal enemies get more difficult to go through the act especially after those first few elite fights always remain the same difficulty some other less important reasons to fight elites include they drop and increase the amount of gold compared to normal fights you need to fight at least one elite the empowered one to get to act four in the heart elites make for perfect snipe targets too meaning should you start your run with niao's lament and make the enemies in the next three fights only have one hp you're literally one shotting elites whose rooms are close to the beginning i plan to cover these and other points in more depth in a different video but the bottom line is that elites are more predictable profitable and present a challenge worthy enough to help you feel out the power of your deck moving forward so start building regular elite fights into your runs as soon as possible if you're not building towards killing elites there's a little chance you're making it to the top [Music] number four do not take every card now that we've hit on general strategy and pathing let's focus on deck building for a bit as a new slayer it's confusing and counterintuitive to not take cards after all you're not even really sure what those cards do yet and what they synergize with but one very important thing you're going to see many skilled players doing is clicking the skip button on card reward screens experimentation is highly encouraged but generally keeping your deck slim and synergistic is important as you build it as don't feel like this is the deck the one that wants to add cards to it [Music] i don't want those after all success depends on you drawing the cards you want to see and not bloating your deck with cards that don't synergize frequently stop and take a moment to consider what your deck does well you can always click on the deck icon here ask yourself what does my deck do well right now what is my deck missing what synergies can i build into do the cards on the screen help me solve a challenge coming up if you're presented with a card reward and can't pretty quickly see how it adds value to what your deck already does or it isn't a card that helps you get through an elite or a boss coming up then you probably shouldn't be taking it take less cards in your future runs and watch your decks get slimmer trimmer and more consistent number 5 simplify your deck in addition to our previous points another option that generally eludes new players is the power of card removal whenever you come across a shop or a specific event you're presented with the option to remove a card from your deck now we establish you don't want to take any old cards so it should be equally obvious we also want to be utilizing card removal to strengthen the overall performance and synergy of the deck we built generally a perfect target for card removal are things like curses which are only penalties to your deck however it's just as important to remove things like strikes block and other trash but simply aren't empowering your deck anymore and are robbing you of a chance to draw more useful cards during fights again every run is situational sometimes the deck may not mind curses too much for example but overall the goal is to build decks full of impactful cards that you can draw and play consistently and removing cards helps you do just that it's being able to get to like all these things we want to see more often you know the more reliably set up things like this with darkness i think is going to allow the damage output to be where it needs to be to get past the hexagons number six get that card draw if in fact our goal as effective slayers is to build decks full of impactful cards we draw and play them consistently then we need to be drawing them an often neglected aspect of many decks are cards to help you draw other cards i find this to be true for players new to card and deck building games in general as it feels like playing a garbage gets you another card is wasteful or slow in fact the opposite is true and the importance of having cards that draw more cards cannot be overstated [Music] think of it this way even if you don't have the energy to play all the cards you draw the fact that you draw past weaker cards makes it more likely you're going to draw into strong impactful cards you've added or will add to your deck which is extremely valuable card draw is one of the main reasons why the ever popular snekoi is as popular as it is and is likely why it has the much higher win rate it does compared to other popular relics with card draw being this important the fact that snekoi provides you an extra two card draw at the start of every turn for the rest of the run is simply nuts that's like playing a draw card every turn except you don't need to draw or play that card and it costs you no energy now this does not mean you should click sneko whenever you see it but if you have a deck that can handle the cost of its cars being randomized then you have an extremely powerful relic on your hands so if you find your decks having trouble drawing to those important powers or other impactful cards consistently slim that deck down and add more draw to that deck number 7 choose the right upgrades in relics upgrading cards is an obvious way to increase your power over the course of the game and while almost any upgrade is good for your deck they are not equally valuable for instance reaper and claw are two pretty popular cards but upgrading to one additional damage on reaper and two additional damage on claws pretty unimpressive on the other hand a card like catalyst loves an upgrade going from doubling the current poison on a target to tripling the current poison takes that rather slow poison build and makes it extremely bursty there's a few different ways to acquire these valuable upgrades during a playthrough but the majority are going to happen at rest sites generally if you build a decent deck and you play it well during fights you should be able to get away with clicking that smith option more often than not and scaling your deck's power all the way up to spire relics can also scale your build's efficacy across the run but have different considerations like we discussed earlier most of the relics you're going to get are presented to you after an elite fight and 99 of the time you simply click it and move on as they are likely to make some aspect to your build better and at worst do nothing at the time there's generally no downside to picking them up and you really aren't required to make a choice now at shops you're actually given many choices now unless you walk in there with like a thousand gold you have to be a bit more choosy and correctly evaluate which if any of the options presented are right for your deck it might not make sense to buy a relic at all and you might choose to remove a striker by a potion instead their really difficult choice about relics comes into play after boss fights in acts 1 and 2. here you're given a choice between three different and typically powerful relics from a specific pool of boss relics you can only get from these fights or if you boss real like swap in the beginning of the game all these boss relics unlike the relics you see elsewhere in the spire have both upsides and downsides to them and in the case of snekoi for example can drastically change how your deck works these relics can increase the scaling of your deck dramatically if you find and choose the right one which brings us to number eight build in scaling the idea of scaling is present all throughout the spire fights get more difficult each act has a boss at the end of it and some enemies gain strength or block over the course of a fight so it's really important your deck scales along with these challenges upgrades and relics definitely help with this but there are other ways your deck can scale as well cards that increase one of your stats after you play it are probably your chief source of within fight scaling these cards are often powers but there are skills to help you with this as well without cards like these it can be difficult to match the increasing intensity of fights throughout the game and typically your deck's going to include at least one such card cards like barricade feel no pain and blur work in conjunction with other cards to generate block or keep it across turns making fights much safer cards like noxious fumes bullseye or terror passive ideal damage or increased damage dealt to enemies across a fight helping you do more damage over time these are just a few examples of cards that increase the effectiveness of your deck across fights but generally when you hear the terms scaling block or scaling damage you're hearing about these kind of cards we covered how having card draw is incredibly important for any deck but we haven't talked about energy yet adding more energy to the mix to play more cards per turn is effectively scaling for any class you choose adding cards and relics that increase both card draw and energy increase your output each turn and hopefully either get your other scale in place or ends the fight all together before the enemy scales to a dangerous point all that said i can pretty confidently say that being able to draw and play more cards on a turn is probably the most powerful form of scaling you can build into on any given playthrough and your chief source of energy scaling across a run is likely to be the boss relics that you acquire most friends are going to incorporate some of these types of scaling but ideally all these forms of scaling come together to form truly legendary builds and epic wins [Music] number nine practice the things you don't like i strongly recommend that you challenge yourself and experiment with things whenever appropriate especially those things that you're not comfortable with i don't get to play with brimstone very often but when i do i'm happy about it if something feels painful or awkward to use it's likely being used in the wrong way in the wrong decks or simply without much practice for instance just a short while ago i never used to consider taking the bossa like swap option from meow at the start of a run which swaps your class's default relic with a random one from the boss rolex pool it was simply weird and uncomfortable and i just didn't want to do it but once i tried it a few times i learned pretty quickly that by not doing so i was missing out on so much since then many of my most memorable runs have started with boss rolex swaps into much stronger and more interesting starting rolex runic dome is a relic that's almost universally disliked in the spire community but for those that practice with it know the enemy behaviors well and build around it it's almost like free energy we know how important that is that said not being able to see enemy intense can be extremely unpleasant to play with at least initially that doesn't make it a sub-optimal choice though many times the optimal choice for a deck is the one you don't enjoy as much or the one that isn't necessarily as fun basing your choices less on what you like and more on what works will often get you further up the spire so if you come across something in the spire that you don't have a lot of experience with or just aren't comfortable with give yourself room to experiment by grabbing that thing and trying it out each time you practice with it you'll learn a little bit more about how it works what synergies it sets off and where it simply doesn't work this will empower your ability to adapt even more some of the more successful spire slayers i know said that this point alone was key to their learning and eventual success number 10 prepare for more immediate challenges focus on the near future and build accordingly throughout this guide we've established that there's a ton of things to consider as you begin ascending the spire so much that it can be hard to understand where to even begin evaluating things like cards pathing and shop choices ideally evaluation of these things begins at floor zero with your blessing from meow and considers everything up to the heart fight at the end but that can be overwhelming and the game is simply unpredictable in my opinion the best place to start is considering the short term and focusing on the current act it's now my question is do we go this way and like try to stay the course or are we going around at any given time in your run pause for a second and ask yourself how does my deck do against the elites i haven't seen yet how does this deck perform against the boss at the end of the act does this relic or card that i'm considering improve my odds in those challenges these questions help you practice the thought process necessary to better evaluate your choices throughout a given run and to begin thinking ahead to future acts when evaluating the same choices this could be time consuming and sometimes daunting to practice but if this kind of thing doesn't come naturally to you like it doesn't for me then this mental exercise might help you develop the abilities you need to more quickly and accurately evaluate the myriad of choices that you're posed with throughout a run it certainly helped me [Music] i hope my perspective on how to path scale up your build and begin to develop the thought process is necessary to make the right evaluations for your particular run helps you become a more successful spire slayer i definitely have a ways to go in my own abilities but practicing these things with my community over on twitch.tv slash inauveda has helped me improve greatly you should come check us out sometime and join the discord as well in case you miss us live we'd love to hear from you make sure you subscribe to this channel for more guides and awesome heart kills and don't forget to check out the details of this video to find out how you can get yourself a little spire swag just by subscribing here and leaving a comment thanks for your time hope you enjoyed and good luck in the spire you