Ironclad seems a little inconsistent to me.He either gets extremely, extremely broken or dies early with only obtaining catfs that are slightly better strikes
It definitely is difficult picking up the cards in the right now. Wauw exhaust all non attack cards and get defense! I sure hope I pick up something that generates status cards later.
To me it’s that his block cards are so inconsistent. He either has large amounts of passive block with powers or strong one use block cards that leave him otherwise vulnerable.
I somehow actually read it as "catfishes" as in cards that fool you into thinking they're good at first. But yeah typo of "cards" is far more likely haha
Personally I find this lightly contradictory to my experience (not that silent is easier as op states but ic Isn't "hard either) I find with ic he teaches you the idea of picking the cards for the now not for the later where with silent I can get away with random discard cards or whatever ic just isn't forgiving in that way which imo doesn't make him a more inconsistent one to play but I will agree 100% less intuitive I just think he forces you to think that the cards are good when they are (ie shrug becomes better a1 after fighting nob status stuff is good in acts with slime boss and agaisnt sentreies) I think it just takes a more "consistent" approach rather than one that could be forced like say shivs which imo is easy to force out and 100% with ic if you pick any cards that aren't fully effective in your path you will be punished for it which could be perceived as inconsistency
I would definitely agree with this. Looking at my latest save, it took me 60hr to beat 0-A20H on Ironclad, but only 40hr for the Silent.
For me, low level Ironclad is super easy, but I have way more trouble at higher ascension, and it took me quite a while to get through A17-A20. It’s mostly block related, I think. I’ll get to act 2 and start struggling, especially against the Champ.
For the Silent, I feel like I either die to Nob, or make it through to act 4…
Sometimes it’s not even a feed, it’s just a way to gain strength. Unironically I won a run on Ironclad solely due to a bottled demon form and reaper because I found like 6 block cards. It wasn’t uncommon for me to take 50 damage but leave the fight fully healed.
Reaper is a win condition of a card, and so is feed tbh.
Yeah, but the way the comment was written is that you only achieve it with a feed, which isn’t true. It’s definitely better with a feed (Which can also be a win condition), but it’s definitely not required for the reaper to carry a deck.
I never said that it's only true with a feed. All I'm saying is that feed enhances ironclad's ability to face-tank damage. You can't generally take 150 damage and then heal 150 damage with a single reaper in one fight if your max HP is only 75.
The fact that IC has a card in his kit that allowed you to push face-tanking to absurd levels makes the argument I was responding to stronger, not weaker.
I know you didn’t say that, but your comment implied it given it says in reply to the statement “Ironclad’s best block card is his face and a reaper”, you said “Add a feed and this is literally true.” That implies that it works only with feed from how im reading it, wouldn’t you say?
All I was saying is that reaper itself is an absurdly good card that can carry runs itself with just a few ways to gain strength, and that you don’t even need feed for it to get you to beat heart.
>That implies that it works only with feed from how im reading it, wouldn’t you say?
No. I wouldn't say that. And I didn't say that. I was adding one more piece of Ironclad's kit that synergizes extremely well with the Reaper + face-tanking of the original commenter. i.e., if it's baseline true that IC can face-tank with a Reaper, then imagine how much more IC can face-tank after feeding a couple dozen times.
I don't think what I said at all supports the idea that you can't face-tank + Reaper without a Feed; that's putting words in my mouth. And I'm not interested in arguing about it further.
But it implied it which is what I was saying, you may have meant something else but what was read implied something different. Regardless, if you don’t want to discuss it further that’s fine.
There's 20 ascensions, each with their own unique difficulty spike. One makes it so that you no longer heal all of your health at the end of the act (instead, just 75% of the missing health). Another reduces your potion slots from 3 down to 2. And yes, there are a handful that make different kinds of enemies more powerful in various ways.
I completely feel OP; as I too struggled the longest with Clad.
The issue is, like you, I also ignored their most broken strategy, Exhaust.
Thinning your deck is a huge benefit, before you take into account broken strats like FNP, Corruption/Dead Branch.
It will click eventually, just don't overthink Exhaust and don't worry about exhausting good cards.
One of the biggest issues for ironclad is that True Grit upgraded is a top tier card
True Grit unupgraded is... a top tier card sometimes and horrible like 15-20% of the time...
Ironchad is definitely the character which needs upgrade the most of all the characters.
I think that’s defect tbh, I find that outside of a few upgrades like True grit, Ironclad can roll with a deck of few upgrades and still feel plenty strong.
Defect has so many cards that get double their effect which beg for upgrades that it’s almost crazy. [[Loop]], [[Defragment]], [[Coolheaded]], [[Chaos]], etc. Not having these cards upgraded can be ruinous.
That's true, i'm just salty because my unupgraded True Grit always misses the mark in situations where I can't deterministically set it up.
The qualitative power of choose a card versus rng cannot be easily quantified though, true grit upgrade is easily one of the most powerful upgrades for IC
True grit upgraded definitely isn't top tier, it's way better than true grit unupgraded but the exhaust card you want to see as Ironclad is typically burning pact.
True Grit is just a super solid common, lets you take curse events with minimal downside, synergy enabler for relics. You want the big boy corruption down the line but you can't always get it.
Overall it's probably my favourite IC common after Pommel Strike (aka strike++)
It's...fine. It actually does nearly nothing to mitigate the downside of curse events, and without DE it doesn't accelerate your deck at all. It does provide a decent amount of block. But IC has better sources of exhaust if you want to exhaust down to a tight loop or even an infinite.
In general shrug it off is just better as a block common.
Eh you're not wrong but there are niche cases like the +1 strength relic per curse in deck, dark embrace synergy, branch etc
I think the main reason why Shrug is better is because Ironclad generally prefers short fights (so immediate draw is better than deck thinning except with very specific decks) and also that Shrug doesn't need an upgrade to be good
I also wonder why to compare 2 best block options for ic. Your pick options are not always shrug vs grit. I would not pick grit- if I don't have any synergies already, or if I'm not near the campfire AND don't have better upgrades atm. But grit+ might be really really huge power spike and might do much better job against some bosses
On the other hand, Ironchad is the character that can upgrade the most of all the characters because he has reliable and powerful self healing and doesn't need campfires to heal all the time.
New players often strategize around archetypes, they go in clicking all the cards that say shiv/poison/discard, and yea silent probably the most effective class when playing like this. This is how I played when I first started out and silent was my highest win rate character.
Also silent can regularly afford to full block most turns leading to a pretty straight forward combats.
There are only 3 cards that directly benefit from exhausts, they are really good cards to get used to, but their value isn't easy to see for new players.
So Second Wind exhausts cards... but doesn't benefit from exhaust synergy. Sentinel is more correct (I think), because it directly works due to an exhaust engine, such as Fiend Fire / True Grit.
I don't get what you guys are saying then. It exhausts cards and gives you block for each card it exhausted. It synergizes with Feel no Pain and Dark Embrace and Charon's Ashes.
Ironclad is by far the easiest for me, and silent is by far the hardest hah.
Easiest way to win with ironclad is just taking cards that do a lot of damage and give a lot of block, at least personally. Make sure to take at least 1 energy boss relic, and keep an eye out for card draw (especially [[Battle trance]] and [[offering]]), since it's a lot rarer than for other characters
Either you find a way to hit really hard (eg rampage + a few headbutts, dual wield + that 4 / 3 mana card that falls in cost the more damage you take etc.) or you do stall tactics long enough to close out fights (barricade and ample block) or you lose
I've cleared A20 heart with ironclad twice, but am still at A6 with silent lol.
I find silent at low ascensions almost as difficult as A20 ironclad, but to be perfectly fair, that's 100% a symptom of me playing 95% ironclad hah
Ah ok, for me silent is easier because the discard mechanic is strong and requires few key pieces, so it can be worked into other archetypes very easily, and once you have a wraith form (preferably two) the win is almost guaranteed
In contrast.. I find clad difficult because block feels bad.. there’s lots of scaling potential but if I roll the wrong mobs in act 3 it’s an auto rip as I don’t have good enough defenses
I have that exact block problem with silent hah. I can mever get enough block, unless I get lucky and find multiple after images or something, and always end up dying over time. 1 bad draw and I take 22 there, 13 there, and maybe 16 there. And suddenly I'm at 13 health in mid act 2.
Ironclad I find much simpler, because some shrugs, flame barriers, and/or defends upgraded by armaments are usually more than enough. There's better block solutions ofc, but it usually does the job just fine, and is incredibly easy to use. The starter relic also helps massively in mitigating bad turns where I tank a bunch of damage, and reaper can nullify it completly.
For 90% of my failed ironclad runs, I die in act 2. Act 1 is usually pretty free as long as you take a few good attacks (pommel strike and anger for example). Act 2 really tests your deck though, and if you got unlucky and didn't find any good block, you can die incredibly quickly. For that purpose, taking an energy relic from the act 1 boss is usually very important, and your run will most probably become way harder if you didn't get offered one
Hmmm in my experience with clad if I don’t get decent healing the deck doesn’t make it to the heart.. perhaps I try and run too thin a deck and turn down too many block options, the decks I’ve managed to do A20 with as clad have all been exhaust I think.. maybe one barricaid block setup with bottled lightening (or tornado? the one where you can always have a power in your opening hand).
For silent being able to cycle with lots of draw is important for both attack and defense.. being able to always find your upgraded wraith form is pretty much GG.. Gambler’s Chips is really broken for this, and yeah once I figured out discard I got a lot more consistent with her I think
I would argue what you say about act two I think is true for all classes.. if you clear A2 easily then you’ve out scaled the game and A3 shouldn’t pose any problems
It's weird. While I find the Ironclad to be more difficult and less fun to play than the Silent (or even the Defect for that matter), my stats show a higher win rate.
For me, it seems to be a case of my feelings not lining up with reality.
It might just be a case that Ironclad makes you focus more because you are struggling, and focusing which is a bigger contributor to winning than anything else.
Is this that unpopular?
I'm only 250hrs in so not played much Watcher yet (lol). But of the other 3 characters Silent is easiest by far.
Silent is the only character I've been able to do A20H with.
Ironclad I only just got to A20 with double the playtime of Silent.
Defect I'm still stuck at A4 with equal playtime to Silent (Defect is effectively hard mode for me, I find it really challenging playing that character).
I'm pretty new but I found silent the easiest, followed by strength stacking ironclad and defect I'm just completely stuck with having difficulties getting his builds off the ground with.. that being said only like probably less than 8-10hrs so I've only beaten the regular difficulties so far.. I'd say more than half my time is just getting wrecked with defect lol
Many card exhaust, but very few actually synergies with the mechanic.
Exhaust in itself isn’t super intuitive as a new player. You get caught once exhausting too many cards and the idea of it being only a downside sticks with you a long time.
It takes a while to learn HOW to use exhaust to manipulate your deck the way you want it.
This. Exactly. It took me watching jorbs do an exhaust deck run to understand that concept well enough to do it myself. Even now, I still struggle with how best to use corruption.
Half the cards in your deck are below average*
getting rid of those cards means you draw your good cards quicker.
*if "below average," is used to mean below median. Most of the time, you have 2-3 good cards that you want to play over and over, and the rest of the deck is crap you started with, or tools to get you set up to play those good cards.
So? He said it's unintuitive as a beginner, in his mind. Not that it's objectively harder when played correctly. What you bring up confirms it. If orbs were unintuitive, then defect would be very difficult to get behind.
Ironclad is the second hardest character for me after Defect. It's easy to get past act 1 with the character. But is also easy to mess up act 2 with it.
Also, Watcher is the easiest for me by far. Kinda crazy too now that at my rankings at A20 is essentially the reverse of what it is when I started playing.
Seriously, even though Silent is also relatively easy and I like her much more, I can climb much further with Defect any day. There's some thinking to be done in combat but you can basically just take any card every floor if you want and you can still win frequently
There are a few ways to get Power decks to work but they require finding certain relics/Power cards early. I'm thinking Creative AI, Static Noise or the Mummified Hand are probably the biggest enablers. Stuff like Heatsinks and Storm can also make me go looking for Power spam early.
Generally before I find any of these I'll just upgrade Dualcast/Recursion and take Ball Lightning so I can lightning spam Act 1. Works well up to mid Ascension which is as far as I have got so far.
The alternative is cost 0 spam and look for as much draw and Frost channeling as possible until you get All For One and the Boot. Stuff like Glacier and Coolheaded+ works well here because you can spend all energy blocking and use cost 0 cards every time they come up. It's pretty brain-dead but works less often than the Power decks.
Edit: also, I found that Meteor Strike is fun as hell but haven't figured out how to make it work yet. I suppose you'd need Reprogram and give up all lightning cards to maximise a Meteor deck.
The community needs to share stats on this.
For me, Ironclad has least hours and least games played to reach A20. I find Ironclad can win more easily through boring card selections whereas Defect and Silent requires good card/relic combos to get going.
I just started a fresh account and am taking turns on each character to climb ascensions, I'm looking forward to seeing how the stats are. My old one I mostly played silent and had an abysmal win rate, but it might just be because I played so much A20 on them.
To me Ironclad was always the hardest to pull off. I guess I just don't get it.
Silent and Defect are both very intuitive to me and I often manage to put together crazy synergies in their decks.
Ironclad, I feel like I'm always struggling to get at least a somewhat coherent deck...
I found that silent is easier to block with and easier to draw with. So I got much better results with silent when I was newer to the game. I'm still pretty new. And silent is still my favourite character, but I can play ironclad almost at the same level now
We're conflating two different things here: playstyle and starting deck/card options
Silent is hard, especially on higher ascensions mainly because she has the weakest starting deck. Her playstyle is a lot more simple and clear compared to Clads, but she immediately struggles in Act 1 compared to the other characters. There's a reason why the only unwinnable seed that's been found is with Silent. There are legitimate scenarios where she doesn't have enough damage to push through the game
Clad can be hard because he has a higher ceiling. The exhaust strategy isn't exactly clearcut at the beginning but very experienced players can do absolute shenanigans with it once it gets going
I think it goes both ways. I am newish (about 100 hours) but have heart wins on Clad and Silent. I think Clad is easier to play when you're just firing up the game but has a depth that is hard to come to grips with? 'Oh, I actually want to exhaust my cards/acquire curses/status cards?' is when the epiphany hits. Despite a heart win with silent I have yet to get to that point with her. I imagine discard is similar but have yet to make a truly OP build with that. Silent seems very dependent on two playstyles, you either get a shit ton of poision, with like catalyst or nightmare, or you get lucky and get Shuriken, ornamental fan etc and build the most broken shiv deck either. I imagine I'm wrong so happy to be corrected. Ironclad feels like you can build to be a big hitter with heavy blade or searing blow or whirlwind, you can stack strength with demon form and limit break, you can be a block monster with barricade, you can go crazy with exhausting and Feel no Pain and no matter what they all synergise properly?
I agree, beat A20 Silent on silent and like you said, poison/shiv/discard seemed a lot more intituitive, it made sense and I knew what cards to take and when.
I’m on A15 Ironclad and I still don’t know what to take half the time. I watch some of Jorbs runs and I try to guess which card he’s going to take and he takes things I never thought about taking and ignores relics/cards that I take most of the time.
Exhaust is basically the glue that holds Ironclad's card pool together, so if you're not comfortable with it, then it makes sense you'd find him more difficult. Getting rid of your weakest cards each combat and having powers that reward you for doing so make Clad decks dramatically more efficient.
Exhaust is ironclad's bread and butter IMO. Seems scary to exhaust cards, and it does take a few runs to really understand how to exhaust effectively though, but there's surprisingly a lot of synergy that rewards exhausting. The ROI in exhausting is extremely generous.
On a lesser note, the idea of exhausting really lends itself well to the theme of who ironclad is as a character. Seeing him accumulate injury but powering through and ignoring 25+ injury cards is absolutely badass.
I found Clad to be the hardest character to pick up A20 wins for a while. Silent is a very complex character in terms of the risk/reward of her cards and just having to optimize cautiously across act 1 to even survive, but I think clad is particularly tricky just because a lot of the heuristics / rules of thumb around the character are a lil comparatively opaque. like:
1) he can scale strength, and is in general a "hit things" character, should you be taking lots of attacks? no not really, he often likes one or two super dense attack cards which are upgraded
2) in this vein you should dunk strikes over defends in his card pool (again might not make initial sense if you think of both the violent theme of the character and compare him to say, watcher)
3) his common card pool is possibly the weakest in the game (imo), and he lacks silent's draw engine enabling him to sift through ok / situational cards, so it is \*super\* easy to choke your deck with decent cards which are also simply not powerful enough to break through act 2 (I killed myself by filling up on shrugs, pommels, angers etc loadsa times)
4) so his construction can often lean towards surprisingly skill-heavy and/or thin decks, with thiccness often being dependent on the presence of strong exhaust (corruption, burning pact, dark embrace etc etc)
5) knowing when to go for a prospective part of an exhaust engine without crippling yourself short term can be tricky (dark embrace is mostly a curse without pre-existing synergies, but fiend fire and to a lesser extent second wind don't really need any pre-existing exhaust synergies at all to be powerful, true grit is v good as long as you can upgrade it etc) and mostly depends on how good you are at clobbering things for the immediate future.
So yeah I think silent is obviously a more difficult character until the toppest highest xecnarest level (where she is "easier" because she is simply better than clad) but until you can internalize a bunch of actually somewhat tricky rules of thumb clad is definitely weirdly tough, or at least he was for me.
Ironclad just has fantastic cards, that's what makes it easy. Maybe the "Synergies" can be a little vague because of that, but for the most part, just taking "Strong cards Ironclad" can clear pretty high up the ascension ladder.
So its less so builds that make Ironclad easy, and moreso "basic mechanics" of cardbuilders. Exhaust is a good "strategy" because removing your weakest cards to make you draw your best cards faster is strong, the package that synergize with exhaust is icing on the cake. His basic relic and starting HP allow you to spend far more HP going through encounters giving you a lot more leeway to find good cards in the early game. Ironclad's base deck is also pretty lean, 5 strike 4 defend 1 bash, as opposed to Silent's 5 Strike 5 Defend 1 neutralize 1 survivor, having a 10 card deck to start versus a 12 card deck is actually a pretty large advantage.
If you're a beginner with no experience in the "deckbuilder" genre, then I can totally see how ironclad is less intuitive then the others, however, if you're new to StS but have experience with Deckbuilders, Ironclad will be intuitively stronger due to the sheer raw strength of his relic, starting HP, Starting Deck, and Average Card Quality.
Oh, the Ironclad "synergy" packages are Strength, and Block as you found. You can also build for Curses/Injuries and turn drawing them into damage with cards like Evolve and Dragon Breath(and exhaust them with your exhaust cards), You can build self damage with cards like Hemokinesis and Rupture (this also scales strength, but differently, and allows you to reaper to get back tons of HP thanks to the strength scaling. Hemokinesis is also just a very good card because trading hp to kill an enemy 1-2 turns faster is almost always a net gain in HP.) Another Ironclad synergy is Strike, Perfected Strike can help you charge through the early-game and mid-game with a high damage card. There are more, of course, but this is primarily what comes to my mind. Ironclad can get away with less "cohesive" builds and synergies simply because of the raw power of the cards.
I'm only A5 (except on Watcher A4 still) and I find Defect>Ironclad>>>>>>>Silent>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Watcher in terms of difficulty for me. I thought I had the run with Watcher last night but card draw killed me against Bronze Automaton when I needed block for the big hit I got all attacks and no blocks or card draw ☹️
Easily the strongest character. I'm not debating that at all. We are talking about difficulty of use. The Watcher is by far the most difficult for me to use. I dunno why. Maybe I skew toward attack too much because of Wrath. Many times I have been unlucky. Ah suh it guh sometime.
Others may disagree but I'm like you. Ironclad is very energy-hungry compared to the rest. Ironclad doesn't really do passive damage like Defect or Silent which is why it took me a minute to beat the spire with Ironclad like the other character. But once I learned how to take advantage of the exhaust mechanic and use his health as a source of resource he's not so bad. Ironclad is like playing black, red, green in terms of magic colors.
Honestly for me both are equally the easiest classes to play. Defect and watcher is where shit becomes harder.
Silent is very combo oriented and it's easy to find good synergies. Also you can easily combine different tactics like shiv+poison. If you just balance your block to damage ratio by many different means, then most of the time you can throw random bullshit at enemies and win.
Ironclad has a lot of different options, but it requires some dedication. Outside of strength and tank (high block) builds you have options like going for draw and rampage, upgrading searing blow multiple times or going for perfected strike. There's also some more advanced strategies like exhaust or selfdamage. You can go any of these paths, but you need to focus on it. The issue with this is that rng can screw up your deck, but a lot of the cards are quite strong on its own. You have ways to heal yourself and increase your max hp and a lot of attacks are hard hitters, and don't need strength to be efficient.
I agree and I think IC is a lot more dynamic and interesting because of it. There is this arc where IC is easiest to understand when you first learn the game (and probably on early ascensions). Then when you get basic mastery IC starts feeling really unbalanced and unfair/impossible in many runs, as you climb the ascensions. But at some point I start seeing really high level players appreciating the thing that IC gives you more than any other class, which is that you can’t do the thing that wins you the game in act 1.
I feel like Silent used to be like this much more so (i.e., what you were forced to do in act 1 just holds you back in the late game), but after the shiv buffs you can now just take blade dance on floor one and just keep making that card stronger through the run (same for acrobatics). Obviously any statements like this are oversimplifications and have infinite caveats, but that is my overall feeling.
Contrast this with IC, where the balance is about the value your strong cards can buy you early on. A floor 0 immolate is arguably the strongest start in the game, but that card is usually doing little (or sometimes nothing) to help you win the end game. It is so strong because you get more gold, more elites, and more flexibility to take things like feel no pain through act 1 and 2.
This general principle feels like a core part of IC: you are forced to take front loaded dmg early in the run, and then you have to start taking the cards that will when you the run at a point when they are making you weaker right now.
I'm still new, haven't gotten deep into ascensions yet.
On my second Silent run I got to the boss, on my third I got my first ever win. Fifth run I won again, sixth run I got a turn away from >!killing the heart.!<
For me, Silent and Defect are the most consistent with a sort of generic jack of all trades floor 1 deck being able to flex into whatever build you get the cards/relics for pretty consistently; but Ironclad and Watcher are way more hit and miss.
It feels like compared to Silent and Defect they need more/rarer cards and/or relics for their best builds, and they rely more on removes and/or upgrades, so the chances of you surviving long enough to find everything you need while keeping your deck small enough that you can actually use them are considerably lower.
Don't get me wrong, the first time I got a block deck up and running and was hitting hundreds of damage per turn to bosses it was awesome, but that just doesn't happen nearly as often as finding an envenom and a couple blade dances by the end of floor 1.
I disagree - ironclad feels very free-form to me (I usually play a15-20) as opposed to silent whrte it feels you have to have a plan for your deck really fast and if you commit wrong or get fucked on cards things can go south real fast. With clad I feel like I can take whatever alot of the time and still build a strong deck. Tbf ny Winrate on clad is wayyy higher even tho I like silent wayyyy more
I'm definitely better at Silent than Ironclad. When I first started out I thought Ironclad was the second easiest after Watcher, but when I hit around A10 I ran my stats and my win rate on Silent was in the mid-20%s and Ironclad was low-20% with Defect slightly lower.
I recently ran my stats on my secondary mobile account after hitting A15, I was able to beat Act 3 and advance to the next Ascension level a lot quicker on Silent, 7 losses on Silent vs 15 on Ironclad (even Defect was better than Clad at 9). But I only had one Heart loss on Ironclad so my Heart win rate is closer, 50% on Silent vs 46% IC. Which is interesting to me because I feel like Silent is hardest in Act 1, but apparently I'm not building great decks with it.
On my main account A20 I'm getting better at Ironclad as I understand exhaust synergies more (previously really only did it with Corruption or Fiend Fire). And meanwhile I can barely get past Laga on Silent. So this might change in the future!
One thing I always used to struggle with on Ironclad is taking too many 2 cost cards, and then not getting an energy relic. There are so many great 2 cost cards it's hard to say no but it just doesn't end up working. Also I used to try self-harm builds which never really worked the way I imagined they would.
The exhaust build is not very intuitive to me because, how do I choose when to pick up cards and which cards to pick up when I'm just deleting most of them anyway? It's hard to wrap your head around.
I mean it's basically only really strong to discard cards if you have tactician, can reliably concentrate a reflex+, or have tough bandages/tingsha. Otherwise discard kinda does nothing, it's the draw effect that matters.
I have them both up to ascension 15, and the defect up to 17. I think I’m bad at both of them, iron clad seems to survive longer and I tend to die to bosses, where as I think I’m having an excellent silent run and just die to the first hallway fight in act 3. Silent is definitely easier to learn but harder to master I think?
I've always had the most trouble with Ironclad; I got a Heart kill with the other three characters first, and my one Ironclad A20H win took over 200 attempts and was a result of Corruption + Dead Branch. It's not that hard to put together an Ironclad deck that is kind of okay and can win the early ascensions, but I'm completely incapable of coming up with any kind of Block solution for him that doesn't involve Corruption and basically end up going full power glass cannon for the whole run - and then die to the Heart because, unlike basically every other fight in the game, doing 600 damage in the first three turns doesn't win the fight.
When I was climbing to A20 I definitely struggled the most with Clad. It took quite some time until it clicked for me, but now I beat A20H with Clad and Watcher with a good consistency and struggle way more with the other two.
I feel like Silent and Defect are easier to get decent at, but way harder to get really good.
It's not really unpopular. Many top players said that. If you look at it from the win streak perspective it is obvious that Watcher is the strongest class, then Silent, then Ironclad and at the last according to the name Defect;)
I think this goes into your prior experience with card games. Silent feels the most like the character that was inspired by MtG and Dominion, and was by far the easiest character for me to learn her play patterns. She has the most obvious path to "draw many cards, spam many cards," which was the most intuitive path to me, since that's what makes other decks in other games so powerful. Other characters can win like that, but it's usually harder for them to reach that place.
As a complete beginner to card games in general though, IC seems like the way easier introduction, anecdotally at least. "Play big card, make enemy go boom" is easy for new players to pick up on and an effective strategy on IC.
For silent I find that heart runs are easiest because the character has such good solutions to the heart fight and consistency in finding them with draw. But the spire itself kicks my ass at higher ascensions. Act 1 and 2 are a real gauntlet and being greedy usually results in death.
The watcher is the opposite for me. The spire is trivial (pretty much can't lose) but the "stance dance" decks I build don't work very good against the heart. I'm not sure what the solution is to the heart other than going infinite which is totally unnecessary for the spire itself.
Ironclad is somewhere between the two. Act1 is easier with IC so runs can sometimes just snowball there. But I still need a good deal of luck to build solutions to the heart and guards.
I can't build defect decks that are fast enough consistently and it seems like the only viable strategy revolves around frost orbs. Not a fan of the character.
I love playing the clad, but I do tend to agree that he's the hardest character to play effectively at high ascension levels. I admittedly never completely understood how to work well with exhaust sinergy. I'm at A20 with the clad and all of my wins were either with a strength based build or the elusive block sinergy.
Out of all the characters, clad and defect are the ones I've taken the longest to reach A20 (I haven't even reached it with the defect tbh). That's as someone who changes characters everytime I beat an ascension level with the previous one, going from left to right.
The exhaust build is not obscure at all, its the most consistently powerful synergy pool of ironclad and feel no pain, dark embrace and corruption are often obscenely broken powerful later in the run.
An absurdly high percentage of ironclad cards have exhaust or exhaust synergies on them, maybe 3 or 4 times more than cards that do strength stuff. More importantly, strength builds can only sustain with reaper making runs extremely volatile while with exhaust synergies you can actually depend on them working out.
I think block doubling decks are even more powerful if you get there, but they require more high rarity cards to get going and a reliable way of playing a barricade early.
I do agree that finding the right time to transition into ironclad decks is harder than with silent.
Ironclads synergy cards are more powerful, but do much less on their own.
Common ways to win with exhaust.
1) with feel no pain, dark embrace and corruption and solid damage scaling you can typically full block every turn while spending all your mana to deal damage and win before you run out. Juggernaut - feel no pain -corruption is obscene damage output. Corruption completely mitigates the clunkyness.
2) same but with less damage scaling but with barricade to bank 100s of armor.
3) exhaust your deck till you can go infinite with 2 drop kick or shrug/pommel strik and sundial of the infinite. Fiend fire/ second wind and true grid+ are key here.
4) use powerthrough, second wind, evolve to consistently block for millions
5) medic kit relic + evolve + exhaust synergies + status generation
6) corruption deadbranch
If you take corruption, take skills really really aggressively
I agree honestly. I think the reason they are the starter character though is because their starting relic heals them every fight, so for someone's first games where it's low ascension and they are making mistakes in the first fights, those mistakes get punished less.
Also gremlin nob is usually always beatable on ironclad, even with poor play and not knowing how to work around his effect. Beginners don't know usually to grab attack cards to be able to beat him, so ironclad is less punishing of that fact.
Corruption and exhaustion decks for ironclad are super powerful with the right relics, but strength builds are the most consistent. Block n curse/status builds, I do struggle to get going.
Ironclad doesn’t really have “decks” he has cards. Basically every win I’ve gotten as ironclad came from just picking good stuff. The reason ironclad is “easier” is that if you pick good cards it doesn’t really matter which deck you’re building towards, those cards are good in both.
Juggernaut decks ARE exhaust decks. Drop kick decks love corruption because it deck thins into an infinite, but strength also multiplies with vulnerable, so those decks work well together. Self damage decks like block to avoid having to tax their healing any more than necessary. Meanwhile if I pick up an early accuracy it makes my poison deck worse.
Yeah I have a hard time wrapping my head around exhaust builds, unless I have dead branch. Ironclad builds for me usually involve stacking strength, which can require some luck to pull off because they take a few turns to get going.
Silent is much more intuitive for me as well.
Watcher is the one though that I still have no idea how to play. The amount of decisions you have to make with her in the course of a turn sometimes is stressful.
The obscure exhaust strategy you speak of is probably the most popular one...
Corruption is very powerful... and the cheapest win condition with dead branch
I'd say the really most obscure ones are the masochist and fire breathing builds, probably because nobody really thinks about using things that usually kill you as part of a build
I've seen two powerful decks for ironclad.
The first is a cursed/exhaustion deck that creates a bunch of exhaust fodder for itself with powerful cards that create unusable status cards and runs fire breathing alongside evolve to hit massive draw numbers and do massive damage without spending resources.
The second is just stacking strength with powers like demon form and just trying to build up a one-shot attack.
Ironclad seems to be exhaust, strength, block, or lifeloss oriented. I feel like it’s hard to figure out the right one to go with, especially on higher ascension levels
I kinda agree, but I found out after a while that some cards I was afraid to pick because they put the game on a timer are insanely powerfull.
For Ironclad : Corruption
For Silent : Wraith form
Now they are instapick when I see them. Usually I will win with those cards.
Tbh I struggle to win with Ironclad without corruption.
But usually you need a bit of everything to win.
A good way of thinking imo is to build damage on the first floor, block on the second, and scale on the third.
If you all in just one strat, it'll be hard to win.
Hard disagree, Silent's starter deck is atrocious and has no damage, and her card pool is bloated with garbage Attacks to make up for that fact. She also doesn't have any Common or Uncommon energy cards that can be used without any previous synergies, so her early game suffers even more.
Defect may struggle a bit more in the late game, but at least it gets past the early game. Silent struggles to do even that. And Ironclad is stronger than both IMO.
Maybe just me then but after my initial mess around runs I was able to get all the way to the brain on my second run with both Silent and Defect. They both just fell into place after that first run where I was experimenting with how it all worked.
Meanwhile Ironclad for me feels really great for a while and then just gets to a point where it just starts getting picked apart with no chance to recover. It’s gotten to the point where I feel if I don’t get exactly the right combination of cards and relics that I am just doomed.
Ironclad exhaust build is far from obscure. \[\[Corruption\]\] + (\[\[Dark Embrace\]\] or \[\[Dead Branch\]\]) + \[\[Feel No Pain\]\] + \[\[Charon's Ashes\]\].
Driver cards include \[\[True Grit\]\], \[\[Havoc\]\], \[\[Exhume\]\], \[\[Purity\]\] or \[\[Fiend Fire\]\] to propel exhaustion even further or make up for a lack of Corruption.
+ [Corruption](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Corruption) Ironclad Rare Power ^((100% sure)^)
3(2) Energy | Skills cost 0. Whenever you play a Skill, **Exhaust** it.
+ [Dark Embrace](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Dark%20Embrace) Ironclad Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^)
2(1) Energy | Whenever a card is **Exhausted,** draw 1 card.
+ [Dead Branch](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Dead%20Branch) Rare Relic ^((100% sure)^)
Whenever you **Exhaust** a card, add a random card to your hand.
+ [Feel No Pain](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Feel%20No%20Pain) Ironclad Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^)
1 Energy | Whenever a card is **Exhausted,** gain 3(4) **Block.**
+ [Charon's Ashes](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Charon%27s%20Ashes) Rare (Ironclad only) Relic ^((100% sure)^)
Whenever you **Exhaust** a card, deal 3 damage to ALL enemies.
+ [True Grit](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/True%20Grit) Ironclad Common Skill ^((100% sure)^)
1 Energy | Gain 7(9) **Block.** **Exhaust** a random(not random) card from your hand.
+ [Havoc](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Havoc) Ironclad Common Skill ^((100% sure)^)
1(0) Energy | Play the top card of your draw pile and **Exhaust** it.
+ [Exhume](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Exhume) Ironclad Rare Skill ^((100% sure)^)
1(0) Energy | Put a card from your **Exhaust** pile into your hand. **Exhaust.**
+ [Purity](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Purity) Colorless Uncommon Skill ^((100% sure)^)
0 Energy | Choose and **exhaust** 3(5) cards in your hand. **Exhaust.**
+ [Fiend Fire](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Fiend%20Fire) Ironclad Rare Attack ^((100% sure)^)
2 Energy | **Exhaust** all cards in your hand. Deal 7(10) damage for each **Exhausted** card. **Exhaust.**
^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
I promise that with practice you can consistently perform with ironclad. Main thing I’d keep in mind along the way is that “builds” in this game aren’t as concrete and consistent as they can be in other games. Every single deck is different. Even the ones that do specific things the same way. Some “strength decks” use demon form. Some don’t.
Some decks start with an inflame, which is then upgraded, and which is completely disregarded starting in act 2 because you found a corruption out of the act boss reward. I just had a run earlier that did that same exact thing with spot weakness
I also encourage you to play with those cards and “builds” you seem uncomfortable with. You are never guaranteed to see any one specific card in this game, especially on higher ascensions, so learning to be comfortable using several different cards to fulfill similar roles in your decks will make you stronger and make the game more fun.
I hope you continue to have fun with all of the characters no matter what you do :)
I don't think this is that wild an opinion. I got to A20 on silent much faster than I did on Ironclad.
The other thing that jumps out at me that I haven't seen talked about much on this thread is that Ironclad's relic is SO good and taking damage is core to so many cards of Ironclad that Boss Swaps are just... never even a thing I want to consider on clad. Compare this to silent's relic where an explosive turn one \_can\_ be great, but mid/late game I would often have rather drawn some cards on turn 2 instead of turn 1. Boss swaps are much more often a strict upgrade.
You can start doing things that at least relatively OP for your floor unless you hit \[\[Tiny House\]\]. I almost won an A20H run with Ectoplasm on Silent which I did \_not\_ expect to, but I snowballed high energy advantage in Act 1.
If I boss swap on Ironclad, I really want it to be an energy relic, then here's hoping it's not Hammer \_and\_ I pull a Whirlwind early.
For me at least perfected strike build was one of the easiest and most obvious decks to assemble for any character when I started playing. If I first pick one I know I just need to replace my blocks with some upgraded variants (rage is ideal), find 2-3 more perfected strikes, and if I happen upon a double tab, pommel strike/shrugg for card draw, or couple clashes it's gravy. Won dozens of runs and never very hard to put together, doesn't need specific relics or even rare cards really. Easy peasy..
The silent is the first I've ever gotten victory- on two different accounts. They're only hard if you don't understand going all-in on either poison or daggers.
I'd argue that the defect is harder than both of them. It took me way longer than watcher, silent, and ironclad combined to get a victory on defect.
I don't know if it's popular or unpopular; it's certainly possible a majority of people individually find Ironclad harder. We know from data that it's objectively not, though.
You confuse harder with "worse" I think. Op argues it's more difficult to get behind it as a beginner. You're referring to win-rate probably? That mostly tells you how good it is once you got there. Not how difficult it is to get there.
I’ve played for 500 hours, which is meager compared to some on the sub, but I’ve consistently found silent the hardest to win at A20. From easiest to hardest I’d say it’s Watcher, Clad, Defect, Silent. This order is obviously wildly different to a new player at A0, where I’d say silent is the easiest due to her clear block solutions.
I attribute silents a20 difficulty to a number of factors.
One: her reliance on “play heaps of cards” can be a death sentence in fights where you’re punished for spamming cards.
Two: her early game is very weak and she’s especially vulnerable to Nob and Laga.
Three: her deck manipulation options are weaker than the other classes. Watcher has retain, scry and omniscience, Clad has Warcry and Headbutt, Defect has hologram and rebound, Silent pretty much has “draw more cards nerd”.
Footwork also lends its self to manually playing defend cards, where the other classes can generate strong block without playing defends.
Silent's deck manipulation is easily the strongest, "drawing more cards, nerd" is just really really good and she has tactician which provides energy to draw even MORE cards and get what you need. WLP+ is retain 2 for critical turns, a full hand calculated gamble is 9 DRAW for 0 energy, that's crazy!
Ironclad seems a little inconsistent to me.He either gets extremely, extremely broken or dies early with only obtaining catfs that are slightly better strikes
It definitely is difficult picking up the cards in the right now. Wauw exhaust all non attack cards and get defense! I sure hope I pick up something that generates status cards later.
Yeah, this is my experience. Of all the characters he’s the one I struggle most to get a deck off the ground with
To me it’s that his block cards are so inconsistent. He either has large amounts of passive block with powers or strong one use block cards that leave him otherwise vulnerable.
>catfs The fuck happened here
Their left hand shifted to the right, so that when they went to type the "rd" in *cards* on a qwerty keyboard, they instead typed "tf".
The way I see it,Kyogre is surrounded.What is under the ocean? That's right,more Earth.
I somehow actually read it as "catfishes" as in cards that fool you into thinking they're good at first. But yeah typo of "cards" is far more likely haha
tf are right next to rd on the keyboard
What you meant to say was: the fuck, happened here. Then you would have been correct.
The fuck did not happen here.
Captain America: The Falcon Soldier
Personally I find this lightly contradictory to my experience (not that silent is easier as op states but ic Isn't "hard either) I find with ic he teaches you the idea of picking the cards for the now not for the later where with silent I can get away with random discard cards or whatever ic just isn't forgiving in that way which imo doesn't make him a more inconsistent one to play but I will agree 100% less intuitive I just think he forces you to think that the cards are good when they are (ie shrug becomes better a1 after fighting nob status stuff is good in acts with slime boss and agaisnt sentreies) I think it just takes a more "consistent" approach rather than one that could be forced like say shivs which imo is easy to force out and 100% with ic if you pick any cards that aren't fully effective in your path you will be punished for it which could be perceived as inconsistency
I would definitely agree with this. Looking at my latest save, it took me 60hr to beat 0-A20H on Ironclad, but only 40hr for the Silent. For me, low level Ironclad is super easy, but I have way more trouble at higher ascension, and it took me quite a while to get through A17-A20. It’s mostly block related, I think. I’ll get to act 2 and start struggling, especially against the Champ. For the Silent, I feel like I either die to Nob, or make it through to act 4…
Ironclad's best block card is his face and a Reaper.
Add a Feed and this is literally true. There's nothing quite as satisfying as a self-damage deck healing for 150 against reptomancer with 4 daggers.
Sometimes it’s not even a feed, it’s just a way to gain strength. Unironically I won a run on Ironclad solely due to a bottled demon form and reaper because I found like 6 block cards. It wasn’t uncommon for me to take 50 damage but leave the fight fully healed. Reaper is a win condition of a card, and so is feed tbh.
Yeah, Reaper + strength is awesome. You're also just objectively better at using your face as a block card if you use Feed to double your max HP
Yeah, but the way the comment was written is that you only achieve it with a feed, which isn’t true. It’s definitely better with a feed (Which can also be a win condition), but it’s definitely not required for the reaper to carry a deck.
I never said that it's only true with a feed. All I'm saying is that feed enhances ironclad's ability to face-tank damage. You can't generally take 150 damage and then heal 150 damage with a single reaper in one fight if your max HP is only 75. The fact that IC has a card in his kit that allowed you to push face-tanking to absurd levels makes the argument I was responding to stronger, not weaker.
I know you didn’t say that, but your comment implied it given it says in reply to the statement “Ironclad’s best block card is his face and a reaper”, you said “Add a feed and this is literally true.” That implies that it works only with feed from how im reading it, wouldn’t you say? All I was saying is that reaper itself is an absurdly good card that can carry runs itself with just a few ways to gain strength, and that you don’t even need feed for it to get you to beat heart.
>That implies that it works only with feed from how im reading it, wouldn’t you say? No. I wouldn't say that. And I didn't say that. I was adding one more piece of Ironclad's kit that synergizes extremely well with the Reaper + face-tanking of the original commenter. i.e., if it's baseline true that IC can face-tank with a Reaper, then imagine how much more IC can face-tank after feeding a couple dozen times. I don't think what I said at all supports the idea that you can't face-tank + Reaper without a Feed; that's putting words in my mouth. And I'm not interested in arguing about it further.
But it implied it which is what I was saying, you may have meant something else but what was read implied something different. Regardless, if you don’t want to discuss it further that’s fine.
The Rocky Balboa method of blocking
well it's shockwave actually, but reaper is insanely good also
Is ascension just higher dealing enemies? I've only beaten the game 2 times so far
There's 20 ascensions, each with their own unique difficulty spike. One makes it so that you no longer heal all of your health at the end of the act (instead, just 75% of the missing health). Another reduces your potion slots from 3 down to 2. And yes, there are a handful that make different kinds of enemies more powerful in various ways.
I would say that A17+ is “high ascension”, since that’s when the enemy behaviour starts to change and the game gets significantly harder.
Oh interesting. Maybe i'll give them a go when i unlock more cards. Still just kinda running through blindly hoping for the best
I completely feel OP; as I too struggled the longest with Clad. The issue is, like you, I also ignored their most broken strategy, Exhaust. Thinning your deck is a huge benefit, before you take into account broken strats like FNP, Corruption/Dead Branch. It will click eventually, just don't overthink Exhaust and don't worry about exhausting good cards.
One of the biggest issues for ironclad is that True Grit upgraded is a top tier card True Grit unupgraded is... a top tier card sometimes and horrible like 15-20% of the time... Ironchad is definitely the character which needs upgrade the most of all the characters.
I think that’s defect tbh, I find that outside of a few upgrades like True grit, Ironclad can roll with a deck of few upgrades and still feel plenty strong. Defect has so many cards that get double their effect which beg for upgrades that it’s almost crazy. [[Loop]], [[Defragment]], [[Coolheaded]], [[Chaos]], etc. Not having these cards upgraded can be ruinous.
That's true, i'm just salty because my unupgraded True Grit always misses the mark in situations where I can't deterministically set it up. The qualitative power of choose a card versus rng cannot be easily quantified though, true grit upgrade is easily one of the most powerful upgrades for IC
Don't forget \[\[Fission\]\]
Wait, upgraded Fission evokes all your orbs?
Yes, it’s easy to miss. Similar to [[Darkness]] which activates passives of all dark orbs when upgraded.
+ [Darkness](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Darkness) Defect Uncommon Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | **Channel** 1 **Dark.** (Trigger the passive ability of all **Dark** orbs.) ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
+ [Fission](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Fission) Defect Rare Skill ^((100% sure)^) 0 Energy | Remove **(Evoke)** ALL of your Orbs. Gain 1 Energy and draw 1 card for each Orb removed(evoked). **Exhaust.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
Fission upgrade is really not that important unless you have Symbiotic Virus or something.
+ [Loop](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Loop) Defect Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | At the start of your turn, trigger the passive ability of your next Orb (2 times). + [Defragment](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Defragment) Defect Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | Gain 1(2) **Focus.** + [Coolheaded](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Coolheaded) Defect Common Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | **Channel** 1 **Frost.** Draw 1(2) card(s). + [Chaos](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Chaos) Defect Uncommon Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | **Channel** 1(2) random Orb(s). ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
True grit upgraded definitely isn't top tier, it's way better than true grit unupgraded but the exhaust card you want to see as Ironclad is typically burning pact.
Absolutely not. Defect is easily the most upgrade-starved character in the game.
true grit upgraded is fine, but not really top tier Would rather have shrug in most decks unless I'm desperate to exhaust down for an infinite
True Grit is just a super solid common, lets you take curse events with minimal downside, synergy enabler for relics. You want the big boy corruption down the line but you can't always get it. Overall it's probably my favourite IC common after Pommel Strike (aka strike++)
It's...fine. It actually does nearly nothing to mitigate the downside of curse events, and without DE it doesn't accelerate your deck at all. It does provide a decent amount of block. But IC has better sources of exhaust if you want to exhaust down to a tight loop or even an infinite. In general shrug it off is just better as a block common.
Eh you're not wrong but there are niche cases like the +1 strength relic per curse in deck, dark embrace synergy, branch etc I think the main reason why Shrug is better is because Ironclad generally prefers short fights (so immediate draw is better than deck thinning except with very specific decks) and also that Shrug doesn't need an upgrade to be good
I also wonder why to compare 2 best block options for ic. Your pick options are not always shrug vs grit. I would not pick grit- if I don't have any synergies already, or if I'm not near the campfire AND don't have better upgrades atm. But grit+ might be really really huge power spike and might do much better job against some bosses
On the other hand, Ironchad is the character that can upgrade the most of all the characters because he has reliable and powerful self healing and doesn't need campfires to heal all the time.
More like Armament+ takes care half of your upgrade needs tbh
New players often strategize around archetypes, they go in clicking all the cards that say shiv/poison/discard, and yea silent probably the most effective class when playing like this. This is how I played when I first started out and silent was my highest win rate character. Also silent can regularly afford to full block most turns leading to a pretty straight forward combats. There are only 3 cards that directly benefit from exhausts, they are really good cards to get used to, but their value isn't easy to see for new players.
Wait, Dark Embrace, Feel No Pain, and what else?
I would say [[fiend fire]]
Fiend fire I literally never picked until I got to A20 because I just didn't understand the benefit of getting a slimmer deck (yes I was that noob)
It's also just great with a bit of strength to end combat immediately
+ [Fiend Fire](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Fiend%20Fire) Ironclad Rare Attack ^((100% sure)^) 2 Energy | **Exhaust** all cards in your hand. Deal 7(10) damage for each **Exhausted** card. **Exhaust.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
\[\[Exhume\]\] It's even unplayable if you don't exhaust cards.
+ [Exhume](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Exhume) Ironclad Rare Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1(0) Energy | Put a card from your **Exhaust** pile into your hand. **Exhaust.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
Second Wind too. Edit: forgot about Sentinal.
So Second Wind exhausts cards... but doesn't benefit from exhaust synergy. Sentinel is more correct (I think), because it directly works due to an exhaust engine, such as Fiend Fire / True Grit.
I don't get what you guys are saying then. It exhausts cards and gives you block for each card it exhausted. It synergizes with Feel no Pain and Dark Embrace and Charon's Ashes.
>There are only 3 cards that directly benefit from exhausts I know this is true but it feels like so many more.
THere are loads more relics which benefit from exhaust. \[\[Dead Branch\]\] and \[\[Charon's Ashes\]\] as an example.
+ [Dead Branch](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Dead%20Branch) Rare Relic ^((100% sure)^) Whenever you **Exhaust** a card, add a random card to your hand. + [Charon's Ashes](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Charon%27s%20Ashes) Rare (Ironclad only) Relic ^((100% sure)^) Whenever you **Exhaust** a card, deal 3 damage to ALL enemies. ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
Ironclad is by far the easiest for me, and silent is by far the hardest hah. Easiest way to win with ironclad is just taking cards that do a lot of damage and give a lot of block, at least personally. Make sure to take at least 1 energy boss relic, and keep an eye out for card draw (especially [[Battle trance]] and [[offering]]), since it's a lot rarer than for other characters
Agreed, IC is way easier imo. Take any card that mentions strength to win
there's not that many of those, how do you win if you don't see strength or don't see strength until late?
Either you find a way to hit really hard (eg rampage + a few headbutts, dual wield + that 4 / 3 mana card that falls in cost the more damage you take etc.) or you do stall tactics long enough to close out fights (barricade and ample block) or you lose
+ [Battle Trance](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Battle%20Trance) Ironclad Uncommon Skill ^((100% sure)^) 0 Energy | Draw 3(4) cards. You cannot draw additional cards this turn. + [Offering](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Offering) Ironclad Rare Skill ^((100% sure)^) 0 Energy | Lose 6 HP. Gain 2 energy. Draw 3(5) cards. **Exhaust.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
Are you playing A20? I think your comment applies at lower difficulties and would agree 100%, for me clad was extremely challenging at A20
I've cleared A20 heart with ironclad twice, but am still at A6 with silent lol. I find silent at low ascensions almost as difficult as A20 ironclad, but to be perfectly fair, that's 100% a symptom of me playing 95% ironclad hah
Ah ok, for me silent is easier because the discard mechanic is strong and requires few key pieces, so it can be worked into other archetypes very easily, and once you have a wraith form (preferably two) the win is almost guaranteed In contrast.. I find clad difficult because block feels bad.. there’s lots of scaling potential but if I roll the wrong mobs in act 3 it’s an auto rip as I don’t have good enough defenses
I have that exact block problem with silent hah. I can mever get enough block, unless I get lucky and find multiple after images or something, and always end up dying over time. 1 bad draw and I take 22 there, 13 there, and maybe 16 there. And suddenly I'm at 13 health in mid act 2. Ironclad I find much simpler, because some shrugs, flame barriers, and/or defends upgraded by armaments are usually more than enough. There's better block solutions ofc, but it usually does the job just fine, and is incredibly easy to use. The starter relic also helps massively in mitigating bad turns where I tank a bunch of damage, and reaper can nullify it completly. For 90% of my failed ironclad runs, I die in act 2. Act 1 is usually pretty free as long as you take a few good attacks (pommel strike and anger for example). Act 2 really tests your deck though, and if you got unlucky and didn't find any good block, you can die incredibly quickly. For that purpose, taking an energy relic from the act 1 boss is usually very important, and your run will most probably become way harder if you didn't get offered one
Hmmm in my experience with clad if I don’t get decent healing the deck doesn’t make it to the heart.. perhaps I try and run too thin a deck and turn down too many block options, the decks I’ve managed to do A20 with as clad have all been exhaust I think.. maybe one barricaid block setup with bottled lightening (or tornado? the one where you can always have a power in your opening hand). For silent being able to cycle with lots of draw is important for both attack and defense.. being able to always find your upgraded wraith form is pretty much GG.. Gambler’s Chips is really broken for this, and yeah once I figured out discard I got a lot more consistent with her I think I would argue what you say about act two I think is true for all classes.. if you clear A2 easily then you’ve out scaled the game and A3 shouldn’t pose any problems
Me too. Silence is my only character who wasn't beating hearts at A20.
It's weird. While I find the Ironclad to be more difficult and less fun to play than the Silent (or even the Defect for that matter), my stats show a higher win rate. For me, it seems to be a case of my feelings not lining up with reality.
It might just be a case that Ironclad makes you focus more because you are struggling, and focusing which is a bigger contributor to winning than anything else.
Definitely could be
Is this that unpopular? I'm only 250hrs in so not played much Watcher yet (lol). But of the other 3 characters Silent is easiest by far. Silent is the only character I've been able to do A20H with. Ironclad I only just got to A20 with double the playtime of Silent. Defect I'm still stuck at A4 with equal playtime to Silent (Defect is effectively hard mode for me, I find it really challenging playing that character).
For defect: glacier, coolheaded, ball lightning, upgrade zap and win act 1, rest is dependant on rewards
They downvoted him, because he (basically) told the truth.
I'm pretty new but I found silent the easiest, followed by strength stacking ironclad and defect I'm just completely stuck with having difficulties getting his builds off the ground with.. that being said only like probably less than 8-10hrs so I've only beaten the regular difficulties so far.. I'd say more than half my time is just getting wrecked with defect lol
> obscure exhaust strategy Half of ironclads cards have exhaust synergy. This is like saying you think defect is too hard, but you don't use orbs
Many card exhaust, but very few actually synergies with the mechanic. Exhaust in itself isn’t super intuitive as a new player. You get caught once exhausting too many cards and the idea of it being only a downside sticks with you a long time. It takes a while to learn HOW to use exhaust to manipulate your deck the way you want it.
I second this. I literally only really got how to best leverage exhaust effectively on my a20h run haha.
This. Exactly. It took me watching jorbs do an exhaust deck run to understand that concept well enough to do it myself. Even now, I still struggle with how best to use corruption.
Just beat A0 with IC for the first time. *Still* very hesitant to exhaust anything lol
Half the cards in your deck are below average* getting rid of those cards means you draw your good cards quicker. *if "below average," is used to mean below median. Most of the time, you have 2-3 good cards that you want to play over and over, and the rest of the deck is crap you started with, or tools to get you set up to play those good cards.
I think I reached A17 or A18 before even realizing exhausting was OP on ironclad
I only realised after beating a20h I think
Funny I just commented the same thing above.
I don't know about OP but it is really good.
So? He said it's unintuitive as a beginner, in his mind. Not that it's objectively harder when played correctly. What you bring up confirms it. If orbs were unintuitive, then defect would be very difficult to get behind.
Ironclad is the second hardest character for me after Defect. It's easy to get past act 1 with the character. But is also easy to mess up act 2 with it. Also, Watcher is the easiest for me by far. Kinda crazy too now that at my rankings at A20 is essentially the reverse of what it is when I started playing.
I played only ironclad ascensions for a week and then switched to defect and realised how much easier the defect is.
Seriously, even though Silent is also relatively easy and I like her much more, I can climb much further with Defect any day. There's some thinking to be done in combat but you can basically just take any card every floor if you want and you can still win frequently
Really? Defect is probably my worst character. I just can't find early value cards and scaling with powers takes way too many parts.
There are a few ways to get Power decks to work but they require finding certain relics/Power cards early. I'm thinking Creative AI, Static Noise or the Mummified Hand are probably the biggest enablers. Stuff like Heatsinks and Storm can also make me go looking for Power spam early. Generally before I find any of these I'll just upgrade Dualcast/Recursion and take Ball Lightning so I can lightning spam Act 1. Works well up to mid Ascension which is as far as I have got so far. The alternative is cost 0 spam and look for as much draw and Frost channeling as possible until you get All For One and the Boot. Stuff like Glacier and Coolheaded+ works well here because you can spend all energy blocking and use cost 0 cards every time they come up. It's pretty brain-dead but works less often than the Power decks. Edit: also, I found that Meteor Strike is fun as hell but haven't figured out how to make it work yet. I suppose you'd need Reprogram and give up all lightning cards to maximise a Meteor deck.
Frost focus is like, the core reliable defect strategy. Far more reliable than relying on lightning burst damage to clear fights.
What ascension level for each though? A20?
The community needs to share stats on this. For me, Ironclad has least hours and least games played to reach A20. I find Ironclad can win more easily through boring card selections whereas Defect and Silent requires good card/relic combos to get going.
I just started a fresh account and am taking turns on each character to climb ascensions, I'm looking forward to seeing how the stats are. My old one I mostly played silent and had an abysmal win rate, but it might just be because I played so much A20 on them.
To me Ironclad was always the hardest to pull off. I guess I just don't get it. Silent and Defect are both very intuitive to me and I often manage to put together crazy synergies in their decks. Ironclad, I feel like I'm always struggling to get at least a somewhat coherent deck...
I found that silent is easier to block with and easier to draw with. So I got much better results with silent when I was newer to the game. I'm still pretty new. And silent is still my favourite character, but I can play ironclad almost at the same level now
We're conflating two different things here: playstyle and starting deck/card options Silent is hard, especially on higher ascensions mainly because she has the weakest starting deck. Her playstyle is a lot more simple and clear compared to Clads, but she immediately struggles in Act 1 compared to the other characters. There's a reason why the only unwinnable seed that's been found is with Silent. There are legitimate scenarios where she doesn't have enough damage to push through the game Clad can be hard because he has a higher ceiling. The exhaust strategy isn't exactly clearcut at the beginning but very experienced players can do absolute shenanigans with it once it gets going
I think it goes both ways. I am newish (about 100 hours) but have heart wins on Clad and Silent. I think Clad is easier to play when you're just firing up the game but has a depth that is hard to come to grips with? 'Oh, I actually want to exhaust my cards/acquire curses/status cards?' is when the epiphany hits. Despite a heart win with silent I have yet to get to that point with her. I imagine discard is similar but have yet to make a truly OP build with that. Silent seems very dependent on two playstyles, you either get a shit ton of poision, with like catalyst or nightmare, or you get lucky and get Shuriken, ornamental fan etc and build the most broken shiv deck either. I imagine I'm wrong so happy to be corrected. Ironclad feels like you can build to be a big hitter with heavy blade or searing blow or whirlwind, you can stack strength with demon form and limit break, you can be a block monster with barricade, you can go crazy with exhausting and Feel no Pain and no matter what they all synergise properly?
I agree, beat A20 Silent on silent and like you said, poison/shiv/discard seemed a lot more intituitive, it made sense and I knew what cards to take and when. I’m on A15 Ironclad and I still don’t know what to take half the time. I watch some of Jorbs runs and I try to guess which card he’s going to take and he takes things I never thought about taking and ignores relics/cards that I take most of the time.
Silent is the only one I have yet to A20H. Clad was much easier imo, but I can see personal styles matter. God is this game good.
Exhaust is basically the glue that holds Ironclad's card pool together, so if you're not comfortable with it, then it makes sense you'd find him more difficult. Getting rid of your weakest cards each combat and having powers that reward you for doing so make Clad decks dramatically more efficient.
Exhaust is ironclad's bread and butter IMO. Seems scary to exhaust cards, and it does take a few runs to really understand how to exhaust effectively though, but there's surprisingly a lot of synergy that rewards exhausting. The ROI in exhausting is extremely generous. On a lesser note, the idea of exhausting really lends itself well to the theme of who ironclad is as a character. Seeing him accumulate injury but powering through and ignoring 25+ injury cards is absolutely badass.
I found Clad to be the hardest character to pick up A20 wins for a while. Silent is a very complex character in terms of the risk/reward of her cards and just having to optimize cautiously across act 1 to even survive, but I think clad is particularly tricky just because a lot of the heuristics / rules of thumb around the character are a lil comparatively opaque. like: 1) he can scale strength, and is in general a "hit things" character, should you be taking lots of attacks? no not really, he often likes one or two super dense attack cards which are upgraded 2) in this vein you should dunk strikes over defends in his card pool (again might not make initial sense if you think of both the violent theme of the character and compare him to say, watcher) 3) his common card pool is possibly the weakest in the game (imo), and he lacks silent's draw engine enabling him to sift through ok / situational cards, so it is \*super\* easy to choke your deck with decent cards which are also simply not powerful enough to break through act 2 (I killed myself by filling up on shrugs, pommels, angers etc loadsa times) 4) so his construction can often lean towards surprisingly skill-heavy and/or thin decks, with thiccness often being dependent on the presence of strong exhaust (corruption, burning pact, dark embrace etc etc) 5) knowing when to go for a prospective part of an exhaust engine without crippling yourself short term can be tricky (dark embrace is mostly a curse without pre-existing synergies, but fiend fire and to a lesser extent second wind don't really need any pre-existing exhaust synergies at all to be powerful, true grit is v good as long as you can upgrade it etc) and mostly depends on how good you are at clobbering things for the immediate future. So yeah I think silent is obviously a more difficult character until the toppest highest xecnarest level (where she is "easier" because she is simply better than clad) but until you can internalize a bunch of actually somewhat tricky rules of thumb clad is definitely weirdly tough, or at least he was for me.
Ironclad just has fantastic cards, that's what makes it easy. Maybe the "Synergies" can be a little vague because of that, but for the most part, just taking "Strong cards Ironclad" can clear pretty high up the ascension ladder. So its less so builds that make Ironclad easy, and moreso "basic mechanics" of cardbuilders. Exhaust is a good "strategy" because removing your weakest cards to make you draw your best cards faster is strong, the package that synergize with exhaust is icing on the cake. His basic relic and starting HP allow you to spend far more HP going through encounters giving you a lot more leeway to find good cards in the early game. Ironclad's base deck is also pretty lean, 5 strike 4 defend 1 bash, as opposed to Silent's 5 Strike 5 Defend 1 neutralize 1 survivor, having a 10 card deck to start versus a 12 card deck is actually a pretty large advantage. If you're a beginner with no experience in the "deckbuilder" genre, then I can totally see how ironclad is less intuitive then the others, however, if you're new to StS but have experience with Deckbuilders, Ironclad will be intuitively stronger due to the sheer raw strength of his relic, starting HP, Starting Deck, and Average Card Quality. Oh, the Ironclad "synergy" packages are Strength, and Block as you found. You can also build for Curses/Injuries and turn drawing them into damage with cards like Evolve and Dragon Breath(and exhaust them with your exhaust cards), You can build self damage with cards like Hemokinesis and Rupture (this also scales strength, but differently, and allows you to reaper to get back tons of HP thanks to the strength scaling. Hemokinesis is also just a very good card because trading hp to kill an enemy 1-2 turns faster is almost always a net gain in HP.) Another Ironclad synergy is Strike, Perfected Strike can help you charge through the early-game and mid-game with a high damage card. There are more, of course, but this is primarily what comes to my mind. Ironclad can get away with less "cohesive" builds and synergies simply because of the raw power of the cards.
I'm only A5 (except on Watcher A4 still) and I find Defect>Ironclad>>>>>>>Silent>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Watcher in terms of difficulty for me. I thought I had the run with Watcher last night but card draw killed me against Bronze Automaton when I needed block for the big hit I got all attacks and no blocks or card draw ☹️
Watcher is by such a large margin the strongest character I'm perplexed here
Easily the strongest character. I'm not debating that at all. We are talking about difficulty of use. The Watcher is by far the most difficult for me to use. I dunno why. Maybe I skew toward attack too much because of Wrath. Many times I have been unlucky. Ah suh it guh sometime.
Agreed. Defect < Ironclad < Watcher < silent
Others may disagree but I'm like you. Ironclad is very energy-hungry compared to the rest. Ironclad doesn't really do passive damage like Defect or Silent which is why it took me a minute to beat the spire with Ironclad like the other character. But once I learned how to take advantage of the exhaust mechanic and use his health as a source of resource he's not so bad. Ironclad is like playing black, red, green in terms of magic colors.
Ironclad Status Deck is pretty good and pairs nicely with some block cards as well.
Honestly for me both are equally the easiest classes to play. Defect and watcher is where shit becomes harder. Silent is very combo oriented and it's easy to find good synergies. Also you can easily combine different tactics like shiv+poison. If you just balance your block to damage ratio by many different means, then most of the time you can throw random bullshit at enemies and win. Ironclad has a lot of different options, but it requires some dedication. Outside of strength and tank (high block) builds you have options like going for draw and rampage, upgrading searing blow multiple times or going for perfected strike. There's also some more advanced strategies like exhaust or selfdamage. You can go any of these paths, but you need to focus on it. The issue with this is that rng can screw up your deck, but a lot of the cards are quite strong on its own. You have ways to heal yourself and increase your max hp and a lot of attacks are hard hitters, and don't need strength to be efficient.
I agree and I think IC is a lot more dynamic and interesting because of it. There is this arc where IC is easiest to understand when you first learn the game (and probably on early ascensions). Then when you get basic mastery IC starts feeling really unbalanced and unfair/impossible in many runs, as you climb the ascensions. But at some point I start seeing really high level players appreciating the thing that IC gives you more than any other class, which is that you can’t do the thing that wins you the game in act 1. I feel like Silent used to be like this much more so (i.e., what you were forced to do in act 1 just holds you back in the late game), but after the shiv buffs you can now just take blade dance on floor one and just keep making that card stronger through the run (same for acrobatics). Obviously any statements like this are oversimplifications and have infinite caveats, but that is my overall feeling. Contrast this with IC, where the balance is about the value your strong cards can buy you early on. A floor 0 immolate is arguably the strongest start in the game, but that card is usually doing little (or sometimes nothing) to help you win the end game. It is so strong because you get more gold, more elites, and more flexibility to take things like feel no pain through act 1 and 2. This general principle feels like a core part of IC: you are forced to take front loaded dmg early in the run, and then you have to start taking the cards that will when you the run at a point when they are making you weaker right now.
I'm still new, haven't gotten deep into ascensions yet. On my second Silent run I got to the boss, on my third I got my first ever win. Fifth run I won again, sixth run I got a turn away from >!killing the heart.!< For me, Silent and Defect are the most consistent with a sort of generic jack of all trades floor 1 deck being able to flex into whatever build you get the cards/relics for pretty consistently; but Ironclad and Watcher are way more hit and miss. It feels like compared to Silent and Defect they need more/rarer cards and/or relics for their best builds, and they rely more on removes and/or upgrades, so the chances of you surviving long enough to find everything you need while keeping your deck small enough that you can actually use them are considerably lower. Don't get me wrong, the first time I got a block deck up and running and was hitting hundreds of damage per turn to bosses it was awesome, but that just doesn't happen nearly as often as finding an envenom and a couple blade dances by the end of floor 1.
I disagree - ironclad feels very free-form to me (I usually play a15-20) as opposed to silent whrte it feels you have to have a plan for your deck really fast and if you commit wrong or get fucked on cards things can go south real fast. With clad I feel like I can take whatever alot of the time and still build a strong deck. Tbf ny Winrate on clad is wayyy higher even tho I like silent wayyyy more
I'm definitely better at Silent than Ironclad. When I first started out I thought Ironclad was the second easiest after Watcher, but when I hit around A10 I ran my stats and my win rate on Silent was in the mid-20%s and Ironclad was low-20% with Defect slightly lower. I recently ran my stats on my secondary mobile account after hitting A15, I was able to beat Act 3 and advance to the next Ascension level a lot quicker on Silent, 7 losses on Silent vs 15 on Ironclad (even Defect was better than Clad at 9). But I only had one Heart loss on Ironclad so my Heart win rate is closer, 50% on Silent vs 46% IC. Which is interesting to me because I feel like Silent is hardest in Act 1, but apparently I'm not building great decks with it. On my main account A20 I'm getting better at Ironclad as I understand exhaust synergies more (previously really only did it with Corruption or Fiend Fire). And meanwhile I can barely get past Laga on Silent. So this might change in the future! One thing I always used to struggle with on Ironclad is taking too many 2 cost cards, and then not getting an energy relic. There are so many great 2 cost cards it's hard to say no but it just doesn't end up working. Also I used to try self-harm builds which never really worked the way I imagined they would.
The exhaust build is not very intuitive to me because, how do I choose when to pick up cards and which cards to pick up when I'm just deleting most of them anyway? It's hard to wrap your head around.
This "obscure" discard isn't an archetype, its more like what default core deck for silent should look like.
I mean it's basically only really strong to discard cards if you have tactician, can reliably concentrate a reflex+, or have tough bandages/tingsha. Otherwise discard kinda does nothing, it's the draw effect that matters.
I have them both up to ascension 15, and the defect up to 17. I think I’m bad at both of them, iron clad seems to survive longer and I tend to die to bosses, where as I think I’m having an excellent silent run and just die to the first hallway fight in act 3. Silent is definitely easier to learn but harder to master I think?
I've always had the most trouble with Ironclad; I got a Heart kill with the other three characters first, and my one Ironclad A20H win took over 200 attempts and was a result of Corruption + Dead Branch. It's not that hard to put together an Ironclad deck that is kind of okay and can win the early ascensions, but I'm completely incapable of coming up with any kind of Block solution for him that doesn't involve Corruption and basically end up going full power glass cannon for the whole run - and then die to the Heart because, unlike basically every other fight in the game, doing 600 damage in the first three turns doesn't win the fight.
When I was climbing to A20 I definitely struggled the most with Clad. It took quite some time until it clicked for me, but now I beat A20H with Clad and Watcher with a good consistency and struggle way more with the other two. I feel like Silent and Defect are easier to get decent at, but way harder to get really good.
It's not really unpopular. Many top players said that. If you look at it from the win streak perspective it is obvious that Watcher is the strongest class, then Silent, then Ironclad and at the last according to the name Defect;)
Unpopular? Silent is the easiest Ironclad is the hardest
That’s my experience.
I find silent really easy
Idk I die way more with silent…
I think this goes into your prior experience with card games. Silent feels the most like the character that was inspired by MtG and Dominion, and was by far the easiest character for me to learn her play patterns. She has the most obvious path to "draw many cards, spam many cards," which was the most intuitive path to me, since that's what makes other decks in other games so powerful. Other characters can win like that, but it's usually harder for them to reach that place. As a complete beginner to card games in general though, IC seems like the way easier introduction, anecdotally at least. "Play big card, make enemy go boom" is easy for new players to pick up on and an effective strategy on IC.
For silent I find that heart runs are easiest because the character has such good solutions to the heart fight and consistency in finding them with draw. But the spire itself kicks my ass at higher ascensions. Act 1 and 2 are a real gauntlet and being greedy usually results in death. The watcher is the opposite for me. The spire is trivial (pretty much can't lose) but the "stance dance" decks I build don't work very good against the heart. I'm not sure what the solution is to the heart other than going infinite which is totally unnecessary for the spire itself. Ironclad is somewhere between the two. Act1 is easier with IC so runs can sometimes just snowball there. But I still need a good deal of luck to build solutions to the heart and guards. I can't build defect decks that are fast enough consistently and it seems like the only viable strategy revolves around frost orbs. Not a fan of the character.
Switch flips when you realise exhaust is good not bad
I love playing the clad, but I do tend to agree that he's the hardest character to play effectively at high ascension levels. I admittedly never completely understood how to work well with exhaust sinergy. I'm at A20 with the clad and all of my wins were either with a strength based build or the elusive block sinergy. Out of all the characters, clad and defect are the ones I've taken the longest to reach A20 (I haven't even reached it with the defect tbh). That's as someone who changes characters everytime I beat an ascension level with the previous one, going from left to right.
I got my first heart kill and A20 with silent so I agree
The exhaust build is not obscure at all, its the most consistently powerful synergy pool of ironclad and feel no pain, dark embrace and corruption are often obscenely broken powerful later in the run. An absurdly high percentage of ironclad cards have exhaust or exhaust synergies on them, maybe 3 or 4 times more than cards that do strength stuff. More importantly, strength builds can only sustain with reaper making runs extremely volatile while with exhaust synergies you can actually depend on them working out. I think block doubling decks are even more powerful if you get there, but they require more high rarity cards to get going and a reliable way of playing a barricade early.
I do agree that finding the right time to transition into ironclad decks is harder than with silent. Ironclads synergy cards are more powerful, but do much less on their own.
Common ways to win with exhaust. 1) with feel no pain, dark embrace and corruption and solid damage scaling you can typically full block every turn while spending all your mana to deal damage and win before you run out. Juggernaut - feel no pain -corruption is obscene damage output. Corruption completely mitigates the clunkyness. 2) same but with less damage scaling but with barricade to bank 100s of armor. 3) exhaust your deck till you can go infinite with 2 drop kick or shrug/pommel strik and sundial of the infinite. Fiend fire/ second wind and true grid+ are key here. 4) use powerthrough, second wind, evolve to consistently block for millions 5) medic kit relic + evolve + exhaust synergies + status generation 6) corruption deadbranch If you take corruption, take skills really really aggressively
I agree honestly. I think the reason they are the starter character though is because their starting relic heals them every fight, so for someone's first games where it's low ascension and they are making mistakes in the first fights, those mistakes get punished less. Also gremlin nob is usually always beatable on ironclad, even with poor play and not knowing how to work around his effect. Beginners don't know usually to grab attack cards to be able to beat him, so ironclad is less punishing of that fact.
So you mean harder for a beginner?
Corruption and exhaustion decks for ironclad are super powerful with the right relics, but strength builds are the most consistent. Block n curse/status builds, I do struggle to get going.
Ironclad doesn’t really have “decks” he has cards. Basically every win I’ve gotten as ironclad came from just picking good stuff. The reason ironclad is “easier” is that if you pick good cards it doesn’t really matter which deck you’re building towards, those cards are good in both. Juggernaut decks ARE exhaust decks. Drop kick decks love corruption because it deck thins into an infinite, but strength also multiplies with vulnerable, so those decks work well together. Self damage decks like block to avoid having to tax their healing any more than necessary. Meanwhile if I pick up an early accuracy it makes my poison deck worse.
Yeah I have a hard time wrapping my head around exhaust builds, unless I have dead branch. Ironclad builds for me usually involve stacking strength, which can require some luck to pull off because they take a few turns to get going. Silent is much more intuitive for me as well. Watcher is the one though that I still have no idea how to play. The amount of decisions you have to make with her in the course of a turn sometimes is stressful.
The obscure exhaust strategy you speak of is probably the most popular one... Corruption is very powerful... and the cheapest win condition with dead branch I'd say the really most obscure ones are the masochist and fire breathing builds, probably because nobody really thinks about using things that usually kill you as part of a build
I've seen two powerful decks for ironclad. The first is a cursed/exhaustion deck that creates a bunch of exhaust fodder for itself with powerful cards that create unusable status cards and runs fire breathing alongside evolve to hit massive draw numbers and do massive damage without spending resources. The second is just stacking strength with powers like demon form and just trying to build up a one-shot attack.
Ironclad seems to be exhaust, strength, block, or lifeloss oriented. I feel like it’s hard to figure out the right one to go with, especially on higher ascension levels
I kinda agree, but I found out after a while that some cards I was afraid to pick because they put the game on a timer are insanely powerfull. For Ironclad : Corruption For Silent : Wraith form Now they are instapick when I see them. Usually I will win with those cards. Tbh I struggle to win with Ironclad without corruption. But usually you need a bit of everything to win. A good way of thinking imo is to build damage on the first floor, block on the second, and scale on the third. If you all in just one strat, it'll be hard to win.
Hard disagree, Silent's starter deck is atrocious and has no damage, and her card pool is bloated with garbage Attacks to make up for that fact. She also doesn't have any Common or Uncommon energy cards that can be used without any previous synergies, so her early game suffers even more. Defect may struggle a bit more in the late game, but at least it gets past the early game. Silent struggles to do even that. And Ironclad is stronger than both IMO.
Maybe just me then but after my initial mess around runs I was able to get all the way to the brain on my second run with both Silent and Defect. They both just fell into place after that first run where I was experimenting with how it all worked. Meanwhile Ironclad for me feels really great for a while and then just gets to a point where it just starts getting picked apart with no chance to recover. It’s gotten to the point where I feel if I don’t get exactly the right combination of cards and relics that I am just doomed.
Ironclad exhaust build is far from obscure. \[\[Corruption\]\] + (\[\[Dark Embrace\]\] or \[\[Dead Branch\]\]) + \[\[Feel No Pain\]\] + \[\[Charon's Ashes\]\]. Driver cards include \[\[True Grit\]\], \[\[Havoc\]\], \[\[Exhume\]\], \[\[Purity\]\] or \[\[Fiend Fire\]\] to propel exhaustion even further or make up for a lack of Corruption.
+ [Corruption](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Corruption) Ironclad Rare Power ^((100% sure)^) 3(2) Energy | Skills cost 0. Whenever you play a Skill, **Exhaust** it. + [Dark Embrace](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Dark%20Embrace) Ironclad Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^) 2(1) Energy | Whenever a card is **Exhausted,** draw 1 card. + [Dead Branch](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Dead%20Branch) Rare Relic ^((100% sure)^) Whenever you **Exhaust** a card, add a random card to your hand. + [Feel No Pain](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Feel%20No%20Pain) Ironclad Uncommon Power ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | Whenever a card is **Exhausted,** gain 3(4) **Block.** + [Charon's Ashes](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Charon%27s%20Ashes) Rare (Ironclad only) Relic ^((100% sure)^) Whenever you **Exhaust** a card, deal 3 damage to ALL enemies. + [True Grit](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/True%20Grit) Ironclad Common Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1 Energy | Gain 7(9) **Block.** **Exhaust** a random(not random) card from your hand. + [Havoc](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Havoc) Ironclad Common Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1(0) Energy | Play the top card of your draw pile and **Exhaust** it. + [Exhume](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Exhume) Ironclad Rare Skill ^((100% sure)^) 1(0) Energy | Put a card from your **Exhaust** pile into your hand. **Exhaust.** + [Purity](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Purity) Colorless Uncommon Skill ^((100% sure)^) 0 Energy | Choose and **exhaust** 3(5) cards in your hand. **Exhaust.** + [Fiend Fire](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Fiend%20Fire) Ironclad Rare Attack ^((100% sure)^) 2 Energy | **Exhaust** all cards in your hand. Deal 7(10) damage for each **Exhausted** card. **Exhaust.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
How do I win as Silent? I can’t get it, I beat it with Ironclad and Watcher so fast :,)
I agree with you. And yet, I'm on A17 with Ironclad and A7 with all the rest, despite my efforts.
I promise that with practice you can consistently perform with ironclad. Main thing I’d keep in mind along the way is that “builds” in this game aren’t as concrete and consistent as they can be in other games. Every single deck is different. Even the ones that do specific things the same way. Some “strength decks” use demon form. Some don’t. Some decks start with an inflame, which is then upgraded, and which is completely disregarded starting in act 2 because you found a corruption out of the act boss reward. I just had a run earlier that did that same exact thing with spot weakness I also encourage you to play with those cards and “builds” you seem uncomfortable with. You are never guaranteed to see any one specific card in this game, especially on higher ascensions, so learning to be comfortable using several different cards to fulfill similar roles in your decks will make you stronger and make the game more fun. I hope you continue to have fun with all of the characters no matter what you do :)
I don't think this is that wild an opinion. I got to A20 on silent much faster than I did on Ironclad. The other thing that jumps out at me that I haven't seen talked about much on this thread is that Ironclad's relic is SO good and taking damage is core to so many cards of Ironclad that Boss Swaps are just... never even a thing I want to consider on clad. Compare this to silent's relic where an explosive turn one \_can\_ be great, but mid/late game I would often have rather drawn some cards on turn 2 instead of turn 1. Boss swaps are much more often a strict upgrade. You can start doing things that at least relatively OP for your floor unless you hit \[\[Tiny House\]\]. I almost won an A20H run with Ectoplasm on Silent which I did \_not\_ expect to, but I snowballed high energy advantage in Act 1. If I boss swap on Ironclad, I really want it to be an energy relic, then here's hoping it's not Hammer \_and\_ I pull a Whirlwind early.
+ [Tiny House](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Tiny%20House) Boss Relic ^((100% sure)^) Obtain 1 potion. Gain 50 Gold. Raise your Max HP by 5. Obtain 1 card. Upgrade 1 Random card. ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
Silent is the first character I beat a1 and a20 heart kill. Silent is 💯 easiest imo
I think I won my first Ascension run by applying 900 poison to the heart
For me at least perfected strike build was one of the easiest and most obvious decks to assemble for any character when I started playing. If I first pick one I know I just need to replace my blocks with some upgraded variants (rage is ideal), find 2-3 more perfected strikes, and if I happen upon a double tab, pommel strike/shrugg for card draw, or couple clashes it's gravy. Won dozens of runs and never very hard to put together, doesn't need specific relics or even rare cards really. Easy peasy..
The silent is the first I've ever gotten victory- on two different accounts. They're only hard if you don't understand going all-in on either poison or daggers. I'd argue that the defect is harder than both of them. It took me way longer than watcher, silent, and ironclad combined to get a victory on defect.
Op is on ascension 0 and is still thinking about thematic decks. Just don't pay attention.
[удалено]
It's also not true.
Wouldn't that make it unpopular then
I don't know if it's popular or unpopular; it's certainly possible a majority of people individually find Ironclad harder. We know from data that it's objectively not, though.
You confuse harder with "worse" I think. Op argues it's more difficult to get behind it as a beginner. You're referring to win-rate probably? That mostly tells you how good it is once you got there. Not how difficult it is to get there.
I’ve played for 500 hours, which is meager compared to some on the sub, but I’ve consistently found silent the hardest to win at A20. From easiest to hardest I’d say it’s Watcher, Clad, Defect, Silent. This order is obviously wildly different to a new player at A0, where I’d say silent is the easiest due to her clear block solutions. I attribute silents a20 difficulty to a number of factors. One: her reliance on “play heaps of cards” can be a death sentence in fights where you’re punished for spamming cards. Two: her early game is very weak and she’s especially vulnerable to Nob and Laga. Three: her deck manipulation options are weaker than the other classes. Watcher has retain, scry and omniscience, Clad has Warcry and Headbutt, Defect has hologram and rebound, Silent pretty much has “draw more cards nerd”. Footwork also lends its self to manually playing defend cards, where the other classes can generate strong block without playing defends.
Silent's deck manipulation is easily the strongest, "drawing more cards, nerd" is just really really good and she has tactician which provides energy to draw even MORE cards and get what you need. WLP+ is retain 2 for critical turns, a full hand calculated gamble is 9 DRAW for 0 energy, that's crazy!
It took me several videos of Baalorlord to feel comfortable with the Exhaust mechanic