Thinking back on all the games I've lost, this analysis is depressing confirmation that I might just not be that good at this game lol. Super interesting read though!
I've even watched a few people's playthroughs and going over which cards are better than others and combo well together, and my win rate is still terrible. Just lost again this morning in Act 2 with another Defect run.
Meanwhile this guy is saying the best players are winning 99% of the time on Standard, and nearly the same on Ascension level 15? Wow.
By the way, for anyone thinking this game isn't really for you, you might want to give it a chance anyway (watch a video at least). I don't usually care for Rogue-likes, and I've been pretty tired of Deckbuilders, but I got into this game hard, pretty much immediately, after putting off trying it for forever and finally deciding to give it a chance.
One thing that really makes it awesome for me is that you know basically exactly what the enemies intend to do and how much damage they're going to do to you, so you can puzzle out how to prepare for it, should you kill this person who's going to do 18 damage to you, or reduce their strength, or build up your block to absorb it, or take the hit this round so you can go after something else, etc. If you've ever played Into The Breach, it feels a lot like that, but with RPG battles instead of a Tactical map.
I've learned a lot from Jorbs - a twitch streamer. It's surprising how much statistics and planning can go into any given fight. It's possible to puzzle out how much of the fight will go ahead of time, with knowledge of one's deck and the enemies moves.
I mean, that is perhaps part of your problem. There aren't any cards I've not picked at least once and made good use of on ironclad even at A20.
The game really is more about building a deck based upon what comes up and constantly reassessing what is actually working in your current deck.
Choosing "good" cards based on their overall strength out of context is essentially a brute force approach to winning.
And there are plenty of discussions online for pretty much every card on how strong or weak people think the cards are overall (like is it worth picking it up if it's offered to you late in a run because the payoff might not be worth it, or if you see you're getting a specific boss that act, etc), and most of the cards have been buffed or nerfed multiple times since the game has come out, so clearly the developers have been convinced that some strong may end up stronger than others on average too (and are trying to keep things pretty even as much as possible, I assume).
With that said, as the Defect, Defragment and Capacitor are nearly always a no-brainer. Capacitor not so much in Act1, because nothing lasts long enough for it to pay off. And if you've got anything that adds orb slots, Consume becomes really powerful (even without, you can do 10 damage a turn from two orb slots instead of 9 from three, which isn't nothing).
Loop builds are very strong as well, but trickier to get right because you need to pay close attention to your front orb. Finally focus+frost can easily give you so much block most enemies can't cut through. (Watch out for Reptomancer, though, she doesn't respect anyone without DPS.)
But I was a little too weak on my defense that go (had some frost generation, but not enough), and I made a dumb mistake attacking the Masked Bandits instead of losing all my gold, who did 50 damage to me before I killed them, bringing me down to 18 health, then I couldn't get to a campfire until I fought 3 more regular enemies, and the next enemy brought me down 6 more, then the second enemy after that got me down the other 12. Oops.
Good luck with Watcher. The biggest advice here is: play it safe until you have multiple cards to get out of wrath. Watcher is super-powerful and _very_ easy to mess up.
I'm a bit tapped out at A8, but it's amazing how the base game goes from nailbitingly impossible to seeming pretty straightforward. (The mechanics contribute to this: the easier a battle is, the more upgrades you do and the more likely you are to grab an elite relic.)
For the ironclad, you might take a cleave, or a whirlwind, or a spot weakness, or an inflame in act 1. The first two give you AOE, and the last two will help scale damage if you find a limit later on.
StS lets you not take a card when you are offered one, and often this is the best play, particularly as you go later into the game and have a deck that is stacked with powerful cards.
Fundamentally having more cards is bad, because it increases variance in what you can draw. Obviously taking a good card can be worth that cost, but often players fall into the trap of assuming the best card of the options given is worth taking, when really the question should be "does this card beat the average card in my deck, or does it dilute the power of the deck", because you are reducing the chance to draw one of the other cards in your deck.
Obviously there are edge cases: sometimes something may reduce the power of your deck right now, but introduces the chance for later synergy, which may be worth the cost—especially early on, but in general it is worth considering not taking the card.
The ideal deck is always the minimum number of cards that allow you to pull off your win state, everything else is just stopping you getting there (this is also why cards that allow you to draw cheaply are good, and one of the reasons why removing cards from your deck is powerful).
If you're in Act 2 and headed for an elite, you have to think, "can my deck beat book of stabbing? gremlin leader? taskmaster?".
If right now your deck sucks against the book, and you're offered a disarm or caltrops, it might be worth picking it even if it's doesn't generally make your deck stronger. Cause otherwise you might get stabbed to death.
On the flip side, Demon Form is a very strong card, but it's practically a curse for most of Act 1, because it's too costly and slow. So sometimes you might skip even a strong card if it doesn't help you right now.
I'd say that's probably the most important "ah-ha" moment where my winrate really started to significantly improve. That and knowing when to min/max # of combats while pathfinding.
At high difficulty levels you need to pick a card (and possibly buy cards at shops) through most of Acts 1 and 2 because you won't be able to reach the boss without a bunch of damage commons.
No, not necessarily. But my brain wants to pick one anyway.
StS has a number of enemies that shuffle bad cards into your deck, so this dillution works both ways. On higher difficulties more of these cards get shuffled into your deck. Trying a "thin" strategy with no countermeasures in such a fight (high damage output to end the fight fast?) can get you railroaded. You also start out with 10 starters that you want to dillute because virtually any card is better than them. Cards with "draw" and "exhaust" written on them also let you workaround the problem of drawing starter or negative effect cards. Picking up one or two versatile 2-cost cards early (attack or block card) can give you a good way to use your energy even if you draw mostly starters or negative effect cards while avoiding excessive deck dillution later on.
StS does offer you worse cards at the beginning of the game, and limited ways to remove or upgrade these cards, so picking up too many cards can burden you later on.
Really to be good at StS deckbuilding mostly requires you to know which enemies will come up when and building your deck sufficiently to survive them without shooting yourself in the foot long term too much. Jorbs is usually focused on building his deck to beat the hardest fight in the game while absorbing the minimum deadweight to survive until that point. Watching a stream can give you a rough idea of what a good "pace" for adding new cards into your deck is.
Jorbs can reliably reach the heart with a much more challenging deck than you or I can. He's also playing a game mode that imposes challenges that don't exist for new players. Just shoving a lot of good cards in your deck might be pretty good advice for new players up until about ascension ten.
...Slay the Spire has nothing in common with roguelikes?
It's always intrigued me seeing other people pick up the game and master it much more quickly than I did. There's some people that get their A20 heart kill just 100 hours into the game.
I really enjoy the feeling of slowly but steadily gaining knowledge and intuition about the game - in the 500 hours of play there's been no shortage ah-ha moments throughout. Truly one of the best $/entertainment value games I've ever purchased.
You're possibly bringing baggage from other deck builders, mentioning combos and better cards is an example of this.
Generally you want to judge cards for what they do for you right now (in the next few fights) to maximise rewards and build long term value. Try not to build into "just in case" combos or synergies or you bleed HP before it shows up. The exception is if you are confident your deck can handle the hallway fights then you might take picks for the boss, and if you can handle that then you can start building for the future.
Apart from that, general pickup rules are: Act 1 is front-loaded damage, Act 2 is AOE damage with some damage scaling for the boss, Act 3 is scaling offense and defense (without damaging your other factors too much). You usually want to be plugging holes rather than building on your strengths but there are always exceptions.
One example: A single dark orb can be enough to kill Champ on Act 2 as defect. Any more is excessive.
I have fun though, so that’s nice.
The heart itself, well it's definitely challenging, but it only works for very specific builds. I went to some effort to beat it once on each character and basically have no intention of doing so again.
If you want a meme deck, A1 is the sweet-spot.
I don't know if the latest version changed this, but the green key was definitely also a sacrifice -- if you look at the map, paths that allow you to get the green key have one less fire.
Suggest you google how to unlock the heart and replay whatever needs to be done. It's really not intuitive if you already got all the characters and cards.
Similar to how every (properly designed) sudoku is solvable without guessing, the fun isn't in having solved it, its figuring out how to solve it.