Slay the Spire Tips – How to Survive the Brutal Bastard of a Game

It's not an easy adventure, take these tips to help.
Slay the Spire tips

Last week, I wrote about my recent obsession with Slay the Spire, but it wasn’t until recently that I’ve been able to beat the final boss.  As a seasoned veteran of this brutal bastard of a game, I thought I’d take some time this week to pay it forward and offer up some handy tips for survival. Slay the Spire tips

Deck Size Matters

Any card game aficionado worth his salt would know that even when given loose limits (or no limits at all), it’s important to keep one’s deck as slim and efficient as possible. You want your deck to have a goal or theme and having too many cards (especially cards that don’t fit within said goal or theme) make the odds of you putting together the right puzzle pieces at the right time less likely. This is all doubly true in Slay the Spire. In a game like Hearthstone, once you’ve drawn your entire deck, you start taking fatigue damage and you’ll eventually die. In Slay the Spire, your cards cycle back out from the discard pile and back into the draw pile. Keeping your deck slim, even as slim as say 15-20 cards, is ideal.

I’ve won games with way more cards in my deck, but now that I’m trying to improve my play, this is something I pay close attention to. The game doesn’t actually force you to select a card when given the option, so feel free to skip card choices that don’t suit your goals.

Be Selective in General

Piggybacking off of the last point, skipping “rewards” applies to anything in Slay the Spire. You don’t always need to pick something up at the merchant, select a card after battle, or even pick up that new relic that dropped from the elite or boss you just killed. If you’re given a choice of something you find detrimental, just skip it.

Curses Are Your Friend

Seriously. Curses are how I finally beat the game. My first win went from a run I was this close to abandoning to being the most ridiculous run I’ve ever had. My deck had become so crowded with Curse cards through a series of unfortunate events that I figured the game was lost. Then I started picking up relics that benefited from having Curses in my deck and all of a sudden I became an unstoppable powerhouse.

There are relics that will increase your max HP for each relic you have and relics that will give you strength for each Curse, for example. I had both of these and enough Curses that my frail Huntress was now at 110HP (they start with 70, a full 10 below the Ironclad) and beginning combat with something like 10 strength. Combined with a relic that applied vulnerability to all enemies at the start of battle, a relic that gave me three 0 cost Shivs at the start of each battle, and two 0 cost Backstabs (Innate cards you always draw on turn 1), I basically wiped everything out on the first turn. I hadn’t even realized that I’d killed the final boss until after it was over. I was just deleting dudes left and right.

If you run into an event where you can trade for something openly beneficial in exchange for a Curse, take the Curse. You can either get rid of it later or you’ll find something that will make it beneficial for you to have. If you’re playing a Huntress, there are also plenty of Discard options you can pick up, making it easier to toss Curses out of your hand before they hit you with a detrimental effect.

Plan Your Route

Finally, plan your route. I like to make sure there are plenty of event spaces in a route if possible, but I also want to fight some elites so I can pick up relics along the way. Merchants are more of a crapshoot. You’ll either not have enough gold to spend on the good things they sometimes have or they just won’t have anything you want. I like to prioritize campfires over merchants if I can. Resting in between elite fights is important for keeping yourself topped off. You can also use campfires to upgrade cards or do other beneficial things if you find the right relics or events.

Got any of your own tips for Slay the Spire? Share ‘em with us in the comments below!

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