I have played over 600 hours of STS, comprising 1500+ runs. That is not so long to some but it is enough for me to have opinions and I would like to share them thank you for reading.
Rares
Most of the cards added to a deck come from post-battle card reward screens where we can choose one card (or ‘skip’) from among three options. The way rares work in STS is that every time you see a card reward that is not a rare, your chance to see a rare card goes up by 1 percentage point.
You start the game with a rare chance of -2% and a forced normal encounter on floor 1. That means the first card reward screen buckets will have, from left to right, rare chances of -2%, -1%, and 0%. In other words, you can’t get a rare from floor 1 combat. Elite fights gives an increased chance in every slot to see a rare (I think +25pp).
After the Act 1 & 2 boss fights, you get to choose from 3 random rare cards.
Ranking System
Every card in STS has its moments. There are times I would pick commons over rares, times when I would pick “bad” cards over “good”. There are too many sources of variation to pick one card more than another in every situation, particularly as the difficulty (ascension) increases. I define 5 broad categories based on two axes: consistency and strength.
- Consistent and gamechangingly strong
- Consistently strong, or situationally game changing
- Consistently okay, or situationally strong
- Consistently weak, or situationally okay
- Consistently shit, or situationally weak
Most of my ranking is defined by how often I take them, and how good they feel when I have them. Order within tier does matter.
Tier 5 – The brutality tier
There are three problems with brutality. First, the effect is delayed. Not only do you only get the card at the start of the next turn, but since you had to waste a draw on drawing brutality in the first place, you really have to wait two turns for it to pay off.
Second, the payoff is really weak. There are way easier ways to draw cards. I would rather have pommel strike, a common, which draws cards this turn and comes with some damage. Late game there are just better ways to draw more cards.
Third, in the situation where we gain something from the self-damage (with rupture) there are faster, more controllable ways to abuse self damage and gain strength. +2 strength per turn, with a two card combo, is just not that strong.
Tier 4 – Sometimes I take them
Double Tap: I rarely feel like I want to take this card. Early on, you really don’t have the energy to play this. Doubling a 1-cost card just makes you feel like you should have drafted and drawn a 1-cost attack instead of the double tap. So really you need to double something 2+ to get value from this card. Bash doesn’t feel like “it” man. If you have an uppercut or a big searing blow, sure. You get a turn of big boom damage on a guy. But you have many turns where you need to defend too. Or set up scaling. So even when double tap is good, it’s not doing much more than helping you do a bit more damage when your draws align.
Berserk: You know I do like berserk sometimes. If I see this in early Act 1 against meh cards I often pick it. It should be noted that the tiermaker icon is old. On live patch Berserk says “Gain 2 (1) vulnerable”, so you only need to hold out a couple turns. There are a number of early fights where you can find a gap to fit this in (Nob t1, Lagavulin, Slime boss, Hexaghost). Those fights can be… not trivialized, but certainly made much easier since they are not designed to be fought with 4 energy.
Exhume: Exhume is a great card in several deck late-game which is total shit early game. You do not pick this in Act 1, maybe ever. Unless your deck is so strong you can afford to have a curse in your hand for 20 more floors. If you can get to late game, Exhuming strong exhaust cards like impervious, offering, limit break, or bringing back things you had to second-wind can be excellent. Exhume back huge skills that you Corruptioned away. Also you can exhume feed. With feel no pain and corruption you can exhume an exhume for infinite block. Expand your mind.
Tier 3 – Thicc Powers tier
Juggernaut: This one and Barricade are really close. Juggernaut can feel good when its going off with multiple exhaust synergies and copies of feel no pain. But the amount of block needed to make jugg feel that strong kind of feel like we would have won anyway with literally any damage cards. Still, it can be a good damage option for a deck that can block well, and found some early basic damage commons, but is struggling to put out consistent damage to Act 2/3 elites. The cost stops it from feeling really playable without at least one energy relic. Look to abuse self-forming clay.
Barricade: Look I know what you want. You want to make 50 excess block, play entrench, and start body slamming. I love barricade more than it deserves, but this won’t happen that often. Decks which consistenly block for enough to outscale and get to 999 block are winning anyway. The real use case for barricade is decks with huge, inconsistent block and plenty of energy. Several copies of impervious, and second wind maybe. Usually this is too slow to be useful. It costs way to much to play early, and you are pretty unlikely to generate enough block to really save anything between turns before Late A2, A3. Look for Snecko Eye to help make this playable.
Demon Form: Just play Spot Weakness. Okay, it has similar problems to brutality, where the benefit comes on a delay. You spend your entire turn playing demon form. Next turn your attacks do 3 extra damage per hit, but you would have probably done more than that if you spent the previous turn also doing damage instead of becoming horny. So really you need several turns for this to pay off. There are faster ways to scale strength (rupture, spot+limit break). It feels good if you can play it for free with snecko, mummified hand, etc. But usually its just too slow. Its benefit over Barricade and Jugg is that it can be a win condition, albeit a slow one, for a deck in Act 3 that hasn’t been lucky enough to see other options.
Fiend Fire: Fiend fire is a consistently decent damage card that can help deal with early elite fights. It’s not winning you the game, but it’s going to keep you healthy to gather more relics, more cards, and win later. Leave your anti-exhaust bias at the door now. It’s only going to get worse later on.
Tier 2 – Yes I pick bludgeon
Bludgeon: For me bludgeon does what fiend fire does but with fewer constraints. FF does more damage with 6+ cards in hand (remember FF doesn’t count itself), but fewer than that and its BLUDGEON TIME. Sometimes you need to bludgeon something and don’t want to exhaust everything in your hand. Sometimes you want to bludgeon more than once. Everything is coming up bludgeon.
More seriously, I would take bludgeon if I found it after an elite in Act 1 a lot of the time, even over most other rares. The Act 1 elites all ask that you solve some version of the problem: Can you do enough damage to a single target fast enough?1Yes even sentries. Bludgeon does damage fast enough. Solve Act 1 elites. Move on. Pick Bludgeon. Dig for “?” spaces in Act 2 to find Necronomicon.
Offering: Card draw and energy. Sometimes I think of offering like: would I turn off my starter relic this fight to draw 3 and gain 2 energy? Usually, yeah. Sometimes I think I wouldnt, but I am probably wrong those times. Those resources probably solve a fight 1 turn faster, and you often take more than 6 damage per turn in early acts. Sometimes we take offering later on because we have no card draw too. It doesn’t win your run for you. But it is always doing something you want to be doing. Unless you’re at 4hp.
Limit Break: Limit break with basically any other strength generator is your deck’s solution for damage. You can very often win almost all your fights with strikes, shitty damage commons, and that engine. There are enough strength cards that you can take this early with no activator, so long as you think you can win the next elite with a dead card in hand.
Immolate: Its AOE Bludgeon.
The damage you put out with immolate means you wont last long enough to care about having burns in your deck, usually. A very strong early damage card to take in Act 1, or even early-mid Act 2 if your deck hasn’t found AOE damage solutions for Act 2 elites yet. Fun fact, Hexaghost also buffs the burns you put into your own deck when he hits cycle 2. Enjoy that.
Impervious: Its block Bludgeon. Basically every deck wants to block sometimes. You can argue the decks that want to go all out offense would still take this, because they would rather have 1 mega block than dilute their deck with many block cards. The exhaust tag can be quite good too for a deck that sets up Dark Embrace or has Exhume.
Tier 1 – Snap Picks
Corruption: Don’t be afraid. Skills predominantly draw cards and block. Corruption in a deck that can’t leverage it very well lets that deck play nonstop offense every turn while drawing and blocking as much as it wants to. Corruption in a deck set up for it with Feel no Pain, Dark Embrace, can’t be stopped. A deck throwing that much power out each turn doesn’t need to worry about running out of cards. You will kill everything too fast.
In specific fights that will last a long time, just don’t play the Corruption. Or make a calculated choice to play it say, 2nd or 3rd cycle through the deck. Obvious synergy with cards like Sentinel, but it also with Barricade, since now none of your spammed block is wasted. Corruption is also one half of the strongest 2-piece combo in the game with Dead Branch.
Reaper: With any reasonable strength gain, reaper lets you kind of stop caring about block. A lot of fights in the game, even many elites, wont kill you 100-0. Instead, they will weaken you enough that the next fight kills you, or the one after that. Reaper means you can always be at 100%. Pair with Exhume or Dual Wield to really stop caring about block at all.
Feed: Feed doesn’t win your game for you. You can’t beat Time Eater by feeding it to death. But, if I saw Feed offered on floor two, against any card in the game, I would pick Feed. Feed changes the way you play fights, it changes the way you route the map more than most other cards. It’s totally doable to get 200+ hp using an early feed. Max hp means more health back on every rest, it means a bigger store of health to be able to restore using reaper. +Max hp also provides current hp, meaning feed heals you too. A health pool that large gives you the freedom to choose the lower-variance, slower payoff path. You don’t need to gamble, you know you’ll live long enough to draw your win condition. In a game all about the intersection of many kinds of randomness, Feed lets you slow down. It takes away some of the game’s difficulty by reducing moments when the player is forced to make suboptimal plays to account for worst-case draw scenarios that could kill them next floor. Also you can feed on the donut boss.
Notes
- 1Yes even sentries.