Deckbuilding Roguelike Games

[Isis]

The poor balance on what parts of slay the spire actually have a shot at killing your run make it not feel that much like a roguelike to me starting with like your sixth play where you're competent. Like Act 2 is a roguelike and none of the rest are. You get to have a lot of fun optimizing your deck further in Act 3 and doing gratuitous infinites but it's not particularly roguelike when the permadeath risk goes away.

And act 1 doesn't really have that rogueish feel of like, "I got a good item, but will I die and have to start over and not really get to use it?", it's more like, "I got a good item, I can't lose in Act I anymore, that's pretty much the bar"

There are increasing difficulties you get to set to but that doesn't redistribute the risk among the acts.

that said I'm afraid to look and see how many hours I put into the game

[Isis]

I'm trying to clear #24 right now

I like playing full random, it's very "roguelike". I also like trying not to reroll, but a couple of the starting common cards seem frustratingly bad, like the one Mana ascend. This game is actively patched, so am I missing something?
All the core/starting deck cards are fine except the frost6 and discard one. It seems soooo bad. I hate it so much. Cant remember last time I beat the second boss starting with those

[Isis]

It's true that the deal six is almost as bad as the frost six and stygian is strong.

I haven't really tried building uberfloors with ascend, only with descend, maybe I will mess with that more. I've done the other basic uses but those seem roughly cancelled out by how often you draw it and there's just one of those uses on the board.

The card probably works better if my strategies are greedier or less greedy, I'm not sure which.

[Isis]

Yeah I take pretty few cards. You'd think the two untrashable curses would skew things more towards taking cards but it doesn't really.

I think a lot of my losses are from not paying attention to how the enemies vary and how to prioritize playing out the match as opposed to the deck building part

I killed my own revenge unit shooting it with fireballs because I wasn't paying attention... Lol

[Isis]

Monster train expansion has seemed cool so far. I despised StS's expansion faction so the new faction exceed my low expectations, it feels pretty fun.
The new stretch goal system is a little confusing and hard to navigate. How much stronger will my enemies get? In a way that would be kind of tedious to track if I researched and memorized the mechanics, setting aside that I don't know the exact mechanics anyhow like whether going over 100 matters.

It skews the game towards certain strategies, probably. Strategies that could just barely beat seraph were interesting. They probably ehjff against this new megaboss. But, it seems hard to expand a game like this, so this is probably pretty good overall.

The top floor debuff nerf is like more impactful to the core game than all the fancy expansion comment almost, so that's kind of crazy. I don't know if my playstyles is weird but usually I hate a lot of excess mama by lategame or midgame so the top floor debuff is just free
Setting aside how morsels and wicks that attack are stronger with it and it is just a gentler debuff by virtue of being delayed one turn.