Quote Originally Posted by Silfir View Post
Slay the Spire is excellent.

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From what I can tell, the key is to build your character's game plan in such a way that they can handle drawing a certain percentage of suboptimal cards, such as by using Discard synergies, which are accessible to the Silent for example. I haven't yet figured out what kind of deckbuilding plan would enable the Ironclad or Defect to reliably beat the true final boss. All the characters seem to be highly reliant on finding powerful relics that happen to synergize with the deck in order to accomplish that.
For the Ironclad, you have to use Exhaust synergies to achieve the same effect. They're slower to get done than the Discard/draw options that the Silent has (unless you take a card like Sever Soul or Fiend Fire that just nukes just about everything in your hand), but they're also permanent for the rest of your fight. Exhaust cards make each subsequent draw more powerful. There's also cards like Warcry and Headbutt that allow you to control (to a limited degree) your next turn's draw.

You could also cheese everything in the game with Corruption+Dead Branch, but that's only fun if you're messing around.

I will agree that the default game mode gets a bit boring after a while, but the game is ultimately balanced around it. Picking the one option in Custom that allows you to draft cards before you start makes Act I really easy - and can even trivialize the entire game if you're lucky. I wish they'd give you the option of themed starter decks that are slightly more useful than the default Strike/Defend decks, without being as broken as drafting 15 cards.

I can't really comment on beating the true final boss with Defect, since I haven't done it, but I imagine using Recursion with Dark Orbs and turtling with Frost Orbs is your best bet.