Deckbuilding Roguelike Games

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Might have played once or twice.

It has replaced Slay the Spire in what I'm obsessed with because it's so goddamn much fun. It really condenses the Slay the Spire experience, and the 5 random starting cards improves from the garbage of StS' first half of Act 1 (sorry it's almost always extremely similar).

I'm honestly trying to hold off on playing it too often because of upcoming expansion, but still beat a few Cov25s now and then. The balance is pretty tight, minus Incant.

Happily looking around for more, but others I've tried like Neoverse just aren't as interesting.

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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

Huh, odd, I'd consider the 1 mana ascend one of the strongest starting cards. It's got truly immense utility. Not only can you do tricks like ascend back line buffers to empty floors to kill them, or ascend tanks to the rear of the floor above to render them meaningless, you can ascend your own troops which lets you break floor limits and build an uber floor. Probably the strongest starting strategy in Monster Train.



Frost 6 card is like Frozen Lance. Your bonus is you're starting in Stygian, those are the penalty for getting to play with Stygian. Although it is better than Frozen Lance, a bit (god I hate Stygian starting cards).

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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.

Take less cards! Monster Train is definitely a game of "don't take too many cards." Someone recently did a bunch of Asc 25 runs where they took no cards, and they won most of them. Most card takes are kind of wrong. Extra cards keeps you away from your strongest cards, and in Monster Train those strongest cards have been enhanced by upgrades making them just manifestly better than whatever you're adding. So anything you add shouldn't be similar to a card already in your deck (with a few exceptions). They need to bring something new.

Ascend card is also a great target for holdover or permafrost to make sure you always have it when you want it. Yes, Holdover. Not even joking on that.

Asc 24 means you've basically done everything you need to to master the game, it's just a matter of unlocking different strategies. I'm still finding new ones! There's ALMOST no starting card that I consider completely worthless (Granted Purifying Cleanse does exist)