Isaac
MORE CONTROL
Tarnished Isaac, just like his Tainted counterpart, has only 8 item slots to use. In exchange for his cycling item pedestals, Tarnished Isaac starts with a Blighted Die, which allows him to turn one of his items into a choice of two of the same quality and item pool after 6 charges or via touching an item pedestal not spawned by it. The Blighted Die can be used when it's not fully charged, but it only spawns 1 item pedestal and removes a red heart container (or deals 2 hearts of damage to you if you don't have any). Tarnished Isaac is unlocked by beating Delirium as Tainted Isaac.
His Birthright gives him a chance that the Blighted Die spawns an item that has a quality of 1 higher than the item rerolled.
- Body Horror: While Tainted Isaac looked somewhat beaten up, Tarnished Isaac is outright mutilated. The same goes for his pocket item, Blighted Die, which is a D6 made out of rotten flesh.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Making the best use out of the Blighted Die requires a good understanding of the item pools and qualities. With that knowledge in hand, a player can take advantage of the system in order to fish for whatever item they please.
- Discard and Draw: Compared to Tainted Isaac, Tarnished Isaac doesn't have the gimmick of pedestals switching between two items. In exchange, he gets the Blighted Die, allowing him to "reroll" the items in his inventory.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: Is only limited to 8 items, just like Tainted Isaac. Unlike his counterpart, Tarnished Isaac lacks the extra choices and needs to strategically reroll useless items rather than just swapping them out.
- Obvious Rule Patch: Originally it was possible to get unlimited free healing as Tarnished Isaac by emptying an item pool, causing you to spawn Breakfast with each reroll. To combat this, the team added an item called Blight, which does nothing except spawn in place of Breakfast when you reroll an HP up into an empty pool with Blighted Die.
- Power at a Price:
- In a different way than Tainted Isaac. While still limited to 8 items, Tarnished Isaac has the Blighted Die, allowing him to replace items in his inventory with 1 of 2 items of a similar rarity.
- Speaking of the Blighted Die, after every use, it turns into the Broken Die until fully charged. While you can still use the Broken Die, you only get a single option and removes a red heart container.
Magdalene
UNCONTAINABLE LOVE
Tarnished Magdalene starts with 3 red hearts and Cardiac Arrest, an item that fires a powerful projectile that causes enemies hit to drop 5 temporary half red hearts but causes her to bleed from her red hearts. Picking up red hearts while your health bar is full grants you a temporary damage boost. She's unlocked by using Tainted Magdalene's Yum Heart in the first floor Sacrifice Room to transform it into the Bleeding Heart, then beating It Lives.
Her Birthright effect causes Cardiac Arrest to sometimes create half soul hearts and apply a bleed Damage Over Time to enemies.
- Breaking Old Trends: As of Wave 4, she is the first iteration of Magdalene to only have 3 red heart containers instead of 4.
- Discard and Draw: In comparison to Tainted Magdalene, she loses the Yum Heart, double HP recovery, and Killer Bear Hugs in exchange for Cardiac Arrest, a powerful item that causes enemies it damages to drop tons of hearts.
- Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Prior to Wave 4, she constantly bled out of all of her red hearts. To make matters worse, unlike Tainted Magdalene, getting hurt by enemies will cause you to lose Devil/Angel Deal chances.
- Slasher Smile: Sprouts one of these in her pre-floor/boss image, characterizing her as being more than happy to slaughter all in her path.
- Torso with a View: If you look closely at her ingame sprites, she appears to have a hole in her chest, complete with an exposed ribcage.
- Traumatic Haircut: Similar to Tainted Magdalene, but even worse. Also, her hair is covered in blood.
- Visual Pun: Cardiac Arrest, her pocket item, has her pull out a heart to throw at enemies. In other words, it's a literal heart attack.
Cain
Cain with a Cool Mask covering half of his face instead of an Eyepatch of Power, he can't fire tears at all. Instead, he swings and throws a bag filled with rocks as a weapon, which can be retrieved using his active item. When picking up an item, he can choose to put it in his bag instead. After you put 2 items in a bag, he gains a new one, gaining effects based on what was put in it. He's unlocked by obtaining the Sharp Rock as Tainted Cain, gathering 70 Wheat from enemies, and killing the secret boss Abel.
His Birthright effect makes it so he has to put 3 items in his bag to make a new one, allowing you to create more powerful bags.
- Cool Mask: Instead of an Eyepatch of Power, Tarnished Cain has a bloody, silver mask covering half his face.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Tarnish Cain suffers from the problem that other charged attacks do (especially Monstro's Lung), in that he has no way to deal sustained damage or easily deal with swarms of low-health enemies. Missing throws is also horrible, especially early when you don't have many bags ready to go. He can deal melee damage around him by swinging the bag without throwing it, but the range is low and the damage is very poor. The payoff is getting some very deadly burst damage with thrown sacks, as well as being able to craft some truly overpowered sacks with the right items.
- Gameplay Randomization: When Cain walks into a room, the order that his bags are thrown in is randomized. This is an Obvious Rule Patch for his launch version, which had the bags always appear in the order they were crafted. This meant that most rooms would be cleared before you ever got to see some of the later bags.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: Putting a familiar that contributes to the Conjoined transformation into a Throwing Bag turns it into a Bloody Bag, which causes it to create bloody creep on contact.
- Improbable Weapon User: Uses a bag full of rocks (and other things) as his weapon of choice.
- Pinball Projectile: Whipping bags into a wall will cause them to bounce off, and with enough range they can easily ping-pong across walls until they hit something.
- Why Am I Ticking?: Tarnished Cain can scoop up Troll Bombs in his sack, indicated with a special audio cue and small bomb icon. If he doesn't quickly throw the sack away, it'll blow up in his hand. This can be used to chuck bombs at enemies from range, but you'll need a good reaction time to pull it off.
Judas
Judas having been corrupted even further by darkness. He starts with a weaker damage multiplier than any other character, but makes up for this by controlling 3 shadowy clones of himself, which get stronger when they're further away from him. He pays for Devil Deals by gaining broken hearts instead of paying heart containers, gaining more shadow clones when surpassing certain thresholds, while Angel Deals remove them. He also takes 1 full heart every time he takes a hit regardless of chapter, and starts with Duality and Descend, a pocket item that allows him to trade places with the shadow that's farthest away from him, with the clones dealing damage when intersecting. Tarnished Judas is unlocked by taking an item from an Angel Room and a Devil Room in the same run as Tainted Judas.
His Birthright effect gives him 1 extra shadow, gaining 1 more every transformation.
- Breaking Old Trends: Tarnished Judas is the first incarnation of Dark Judas that can actually use red hearts.
- Casting a Shadow: Passively does this, and can actively do so with Descent.
- Glass Cannon: Tarnished Judas is very fragile; while not to the same extent as The Lost, Tarnished Judas takes full heart damage from all sources from the very start of the game. As he gains more corruption, both the "glass" and "cannon" parts are emphasized; sure, Judas gains more shadow clones and thus more firepower, but the additional broken hearts limit his maximum possible HP. Coupled with the doubled damage received, and Judas better make sure that he kills everything before they kill him.
- Me's a Crowd: Tarnished Judas's main ability; he has several shadow clones that mirror his attacks. As he gets more corrupted, he gains more clones and thus more power.
- Power at a Price: The more broken hearts you have, the more shadows you have, but the less damage you can take before dying. You at the very least have the option of using Angel Rooms to regain health, however.
- Virtue Is Weakness: Accepting items from Angel Deals will heal Tarnished Judas's broken hearts, but this also comes at the cost of potentially removing some of his shadow clones and thus reducing his firepower.
Samson
A version of Samson even more focused on his rage and super strength. Instead of firing tears, he unleashes a flurry of melee-ranged punches, and also charges a meter that causes him to slam the ground, dealing damage to nearby enemies and raining debris from the ceiling. Taking and dealing damage also charges up his Slaughter Bar, which temporarily increases his damage and tears. If he dies with at least one tier of the Slaughter Bar filled, he instead enters Immortal Rage, making him unkillable and granting a massive Tears boost, but immediately killing him upon expiring if he didn't deal enough damage. He begins with Killer Instinct in his pocket item slot, which causes Samson to charge forward, making him invincible and damaging enemies he charges through. However, if used while he's holding debris, he smashes it over his head to immediately enter Immortal Rage. He's unlocked by obtaining Delilah's Razor as Tainted Samson and completing three Challenge Rooms, then entering a special room where you must kill eight waves of enemies.
His Birthright effect increases the Slaughter Bar's multiplier to x3, causes the Slaughter Bar to fill to half when Immortal Rage ends, and allows Tarnished Samson to build a sixth tier of the Slaughter Bar while raging.
- Barbarian Long Hair: He's got one very messy hairdo that's pretty long, and it even flows up when Immortal Rage is active.
- The Berserker: Even moreso than Tainted Samson, if you can believe it.
- Determinator: While Immortal Rage is active, Tarnished Samson is, well, immortal. If he's able to deal enough damage while raging, he'll continue to live even after the rage ends.
- Facial Horror: Those Philistines clearly showed no mercy. He's left with his Mouth Stitched Shut and his eyes ripped from his head.
- Good Old Fisticuffs: Tarnished Samson's default attack is a punch rather than tears.
- Ground Punch: Holding down the fire key charges a secondary attack, where Tarnished Samson slams the ground with his fists to deal damage to all enemies around him and causing debris to drop from the ceiling.
Eden
An even more glitched-out and corrupted version of Eden. They always start with base Isaac stats, a random item, the D8, and their pocket active, Debug. Not that it matters, since every time you enter a new room, all of your stats and items, barring the latter two, are randomized. What's more, getting hit by enemies can transform them into Glitched Gapers, which can spread across enemies until it gets out of control. Their pocket active, Debug, allows you to invoke the rerolling effect at the cost of two charges, and when fully charged, allows you to "debug" an item you pick up to lock it to your character and keep it from rerolling. They're unlocked by beating the first floor boss in under a minute as Tainted Eden, then carrying the Glitched Photo the the Strange Door in the Depths.
Their Birthright effect permanently charms the Glitched Gapers they spawn, and allows their tears to have a chance of causing the transformation.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Due to the extreme randomness of the character, Tarnished Eden has several features to help mitigate those effects, and allow some semblance of control over the chaos:
- Using a fully charged Debug when picking up an item, whether active or passive, gives the item immunity to the reroll effect, allowing Eden to keep practical or powerful items for the rest of the run.
- Similarly, Debug allows you to initiate the rerolling effect at the cost of two charges, allowing you to fish for a better loadout when things are tough.
- Items will prioritize being rerolled into others of the same quality, so finding a high quality item is not a lost cause. They also will not reroll into useless items, such as those that simply give you items.
- What's more, they will also reroll based on the item pools you find them in, meaning, as an example, if you have several treasure room items and one planetarium item, then there is a chance those items can also reroll into planetarium ones.
- Facial Horror: By default, their face is an open gape with blank eyes; evidently, being a Glitch Entity is slowly mutilating him overtime.
- Glitch Entity: Tarnished Eden plays this up even further than Tainted Eden. Their unlock quest is very clearly about breaking the game and causing it to go haywire. Tarnished Eden themselves is extremely unstable, and even interacting with enemies has a chance of causing them to transform into a Glitched Gaper, further corrupting things. Their "voice" is also little more than garbled nightmares, with Isaac's damage and death grunts being heavily glitched to the point of being barely recognizable.
- Good Counterpart: Tarnished Eden draws even more similarities to Delirium than Tainted Eden does, with a white, melting appearance, constant changing, and even warping the background with static.
- Nerf: Eden used to start with a D8 active item that's immune to rerolling, but has since been replace with a one-time D8 pocket item, only allowing rerolling of stats once.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Unlike Tainted Eden, Tarnished Eden displays this constantly; their default appearance is incredibly corrupted, and use of Debug is heralded by the background freaking out and switching to something else.
The Lost
The Lost, now covered in soot and dust from his time in the attic. Tarnished Lost has all the same upsides and downsides as The Lost but can only encounter items with "offensive" or "nolostbr" tags, the latter of which contains items that are completely worthless for him. Tarnished Lost starts with Divine Remnants as his pocket item, which provides a Holy Mantle shield while fully charged but loses all charge upon taking damage. When used in a room with items, the items are rerolled and are not taken from the "nolostbr" pool. When used in a room without items, rerolls all hearts into better pickups and upgrades the Divine Remnants, making its next reroll higher quality but increasing the charge time. It also upgrades when blocking damage. Finally, Tarnished Lost gains extra charges when clearing certain rooms, like bosses and challenge rooms. He is unlocked by leaving Tainted Lost's Holy Card in the starting room and clearing the first floor boss, then collecting 6 Mantle Shards and entering a Bedroom.
His Birthright effect causes champions and bosses to drop Mantle Shards, which will charge Divine Remnants when picked up.
- Mix-and-Match Weapon: Divine Remnants is essentially Tarnished Lost's version of the Holy Mantle, the Eternal D6, and (once upgraded) the Sacred Orb all rolled into one item.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: As per standard with The Lost, Tarnished Lost will die upon taking any real damage, and relies on a shield to block hits.
- Power-Up Letdown: By design, Tarnished Lost will encounter lots of totally useless items like flight and HP ups, forcing you to use Divine Remnants offensively to actually get worthwhile stuff.
- Single-Use Shield: Divine Remnants can be used to block one hit similar to a Holy Card, but you'll also need to conserve the charge to upgrade useless items.
Keeper
The Keeper has fully embraced his transformation, now transformed into a gold statue akin to Ultra Greedier. He's now even more reliant on money compared to his counterparts, as it now equals the amount of health he has. Every hit removes up to twenty coins, and when he gets hit at zero coins, he dies. Not helping matters is that he can no longer pick up any items or collectibles, as they now transform into money when he touches them. Shop items and devil deals are the only items he can grab. His pocket active, Turnover, mitigates that limitation by allowing the Keeper to create his own shops in any room — at a price, of course. He's unlocked by obtaining the Keeper's Association Entrance Keycard from the secret room in the first floor of Greedier Mode as Tainted Keeper and keeping it renewed until you beat Ultra Greedier.
His Birthright effect adds a special Golden Restock Machine to every fully upgraded shop that requires 5 coins to use but is guaranteed to work on every use.
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Even more than Tainted Keeper. The only way for Tarnished Keeper to get anything, items and pickups alike, is to buy it. Everything else just turns into more money for the shops. And since money also equals your health, you are constantly and literally gambling your life away in order to pay the price.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Inflicting self-damage in most ways (certain active items, devil beggars, sacrifice rooms, etc.) only makes you lose five coinsnote instead of the normal twenty.
- Cast from Money: Activating Turnover costs some of Keeper's money in order to turn the room into a shop or upgrade an existing shop. More valuable rooms like Secret Rooms and Curse Rooms require more money to start and multiple activations before items even start showing up. Due to the way Tarnished Keeper's health works, this also counts as Cast from Hit Points.
- Cursed with Awesome: Explicitly stated to suffer from "Midas' Curse", causing him to turn everything he touches that he hasn't paid for into gold. However, this gold can be used to buy things from his Turnover shops.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Just like Ultra Greedier, he explodes into golden dust when he dies.
- Developer's Foresight: His unique mechanics required that some items needed to be reworked:
- There's Options and More Options, which add an additional item choice to the boss room or treasure room respectively, instead reduce the amount of times you need to pay to fully upgrade a shop in that room down to three easy payments of five coins.
- Deep Pockets lets you store up to 999 coins as usual, but to prevent it from transforming Tarnished Keeper into a Stone Wall, getting hit with over 100 coins in pocket will make you drop 60% of your coins!
- Greed's Gullet normally grants more health based on your coin amount. Since Tarnished Keeper already has that mechanic, the item instead grants a unique coin mantle for every 25 coins picked up. Similarly, grabbing eternal hearts grants the same effect, along with a few flies.
- The Store Credit trinket simply grants a free use of Turnover, equaling to one free shop upgrade, rather than making one item free.
- Using Sumptorium sacrifices ten coins to make a golden clottie.
- The Wafer and Cancernote halve the amount of coins you lose when hit.
- Difficult, but Awesome: In many ways, playing Tarnished Keeper is an uphill battle; since his coin total is also his health, taking a hit means losing the same coins needed for gaining items that any other character can get more straightforward, and spending money for the sake of upgrades and collectibles means Keeper's capable of being incredibly frail. But with the right amount of money on hand from average item/pickup spawns and enemies, and how efficiently he earns/spends that money, means he has full control over the items/pickups for each type of room, even capable of spawning more than one item per room with the right profits.
- The Magic Touch:
- Any pickups or item pedestals he touches converts into a bunch of coins, with the amount given based on their average shop price/rarity/quality.
- Any enemy that damages him will temporarily turn to gold like they're hit with the Midas Touch item.
- Interacting with any of the beggars will have them turn to solid gold, after which they can be bombed for more coins.
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Tarnished Keeper expands upon his Tainted counterpart's already unusual mechanics.
- Like his Tainted counterpart, enemies spawn coins upon death, which can come in handy for regaining health. Problem is, money is his health. Every 20 coins is equal to one coin heart, and getting hit causes him to lose those 20 coins. He does drop half of them to partially recoup the loss if he's fast enough to grab them.
- Similar to Tainted Cain, Tarnished Keeper can't grab items, as they are automatically converted to coins. The same applies for collectibles. He's completely reliant on shops and devil deals for getting anything that isn't money.
- His pocket active, Turnover, allows him to pay five coins to create a shop in the room, with merchandise based on the current room's item pool. He can pay more to further upgrade them, expanding the catalogue.
- Midas Touch: Fittingly, Tarnished Keeper's ability to turn stuff into coins/gold prevents him from having an easy time:
- The inability to grab all pickups and items normally prevents him from grabbing a particularly good item or trinket that spawns; he has to buy it all in a shop, devil deal, or via Turnover.
- Because Beggars turn to gold immediately upon contact, they're rendered completely moot in regards to their normal pickups/item pool drops.
- Serial Escalation: Tarnished Keeper escalates the transformation of the Keepers. He now has a pentashot tear attack, his money is his health instead of being used as health, and he's completely incapable of grabbing anything, now required to pay for it all. His entirely golden body and death animation are both reminiscent of Ultra Greedier.
- Taken for Granite: Any beggar that Tarnished Keeper touches instantly turns into a gold statue you can bomb for coins.
