Game Breaker / Inscryption

That's gonna leave a mark.

Inscryption is a game all about finding powerful synergies between cards and their abilities. There's no shortage of strong cards and combinations to break the game with.

Act 1

Mechanics

• With good RNG, the Death Cards you make after losing a run can become stupidly busted. You can get the strength and health of a Grizzly (4/6) or an Urayuli (7/7), the instant death effect of an Adder, the Strike effects of a Mantis or Mantis God, or the Airborne sigil. Things get even more insane if your cards have sacrifice and bonfire bonuses on them: how does a zero cost, Airborne 21/21 (or more) card with Trifurcated Strike sound? That said, do beware that player cards can be used against you in the second round of the Act 1 final boss battle.
• The Mycologists are almost an intentional example, combining two duplicate cards, their sigils, and their stats. This is deck thinning and stat upgrading done in the same swoop, with absolutely no downside. This makes for one of the most busted mechanics in a deckbuilder, to the point that their experiments can carry you through the entire game.
• Campfires can upgrade a creature's attack by one or its health by two, but later in the story they can be used multiple times at the risk of losing the creature to the hungry villagers. This can be a huge benefit, and the risk of losing your creature can be eliminated if the player feeds the villagers a poisonous creature like an Adder or Ring Worm first. Good targets for these benefits include:
  • Mantis Gods with just two extra points of attack are capable of one-shotting an opponent if unopposed or given Flying.
  • Vulnerable creatures like Wolf Cubs or the Strange Larva are more likely to survive and trigger their effects if given additional health.
  • Giving extra health to a Beehive turns it into a Stone Wall that generates free units every time it is attacked.
  • If you don't have better targets, just put your most useless card on the fire twice while the villagers are alive and it'll either be destroyed, boosting your deck's consistency, or gain enough stats to become moderately useful.
• Totems grant a special ability to an entire class of creature for free if you can get the right head and base. This includes powerful abilities like Airborne, Fecundity or Unkillable.
  • The squirrel totem head in general is a game breaker, especially since once it's unlocked you always start out with it. Squirrels are your free cost 0/1 units meant to be sacrificed to afford bigger and more powerful cards and have a separate draw pile meaning they're always available, so attaching a sigil to them offers guaranteed benefits that can quickly stack up.
    • Any sigil which improves their blood sacrifice yield will break the game wide open by reducing or completely eliminating the need to draw additional squirrels for sacrifices.
    • Fecundity means that you should never need to draw more than one squirrel per battle, as playing it will give you give you a free copy in your hand, which you can play and sacrifice again and again ad infinitum.
    • Undying returns squirrels to your hand after each death/sacrifice, and while it does require you to draw more than one for cards with higher summoning costs, it also means that you can use them as expendable meat shields to block empty slots.
    • Many Lives has a similar effect to the latter by essentially turning squirrels into cheaper cats.
    • Worthy Sacrifice allows you to summon more powerful cards like Great Whites and Grizzlies on round one and makes it possible to support a frontline comprised entirely of 1+ blood monsters.
    • Similarly, any sigil which attaches additional benefits to playing squirrels can count as this. Hoarder is immensely powerful, as it grants you a free card of your choice when playing a squirrel, all but eliminating the need to draw from your regular card pile and allowing you to draw your strongest cards from the get-go.
    • Trinket Bearer gives an item every time you play a squirrel, making it hideously strong as it essentially means you can spam items every battle.
    • Ant Spawner will you give you an ant card each time you play a squirrel, which almost completely obviates the need for deck building: because ant attack power is dependent on the number of ants on the board, it potentially allows you to create an army of 4/2 cards out of nothing but squirrel draws.
    • The squirrel totem is so powerful it was outright removed in Kaycee's Mod, not being available even as a random drop.
  • Insect totems aren't too far behind either, especially if the player collects a Beehive. Give it something like a Fecundity sigil, and you end up with a endless army of bees that you can use for whatever scenario comes up, effectively trivializing the blood-cost mechanic.
• In Kaycee's Mod, Goobert appears as a tile on the map, landing on which allows you to create a copy of a card of your choice from your deck. The copy isn't always perfect, sometimes with slightly different stats or with a sigil replaced with a different one, but mistakes aren't super common and sometimes go in your favour (e.g. raising the attack of a creature) and the value of getting another copy of your favourite card and becoming that much more likely to draw it can't be overstated. Alternatively, this copy can become an entry fee for a Mycologists surgery, which as stated above, can allow for insanely powerful cards.

Individual Powerful Cards

• The Mantis and Mantis God cards are among the strongest cards in the game. They cost only one blood to play and come with the Bifurcating/Trifurcating Strike sigil, allowing them to strike two/three slots with each attack. While good enough on their own, combining them with a Campfire attack bonus or two will allow you to clear the board of opposing cards or end battles on turn one.
  • The Mantis God Starter Deck in Kaycee's Mod allows you to start with a Mantis God and two poisonous Ring Worms you can use to kill the Campfire villagers, making it trivially easy to get a boosted Mantis God with 3+ attack within the first area.
• The Ouroboros card comes with the Undying sigil and has the unique ability of increasing its power and health each time it dies and returns to your hand. While having an undying card that increases in power as it dies (or you sacrifice it) already sounds quite powerful, its true game-breaking potential comes from the fact that this increase in strength and health is permanent, which carries over into subsequent playthroughs and acts. In Act II, there is an even more efficient cycle of destroying and re-summoning Ouroboros such that it is possible to get it to ridiculously high values of strength and health — think hundreds of damage and health, in a game where four is considered high — effectively trivializing any card battle while generating a huge amount of teeth/foils/robobucks through overkill damage. Oh, and this card is obtainable in every act of the game, if you solve the right puzzles. However, its stat increases are not carried over in Kaycee's Mod playthroughs.
  • You don't even need to wait until Act II. If you're fortunate enough to get your hands on a Black Goat with Fecundity or Undying, have fun sacrifice-looping it and Ouroboros until the latter's stats reach absolutely stupid levels.
• Warrens give you a free Rabbit card when summoned. This is already good as you now have two cards to sacrifice or use to block attacks. Where it becomes really broken though is that the rabbit generated also has any bonus sigils the Warren has. An especially useful addition is Hoarder (search any card from your deck on summon), which will give you two searches for whatever you want as well as two bodies on the board to summon them with.
  • Bee Hives work similarly, summoning a Bee each time the Hive takes damage. The Bees are 0 cost 1/1 Flying cards in addition to having the Hive's extra sigils. With either enough health boosts to the hive to ensure it can survive multiple hits or the Undying sigil to resummon it, the Hive can generate a shocking number of Bees.
  • A lesser example of the same trait is Skinks, which change position leaving a Tail card behind when attacked. The tail has the same sigils, making Armored, Undying, or Fecundity useful additions. While the tail starts with 0 attack, it inherits any attack boosts from campfires as well.
• Corpse Maggots is a common card that summons itself for free when a creature on your field is destroyed (including by the Prospector's Pick, which normally leaves you without any creatures on your field). Sacrificing them to move their sigil onto a high-cost creature like a Grizzly or Urayuli allows you to get a game-ender onto the field for free. If this is then paired with an Undying sigil, when the card dies it will actually summon itself.
• Child 13 initially seems like a rarer cat (remaining on the field after being sacrificed) but every other sacrifice has it assume a different form with two attack and Airborne (effectively a one-cost raven with less health).

Act 2

• Tomb Robber is an astoundingly broken card, due to its ability to convert all your current Bones into no-cost 1/1 Skeletons. This essentially turns it into an infinite sacrifice machine, since sacrificing Skeletons turns them into Bones, which can then be turned back into Skeletons—even if Skeletons die after attacking, Tomb Robber can just revive them again. Among other things, this also provides you with a possible way to loop the effect of Ouroboros - with nothing more than a couple of fodder cards from which to extract bones (unless you have the Bone Lord's femur, at which point even this is no longer necessary), you can endlessly summon, then destroy Ouroboros to jack its stats up to insane heights. What's more, when combined with Necromancer, which causes every killed card to be treated as killed twice, you can destroy a Skeleton and generate two bones out of it, converting it into two Skeletons, and repeat—creating an infinite supply of Bones, which can be used to fuel either incredibly strong summons or a Bone Heap that will yield dozens of foils in a single swing. Add in the fact that Tomb Robber has no cost itself, and it ends up being a great draw at any point in the game. And Tomb Robber is not hard to come by, especially if you start with Leshy or Grimora.
• The Training Dummy in Magnificus's tower, being part of a puzzle, is an infinitely repeatable battle that's impossible to lose, since the opposing cards never attack you. This allows it to become a Peninsula of Power Leveling on two different fronts. For starters, it's by far the easiest place to perform the above-mentioned Tomb Robber/Ouroboros loop, since you can just keep drawing cards until you get all of the pieces needed for the loop to work. Then, once you're tired of sacrifice-looping Ouroboros to obscenity, you can then repeat this fight over and over again, using your god-serpent to deal the killing blow and ending up with pretty much as many foils as your Ouroboros has attack power per fight. Then you can buy all of the card packs you could ever want and then some, allowing you to cheese the "Collective Effort" achievement with exceptional ease.
• The Bone Lord's Horn allows you to convert Energy into a huge amount of bones, up to 18 per round once the energy bar maxes out. Combine this with a card that use bones to boost its power such as the Bone Heap and you can easily one-shot any encounter and generate a huge amount of foils with the overkill damage. If you're really patient, you can combine this with a set of conduits that negate the Horn's energy cost to power the Heap up hundreds of times in a single round.

Act 3

• The Custom Bots are similar to the player Death Cards in Act 1, but with a key difference that makes things even more insane: The RNG factor that could limit strong player cards is completely nonexistent. While the skill point system means you usually won't be able to make anything as powerful as the player cards, the consistency means it's not too hard to min-max a set of bots that will snap P03's game in half. (Just for a basic example: Energy Boost + Undying + Fragile on a no-energy 0/1, which results in a card that immediately puts you ahead of the game's curve and recycles itself on death with a downside that will either never matter or be out-and-out helpful.) In addition, you don't have to worry about your custom cards getting used against you, unlike player cards.
• While difficult to get, the Mycobot you get by defeating The Mycologists is exceedingly broken as it combines the stats and sigils of all the cards you had on the field when you defeated them, without sacrificing the component cards. With a bit of planning ahead, it's entirely possible to end up with a Mycobot that's even stronger than the Ourobot - and given just how stupidly broken that card is, that's saying quite a lot.

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