Video Game / Slay the Spire

That is the Spire which we have to slay.

"Welcome... back..."

—Neow

Slay the Spire is a roguelike Deck Building Game, developed and published by a US-based indie game studio in Seattle, Washington known as MegaCrit Games. It follows the story of several mysterious outcasts as they attempt to climb the eponymous Spire, all in the hopes of reaching its heart and destroying its evil influence. This won't be easy, as the Spire is full of cultists, monsters, hostile constructs, and even stranger terrors, all looking to bring your quest to a premature end.

The game received its full Steam release on January 23, 2019 with three fully-playable characters (the Ironclad, the Silent, and the Defect) and a daily run mode. On May 21, 2019, the game released for the PlayStation 4, followed by subsequent releases for the Nintendo Switch on June 6, and the Xbox ONE on August 14. A fourth class, the Watcher, was released in 2020. The Watcher would go on to represent the series in Fraymakers.

Contention Games held a Kickstarter campaign to fund a cooperative deckbuilding game, Slay the Spire: The Board Game.

On April 10, 2024, a sequel was confirmed to be coming to Early Access in 2025 with at least one new hero, the Necrobinder.

Not to be confused with The Dark Spire.

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This game contains examples of the following tropes:

• Achievements in Ignorance: The Confused status, given by the Snecko enemy, the Snecko Eye relic, and the Snecko potion, randomizes every card's cost between 0 and 3 every time it is dealt, meaning that an action might require less energy than it should because the character is confused about how much energy they need to do it.
• Action Bomb: The aptly named Exploder, which does two attacks and then explodes for 30 damage on its third turn.
• After the End: Several relic descriptions mention a "Spireblight" that seems to have wiped out most of the edible plant life in the world. The relics in question are various pieces of fruit, which are treated as precious artifacts of a time long past.
• A.I. Roulette: This is mostly an Averted Trope here, as every enemy follows a semi-set pattern, but some enemies do have multiple different moves that they can perform on certain turns. However, even in these cases, the trope is downplayed, as every enemy script with random actions does have failsafes to ensure that no single action is performed more than two or three times in a row.
• All Your Powers Combined: On a Custom game, if you select the Chimera and Diverse option, you get to start with that deck that has cards from all the characters and they can earn cards of different colours as they progress through the game.
• Alpha Strike: A playstyle encouraged with the Watcher. She possesses multiple cards that retain in your hand at the end of your turn, and her two primary stances, Calm and Wrath, are designed in a way that you gain energy from exiting Calm, then once in Wrath stance, unload your attacks you've been holding onto before the enemies can hit you back hard.
  • To a lesser extent, the Ice Cream relic, which can allow you to hoard up energy over multiple turns and then spend it all in one round on a huge X-cost card or a barrage of high-value card plays. Bonus points if you have ways to gain energy faster, such as energy-increasing relics or cards.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Outside of the Silent (whose skin tone is normal for African ancestry), no other humanoid character has a human skintone, with most varying from blue to green to gray. Of course, nothing says that they're human.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game's secret final act and its two fights, the Spire Shield/Spear and Corrupt Heart, are a step high above everything else in the game. As a result, you only have to go through it once with each character to get every achievement, and it can be done on the base difficulty. Ascension level progresses regardless of whether you enter the Final Act or not, and losing the run by then still unlocks the next difficulty.
  • The Writhing Mass enemy in Act 3 has a gimmick where it will change its intent based on whether or not the player did attack damage to it. Since it is specifically attack damage that triggers this, it prevents the Writhing Mass from changing its intent from the passive damage that things like poison and lightning can inflict at the end of the turn, which would make countering it a huge pain in the ass.
• Armored But Frail: One event takes away a large percentage of Max HP and adds Apparition cards to your deck. These cards reduce all damage to Scratch Damage, while they last.
  • The Spheric Guardian, a hallway monster from act 2, has only 20 HP, but a huge stack of block that carries over between turns and is continually replenished.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Melter will remove an enemy's block for that turn and then deals its damage. This makes it an excellent opening attack on enemy's with high block scores.
• Asteroids Monster: Large Slimes will swap their current action to Split once they reach half health, splitting into two smaller Slimes that each have the amount of HP the Large Slime had remaining when it split. The Slime Boss takes it further by splitting into two Large Slimes that can split further.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Depending on your deck, a lot of seemingly amazing cards can just wind up being dead weight if you don't have the right cards to fully take advantage of their abilities. Many cards only shine with other cards or even relics to provide synergy. Likewise, some relics are almost useless without the right cards to synergize with them, particularly those involving mechanics such as Poison and Exhaust.
  • The Silent's Grand Finale deals 50 damage to all enemies (60 when upgraded) for no Energy. The catch? It can only be used once your draw pile is completely empty, and setting up this situation requires perfect control over all your cards that enable draw.
  • On the Ironclad side of things, Searing Blow's special ability is that it can be upgraded an infinite number of times (as opposed to every other card where it's a one-and-done affair), and the bonus damage the card receives increases with every upgrade. Unfortunately, this means that you have to focus on upgrading only Searing Blow, since it requires a few upgrades before it becomes viable, which in turn means that cards with more utility are left in the dust and you're foregoing opportunities to heal. One slight upside is that other cards such as Armaments and Apotheosis allow you to do this for the current combat^note Armaments can upgrade another card in your hand, or all other cards in your hand if it's upgraded, while Apotheosis upgrades all other cards in your deck, then exhausts itself, and Armaments does not exhaust itself when used, meaning that if you're lucky enough to keep getting Armaments and Searing Blow in your hand at the same time, you can upgrade Searing Blow multiple times in the same combat. (And if you have the option of mixing cards of multiple colors and can get Searing Blow and Lesson Learned^note Lesson Learned is a Watcher card that permanently upgrades a card in the deck every time an enemy is killed with it. in the same deck, things can get even more ridiculous.)
  • 3-cost cards in general can fall into this, as unless you have a way to make them cost less or just have more resources to use, they frequently aren't worth spending your entire turn to use. The Snecko Eye is a common suggestion to alleviating cost problems, as it applies confusion to you at the start of each combat, so card costs become randomized and (potentially) less of a problem.
    • Another relic that works well is Mummified Hand, which reduces the cost of a random card to zero when you play a Power card. Since some decent Powers cost 0 to play, the chance that a 3 cost card is reduced to 0 cost is greater.
  • Bludgeon, an Ironclad card which deals a massive 32 damage, is a particularly blatant example, as it has difficulty scaling later in the game; the Ironclad has many other attack options that get bigger boosts from Strength buffs or have additional effects, and they cost a lot less. Without ways to lower the cost or assistance from Double Tap, it's a dead draw in many cases.
  • The Defect card Meteor Strike is probably the most absurd example. At five base Energy cost (and it doesn't go down), other cards (Conserve Energy, TURBO) or effects (Snecko Eye or multiple Energy gain relics) must already be in play to even use this card. But if you use it, not only do you deal massive damage (24 base, 30 upgraded), you channel three Plasma, which rapidly cycles orb slots to trigger evoke effects while the Plasma itself passively gives one Energy or can be invoked for two Energy. One use of Meteor Strike will let you use it (and pretty much every other card you have) for the rest of the battle, but only specific builds can really capitalize on that.
  • The Watcher is a walking compendium of cards which are theoretically devastating but practically useless outside the very specific decks that can utilize them.
    • Blasphemy instantly puts the Watcher in Divinity mode: Triple damage plus an extra three energy. The catch? It kills you on the next turn. The player can therefore only use it if they can be sure they can finish the battle on that turn. You could theoretically circumvent this downside by being Intangible when the supposed death kicks in, but that comes with its own set of issues. Upgrading it gives it Retain, allowing you to keep it in your hand between turns, turning it into 1-cost Divinity on demand as long as you can still defeat the enemies in time.
    • Alpha (a 1 energy card) puts Beta (a 2 energy card) into your deck, which puts Omega (a 3 energy card) into your deck. Omega does 50 (60 upgraded) damage to every enemy at the end of every turn, an awesome effect which you will likely be half-dead before you even see it.
    • Omniscience enables you to pick any card in your draw pile and immediately play it twice. Because of the weight of incredibly powerful abilities the Watcher has, you can theoretically combo this with many other cards to game-winning effect. The problem is it costs 4 energy to use, there's no guarantee you'll draw it before the card you want to use it on, and just having it in your deck with the kind of high energy card you'd want to combo it with is likely going to cause you problems.
    • Deva Form gives you increasing amounts of energy per turn to the point where you'll have more energy than you know what to do with. While good with Fasting or decks with a lot of card draw^note or, to a lesser extent, perhaps Conjure Weapon, Watcher normally doesn't have much of an energy deficit and can usually do her job just as well without Deva Form.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic: There is just a 3% chance of a non-boss card reward offering being rare, but for every common card offered, this chance goes up by 1%, resetting back to 3% once a rare card is offered^note Also, at the start of the game, the rare card chance is set to -2%, making rare card offerings impossible after the first encounter and unlikely after the second, as three cards are offered after each encounter. This makes the Busted Crown's drawback more severe than it would be otherwise; because it limits card rewards to one choice instead of three, the rare card chance climbs up only a third as quickly.
• Badass Normal:
  • Of the player characters, the Silent makes do with agility, training, and sheer volume of knives/poisons, while the other three have demonic strength, Lost Technology, or Enlightenment Superpowers.
  • Of the Act II bosses, the Champ stands out. Whereas the other two are a sorceress Humanoid Abomination of some sort and an advanced combat automaton courtesy of the Spire's security systems, he's just a very big man with a very big ego and force of personality and the strength and skill to back up every boast.
• Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: With the release of the fourth character, the game now falls under this:
  • Balance: The Watcher, which emphasizes balancing big attack and defensive stances, and playing cards in specific orders.
  • Power: The Ironclad, who's about scaling and doing lots of damage fast.
  • Skill: The Silent, who has lots of card draw/discard, poison, and other tactical techniques.
  • Gimmick: The Defect, built around an orbs/focus system nothing like anything the other characters have.
• Battle Trophy: The strange animal skull that the Silent wears on her head is, according to one event, from a creature that she had to slay for the right to challenge the Spire. An Elite called Nemesis from Act III has a remarkably similar skull-head, suggesting that Silent killed it or some lesser variant of it outside the Spire. The fact that the Nemesis is the only enemy who uses Intangible, while the Silent is the only character with a native way to use that same effect also furthers this connection.
• The Berserker:
  • The Ironclad, who prefers to go with all-out damage compared to the other characters. He even has a card named Berserker, as well as cards like Anger and Rampage.
  • Wrath stance also turns the Watcher into this as well.
• BFS: The Ironclad's sword is a relatively minor variant of this trope, although it certainly applies when using the Heavy Blade Attack.
• Big, Thin, Short Trio: In one city event, you can encounter a group of masked bandits: the tall and slim leader Romeo, the large and defensive Bear, and the small and aggressive Pointy. They put up a formidable challenge together, but they'll let you through unharmed if you give them all your gold.
• Blessed with Suck: The Tungsten Rod reduces all damage taken by 1, which is almost always an upside; however, it can screw up The Ironclad's playstyle, as it prevents Rupture, Self-Forming Clay, and the Runic Cube from being triggered by some cards.
• Blind Seer: The Watcher, combined with Blind Weaponmaster.
• Bloody Murder: Ironclad's Hemokinesis involves sacrificing HP to spray a deadly spray of blood on enemies for high damage. And since he has "Burning Blood" and a number of flame-related powers, they could tangentially be considered under this trope as well. ^note Particularly Combust, since it deals damage to yourself to hurt others.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Each character starts with a single Relic that has an unimpressive but valuable effect: health regeneration for The Ironclad, extra card draw for The Silent, a free lightning orb for The Defect, a Miracle card added to every first hand for The Watcher. You can trade them in for a powerful Boss Relic, but depending on what you get, it might be a significant downgrade.
  • Vajra, Oddly Smooth Stone, and Data Disc, which give you a point in Strength, Dexterity, and Focus at the start of each fight, respectively. Hardly spectacular, but their benefits add substantial numbers to your damage, block, and orb efficacy.
  • One event in the game allows you to either remove a card from your deck, or upgrade all of your basic Strikes and Defends. Either effect (depending on the sort of deck being made) greatly improves your deck strength.
  • The ability to remove cards from your deck in general. Adding new cards is surely more exciting, but getting rid of your generally subpar starting set of Strikes and Defends helps streamline your deck and allow you to draw more useful cards more often in battle. Most strategies work perfectly fine with only a handful of specific cards, so any additional ones are more or less just dead weight. Card removal also gets rid of any Curses you incurred during your journey.
  • Exhausting and discarding cards may look like a downside at first, but they can also be handy in getting rid of temporary debuff cards added mid-combat or mitigating the effects of curse cards you've gained during your journey.
  • Cheap multi-hit abilities scale very well with Strength-adding effects since the strength applies per hit. Other than being multiple weaker hits, these abilities are very vanilla. The same applies to any free low-damage card, such as Shivs.
  • Flash of Steel is a zero-cost, three-damage card that also allows you to draw one card. This makes it one of the few cards that synergizes well with almost every deck, as it's never a dead draw and can even add significant damage to "machine gun"-type decks.^note It could theoretically go infinite with itself, but in practice, you won't be able to trim your deck down to nothing but Flash of Steel.
  • There's quite a few common cards that are pseudo-free (they cost one or two energy, but fulfilling a relatively easy condition like using it on a Weakened enemy results in gaining this energy back and/or drawing another card) that also do damage.
  • Neutralize, one of the Silent's unique starting cards. It doesn't do much (deal three damage and apply one stack of Weak), but thanks to being a zero-cost card and Weak being a very useful status effect, you're pretty much always glad to draw it.
  • Defensive decks. Sitting behind tons of damage mitigation while safely scaling up wins almost every fight in the game, but also makes them play out almost identically.
  • The Scry mechanic. The player takes a look at a number of cards on top of their deck and may choose to discard any number of them. It is a very simple but powerful way to manipulate your deck, since you can look at upcoming cards to prepare your next turn, and you can discard unwanted cards out before they are even in your hand, allowing you to potentially draw the key card you want a lot earlier.
  • Lizard Tail and Fairy in a Bottle, which bring you back to life once upon dying. If you get a bad run of cards against an Elite or a Boss, both will prevent the player from dying.
  • The Courier and Membership Card. The Card lowers the prices of all items including relics and card removal, by 50%, and the Courier not only reduces the prices by 20% but also restocks.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: While the Mini-Boss elites are clearly marked, Act II's Snecko, and Act III's Transient are Hallway encounters that have unique mechanics and are just as hard as an elite without being marked (and without the rewards).
  • The Maw, an Act III unique regular enemy, is essentially just a very very strong Jaw Worm. Jaw Worms are already pretty tough, but one with over 100 health necessitates pulling out all the stops.
• Card Cycling: Discarding and immediately replacing cards is one of The Silent's specialties. She possesses many cards which allow her to draw and/or discard cards, as well as unique power ups that benefit from discarding cards:
  • "Prepared" is a no cost card that lets the player choose a card to discard, then draw a replacement card.
  • Tools Of The Trade, once played, has the player choose a card to discard, and draw a replacement card, every turn.
  • "Calculated Gamble" discards the current hand and replaces each card with a newly drawn card.
• Cast from Hit Points: Many of the Ironclad's cards cost HP, in exchange for powerful effects such as gaining energy, drawing cards or damaging enemies. Due to a card that causes the Ironclad to gain strength from self-damage, as well as a Life Drain attack, this can be a very powerful mechanic, allowing the player to treat their HP as a renewable resource rather than (as usual for roguelikes) as precious.
• Chain Lethality Enabler: The Gremlin Horn enables your character to do this, refunding 1 energy and drawing a card whenever you kill an enemy, as does the Defect's Sunder card, which refunds you 3 energy if you kill an enemy with it. The Silent's Specimen relic transfers poison from killed enemies to living ones, and her Corpse Explosion card causes the target to deal its own maximum HP in damage to its allies when killed.
• Clingy MacGuffin: The Necronomicurse, gained by obtaining the Necronomicon. It cannot be removed from your deck, and exhausting it causes it to be immediately put back into your hand. Another is Curse of the Bell, gained by obtaining Calling Bell, which cannot be removed from your deck but can still be exhausted. Finally, there's the Ascender's Bane, which is permanently put into the deck on Ascension 10 and higher, but is Ethereal (meaning it exhausts for the combat if it's in your hand at the end of your turn). Other than that, they act like standard, unplayable curses. Downplayed with the Parasite curse, which reduces your max HP when removed from your deck.
• Cloth Fu: Prominently featured in the Watcher's cards, like Sash Whip and Flying Sleeves.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Red for the Ironclad. Green for the Silent. Blue for the Defect. Purple for the Watcher. Each character normally can only obtain a card of their own color, plus grey (so-called colorless cards, including status cards) and black (curse cards).
  • The Watcher herself also has her own set of this via her stances, with red for Wrath stance, blue for Calm stance, and purple for Divinity stance.
• Commonplace Rare: Many of the relics are implied to have powerful magic or technology, or are at least proper weapons and armor. Others are seemingly mundane objects such as a shovel, calipers, a poker chip, or a variety of foods. (Even better, all the relics which were just listed count as "rare" relics).
• Cosmic Horror Story: It's not entirely clear what the Spire is, but whatever it is, it's powerful, malevolent, and utterly alien. And attempting to destroy its heart kills you, resulting in you being resurrected at the bottom by Neow. It requires three deaths at least to even get a weapon that could possibly destroy it.
• Creepy Good:
  • Cleric, the obnoxious goblin-like man who you can occasionally encounter, will heal you or remove cards from your deck (in exchange for some gold). He genuinely seems to mean well, however. The trope is invoked when you don't use him, as the text will say you don't trust this "priest" (quotes included).
  • Neow herself, as she appears as a gray, desiccated whale with three eyes at the start of every run.
• Critical Status Buff: The Red Skull relic grants you 3 bonus Strength when you're at or below 50% of max health.
• Cult: A frequent presence throughout enemy encounters and events are members of a bird-themed cult. Two bosses are tied to them: the Collector, a cloaked shadowy cultist sitting on a crow-shaped throne, and the Awakened One, the birdlike being that the cultists worship.
• Cursed with Awesome: Literally.
  • The Du-Vu Doll grants one Strength for any curse in your deck at the start of battle.
  • The Ironclad has a pair of powers which mitigate the worst effects of status cards - Evolve prevents them from ruining your draw, and Fire Breathing uses them to burn enemies en masse, which also works on curses. An Ironclad run lucky enough to find both can end up with a deck whose victory condition is to self-inflict statuses as much as possible.
• Damage Over Time:
  • The Mercury Hourglass (deals three damage to all enemies each round) allows any character to play this no matter their deck, though it's very slow compared to other methods.
  • The Silent can do this with her poison and defensive cards, shutting down enemies with low health and high armour while the poison damage piles up.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • The Unceasing Top relic draws you an extra card whenever your hand is empty... assuming you don't just hit "End Turn" right after playing the last card, that is.
  • Similarly, you spend so much of the game on three energy that having an early extra energy relic will still have you press "end turn" after playing three cards for a while, out of habit. Then there's the Ice Cream, which conserves energy between turns - players may forget to not play unnecessary cards to save that energy for the next turn.
  • The Orichalcum relic gives you six block whenever you end your turn with zero block. The basic Defend card gives you five block. So what do you do when you have one energy left and only a Defend in your hand left to play? You play it without thinking, realize your mistake, and then kick yourself for taking one more damage than you needed to.
• Danger with a Deadline: Transients are extradimensional creatures that have near-unkillable amounts of HP, but also have a timer on them that causes them to fade out of existence within five turns, automatically winning you the match. The difficulty is in holding out until then, both battening down the hatches and smacking them around to lower their horrifically high damage.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • In the backstory, the Ironclad obtained his supernatural powers by selling his soul to demonic forces. A fantastic number of his abilities and cards are implied to be the result of this (Corruption, Combust, Offering, Demon Form, Hemokinesis, and more).
  • There are also a number of "devils" — some literal, some not — who offer extremely nice-sounding deals... for a price. Usually, it takes the form of HP damage, losing some of your maximum HP, or having to take a Curse.
  • One particularly noteworthy event involves getting turned into a vampire, which makes you lose a whopping 30% of your max HP but replaces all of your Strikes with Bites, which do slightly more damage and heal you. Considering how rare healing effects are, especially for the Silent, some players consider it a massively useful effect. If you have the Blood Vial relic, you can trade it instead of your max HP. The Blood Vial heals 2 HP at the start of combat, a pathetic amount of healing compared to the what the Bites will give you in the long run, so it is almost always worth it.
  • There's also the event with the three creepy face-thingies, who offer to let you trade in a massive 50% of your max HP in exchange for 5 Apparition cards (3 on higher Ascensions). While the price is incredibly steep, the reward is also incredibly powerful: Each Apparition can be played once per battle and gives you the Intangible status effect for one turn, which reduces all instances of incoming damage to 1, making you nearly invulnerable for that turn. With a bit of luck with the draw, these cards might just end up saving you from taking any damage in the first place, rendering the loss of 50% max HP less of an issue, but it's nonetheless a huge risk to take. An additional problem is that un-upgraded Apparitions are Ethereal, turning them into "use it or lose it" cards that can cause major problems if you pull multiple in one turn and can't discard them.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • Referenced with the A Thousand Cuts Power, which deals one (two upgraded) point of damage to every enemy whenever a card is played. This is a Power for the Silent and synergizes well with one of her possible deck styles, involving playing a lot of low-damage, zero-cost Shivs. Similarly, she has several synergies that work with this strategy, such as Envenom (all unblocked hits apply 1 poison) or Accuracy (increases Shiv damage).
  • One of the playstyles available to the Defect — they can easily run a "0-cost" deck with cards like All For One, Scrape, Claw, Beam Cell, FTL, and Go For The Eyes, using the same few low-damage cards repeatedly and rapidly. Claw, notably, starts off as Scratch Damage and scales gradually per combat (or quickly, if your deck is well set up to take advantage of it).
  • A Watcher deck centering around stance swap can also do this with Flurry of Blows, or a Scry deck with Weave.
  • The Book of Stabbing and some other enemies can sometimes do high DPS attacks that's actually just a flurry of weak hits. Having thorns on your character will really ruin the enemy's day as they inflict tons of damage on themselves as they often use multi-hit attacks.
• Death or Glory Attack:
  • The Watcher card Blasphemy immediately puts the player into the Divinity stance, which grants three energy upon activation and triples any damage dealt to the opponent. The Death part comes into the equation when it kills the user at the start of the following turn. On a lesser note, being in Wrath stance doubles all attack damage — yours and the enemy's.
  • Downplayed with X-cost cards. They use up all your remaining energy and have effects based on how much energy was spent on them — devastating if you've built up your energy properly before unleashing them, but without any energy afterwards, you'll have to end your turn barring any 0-cost cards you have.
  • The Silent's Wraith Form is a Death Or Glory Defense — it gives you 2 or 3 turns of Intangible, meaning that you'll only be taking Scratch Damage for a few turns, but it also penalizes you with -1 Dexterity per turn, so if you haven't won the fight by the time the Intangible effect wears off and the damage you take returns to normal, it'll be a lot more difficult for you to mitigate enemy attacks.
  • Likewise, the Defect's Biased Cognition can count as this for Orb-heavy builds. It gives you 4 Focus up-front, sharply increasing your orbs' effectiveness. However, it makes you lose 1 Focus per turn afterwards, so if you don't win quickly, or have Artifact to negate the focus loss, you’ll end up worse off than when you started.
• Deck Clogger:
  • Curse cards are junk cards that are permanently added to the player's deck, usually through random events. They're virtually useless outside extremely niche situations, and most have additional negative effects. Most can be removed from your deck at shops or random events like any other card.
  • Status cards are junk cards placed in your deck by enemies or a card effect. Most are unplayable and many have additional negative effects. Unlike curses they only stay in your deck for the duration of the fight.
• Degraded Boss: The tournament event in Act 2 which lets you fight Gremlin Nob, an Act 1 elite, and Taskmaster, part of an Act 2 elite at the same time for increased reward. There is also an event in Act 3 which lets you fight one of the Act 1 bosses again for a relic. By that point, the boss is very unlikely to be very threatening.
• Developer's Foresight: The Ironclad card Perfected Strike deals more damage for every card in the Ironclad's deck that has "Strike" in its name. Normally, this is intended to be buffed with the many Strike cards the Ironclad can get, but if you can get other colors into your deck (through a challenge modifier, the Prismatic Shard relic, or the "A Note For Yourself" event), cards like Sneaky Strike and Thunder Strike will also increase its damage.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • A lot of the most powerful combos require a bunch of luck to even be possible and careful decision making to bring together. If you can assemble the needed combination of relics and cards you can do all sorts of wild things like having 999 block (and never losing it), poisoning targets for hundreds of damage each turn, or literally dealing infinite damage.
  • Probably the most impressive, but one of the most difficult is the "Infinite Combo deck" which allows you to play an infinite combo of cards. This requires either getting the Unceasing Top (whenever you run out of cards in your hand, you draw another card) and also removing every single card in your deck that costs energy, or getting at least two very uncommon "free cards" (cards that cost 0 energy and allow you to draw at least one card) and getting your deck down to no more than 4 (6 for the Silent) non-free cards. Both of these techniques require luck in getting what you need to discard enough cards from your deck and more luck in stumbling onto either the rare relic or the uncommon cards (twice). Both also become very vulnerable when you've reduced your deck to only a few cost cards, but not enough to actually trigger the combo. But once you get past that, you can literally destroy any fight on the first round (the only exception being the Time Eater^note which forcibly ends your turn and buffs its Strength for every 12 total cards you play and the Heart itself^note which has an ability that imposes a hard cap on how much damage you can deal to it in a single turn).
• Discard and Draw:
  • A thematic story example: as you progress through the game, you unlock new cards as you construct new decks every run. As it turns out, the permadeath roguelike mechanics aren't just for show — Neow is reviving your character as they climb the Spire, getting new powers (cards) and losing existing ones (your reset deck).
  • The Silent relies heavily on effects that trade cards, drawing some while discarding others, such as with the common Acrobatics and Dagger Throw cards.
  • Mechanically, the Ironclad has his own set of cards that remove cards from the deck, but they're based on Exhausting (removing them from play for the rest of combat) rather than simply discarding them. Special mention goes to the Sentinel card, which is a basic Defend card that gives bonus energy if you manage to Exhaust it.
  • Several effects, such as the Astrolabe, allow you to permanently transform cards in your deck, replacing them with something different at random.
• Disc-One Nuke: If you get it early enough (usually by finding it in a shop) and upgrade it, the Apotheosis card certainly counts, as it upgrades every card in your deck for the rest of the current battle.
• Double-Edged Buff:
  • The Silent card Wraith Form grants you a few turns of Intangible, which reduces all damage to Scratch Damage. However, it also gives you a debuff that gradually drains your Dexterity, sapping your ability to block. If the fight goes on for long enough after Intangible wears off, you'll be defenseless.
  • The Defect card "Biased Cognition" buffs your Focus by 4 (5 when upgraded), but also gives you a debuff that saps one Focus at the beginning of each turn.
  • The Defect card "Reprogram" buffs your Strength and Dexterity by 1 each (2 when upgraded), but you lose the same amount of Focus. This makes you better at using "normal" attacks and blocks, while making your Orbs weaker.
  • Downfall (Slay the Spire): The Hermit card "Gestalt" gives him 2 stacks of Rugged, a buff that decreases the damage of one unblocked hit to 2. However, it also gives him two turns of the Damage-Increasing Debuff Vulnerable (one when upgraded), which means that any incoming hits not blocked by the Rugged stacks will be more dangerous.
• Downer Ending: On a normal run, no matter how hard you try, once you meet the Corrupt Heart of the Spire, your character will die and be resurrected by Neow to start the climb back up again.
• Draw Extra Cards: Relics to draw two extra cards on the start of their first turn:
  • The Ring of the Snake
  • The Bag of Preparation relic.
• Early-Bird Boss: All Act I bosses to an extent, but especially The Guardian. While the Act III bosses all have abilities to pose problems for a certain kind of powerful late-game deck, the Act I bosses have no defenses against these decks. The Guardian in particular can be defeated just by having consistent attacking and blocking. These bosses depend on your deck not being fully built yet. There's even an event in Act III that lets you fight an Act I boss, allowing you to see just how much less of a threat they are.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: If you can unlock Act IV and defeat the Corrupt Heart, you will finally Slay the Spire, freeing the world from the Spire's influence and granting Neow her revenge.
  • In the Ironclad's victory, he not only cuts the Heart in two, but he ascends to the top of the Spire and sets it ablaze, causing it to erupt in black demonic fire. All the pain and suffering, all of the sacrifice has been worth it to save the world and avenge his brethren.
  • In the Silent's victory, her combination of blades and poison finally fells the Heart, allowing her to climb out of the Spire and return to her tribe, having proved herself worthy of the honor they bestowed upon her.
  • In the Defect's victory, he blasts a hole through the Heart with his laser, and is able to climb out of the Spire for the first time, to look upon the beauty of the moon in the clear night sky.
  • In the Watcher's victory, her palm punches a hole through the Heart. She ascends to the top of the Spire and obliterates it with divine power.
• Elemental Powers:
  • The Ironclad has fire. His starting relic is Burning Blood, and he has multiple fire-based cards, letting him burn both himself and his enemies.
  • The Slient has poison. Her starting relic is the Ring of the Snake which can be upgraded to the Ring of the Serpent. Many of her cards let her inflict deadly poison to her enemies, and she's the only one who can obtain poison potions.
  • The Defect's orbs follow an elemental theme. His basic attack orbs are Lightning, his defense orbs are Frost, he gets an energy boost from Plasma, and he gets a "bomb" in the form of his Dark orb.
  • Averted with the Watcher, who is thematically tied to water and wind, but these are symbolic of her monk training, and despite the names of some cards, they are depicted as powerful blows, not elemental strikes.
• Equipment Upgrade:
  • All cards except curses and status cards can be upgraded once, increasing their power, decreasing their cost and/or reducing their negative side effects (if any). The Ironclad card Searing Blow is the only card that can be upgraded an unlimited amount of times, dealing more damage with each upgrade. Certain cards and relics can upgrade cards for the current fight, though they revert afterwards (except the Watcher's Lesson Learned, which gives a permanent upgrade if it kills an enemy).
  • Each of the starting relics can be upgraded/replaced with a more powerful version of the same relic.
    • The Ironclad can replace his Burning Blood (heal 6) with Black Blood (heal 12)
    • The Silent can replace the Ring of Snakes (draw 2 extra cards on your first turn) with the Ring of Serpents (draw 1 extra card EVERY turn.)
    • The Defect can replace his Cracked Core (generate one Lightning orb on your first turn) with the Frozen Core (generate one ice orb any turn you have an empty orb slot)
    • The Watcher can replace their Pure Water (gain 1 miracle card on your first turn) with Holy Water (gain 3 miracle cards on your first turn)
  • A couple of other character-specific relics also fit this description thematically.
    • The Slient's Wrist Blade (more damage with 0 point cards) is an upgrade to deploying her knives and shivs.
    • The Watcher's Cloak Clasp (gain one block for each card in your hand) is an upgrade to her typical Clothing Combat.
    • Other than the Symbiotic Virus, every Defect-specific relic is upgrading his computers.
• Escape Rope: The Smoke Bomb potion lets the player flee from any combat when used, skipping the rewards as well. It doesn't work against bosses, and it can't be used on the Spire Spear and Spire Shield until one of the two enemies is dead.
• Exact Words:
  • Ethereal cards will exhaust if they're in the player's hand when their turn ends, and that rule is very specific. Discarding an Ethereal card will keep it in play for another shuffle since it didn't stay in the hand long enough to get exhausted; this also applies to cards like Ghostly Armor, which are Ethereal but don't exhaust themselves when used. Conversely, trying to Retain an Ethereal card will still cause it to exhaust since the card is in your hand at the end of the turn, even though it isn't about to be discarded.
  • The Necronomicurse and the Curse of the Bell state that they cannot be removed from your deck once added. This is meant as a balancing measure to the relics they're attached to. However, if you carry the Omamori with you as you pick up the Necronomicon or the Calling Bell, you'll receive the benefits, but not get the associated curse put into your deck, i.e. you technically didn't remove the curse as much as you didn't let them enter your deck in the first place.
  • The Snecko Eye relic randomizes a card's energy cost every time it is drawn. The key word is "drawn" — cards retrieved from the discard pile, generated during play, and the like will cost whatever they did beforehand. This includes cards whose cost was previously randomized — if a card went from 3 energy to 0, it will remain 0 unless you draw it again.
  • In the story, the Ironclad asked a demon to make him the most powerful member of his clan. While the demon DID grant the Ironclad his burning blood, the result was the complete obliteration of his entire clan save him, which the demon happily points out "YOU REALLY ARE THE STRONGEST NOW! Haha.. HEHE... HAHAHAAAAH!!"
  • The Watcher skill Judgment sets an enemy's HP to 0. This bypasses all possible mitigation, even the powerful Intangible effect which would reduce all HP loss to 1. After all, the enemy doesn't "lose" HP - their HP are simply set to zero.
  • The Mark of the Bloom prevents the player from healing in any way, shape or form. Since the Fairy in a Bottle and Lizard Tail effects say "When you would die, heal to X% of your max HP instead", those also don't work.
  • Averted with Blasphemy: While the card description says you will "die next turn", in practice you will merely take a single hit of extreme damage, which can be avoidable with several effects.
  • The Watcher power Establishment reduces the cost of cards every time they are Retained - Retain being a specific keyword that prevents a card from getting discarded at the end of your turn. The relic Runic Pyramid has a very similar effect: "At the end of your turn, you no longer discard your hand." However, since it does not specifically state you Retain those cards, Establishment will not reduce their cost.
  • The Artifact status effect prevents the next debuff from applying to the player; nothing about that says it must be from an enemy. Often players have a "Eureka!" Moment when they notice or realize that it negates the downsides of many useful cards, e.g., getting to keep the Strength from Flex, not losing Dexterity from Wraith Form, and so on.
• Expy:
  • The Ironclad is only a colour swap away from becoming Hakumen. This was an intentional Shout-Out on the developer's part, saying he liked Hakumen's stance and if Arc System Works asked he'd send his praises for the inspiration.
  • The Giant Head elite in Act III has more than a passing resemblance to Saitama. It also happens to start hitting really, really hard once you've hung around long enough for it to decide to actually fight.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The first three playable characters fit broadly into these roles, though each can be built in a number of ways:
  • The Ironclad is the Fighter, with a focus on increasing his strength and both dealing and tanking large amounts of damage.
  • The Silent is the Thief, with an overall Fragile Speedster setup focused on playing large numbers of cards or using dexterity to dodge attacks; she also specializes in poison and throwing huge amounts of Shivs.
  • The Defect is the Mage, with a focus on setting up long-term buffs and on manipulating Elemental Powers through their orbs.
• Fission Mailed: After beating Act 3 with each character at least once, you get the opportunity to collect three keys in subsequent runs. If you beat the Act 3 boss without the keys, you'll futilely strike at the Corrupt Heart, only to mysteriously pass out afterwards, ending the run. If you collected all three keys beforehand, though, the Heart retreats, and you're allowed passage into Act 4.
• Flawless Victory: Defeating at least one Boss without getting hurt will net you the score Perfect. If you kill all 3 Bosses without losing any health, you get a special score called Beyond Perfect.
• Flechette Storm: The Silent's primary weapon of choice is daggers, complemented by many, many shivs. Much more so if you're building your deck around the A Thousand Cuts Power. How many Shivs does the Silent have? One of her powers is called Infinite Blades.
• Fragile Speedster: The Silent has the least amount of health out of all the characters and far less direct damage output, but a lot more in terms of indirect damage (particularly with poison). She also tends to cycle through her deck way faster than the others, thanks to a large number of Discard and Draw effects.
• Full Health Bonus: The Runic Dodecahedron, which grants an extra Energy at the start of each turn as long as you're at full HP. This relic was eventually deprecated because it turned out to be too difficult to remain at full HP for long, especially on higher Ascensions (not only are you more likely to take damage at a higher difficulty, but by Ascension 6 you only heal 75% of your max HP and you start each run damaged), so the bonus would often go to waste.
• Game Mod: Since the game is programmed in Java, it was trivially easy to disassemble the game and create custom content; eventually, modding tools were created so that you could mod the game directly and there are now all sorts of mods that introduce new mechanics, acts, events, characters, relics, cards, etc. As a result, PC version is compatible with Steam Workshop.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: A minor case: Some events that add a curse to your deck describe the effects of the curse that the event places on you, even if you have something to block the curse (such as the Omamori relic).
• Gathering Steam: All over the place!
  • The Kunai and Shuriken build Dexterity and Strength respectively every time you play three attacks in a turn.
  • Cultists' signature power is raising their Strength by three each turn.
  • Many Elites and bosses have souped-up versions of the Cultist's ability, including the Gremlin Boss and Gremlin Nob, as well as Donu and Deca (technically just Donu, but it boosts both its own and Deca's Strength every second turn). The crowner is likely the Giant Head, who literally gives you a countdown of five with weak attacks and debuffs before starting to hit you with increasingly huge amounts of damage every turn. Ironically, the Awakened One, the creature the cultists worship, does not possess this ability. It does, however, gain Strength every time you play a Power card (until it changes to its second form).
  • The Ironclad has Demon Form and Rupture, which give the Ironclad additional Strength every turn they activate. His Rampage card gets stronger every time it's played, making it very strong in thin decks.
  • The Silent has the various poison abilities, which all stack with each other, eventually allowing you to deal truly absurd damage every turn.
  • The Ironclad can do something similar with Block by using Barricade to keep Block between turns, Entrench to double Block, and Body Slam to deal extreme damage once Block is high enough. You better hope the enemies don't deal enough damage to cancel out that initial block before you can get it going, however.
  • The Watcher has Mantra, a status effect that needs to reach 10 stacks, which will then be consumed to allow her to enter Divinity stance. Cards that generates Mantra are few and far between, but it is oh so rewarding to finally get that 3 extra energy and tripled damage output.
  • The Watcher's Windmill Strike is a more straightforward example of this trope, as it needs to sit in your hand for several turns to increase its damage, up until you use it to whack something for 50+ damage or so.
  • The reigning champ is the Defect. Proper use of the orbs system can give you an absurd amount of damage or block every turn, but they take time to put into place. Likewise, White Noise and Creative AI provide powers for free, which can result in truly absurd power combos when your opponents let you live that long. Darkness orbs are specifically built around this, since they gain strength over time and release it when Evoked, incentivizing you to avoid cycling out orbs until they get as strong as possible.
  • There’s also 2 cards that do this by themselves:
    • The Defect’s 0-cost Claw card starts out dealing a measily 3 (5 if upgraded) damage, but adds 2 damage to ALL claw cards in your deck, including the one you just played. Play enough of them or go through your deck fast enough and soon a single claw can outdamage most 3-cost attacks.
    • The Watcher’s pressure point inflicts 8 (11 upgraded) stacks of the “Mark” debuff on a target enemy. This debuff itself does nothing, but the secondary effect of the pressure point card is that after applying it, every enemy with any amount of “Mark” then loses that much health.
• Genius Loci: The Spire is alive, and it is not happy that you're here to kill it.
• Glass Cannon: The Watcher's Wrath Stance turns you into one. While you're in this form, you deal double damage, but take double damage, too.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • One event involves your character getting lost in a hall of Alien Geometries, where strange voices try to whisper to you to tell you how to get out. If you listen to the voices, this trope takes effect, giving you two copies of the Madness card at the cost of some health.
  • Another event involves reading a Tome of Eldritch Lore. You need to keep choosing to read it and take increasing amounts of damage before you can actually take it as an relic.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Inverted. Time keeps moving on, but you keep repeating the same day. Every time your character dies, they collapse and reawaken at the Exordium, to begin the ascent up the Spire once more. Other characters will recognize you at the start of events, because they've met you from previous runs and some rare events allude to previous runs; one has a spot where you can take a card and leave one behind, letting different color cards cross runs. This also happens even if you manage to beat the boss at the end of Act III and attack the Corrupt Heart. One event involving reading a tome that damages you more and more as you read it reveals that the loop is a result of the giant whale at the start, Neow, reviving you without your memories every time you die as a way to try and get revenge on the Spire.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: There are very few ways to heal outside of sleeping at a rest site. The Ironclad starts out with a relic that heals you after every fight due to his Cast from Hit Points playstyle, and Reaper, a rare card, allows you to heal the amount of unblocked damage you deal to enemies. Defect has Self-Repair, which has a similar effect to Burning Blood. Other classes will have to resort to Meat on the Bone, which heals you 12 HP when you're below half health, or Bandage Up, a Colorless card that heals you for 4(6) HP.
• HP to One: One of Neow's possible gifts at the start of a run is Neow's Lament, a relic that reduces all enemies to one hit point for three battles. This makes the first fights of Act I risk-free and may lead to a ridiculously easy Elite fight.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty-modifying system of the game is named "Ascension". Ascension acts as a difficulty slider, with each rank adding an extra challenge (more Elites, stronger enemy tactics/damage, lowered heals and gold rewards, and so on) up until Ascension 20, which caps it off by having you fight two Act III bosses in a row. You unlock Ascension for each character by beating Act III with them, and every subsequent level is unlocked for that character by beating the previous one.
• Jackass Genie:
  • The Tesseract reveals that the Ironclad asked a demon to make him the strongest of his clan. The demon did this… by killing everybody else and pointing out that since he's the only member of his clan alive, he's strongest by default. Although unlike most examples of this trope, he also granted the Ironclad his burning blood (which is how he killed the rest of his clan)
  • Mostly averted with Neow, the Space Whale that you find any time you start a new game. She gives you a choice of potential gifts, and does so without actively trying to screw you over. Neow is also the reason the character keeps getting revived, although this revival is without memory of your previous run (hence, a new deck every run).
• Jack of All Trades: In deck-archetype, the Defect is an in-between compared to the Mighty Glacier Ironclad and the Fragile Speedster Silent. Results may vary during deck creation, but the Defect can distinctly build as a Mighty Glacier with Frost as an orb type, or build fast cycling decks with Skim, FTL, and Streamline.
• Joke Item:
  • The Spirit Poop relic, a special item that can be gotten in the "Bonfire Spirits" event by sacrificing a curse, just subtracts one point from your score after a run.
  • The "Face Trader" event can give you one of five masks. Two of them are decent relics, two of them give you negative effects, and the last one is the Cultist Headpiece, which just makes your character caw like a crow at the start of each battle.
• Last of His Kind: The Ironclad was once one of many of his order. Now, thanks to being tricked in a Deal with the Devil, he is the only one left to carry on their name.
• Look Behind You: Implied by the Distraction card's artwork. The Silent pointing her finger is enough to make the enemy look away.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The game does everything in its power to make this an Averted Trope, working around the Roguelike genre's more frustrating quirks. Enemy actions are shown outright with all buffs/debuffs factored in, enabling much more precise offense vs. defense strategy. Events tell you outright what each choice will do, with no random "gotcha!" options. The starting decks generally don't contain anything that will turn into a dead draw until you've got enough to a build to work with it, and so on.
  • One obvious case where luck is a factor is Confusion, a status effect that randomizes the cost of some of your cards every turn. Depending on how favorable the game is feeling, either your expensive strong cards will become extremely cheap or your simple low-cost cards will require a lot of energy. The balancing factor is that there are only a few sources of Confusion in the game, such as the Snecko enemy (who only appears in Act II and gives you a freebie turn before it inflicts the status) and the Snecko Eye relic (a Boss relic that gives perma-Confusion if a player desires it for certain builds).
  • There are a handful of events with randomized possibilities, which means that you could be given some great options or stuck with terrible choices. For instance, N'loth asks for a completely random relic to eat — so he may ask for boss relics that come with a downside^note such as Coffee Dripper or Ectoplasm, relics that had a limited number of uses^note such as the Old Coin or the Empty Cage, or even the useless Spirit Poop, but he could also potentially ask for a relic that's the lynchpin of your strategy. Likewise, the "Falling" event could either help you get rid of a lame card that's holding you back or force you to lose a great card that you're depending on to make your deck work.
  • What cards, relics, encounters, and events you run into are completely random and can completely screw you over if you start trying to build a specific type of deck and then find nothing to help (for example, if you pick up Accuracy, but then never get any shiv cards to use the boost on).
  • Since each of the Act 3 bosses are built around discouraging a different type of deck (Turtle decks, multi-play decks, and power decks) and you can't find out which boss you are going to fight until you reach Act 3, they can also completely screw you over.
  • You may often run into battles you lost where you may have won if your important Powers or other set-up cards were higher up in your deck.
• Magical Accessory: A large number of relics take the form of jewelry or worn items.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Defect card Genetic Algorithm starts out with a lackluster one block for one energy that exhausts itself. However, each combat you use it in permanently raises the block it gives in future combats by two, or three if upgraded. A similar example is the event-obtainable card Ritual Dagger, which starts at 15 damage for one energy and exhausts, but deals more damage each time you kill an enemy with it.
  • The Ironclad card Searing Blow starts off with mediocre damage for the energy it uses. However, it can be upgraded an infinite number of times, with each upgrade improving it even more than the last.
  • The Blood Vial. When you get it, it's just a really pathetic version of the Ironclad's Burning Blood. It never gets better, but you can cash it in if you encounter the vampire event to get the powerful Life Drain cards without the loss of maximum health. Instead of being a balanced tradeoff, you become ridiculously tanky, to the point that many a player will be happy they got the Blood Vial even though it does almost nothing.
  • Shivs. They cause a mere 4 damage, but cost 0 energy. However, they can be the deadliest weapons in the entire game. For example, the Wrist Blade relic adds 4 damage to all attacks costing 0 energy. The card Accuracy adds 4 (or 6 if upgraded) damage to all Shivs. Infinite Blades will give you a Shiv every turn. The Ninja Scroll gives you three Shivs automatically to start combat. Cloak and Dagger gives 6 Block and a Shiv. Have Curses or unnecessary cards in your hard and have 1 Energy left? Storm of Steel will turn all of them into Shivs. Then, there's the engines that can operate with Shivs. Master Reality will upgrade all created Shivs (and Shivs are always created). Envenom is an obvious buff to Shivs — every Shiv is +1 Poison. After Image and A Thousand Cuts activate with Shivs. Artifacts like Ornamental Fan, Shuriken, and Kunai add 4 Block, 1 Strength, and 1 Dexterity with every 3 attacks played, while Panache (+5 damage) activates with every 5 card plays. The Dead Branch artifact adds a card every time a card is Exhausted, and Shivs are Exhausted upon use. Finisher? Yeah, you know all those Shivs (and other attacks) you used? Well, the Finisher card does an attack for every attack made that turn. With the right artifacts and cards, Shivs may be able to cause 20 or more damage per shiv for zero energy.
• Master Poisoner: If she's not shivving her enemies to death, the Silent is likely poisoning them instead. Or doing both at once with the Envenom Power.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: The Defect's orb system makes them play a lot differently than the Ironclad or the Silent, since they need to build around channeling and evoking the right orbs and they have an extra stat (Focus) related to them. It's possible to build the Defect as a straight attacking/blocking character like the others, but even those decks still make use of orbs.
• Memory Match Mini-Game: The match and keep event has you playing with the in game cards. You get 5 tries, and any cards you match are added to your deck, including curses.
• Mid-Battle Tea Break: The artwork for the Watcher card Tranquility suggests she literally does this.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • The Ironclad tends towards this archetype, thanks to his higher health and starting with a relic that grants regeneration. He also has a large number of Strength-boosting cards (in particular his Demon Form) and his Barricade Power, if used properly, can be used to accrue a preposterous amount of Block. On top of that, he has access to Body Slam, which deals your current block as damage.
  • This becomes doubly true if you can obtain the Juggernaut Power, which deals damage to a random enemy every time you increase your Block. It's actually possible to kill bosses without ever attacking, simply by constantly boosting your Block.
  • Possible for a Defect specialized in Frost, as they can generate tons of Block per turn passively. Notably, one Frost-generating card is called Glacier.
• Mix And Match Creature: The Snecko, half snake and half gecko. It's head is halfway between that of a snake and a gecko, with a snake's tongue, it has a long neck, just the upper-half of a gecko's torso with only the two forelegs, and a snake's tail finishing it off.
• Modular Difficulty: Custom Mode lets you pick seeds, ascensions, and enable cards you haven't even unlocked. You can also enable tons of modifiers, including but not limited to: endless mode, making enemies drop relics, starting with various relics, lowering max HP, debuffing enemies, ignoring paths, etc.
• Multi-Melee Master: Implied with the Ironclad, whose starting card Bash depicts him using a mace, while Bludgeon depicts a hammer. He also possesses the Dual Wield skill to duplicate Attacks or Powers.
• Mystical Lotus: The Violet Lotus is a boss artifact for the Watcher that increases her energy when she exits her "Calm" stance, with the flavor text implying that it grew on the surface of a pool of mystical energy.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • Normally, Neow offers the player one of four different starting benefits before a run starts proper, some of which give a random result like trading the character's starting relic for a boss relic. In order to discourage players from reset-scumming to get a good result (or an overall lucky first floor), Neow will only offer one of two low-risk benefits if the boss of the Exordium wasn't reached in the previous attempt.
  • The "A Note For Yourself" event can be exploited to store an overpowered card from a custom run and later use it to enhance a standard run. To counteract this, the event cannot appear when playing an ascension level that hasn't been cleared yet. At ascension level 15, the "unfavorable events" modifier, on top of its main function of making many of the events slightly worse than before, also completely removes this event, even if that ascension level has already been cleared, to prevent any shenanigans with it at higher ascensions.
• Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack: There are several colorless attacks that deal no damage:
  • "Blind" applies weak.
  • "Dark Shackles" reduces strength.
  • "Trip" applies vulnerable.
• No-Sell: The right combination of cards and/or relics can make you completely immune to even the most powerful attacks — for instance, the Tungsten Rod and Apparition (or Wraith Form) cards make you invulnerable to ALL attacks, and even a Disarm card^note The weakest Strength-reduction card can reduce the Heart's "Blood Shot" attack from 2 damage 12 times to 0 damage 12 times.
• Not the Intended Use: Necronomicon comes with a drawback of adding a special curse card to your deck that's impossible to get rid of - if you exhaust it, you get another copy immediately. With renewable ways to exhaust it such as the Blue Candle and effects that trigger whenever a card is exhausted, the curse can actually be more useful to the Ironclad than the relic itself.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Blasphemy's "Die next turn" effect is coded as a buff instead of a debuff to prevent easy removal with Artifacts or Orange Pellet.
• One-Hit Kill: The Watcher card Judgment can become this. Judgment kills any enemy which currently has 30 or less HP, or 40 if upgraded. Since some enemies start with low HP, such as Spherical Guardian, Louses, Gremlins, etc., Judgment can be used to kill them straightaway. Due to its specific wording (it "sets HP to zero" rather than dealing damage or merely reducing HP) it completely bypasses all block and immunities, and is a powerful counter to Armored But Frail enemies.
• Orichalcum: You can get an ingot of it as a relic. It provides six Block at the end of your turn if you end it with zero Block.
• Our Vampires Are Different: A clan of vampires apparently have some connection to the Spire, living in the City of Act II. They offer to let you become one of them (swapping out all Strike cards in your deck with Bites, which are stronger and have Life Drain) in exchange for a third of your maximum HP. Unless you carry a Blood Vial with you, in which case you can trade that for the benefits. Also, the Defect can somehow become a vampire despite being a robot, and can still use those bite cards just fine despite not having a mouth.
• Path of Most Resistance: Elite fights are (usually) much more difficult than the regular hallway fights, but offer better rewards in the form of relics if you win. While you often can avoid most or all of the elite fights by choosing different paths, in the long run, this is typically a mistake, as you will miss out on useful relics that can help you in the later portions of the game.
• Percent Damage Attack: Act 1 boss Hexaghost always starts the fight with an attack that deals half your current HP. You can still try to block the damage, and any card that reduces enemy strength will neuter it.
• Phantasy Spelling: It's almost a running joke applied to names of various animals. Among critters encountered or mentioned are byrds, phrogs, kranes and sneckos. The last one may be the only justified example, as the creature seems to be a cross between a snake and a gecko.
• Playing with Fire: Several of the Ironclad's abilities are fire-themed, in particular his Flame Barrier Skill and his Fire Breathing Power.
• Plot Coupon That Does Something: Inverted with the blood vial - like most relics, it initially seems to have no effect on the game's plot. However, in the "Vampires(?)" event, it can be used as payment instead of sacrificing a fraction of your Max HP.
• Poisoned Weapons: The Silent has several poisoned weapons in her arsenal to dispatch her foes. Most notable are the cards Poisoned Stab, which deals damage and inflicts poison, and Envenom, which turns all attacks into this trope.
• Power at a Price:
  • All the relics that provide guaranteed Energy each turn have some downside, from not being able to play more than six cards, to not being able to rest, to not being able to see what enemies are about to do.
  • Each characters has a variation of Power card that will inflict a status effect on you. Fortunately, they can be prevented by Artifact buff, or removed by Orange Pellet relic.
    • The Ironclad has the aptly named Berserker, which temporarily makes you take more damage in exchange for an extra energy for the rest of the combat.
    • The Silent has Wraith Form, which makes you practically take no damage for a few turns, at the cost of gradually lowering your Dexterity, slowly stripping your ability to block.
    • The Defect has Biased Cognition, which grants a burst of Focus on only 1 energy but drains Focus every turn, and Reprogram, which grants bonus Strength and Dexterity at the cost of some Focus.
    • The Watcher has Fasting, which grants a load of Strength and Dexterity, while causing you to have less energy for the rest of the combat.
• Power Up Letdown: Some upgrades are so underwhelming that not only are they not worth the hassle, but it's debatable if they're even an improvement over the original card:
  • Upgrades that remove Ethereal (which makes the card exhaust if it's left unused in your hand at the end of your turn) for cards like Echo Form and Deva Form. The problem is that if you don't want to play the card on the first cycle through your deck, you probably don't want to play it on the second either, so it's a good thing that it goes away on its own instead of continuing to clog your deck.
  • Upgrades that add Innate to cards like Tools of the Trade or Brutality. Being guaranteed to see them in your opening hand is not great in fights where you don't want to play them anyway and they just end up wasting a hand slot on turn 1.
  • The upgrade for Rainbow removes Exhaust, enabling you to use it multiple times in the same fight. The problem is that while the card is a quick way to fill orb slots early in the fight, the effect isn't great on later on.
• Psi Blast: Mind Blast is a colourless, uncommon card that has your character shoot a cone of mental energy out of their heads. This can easily be one of the deadliest attacks in the game as its damage is based on how many cards are in your draw pile and it's innate. With a large deck and certain relics, you can easily do hundreds of points of damage in a single blast.
• Random Drop: Every time you win a fight, you get a small amount of gold, a selection from one of three cards to add to your deck, and occasionally a potion. Elite enemies and bosses also drop relics.
• Randomized Transformation: The "Face Trader" event where you can choose to swap your face for something new. The effects are randomized and there are 2 good heads and 2 bad heads, while the fifth one is a Joke Item which has you yell out something along the lines of "CACAAW!" at the start of each combat.
• Religious Robot: While not stated as following any specific religion, there are hints that The Defect is at the least a seeker of spiritual enlightenment. The art for the card White Noise depicts them kneeling in a prayer-like posture contemplating a glowing orb, while the cloak they wear resembles vestments worn by numerous priesthoods.
• Reviving Enemy: One possible encounter in Act III is a group of three Darklings, which each have an innate Life Link status; if any other enemies are alive two turns after they die, they'll revive with half of their health restored. Having all three Darklings be dead at the same time will end the battle.
• Save Scumming: Played with, as soon as you make any decisions about where to move on the map or what choices to make in an event they are locked in. However by using the save and quit option mid-battle then choosing continue from the main screen any battle can be restarted and your draw order will change if you play different cards out of your opening hand.
• Scratch Damage: Averted in general, as reducing Strength or gaining Weakness can cause both your attacks as well as your enemies' to do zero damage. However, in the case of the status buff Intangible, it's played straight: It reduces all incoming attack damage to exactly 1, no more, no less, regardless of how powerful the attack would be normally.
• Secret Final Campaign: After beating Act 3 with all of the characters, you unlock the ability to access Act 4 in subsequent runs.
• Secret Test of Character: You can encounter an old beggar, dying of disease. If you give him the money he asks for, he will reveal himself to be Cleric, who will reward you for passing his test. ^note It's only a secret test for the character. As the player, you are told that you will be rewarded for donating the money.
• Shoot the Medic First: Subverted. One of the encounters is Centurion (an armored knight) and Mystic (a robed healer). Centurion has more health and starts using a powerful multi-hit attack instead of blocking if Mystic dies first.
• Shout-Out: Quite a few, including (but not limited to):
  • All For One - shares the name with a villain in My Hero Academia and depicts the Defect in a pose similar to All Might's signature punches.
  • All-Out Attack card — a cartoony cloud with fists popping out of it, similar to those caused by the moves of the same name in the later Persona games.
  • Bullet Time card — Neo stopping bullets in The Matrix.
  • Happy Flower relic — Sunflower in Plants vs. Zombies.
  • Centennial Puzzle relic — the Millennium Puzzle in Yu-Gi-Oh!.
  • Unceasing Top relic — Cobb's spinning top in Inception. The custom mode that has you start with it is even called "Inception".
  • Enchiridion relic — has a picture of a sword on the cover and belonged to an ancient lich, just like the one in Adventure Time.
  • Smiling Mask relic — the Happy Mask Salesman from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
    • The Fairy in a Jar potion only gets used if you die and restores a bit of life when you do, just like having a bottled fairy in The Legend of Zelda.
  • Runic Cube relic — the Puzzle Box from Hellraiser.
  • The playtester art for the Boot Sequence card depicts the Defect hanging out in Kuribo's Shoe from Super Mario Bros. 3, and the Boot relic is the boot in question.
  • Inserter relic — a standard inserter from Factorio.
  • The "Die Die Die" card — a reference to Reaper's voiceline when using his ultimate ability in Overwatch. The card's effect (heavily damaging all enemies) is also similar, and it's a Silent card, who has similar fashion sense to Reaper.
  • Fossilized Helix — a reference to the Helix Fossil from Pokémon and how it became memetic from Twitch Plays Pokémon.
  • Toxic Egg — a reference to the Xenomorph egg on the poster of Alien.
  • One of the merchant's quotes is "Stay a while and listen!"
    • Another is "It's dangerous to go alone. Give me all your gold!"
  • The Limit Break card lifts its name directly from Final Fantasy, and the radiating aura depicted on the image greatly resembles the visual effect of Limit Break activation in Final Fantasy VIII.
  • The relic Chemical X could just be a reference to any bit of mad science, but when you look at the description in the in game archive, it includes a warning not to combine with sugar, spice, and everything nice.
  • Choosing to settle down and read the book you find in a library will randomly select between a book about a girl with insect powers who wants to be a superhero, involving complex issues and perspectives, a man who journeyed beyond the stars and found himself stuck on a desolate foreign planet. Ingenuity, luck, perseverance, and humor to retain his sanity were his tools to return home, or a story that takes place in a giant isolated building underground as the outside conditions have become unbearable, mired with conspiracies, propaganda, and injustice.
  • The Snecko and Bronze Automaton have attacks called Tail Whip and Hyper Beam, which work identically to the Pokémon moves of the same name.
  • One of The Watcher's ability cards is Reach Heaven, which adds a card called Through Violence to the hand. Reach Heaven Through Violence is a common mantra in Kill Six Billion Demons as well as the 36 Lessons of Vivec.
  • The uncommon relic Meat on the Bone, the sprite, and the specific way it's worded is a reference to a particularly infamous meme from Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair.
  • The Specimen is a direct reference to Kaiman of Dorohedoro.
  • The Watcher's Establishment card's beta art imitates a famous Spider-Man meme.
  • One of the game’s rare relics is a Prismatic Shard.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Some uncommon or rare cards (blue or gold border respectively) have simple effects that are universally useful.
  • Offering for the Ironclad and Adrenaline for the Silent, both notably Rare cards as opposed to common ones that may be found under Boring, but Practical. Adrenaline is a zero-cost card that gains one energy (two upon upgrading it), draws two cards, and then exhausts itself. Offering is a stronger version with a (potential) drawback — sacrifice six HP (which may synergize with other Ironclad cards) for two energy and three (five when upgraded) draw.
  • Madness is an uncommon colorless card. Un-upgraded, it costs one energy, but makes a random card in your hand cost zero energy for the rest of combat. Upgraded, it costs zero energy. In longer fights, you can save amazing amounts of energy, especially by using Madness on a card that costs 3 or more.
  • Decks which use a bunch of zero cost attacks such as Shivs (for the Silent) and Anger (for the Ironclad) are generally pretty easy to build up in any given run, can be easily boosted by Strength stacking or in the case of Shivs, have a host of cards which play into that archetype. The only thing that makes them inconsistent is that there are several Boss and Elite enemies in Acts II and III designed to punish these decks, but an experienced player can sometimes work around it.
• Sinister Geometry: Several enemies, including a pair of level bosses, are geometric shapes that attack.
• Sleepy Enemy: The elite enemy "Lagavulin" will sleep for the first three rounds of combat, or until it loses HP (either by being dealt more than 8 damage in a turn to break through its block, or by applying a status that causes unblockable HP loss); whichever comes first.
• So Last Season: One of the choices of the Act 3 Mind Bloom event lets you fight an Act 1 boss with all the cards/relics/upgrades/etc. that you've collected since then. This is also usually seen as the best choice ^note Winning earns you a rare relic and normal fight rewards, whereas the other choices upgrade your cards but prevent healing, give you lots of gold but give you two curses that prevent you from playing more than 3 cards when you draw it, and heal you but gives you a curse that weakens your attack when you draw it in part because a run that made it to Act 3 can easily obliterate an Act 1 boss.
• Space Whale: It's not clear where she's actually from, but the many-eyed whale-like creature called Neow that greets you every time you resurrect at the Exordium seems to fit this trope. Neow is actually the one who resurrects you, as one event reveals.
• Spam Attack:
  • The Silent can do this with a shiv-focused deck. Shivs deal only 4 damage^note At least at first. The Accuracy Power card boosts Shiv damage by 4 (6 if upgraded) and the Wrist Blade relic boosts the damage of all 0-cost Attack cards by 4. but are free and generated by certain Silent cards. There is an achievement for generating ten or more shivs in a single round.
  • The Defect can adopt a Claw-based deck, which focuses mostly on the common Claw card (which begins with 3 damage and increases the damage of all Claw cards by 2 per use) and scaling it up in damage while supporting it with cards to increase how often Claw shows up in the hand, like with All For One and Scrape.
• Speed Run Reward:
  • The game has two score bonuses for completing a run in under 60 minutes and 45 minutes (though the latter overrides the former). These two, along with other score bonuses, help you progress towards the next level and unlock new cards and relics, so it counts as Actually Advantageous until everything is unlocked, at which point it becomes Completely Cosmetic.
  • Completely Cosmetic: The Speed Climber achievement is unlocked by completing a run in under 20 minutes.
  • Inverted by the Secret Portal event in Act 3, which lets you skip straight to the boss and is potentially useful if you already have a good build to end the run quicker. It can only appear from an Act 3 ? Room if more than 13 minutes and 20 seconds had elapsed on the current run.
• Squishy Wizard: The Defect, to an extent. He was much more squishy when first introduced, but has slowly gotten better defensive options over time; even so, his defenses tend to be more situational or limited than the other two characters, or take more time to set up.
• Status Effects: Takes two forms in this game. The first are what you might expect, taking place only in combat and doing things like boosting/reducing damage, increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of attacks and defenses, and so on. The second are status cards, which are forced into your deck by enemies (or occasionally your own cards) that are similar to Curse cards (unplayable cards that give your deck dead draws and sometimes have a negative effect if they're in your hand at the end of turn), but go away at the end of the battle. Unless you got them put into your deck by an event, which has them stuck there until removed.
• Story Breadcrumbs: The game doesn't offer much plot up front, aside from "you're an adventurer, ascend the Spire and slay it". Bits of information about the world, the characters' backstories, and the nature of your quest can be found scattered around various random events and some relic descriptions.
• The Strategist:
  • The Silent. With cards such as Well-Laid Plans, Escape Plan, Prepared, and Concentrate, it would seem the Silent relies quite a bit on advance planning. The Silent in general has a lot of cards which can manipulate Energy and the hand, be it trading power now for power later, Discard and Draw, or even retaining cards between turns instead of discarding at the end of the turn.
  • The Watcher also falls under this. While she doesn't have the level of card cycling and energy gain as the Silent, she has multiple cards that retain themselves, with many becoming stronger or cheaper over multiple turns, can Scry cards to see her next card draw and remove potential "dead cards", and cards which enhance or is enhanced depending on which type of card you played last turn. Much of her game plan involves cycling between stances, going into Calm stance for energy gain later and going into Wrath stance to deal extra damage and exiting out to avoid taking more damage.
• Stylistic Suck: Beating Act IV with a character will let you replace the artwork on their cards with its equivalent from the beta version of the game. Except not every card has such artwork, so to fill in the gaps, those cards use fan-submitted artwork instead, most of which is deliberately, hilariously terrible and includes some Visual Pun (i.e. Reckless Charge depicts a stickman buying a lot of things at once with a credit card and just about every card with "Strike" on the text involving picket signs).
• Super Mode: Invoked with the Watcher's Divinity Stance. While in it, you gain a lot of energy and you deal triple damage, but it only lasts a single turn. It's also hard to acquire, as you need to either build up 10 Mantra or play Blasphemy, which kills you when you end your turn.
  • As well, each climber has one unique "Form" Power that gives the player a huge boost to their combat prowess. Demon Form causes Ironclad to gain two strength every turn, Wraith Form gives Silent two stacks of Intangibility but plummets her Dexterity, Echo Form causes Defect's first card per turn to be played twice, and Watcher's Deva Form causes her to gain one energy, which increases by one each turn.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The narration for the Golden Idol event (where you see a Golden Idol on a pedestal and have the option to take it in exchange for triggering a trap) says "you sure don't see any traps around here."
• Sword and Fist: A great deal of the Ironclad's attack cards involve decking the opponent, either implied through the card art (Anger) or the name of the card outright (Uppercut, Clothesline).
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Each of the Act III bosses are designed to punish one particular deck type via specific Strength gain: The Time Eater counters Spam Attack decks (it counts the amount of cards played over time, ending the player's turn and gaining Strength for every twelfth card played), The Awakened One counters Power-based decks (it gains one Strength for every Power played before its second form), and Deca and Donu counter slow damage and Gathering Steam decks (Donu's Strength buffs can stack up very fast if it isn't killed early into the fight). Since your deck should be taking shape by Act III, this can mean matching the "wrong" boss will make for a really troublesome final fight. And if that wasn't bad enough: on Ascension 20, you have to fight two bosses out of three, and the second one is unknown until you face it.
• A Taste of Power: Playing a customizable game will not progress your story, but it allows you to alter the rules of a character including allowing them to use the other character's cards, start with a rare relic, ignore path branches and etc. One great thing is that customizable games do count towards a character's locked cards and relics.
• Time-Limit Boss: On turn 16, and every 3 turns afterwards, the Corrupt Heart will gain 50 strength, which will make its Blood Shots attack overwhelm even the maximum block of 999. The chances of having the tools needed to survive even one such attack is so unlikely that it effectively functions as a turn limit against the player.
• Took a Shortcut: When you encounter the merchant in Act 4, before the Spear/Shield and the Heart, one of his lines lampshades the fact that he made it that far.
• True Final Boss: The Corrupt Heart at the top of the Spire can be challenged in the hidden Act IV, if you complete all the necessary requirements (including first beating the game with the base three characters). It's hard, as is appropriate for this trope, and will challenge even some of the most powerful builds, though you never have to fight it to progress Ascensions.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It is possible to exhaust or remove your entire deck and have nothing to play, leaving you only able to end turn until your enemy put you out of your misery. However, doing so requires a great deal of luck (there are only so many opportunities to remove cards, and in an average game you may only see a couple) and/or effort (getting exhaust cards, getting them to exhaust your whole deck and also themselves, not dying in the process) and will almost never happen in regular play.
• Uniqueness Rule: Downplayed. While you can pick up as many copies of a card as you want (assuming you can find them), your score gets the Highlander bonus if your deck contains no duplicates outside of basic cards.
• Unwinnable: Possible due to the Lagavulin's Siphon Soul ability, which reduces strength and dexterity. If a player's means of damage is all tied to weak direct attacks, and they dawdle too much in this fight, their strength will eventually diminish to the point that all of their attacks do zero damage. Even if they keep themselves defended in a way that is not tied to dexterity, they'll be stuck in a fight they cannot win.
• Unwinnable by Design: It's theorized that even with perfect play, some seeds are probably completely unwinnable: on high ascensions, the Silent mathematically cannot do damage fast enough to kill Lagavulin with her starter deck, and it's plausible, though extremely rare, that a seed may contain an early forced Lagavulin fight with no additional damage sources dropping beforehand. Only one such seed is known to exist, as detailed here.
• Unstoppable Rage: The Watcher's main gimmick is going into a flying rage that doubles her attack, but also doubles the attack of enemies, and doesn't go away on its own, requiring her to enter a different stance (most commonly Calm) to stop it.
• Very Punchable Man: One of the events you can encounter in any Act is a special shop with a very obnoxious shopkeeper, whom your character instantly desires to punch in the face. Giving in to said urge is not recommended, since it deals some Scratch Damage to you for no benefit and the shop provides useful services.
• Why Am I Ticking?: The Silent's Corpse Explosion card debuffs an enemy so that on dying, it will explode, doing its maximum HP as damage to any other enemies. The debuff can also be stacked, making the explosion more powerful.
• Worldbuilding: The player has to piece together exactly what is going on from vague interactions, such as who is Neow, who the Cultists are, what the Spire is, and so on.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Several of the Ironclad's cards involve him uppercutting, clotheslining, body slamming, or even dropkicking his enemies. Even The Silent gets in on it with flying knees, leg sweeps, or heel hooks (which somehow still manage to work on monsters without legs).
• Zonk: One event gives you the chance to sacrifice a card to the spirits in exchange for a reward. If you "sacrifice" a curse (a card that does nothing but hurt you), your "reward" — aside from getting the curse out of your deck — is the Spirit Poop, a relic which has no effect beyond giving you a negligible -1 to your final score.

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