YMMV / Slay the Spire

• Awesome Music:
  • The Heart, which plays during the fight with the True Final Boss.
  • Mind Bloom, a Dark Reprise of The Guardian Emerges, the first boss theme. This track only plays during the event of the same name in Act 3. If the player chooses "I am War", they fight a boss from Act 1 for a Rare Relic. Characters who survive up to Act 3 can usually take down the boss with ease — and Mind Bloom's menacing tone reflects that perfectly.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The Defect has 4 types of orbs to play with. However, due to this game's roguelike nature and scarceness of healing options, most players prefer to build toward Frost orbs for their ability to grant block. Made worse that a Frost orb build is regarded as the only reliable way to win on higher Ascension. The reception for this is quite mixed, as some players find it boring to build toward Frost orbs game after game just to win a run.
  • The Watcher's "stance dancing" deck is very easy to put together, can easily include an infinite loop combo, and is just plain stronger than most of the other things the Watcher can do. As a result, the most effective way to play Watcher involves never, ever taking a huge portion of her card pool; they're "useful but fair" cards that other characters would absolutely love to have in their decks, but the Watcher has absolutely no need to play fair.
  • Some events have options that rarely get chosen:
    • The Secret Portal can take you directly to the Act 3 boss, but most players don't bother with it because it's unlikely that your deck will be good enough to beat the game (especially if you're going for Act 4) while not being good enough that it can get through Act 3 and benefit from it.
    • The Mind Bloom event has four possible options, but most players choose I am War, which has you fight an Act 1 boss for a Rare Relic and 50 Gold in addition to the normal rewards. This option has little risk (the only real problem is that Hexaghost's second turn can be scary, since its damage scales with your HP) and good rewards. In contrast, all of the other options have terrible downsides: I am Awake upgrades all your cards at the cost of disabling all kinds of healing, and is generally too risky unless you're very confident that a fully-upgraded deck will make you all but invincible. I am Rich gives you a bunch of gold, but two crippling Normality curses, which makes them awkward to remove. I am Healthy gives you a full heal for a less bad curse, but is still not worth it (especially if your current health is high) unless you're worried about dying to the Act 1 boss or are running a curse build.
    • Players often avoid options that give curses or even a chance of a curse (agreeing with The Ssssserpent or desecrating the Golden Shrine for gold, taking the random relic in Big Fish, Pleading Vagrant or the Mausoleum, healing for 25% in Winding Halls, choosing the curse option over losing HP or max HP while taking the Golden Idol, or choosing the curse over taking damage in Forgotten Altar). Success in the game depends on drawing good cards, and a Deck Clogger is very bad. Even if you can remove it immediately, it means missing out on a chance to remove a crappy basic card and improving the chance of seeing your good cards.
• Demonic Spiders: Pretty much every Elite enemy in the game is this, although you do get rewarded with a Relic if you come out on top.
  • Act I Elites:
    • Lagavulin is probably the roughest Elite you can get. Dealing 18 damage two turns in a row is already rather dangerous (and that's its base strength, not taking Ascension bonuses into account), but every third turn, it will use Siphon Soul to reduce your Strength and Dexterity by one (two on Ascension 18 and above), so playing a long defensive game is discouraged even further. Unless you got particularly lucky with your card choices (or you're playing as Silent and you poison/block it to death), prepare to have your life get slashed in half from this fight alone. The one mercy you're given is that Lagavulin starts asleep until it loses HP or three turns have passed, giving you time to prepare Powers and buffs/debuffs… but if you encounter it during the "Dead Adventurer" event, it's awake from the get-go and starts with Siphon Soul.
    • Gremlin Nob is also a potential run-ender, especially on Ascension. Not only does it hit hard from the jump, but it'll also constantly make you vulnerable in order to hit you even harder. And if you try to block? It has an ability that raises its Strength for every Skill card you use. It does spend turn 1 setting up its buff, giving the player a short grace period to strike hard for a head-start or set up their buffs, but after that, the fight just amounts to a constant stream of pain where trying to mitigate the incoming damage more often than not just makes things worse.
    • Sentries don't hit as hard as either of their fellow Act I Elites, but compensates by shuffling a bunch of Dazes into your discard pile. If you don't kill one of the outer Sentries by the time your deck reshuffles, you'll find yourself not drawing enough Defends to avoid taking a double-dose of lasers in the face. The fight also tends to drag on, especially if you haven't enabled Fast Mode.
  • Act II Elites:
    • The Taskmaster and his two Slavers. Solid damage output from each enemy on top of inflicting you with various status effects (one of which disables your attack cards for a turn), and you have an encounter that only needs a slight health buff to become a proper boss fight. To add insult to injury, the three enemies are almost guaranteed to all attack on the first turn (unlike the Gremlin Leader, who buffs her minions, or the Book of Stabbing, which starts off with a softball attack) with roughly thirty damage at the beginning and continuing similar amounts of damage throughout the fight. On higher Ascensions, the Taskmaster shuffles three Wounds into your deck and gains Strength every turn.
    • The Gremlin Leader squad, featuring this 160 HP Elite and up to three randomly-summoned Gremlin minions (two of which spawn at the very beginning of the fight). She's very much a prototype for the (potential) boss for the act, the Collector. Take too long to kill the main enemy, and she'll crush you with multi-hit, high damage attacks, but if the minions aren't cleared, they will get buffed by the main enemy, and they themselves have a variety of annoying effects. The Gremlin Leader will also continually re-summon Gremlins as needed.
    • The Book of Stabbing is pretty brutal for unprepared decks. It can and will quickly shred even a full-HP character with high-damage attacks every turn, and has a huge health pool compared to other Elites in Act 2. While it's more vulnerable to statuses like Weak than other Elites, it's fully capable of killing you in a handful of turns before you draw a card to inflict the status, and every unblocked hit will clog your deck with Wounds.
  • Act III Elites:
    • The Giant Head is brutal. It starts out pretty easy with some weak attacks and debuffs, but it counts down by one every turn, and after five turns it starts dishing out increasingly high damage attack (notably not through Strength gain, and it uses single hits, so debuffs can only help so much). Topping it off is a total of 500 hitpoints, higher than every boss except Awakened One's two forms combined and the Corrupt Heart. It has the unique Slow status that makes cards deal more damage as you play more in a single turn, which is helpful for Spam Attack builds with the Silent and the Defect, but other builds and the Ironclad are going to dread finding it instead of the other two Elites.
    • The Reptomancer, while not nearly as tanky, more than makes up for it with the ability to do massive damage nearly every turn, whether she's attacking you herself or summoning daggers that attack for massive damage after 2 turns. This gives you a Sadistic Choice similar to that of Gremlin Leader. Do you kill the minions to stop their big attacks, leaving the main enemy to summon more and attack you, or do you try to rush down the main enemy and just wait for the daggers to kill themselves, but attacking you for dozens of HP in the process? Whichever one you try to do is made a lot harder by the fact that Reptomancer can apply Weak to you, which makes you have to spend more cards killing the daggers and take longer to kill the main enemy.
    • Nemesis has around the same HP as the Reptomancer, but his gimmick is becoming Intangible every other turn, which will reduce the damage of all your attacks against him to 1. This is especially troublesome if you draw a lot of attack cards on the turn he becomes Intangible, as you likely won't have the block necessary to mitigate the damage from his attacks. His multi-hit attack isn’t as painful to deal with, but he can also use an attack that deals far more damage at 45. Not to mention that he can use a debuff that shuffles 3 burn cards (5 on Ascension 18 and above) into your discard pile. Having to wait for the right moment to deal a lot of damage in a single turn can be very tough when he can force you on the defensive thanks to his heavily damaging attack, and you can't afford to let the fight drag on too long, as those burns will not only damage you, but also clutter up your deck to severely interfere with your card draw.
  • Act II in general has a lot of surprisingly challenging combinations of enemies:
    • The Chosen is an enemy that appears on its own and alongside a Cultist or Byrd (which themselves are Goddamned Bats). It has a pretty high HP bar (as much as Gremlin Nob, an Act 1 Elite) and inflicts you with a unique status effect called Hex that shuffles a Dazed into your draw pile whenever you play a non-attack card (yes, that includes Powers). This would be manageable aside from the fact that if you play too many skills on the turn before your deck reshuffles, you could end up with a hand full of Dazeds. There are no other Act 2 enemies, not even Elites or Bosses, that shuffle status into your draw pile, so you may not be prepared for it. On top of all the status cards clogging up your deck, you also have to deal with Weak, Vulnerable, Strength gain, and an attack that hits for 18 damage base, but likely a lot more factoring Strength and Vulnerable. Even worse, on Ascension 17+, he starts with Hex first, making it almost impossible to kill him before your deck gets overrun with status.
    • The Snake Plant is another enemy with relatively high HP that is incredibly painful to deal with. It will either deal 7 damage to you 3 times (8 damage 3 times on Ascension 2 and above) or it will use Enfeebling Spores to inflict Frail and Weakened on you for 2 turns. It also has Malleable, which grants block to it every time it is attacked, starting at 3 block and increasing by 1 for each attack, resetting at the end of your turn. This makes the Snake Plant tough to break through, especially after it uses Enfeebling Spores, and because its attack hits hard, it's going to be rough trying to mitigate the damage it dishes out as well.
    • One particularly noteworthy one is the Shelled Parasite and Fungi Beast, two enemies that are relatively tame on their own, but cover the other's downside well. The Shelled Parasite is a damage sponge that can generate high amounts of block every turn, but it doesn't ever get any stronger and deals manageable damage, making it a low-priority target. Meanwhile, the Fungi Beast is a squishy enemy that attacks for pitiful amounts of damage, at first. Leave it too long, and it will grow its strength to formidable levels, and likely get a few powerful hits in before you can focus it down. But when you do kill it, it applies Vulnerable to you, increasing the damage of other enemies. Luckily, in Act I, the monsters there aren't especially dangerous, so you don't have to worry too much about taking damage. Enter the Shelled Parasite. If you kill the Parasite first, which will take a long time, you're leaving the Fungi Beast free to grow its strength and attack you for massive damage. If you kill the Fungi Beast first, you now have to deal with a Lightning Bruiser Shelled Parasite that can attack you for 20+ damage per turn while itself taking just as long to kill as ever.
  • The double Gremlin Nob fight in Act 2's colosseum event was sure death if you couldn't put out enough damage fast enough, but at least it was optional and rewarding. The fight was eventually reworked to have only one Nob and a Taskmaster.
  • The short-lived Mystic/Snecko/Mystic fight in Act 3 was a pain. The Snecko of course used its signature "Confused" gimmick on you, which meant you risked having bad turns through no fault of your own if the RNG gave you a hand of expensive cards. This was obnoxious when combined with Mystics spamming heals on every enemy, which dragged out the battle and increased the chance of getting bad RNG eventually — which was extra bad because the Snecko kept applying Vulnerable and the Mystics kept buffing every enemy, so you could take a lot of damage from a single bad turn. Thankfully, the encounter was removed due to its poor reception.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Cleric, a friendly healer found in Act I events. He is capable of removing cards pretty cheaply early on, making thin decks much easier to build. More than that, he's Big Fun with a constant cheery smile that's hard to dislike. He also shows up in Act II dressed as a beggar, and will reward you the same way for passing his Secret Test of Character.
  • The Cultists and their crow-like quirkiness are beloved by the fanbase.
• Fan Nickname
  • The boss "Awakened One" is commonly referred to by fans as "Woke Bloke".
  • "Orb Walker", an enemy in Act 3, is also called the "Push Up Bros" due to their animation and ability to gain Strength every turn.
  • "Shelled Parasite", an enemy in Act 2, is sometimes referred as "Avocado".
  • "Fungi Beast", an enemy in Act 1 and 2, is sometimes referred to as "Rat". Combining this with Shelled Parasite's nickname, the Act 2 encounter featuring both enemies is sometimes called "Avocado Rat".
  • The Ironclad's name is sometimes shortened to just "Clad". Some of his fans also like calling him "The Ironchad" or just "Chad".
  • "Time Eater" is often called "Time Cop".
• Funny Moments:
  • Finishing off Donu (an Act III boss) with Feed (deals damage and, if it kills an enemy, raises your max HP) nets you an achievement/trophy. Its name? "Oooh Donut".
  • The Cave Fisher event if you chose the relic. The event goes that three objects dangle in front of you. You can choose the banana (regain hit points), the donut (increase max hit points), or the box (gain a relic but add the Regret curse to your deck). Regret is one of the more dangerous curses, forcing you to lose one hit point for every card left in your hand at the end of the turn. But what is it you regret? You really wanted that donut!
  • Several of the beta cards are rife with Visual Puns and in-jokes. The most famous is probably the Defect's "Boot Sequence" card◊. Watcher's beta art in particular is filled to the brim with memes.
  • The Cultist's "Caw caw!" The player will shout it if they win a Mask from Face Trader or consume the Cultist Potion. The Cultist will sometimes shout as the battle begins: "MY POWER IS UNMATCHED!" When he dies, he'll mumble, "My power was matched."
  • The Corrupt Heart's Blood Shots attack is very fearsome, as it hits 12 or 15 times on higher Ascensions, especially once it stacks a lot of strength. But because it hits so many times, you can turn the tables on it by using either Thorns or if you're playing as the Defect, Static Discharge, which is a power card that channels one lightning orb every time you receive unblocked attack damage (two lightning orbs when upgraded). If you can stomach the hits and do enough stacking with those aforementioned methods, you can watch the Corrupt Heart damage itself over and over, potentially killing itself with the attack that normally makes it so dreadful to go up against.
• Game-Breaker: Now has its own page.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This game is very popular in China. Many of them bought and played the game even before any localisation was available in the game.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Byrds use multi-hit attacks, which scale rapidly with strength buffs (which they can apply to themselves), and need to be hit three times in the same turn to stun them, which you might not even be capable of doing by early Act 2. On higher ascensions, they start with strength buffs and need to be hit four times, upgrading them to Demonic Spiders status to the point that they're more difficult than many boss fights. They do tend to shred themselves if you can get Thorns, though.
  • Any enemy that can build up block on their turn is going to take a while to wear down. Enemies with innate block-granting buffs are even worse, such as Spheric Guardians (Barricade lets them maintain block between turns, and they start with a lot of block, and even poisoning them takes a while because they have a few stacks of Artifact to prevent status effects), Shelled Parasites (Plated Armor gives them a set amount of block every turn, decreasing as they take hits to their health), and Snake Plants/Writhing Masses (Malleable lets them refresh block in increasing amounts as they take health hits, resetting after their turn). The Defect will be very happy to have Melter for taking them out.
  • Writhing Masses deserve extra mention for their other obnoxious effect. Most enemies don't change their turn action except in special circumstances, but the Writhing Mass changes it whenever it's attacked. Taking too many risks can lead to a weak attack becoming much stronger with no way to change it again, forcing decks that use a low amount of attack cards to play slowly. Making things worse is that its one action that isn't an attack causes it to stick a Curse into your deck (the only enemy that can do this); it can only use it once, but a Curse in Act III is especially unfortunate since there aren't many opportunities left to remove it. It doesn't help that the specific curse in question, Parasite, actively punishes you for removing it.
  • The "Shape" enemies found in Act III battles. All three variants of them have low health, but they appear in groups of two (possibly alongside a Spheric Guardian) or four and come with annoying effects. Repulsors can fill your deck and discard pile with Dazed cards and Exploders explode for heavy damage on their third turn, but Spikers are the worst; they come with the Thorns buff and can keep building it, making it difficult to use area-of-effect attacks on the whole group. If a Spiker is left alive for too long, expect to spend a while trying to buff your block high enough to wear it down without maiming yourself in the process.
  • Darklings come in packs of three and need to all be dead at the same time for the battle to be finished. They revive themselves at half-health two turns after dying if one is left standing. If you have to take one out before the others to avoid damage, it's easy to get caught in a cycle of continually killing each one.
  • "Minion" enemies are annoyances in any battles they appear in, especially if you lack good area-of-effect cards to take them out alongside their summoner.
• Good Bad Bug: Node glitching, indispensable for speedrunning. See details here.
• High-Tier Scrappy: The Intangible buff. It makes each incoming hit deal 1 damage, making a big, single hit attack trivial. Many players do think that it is too powerful and makes the game too trivial, being something that could just be popped with minimal thinking to not lose a fight. The other camp argues that it is not a common thing to come by, coming from only four sources: Apparition, a card from an event that you have to trade half of your max HP for; Wraith Form, a rare and costly card for the Silent, a character that is notoriously squishy and tends to have fights that lasts longer (and if you haven't won by the time Wraith Form's Intangible buff wears off, you're in big trouble due to its time-scaling Dexterity debuff); Ghost in a Jar, a rare potion exclusive to the Silent; or Incense Burner, a relic that makes you Intangible every 6 turns and doesn't give the buff on demand.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Now has its own page.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Calipers would be good here. ^ExplanationCalipers is a relic that functions as a pseudo-Barricade, making it highly effective when your deck is occasionally capable of generating immense amounts of Block in a single turn.
  • X is a block card. ^ExplanationThe community often likes to joke that virtually '''anything' can be a block card, because it gives you health or mitigates damage in some roundabout way.
    • Reaper is a block card.
    • Wrath is a block card.
    • Centurion and Mystic is a block card^ExplanationThis is considered to be the easiest Act 2 encounter a player can get, as the Centurion tends to focus on blocking the Mystic, while the Mystic will start healing once you damage the enemies. As such, the offensive pressure is much lower than in many of the other encounters.
  • Claw is Law. ^ExplanationClaw, a common 0-cost Defect attack card that gains damage every time a Claw is played, is considered a bit of a trap. It encourages players to try to force a build around Claws and their synergies, which — like most deck forcing — usually fails. However, it is also considered fun, and when it works, it works spectacularly, and so the meme arose that it must always be taken on sight.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Many players dislike playing with the Runic Dome due to its drawback/gimmick of hiding enemy intents. Unless you have a deck that doesn't care what the enemies are doing (e.g. a Barricade/Body Slam deck that wants to block even if no one is attacking), memorize the enemy patterns, or are willing to check the wiki constantly while playing,^note or install a mod that shows them in the game taking it will result in disaster. The former doesn't happen a lot, and the latter two are generally not considered very fun.
  • Even though the game is reasonably fair to the player during events and gives them a fair trade-off even if they're forced to hurt themselves, there are a few that will disadvantage them no matter what.
    • The "Falling" event from Act 3. Your character takes a fall and is forced to pick one of three cards to lose, with no other way out. Though people aiming to keep their decks thin can get lucky and be able to get rid of cards they don't need, there's no guarantee it won't make you pick between three cards you do need. It is especially nasty for a player that has already trimmed their deck down for a specific combo, as this event could take away a key card that enables said combo, and there will be very few remaining chances to add another copy to the deck. In particular, the event is notorious for ruining Minimalist attempts, which requires you to build a tiny (5 cards or less) combo deck.
    • Act 3 has three possible bosses, each with its own ability to counter a specific type of deck (Donu and Deca scales too fast for a Gathering Steam deck, Awakened One punishes a power deck, and Time Eater punishes an infinite and/or low-cost, card-spamming deck). The thing is, the player will never know which of these three will be their Act 3 boss until they reached the Act. If the deck that they had built is countered by the boss they will face, it could spell the end of a run for them.
    • The Wheel of Change event, which has a one-third chance to give an unfavorable result, one of which deals unavoidable damage to the player. You could be low on health after an Elite with the only way forward being a question mark, and if you low-roll, you're dead. While it is not the only event that could kill the player, most of them can be skipped and do not rely on chance like this one.
    • The Forgotten Altar event in Act 2 will either be the best or worst event depending on whether you have the Golden Idol from Act 1 or not. If you do, you can turn it into the Bloody Idol which heals you 5 HP whenever you gain gold, which is very useful since you'll be gaining gold after each combat and during certain events. If you don't, you're forced to choose between losing a big chunk of your HP to increase your max HP or getting a Decay curse, which — on top of being a curse — causes you to lose 2 HP at the end of your turn. Neither of those outcomes are favorable to the player most of the time, especially during the Difficulty Spike that is Act 2.
    • The Winding Halls event in Act 3 is generally disliked. Your character finds themselves lost in a labyrinth with madness inducing voices, and you're forced to choose between receiving 2 Madness cards^note reduces the energy cost of a random card in your hand to 0 for this combat at the cost of your health, healing your HP and getting a Writhe curse, or losing a small amount of your max HP. The extra Madness cards are unreliable and take up space in your deck, making them typically not worth the health loss. Meanwhile, Writhe is considered one of the worst curses in the game next to Normality because it starts in your hand for each combat, which severely cripples your first turn. While losing max HP is never a good thing, the third option is still usually the "best" choice that most players end up picking.
• That One Achievement: Oooh, Donut requires you to defeat Donu (an Act 3 boss alongside Deca) with a Feed card (a golden card exclusive to the Ironclad). This is basically a Luck-Based Mission, as you'll need to have both the Feed card and Donu & Deca as the Act 3 boss of your run. Even if you play Ascension 20 to fight two Act 3 bosses, you might still end up with both the Time Eater and the Awakened One, which means no chance to get the achievement for that run.
• That One Attack: Hexaghost's first attack hits six times, which will hit very hard for newer players who go into this fight with high HP. This is because this attack scales accordingly depending on how much HP you currently have. Once you know this, it's easy to plan around this attack by taking a certain amount of damage before entering this boss fight. However, this attack becomes much more painful to deal with if you're forced to recover HP right before this fight due to certain relics or being forced to rest, if the Hexaghost has strength buffs from the Philosopher's Stone if you swapped your starting relic for this boss relic, or if you're playing with the Lethality mod, which has both you and your enemies start each combat with +3 strength.
• That One Boss:
  • Act 3 bosses are designed so that any of them can be "That One Boss" depending on the deck you build.
    • Every time you play a card, the Time Eater's counter of 12 ticks down, and when it reaches zero, your turn ends automatically and it gains Strength. Not only does it require you to be extra careful about what cards you play, but if you've built a deck around playing large numbers of cards (such as a Silent relying on A Thousand Cuts or After Image), you're going to be in trouble. On top of this, once you reduce it below 50% health, it Turns Red, removing all debuffs on it and healing back to 50% health, making things like stacking poison considerably more annoying.
    • Every time you play a Power, the Awakened One gains Strength. This isn't a huge issue for decks with only one or two important powers in them, but decks that rely on playing lots of powers (such as most Defect decks) will be very unhappy to see them.
    • Deca and Donu are perhaps the least geared to punish a specific play style, but can still be quite brutal. Slow-starting characters in particular run into issues as the pair start with several charges of Artifact and gain +3 strength or +16 armour, making it difficult to debuff them to buy time. If you can kill one of them quickly, particularly Donu, it will make the fight much easier, as you'll only be attacked every other turn and the strength will stop stacking.
  • The Corrupt Heart, an enemy worthy of its True Final Boss status. It has a massive health pool which is bolstered by the damage cap that only allows you to deal a certain amount of damage to it per turn. Its Beat of Death makes you take 1 damage every time you play a card, rising to 2 damage at Ascension 19. It starts out the fight inflicting you with every a myriad of debuffs and and Statuses, including Vulnerable, which coupled with its Echo attack, can cut anywhere from half to all of your health in one sitting. Its Blood Shots attack hits 12(!) times (15 on higher Ascensions), and its Strength scales incredibly fast, meaning that the multi-hit attack will start hitting for ludicrous amounts of damage in no time. It can be mitigated somewhat by cards that reduce Strength, such as Piercing Wail or Disarm, but the Heart will buff itself with Artifact on its first Buff to catch an unwary player off-guard. Oh, and if you don't kill it fast enough, it gains 50 strength on its 5th Buff, which is enough to kill a player even through maximum Block. In short, the Corrupt Heart has a counter for pretty much every deck archetype, and killing it will require a well-made deck and every ounce of the player's concentration.
    • The Spire Shield + Spire Spear combo is sometimes considered even stronger than the Corrupt Heart. Featuring a unique mechanic Surrounded, which makes you take 50% more damage if you're facing away from one of them, and a brutal damage output (turn 2 is the highest non-scaling incoming damage in the game), it also comes right before the Heart fight, so if you survive with low HP and/or no potions, you've almost certainly lost already.
• Underused Game Mechanic: There are plenty of buffs/debuffs or other effects that are only encountered through a single card or relic. For example: Accuracy (which increases the damage of Shivs), Lock-On (which increases the damage of the Defect's orbs by 50%), Corpse Explosion (which deals damage equal to an enemy's max health to all other enemies when it dies), Reaper (which deals a small amount of damage to all enemies and heals you for that amount), Exhume (which makes an exhausted card playable again), and Pressure Points (which applies a certain amount of Mark to an enemy and reduces the enemies’ HP by the amount of Mark an enemy has when this card is played). There are also several enemies with unique mechanics not encountered anywhere else, for example: The Transient (who has ridiculous damage and HP, automatically dies after several turns, and loses Strength each turn equal to damage it has received during that turn), Spire Shield and Spire Spear (who attack from both sides and deal extra damage if you're facing away from them), and the Byrds (who only receive 50% of incoming attack damage, but get stunned for one turn if hit by three attacks in one turn).
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • According to the developer, the Collector, a dark faceless figure in a tattered cloak, is female.
  • Gremlin Leader is also female.
• The Woobie: The Ironclad just wanted to become the strongest in his clan in order to defeat the Corrupted Heart. However, because he made a deal with a Jerkass Genie, all of his clan was slaughtered.