After many years of procrastinating and trying to hit Ascension 15 in multiple classes, I finally feel that I understand the game enough to put it down, satisfied and write my thoughts about it.

Thinking back, in terms of value for money, it felt ridiculous how much value I milked out of this game. It's crazy how much I learn with every run. My evaluation of cards, enemies, bosses, events, relics just keeps changing, and at Ascension 15, I still feel that I'm just at the tip of the iceberg. I feel like there's so much more to learn. When I check out veterans online who clearly put more hours into the game, they, too, are still learning.

It feels like a miracle of a game. I pride myself for being a systems design kind of person but looking at this game, I kept wondering how is this even possible? Does the developers know, or is it purely chance? It's one of those things which I fear I will never truely know in my lifetime.

Maybe I'll talk about the main 3 classes: Ironclad, Silent and Defect. I'll skip Watcher for now because I have not A15'ed her and to be honest, I heard that she's 'easy'. I'll update the guide once I reached A15 with her.

Ironclad was surprising difficult to figure out, with 'surprising' being the keyword. I think that since the class is introduced as a straightfoward class with cards that have potentially ridiculous ceilings, I was mislead in my ideas of what Ironcard deck archetypes are. I had to actually unlearn and think about how much damage or block is good enough. Another thing I had to overcome was that for Ironclad, I can turn bad status cards into value. It's quite interesting to see how with the addition of some cards can just completely flip your evaluation of bad status cards in the run. That was something I had to get used to.

Silent is probably the easiest to understand. It's probably the class with the clearest deck archetypes (poison, shiv, play-many-cards), which was interesting because...well I thought archetypes are a thing when I tried Ironclad but turns out it's not. But with Silent, suddenly it IS.

I wonder if it's...a playstyle preference thing...?

Then there's Defect. To be honest, I felt that I cheesed through Defect at some point because...I was too impatient. It's definitely the hardest class for me and complete. I just don't have the mental capacity to calculate probability with Zap RNG. Their cards are a little difficult to evaluate too with how orbs work. The idea that orbs have passive triggers and evoke triggers is a little too much for me. Hopefully I will get better at it if I keep playing but I think I'm just impatient...

Otherwise, this game deserves a full 10/10 from me.

Card Opinions

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