Not just a shuffle of the deck.



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I've beaten Ascension 10 on every character other than the Necrobinder and Defect (and their day is coming), and I'm having a much better time than I did trying to climb the difficulty ranks in Slay the Spire 1.

Slay the Spire 2 has—among some of my coworkers—been a bit of a contentious little game. Back when it first came out, my fellow writer Robin Valentine wrote that Slay the Spire 2 felt more like a remake than a sequel after beating it with an eight year old deck, calling it "a really impressive late expansion pack." Still good, but treading over old ground.

Here are my creds: I've since been consumed by Slay the Spire 2, I've put nearly 140 hours into it (a number that shocked me when I went to check it for this article), and I've currently squeaked out Ascension 10 wins on Ironclad, Silent, and Regent (and am working on my wins with the Necrobinder and Defect now).

And while I do agree with Robin that a lot of the same decks can win those earlier ascensions, the more I play, the more I'm deeply taken by Slay the Spire 2 in a way that I was never absorbed by the original—which I went back and played a bit of before this and just didn't have the same zest for.

Slay the Spire 2 is samey, sure, but it's deceptively so. There have been several core, granular baseline level changes that have, in my estimation, made it feel very different.

The first, the most obvious shift, is in the ancients—at the end of each act of STS2, you have a chance of rolling between a set of ancients, each of which will have their own trade-off boons. In STS1, beating one of the acts netted you a relic which almost always gave you one more energy per turn—and, because of how tempo worked, the non-energy relics were almost never worth taking.



Slay the Spire 2 has such a better variety in this regard. They can be completely run-defining. Getting one extra energy per turn is still incredibly valuable, but relics that offer that often come with major downsides.

Take Vaaku's Whispering Earring, for example. You get one extra energy, but you have zero control over your first turn, with Vaaku playing your cards from left to right—this is a massive gamble, but it's almost always possible to survive a bad first turn, right until it isn't.

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Tezcatara's Seal of Gold is also majorly impactful, too. At first glance, losing five gold per turn for extra energy doesn't seem terrible—but I've had entire builds won with the right choice of relic from the merchant. Take my Ascension 10 Regent win, where I managed to snag a Mystic Lighter to buff a sharp-enchanted Seven Stars.

Suddenly I had a card that dealt 18 damage seven times (for a total of 127 damage) for a piddly one energy, with cards to help buffer the star cost and recycle it back into my draw pile. If I'd taken the Seal of Gold, I wouldn't have been able to afford it.

Nonupeipe's Glitter relic is a stand-out, giving all Act 3 card rewards a once-per-combat replay. This thing alone has completely steered my gameplan from a thin deck to a thick boy with lots of value.

Speaking of, the card enchantment system's great, too—I want to shout out Clone, which is absolutely absurd in some runs, letting you get potentially dozens of the same card type if you're able to finesse rest sites enough to use it. Momentum turns every card into the Ironclad's Rampage, Royally Approved can make any card a core component of your deck. The possibilities make my roguelike heart giddy.

Then there's the enemy design, too—I just like STS2's encounters a whole lot more. Yes, even the absolute bullshit ones. I'm looking at you, Hunter-Killer.



STS2's rogues gallery is flooded with brutal encounters that scale quickly and, at higher ascensions, require you to cover your bases. Rather than t...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com

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