Good morning, world. We’re all up. AAAALLLLL of us.
I managed to squeak in a cat nap yesterday afternoon. I grabbed a fluffy blanket, and tried to watch Shawshank play Tears of The Kingdom. Chaucer climbed into my lap and happily snuggled with me.
I’ve been making a point to do the daily challenge in Slay the Spire. Ever day features a new custom run, with three variables to fuck with players. Almost every day, it’s the same thing. I look at the variables and think to myself this is gonna be soooo bad. Roughly half the time, my opinion changes by the time I reach the first boss. Some modifiers have really forced me to rethink how to play, or what makes a good deck. Would I willingly try to make a deck of just 20 cards? Nope. But I’ll do it if I’m forced to, and oh look, it works out smashingly under some circumstances.
I thought yesterday’s challenge was going to be terrible, and it certainly started off that way. One of my disadvantages was picking up a curse every time I opened a chest. Ok, so that takes up some space in my hand, but I’ll deal. Another disadvantage was the inability to remove cards from my deck. The only “positive” variable in the run was when I picked up a card, I would also take two additional copies of it. Extra cards can be good, if they work with the others in the deck. If I made a bad choice, I’d be stuck with three of them, with almost no chance of removal. And the same rules applied to curses – pick up one, add three to the deck.
At some point early on, I ended up picking up a relic that increased my hit points every time I took up a curse. Grabbing curses three at a time would normally suck, but the extra HP became super helpful as the run continued. By the time I reached the end of the line, I’d pretty much doubled my starting HP. The biggest turning point came into play towards the end, when I picked up a Mind Blast card. By that point, I was 40 levels into the challenge, and holding about 120 cards in my deck. I have three copies of this massively overpowered card sitting my hand at the start of any fight. Depending on strength, I could drop nearly 300 points of damage in one turn. I was unstoppable at that point, and beat the final boss very easily. Unfortunately, since it wasn’t a standard run, my success didn’t count towards unlocking the fourth character.
Some day I’ll unlock it.
