So I have been playing a lot of slay the spire 2, I just passed 200 games and have gotten to around a 70% A10 winrate on every character except ironclad (where I am in the gutter at 30%, how do you play this character if you don't get the vulnerable cards? How do you play the vulnerable cards against aeonglass with 3 artefact?).
I've been entirely on the beta branch for context.
This game fascinates me, it's one of if not the best strategy games I have played. Feedback for most things is extremely salient, you makes a judgement call and then a turn or 2 later you have lost N or N+M health and can evaluate your tactics. The thing that keeps me coming back though is the less salient stuff, the layers and layers of thinking to pathing.
As I improve (I would consider myself approaching mediocre at the game, I think 90% winrate is when you can probably say you are good) I find myself evaluating turns on a much deeper level, asking questions like "the elite that's coming up has a big attack on turn 3, given that and how many skills I play each turn what number should tuning fork be on so that it goes off that turn?"
I think people think of the game as requiring luck but my experience seems to be outside of rare occurrences (like an awful 1-in-a-large-number shuffle against a boss you struggle at) luck is not usually a major factor. If I don't die in the first few floors of act 1 (or reach a state I cannot recover from because I am bad) I usually die on the act 3 second boss.
One of my favourite aspects is how A10 forces you to build for all 3 act 3 bosses, since there is a 2/3 chance you face them. This really tickles your brain to get you to think of how you're going to make your deck do everything it needs to win.
My one criticism of the game is that almost all the interesting enemies are in act 1, although with the recent (oppressive, halp!) changes to infested prism and aeonglass I think that things are on the right track.
If you're into deck builders, or just marvelous strategy games, I unreservedly recommend it.
I did read it, maybe you didn't understand my answer. The damage payoff from thinning your deck is to, for example, get to play Thrash 5 times instead of twice. Or Pillage. Or Bludgeon. Or whatever. That is a damage payoff from exhaust that did not include Ashen Strike, the damage payoff comes from being able to play your high-damage cards more often. Like I said, it's not a direct damage payoff like Ashen Strike, the damage payoff comes from not having to draw shitty cards.
Getting more energy and card draw is one of your priorities. Offering is probably the best ironclad card, but Bloodletting, Pyre, Expect a Fight, Pommel Strike, Vicious, Battle Trance aren't far behind.
If you combine that with the plethora of exhaust options, you can often cycle through your whole deck by the second turn and exhaust half the shit you have, and then just keep drawing idk, Rage+Pillage+Anger over and over again. Full block and tons of damage each turn. You can do so many things like that with exhaust, it depends of course on what cards you find. Or if you get Thrash, in addition to exhaust, you only want more card draw and energy and stuff like Headbutt and you can draw Thrash like every turn or every 2nd one and keep blocking with Evil Eye, which you would also just keep drawing the whole time.
Block is tough with Ironclad, no denying it. But with stuff like Rage, Colossus, Evil Eye, Flame Barrier, Shrug It Off, Feel No Pain, Taunt, Uppercut and even colorless cards like Fisticuffs, Prolong, Finesse, Shockwave, you can get Block through still doing/increasing your damage. The point is to draw these cards more often by getting rid of all the shit by exhausting.
And yes, I play all characters on A10.
I get what you're saying and there are cards which are almost always good like offering and bloodletting but I don't see how the sort of turns you propose solve queen and aeonglass, and at A10 a deck must be capable of doing all bosses.
On those turns you're playing blugeon say, you still need block. So propose you have a near ideal hand, you have bloodletting + blugeon + some defence you draw into. If you have to pay for draw you have 1 energy to block, you're probably eating like 40 damage, I mean on aeonglass turn 1 you need to put up 30 block. Card spam against aeonglass will kill you unless you have second wind, so you can't build a spam deck until you get that card and you might not see it. Decks without redundancy frequently brick against queen if 2 cards you need to play are in the first three draws so you can't center a strategy around rare cards. You have 75 health, that's 2 bad draws and you're looking pretty close to death.
Pyre is really slow, you're sacrificing 1 turn for marginally better turns later, if you see an upgraded one it's more attractive but that's unlikely. Ironclad doesn't have retain or scry so odds are you're eating damage on that turn too.
Uppercut doesn't work against aeonglass, and it eats a campfire to make it good.
Idk, when I see players with high winrates they seem to favour very different strategies to what you propose. Like look at these spirebird rankings: https://spirebird.com/#cards=&c=strongA10
By picked wins above replacement
Which is all pretty much in line with my expectation that vulnerable is the most reliable damage solution, but then aeonglass is sitting there laughing in the wings.
Card elo says a similar story.
Sorry, it's a bit funny to me that you give me this link, but then when you just sort by the normal card ELO, you have things like Burning Pact, True Grit, Feel No Pain, Stoke, Second Wind, Feel No Pain, Dark Embrace, Evil Eye, all in the top 30 ;) Like just look through your link, literally all exhaust cards are in the upper third of all Ironclad cards.
And yeah, of course vulnerable is amazing damage, I almost always pick Tremble and Dominate when I can find it, but it's still exhaust that makes the strength you get from vuln actually super effective. Obviously, exhaust will not directly show in stats as damage because it enables other cards/damage strategies by getting rid of the crap and only leaving the good cards you built your deck around.
Same with block, maybe you struggle so much with block because you too rarely take Evil Eye (1 energy 22 block, wtf) or Feel No Pain, Second Wind. Same with damage, exhaust itself doesn't even have to block, since you also can play your good block cards more once the other crap is out.
Also, you miss the point of Uppercut. It's not useless, it's actually the best card against it. Aeonglass has only 3 Artifact. 1 Uppercut removes 2 Artifact. Uppercut a second time and you have your vuln on Aeonglass. Getting either 2 Uppercuts or playing it twice is not actually hard. Just because an enemy has Uppercut, doesn't mean you stop playing debuffs against them, you actually play more debuffs to get through the Artifact. You plan for Aeonglass by getting like 1 or 2 more debuff cards than you would usually get.
And if you never take Pyre because you think it's bad, that is telling, because I've actually played 2 Uppercuts in 1 turn against Aeonglass, which you can do if you have 5 energy. Or you can play Bludgeon and still have 2 energy for blocking. On Bludgeon, of course if you have it you use some strategy to play it, for example taking the relic that makes your fifth card play free, or Unrelenting/Pyre/Stampede/Cascade/Havoc/Mayhem/Catastrophe. Though true, often Bludgeon is just a single card being a curse most of the time if you don't find any way to play around it specifically, which is also fine.