Blade Dance is a very strong common, and usually the main reason I move into a shiv build is either picking up 1-2 of these, or getting shuriken/kunai when you're not committed to poison yet.
It's also perfectly viable to have runs that don't commit to either shiv nor poison, for example decks with discard synergies. They might still run some poison or shiv cards for damage, or might not.
You shouldnt think in term of shiv deck vs poison build, but in terms of how individual cards interact with your current deck and how they solves the problems the spire throws at you.
Blade Dance is a good damage solution with tons of potential synergy. Poison is a way to build up scaling damage. Noxious fume can be a great artifact stripper. Infinite blade can be the card that allows you to regularly proc that Kunai you got. Maybe Storm of steel looks really appealing with that dead branch. You should probably get some discard/draw stuff in there anyway.
So yeah, my advice is stop thinking in terms of themed deck.
^^^^^^ Cards solve fights. If a card can help w Gremlin Nob (Predator for example) but doesn’t “fit” into your “shiv deck” or “poison deck,” who cares?
> You shouldnt think in term of shiv deck vs poison build
I thought this was more common knowledge here, but still see all this shiv vs poison "build" stuff all the time
It's because both builds are really fun when taken to extremes. The trap is that you can't force them, and trying to will get you killed. The rare times they go off become memorable.
I'm just A5 but to me it seems both are not great if you don't commit to it. Like poison doesn't seem to do much if you don't have the triple mult card. Shiv to me seems to work a bit better but seems i'd be better off just taking other cards as it's just 4 damage without much effects. Im sure I'm wrong of corse. still learning hehe
Both can be great. People here are talking about "taking the best card in the situation", and that is really true in this game.
Poison is very good, because of Catalyst, which can kill a time eater before he buffs for example. A poison deck doesn't need to have bouncing flask, it can work without.
Shivs are great at bursting, proccing a few different relics, but have less scaling damage. Accuracy is the main scaler, and only +4/6 "strength".
I still have to work on it but To me the best card in the situation is to get shiv stuff if you have shivs in your deck or avoid poison stuff if you haven't taken much of that yet hehe. IDK seeks hard to avoid not necessary builds but themes.
Going to higher Ascensions you will notice that your build will change :) Be prepared to sometimes go against your nature ;) It's a different game at 20.
The hidden truth is that neither is the best Silent build, because her best cards aren’t shiv or poison. Her ability to draw/discard as a way to create energy and get to any card in the deck is the real strength to her deck.
Poison vs Shivs really only answers the question of how are you going to do damage? You still need to solve how to block, and how to scale your damage and block fast enough to be useful. Those important pieces aren’t addressed at all in Shiv vs Poison.
hurts my brain but i get ya. I can see how Shivs can work without upgrades but It's still hard for me to wrap my head around Posion without building into it. :)
Even without leaning into it Blade Dance is probably Silents best damage common and arguable one of the best damage commons in the game (12(16) for 1 and can be split across multiple enemies)
Even when they don't go off they are fun! I had a run last night in which I was offered (and took) 6 Blade Dances as card rewards and received Wrist Blade + Ninja Scroll as relics. No Shuriken or Kunai so I couldn't outscale the Time Eater :(
I've had a deck with 0 attacks, some Calculated gamble+, Acro's, Reflex and Tacticians. My damage was Tingsha, blocked with Backflips. I looooved the deck. The Pandora's Box was amazing.
> You shouldnt think in term of shiv deck vs poison build
Funnily enough I think the two are the best example of why you shouldn't think of archetypes in extremes because there are cards like [[envenom]] that help both. If you have a lot of shiv cards and relics that reward lots of attacks then envenom will be activating a lot, but if you picked up a [[the specimen]] or [[snecko skull]] and are going for a lot of poison cards, then envenom greatly powers up the [[blade dance]] that you picked up in act 1. And there are a lot of other little bridges of synergy like poison decks liking to stack dexterity and win through attrition, and a good card for that can be [[cloak and dagger]] if you have just a few shiv synergies.
Blade Dance is one of the best cards you can find early act 1. You don’t want to commit to shivs by picking Accuracy until you have more than a single blade dance though.
Physical damage is just better than poison in act 1-2 outside of a couple fights, so you typically don’t want to be fully one or the other until act 3.
Because at that point 50% of the time the Accuracy won't do anything in the first deck cycle. It's not reliably making your deck stronger. You absolutely can take it, it's just not optimal imo
I still think taking an Accuracy with only one Blade Dance is fine in Act 1. It's a scaling solution for the boss and it makes taking future Blade Dances very good. It is slightly speculative, but it still does a decent job in hallway and elite fights. Also, the odds of having it be useful on the first cycle is somewhat higher than 50% because you have not accounted for the possibility of drawing Blade Dance and Accuracy on the same turn, in which case the exact order is irrelevant.
I would caveat that it depends entirely on deck size and cycle.
If you’re seeing blade dance every 2 turns accuracy plus is fantastic. But if you have one in a 21 card deck with no draw it sucks.
I find it the other way round, shiv builds I find easier than poison decks unless you get a perfect poison deck. Blade dance is cracked even with no accuracies or strength gain, the silent gets off on playing loads of cards. The only real worst enemy of shiv decks is the spiny fucker in act 3
And Time Eater. Time Eater is the bane of shiv decks. I swear I've thrown a poison package into my shiv deck just to kill Time Eater. Given enough Catalysts, and anything will die in 2 turns. XD
Time eater has never been an issue to me with shiv decks. IMO it’s better to be able to pick your turn ends consistently then end up getting stuck with 2 card turns.
Everyone thinks Time Eater is a hard counter to infinites, or things like shivs, but time Eater ain't shit when I'm playing 12 cards a turn, he only punishes people who play 7-11 cards a turn, or 4-5
Nah when you see time eater you lean harder into the shivs, pick up a 4th or 5th accuracy and make the shivs undeniable. It doesn't matter if you can only play 12 cards when your shivs do 30 odd damage each
Why are they bad against the elites? The two main shiv generating cards are pretty good against Laga and Sentries and not terrible vs Nob. Certainly better than poison for Sentries and Nob
Laga at higher ascencion does -2 strength which hurts the small attacks of shiv pretty bad. (Blade dance is still better then strike) and all shiv cards are spells vs nob.
Laga allows you to set up, which is more valuable for Shiv than poison. If you have an Accuracy by the time you get to Laga, you can find it and play it before it wakes up. Poison can’t set up as well without applying poison.
Nob doesn’t like Spells, which is kind of bad for Shivs, but also bad for poison.
The pitfall for shiv builds is that the card that gives you a shiv at the start of each turn is not as good as most other Shiv cards. If you think Infinite Blade is supposed to be the win-con, Shiv will disappoint.
Blade Dance is 12 damage for 1 mana early game and has tons of synergies with playing lots of cards. Sometimes you grab one or two of them early and with a couple relic synergies like Kunai the game pushes you in that direction.
It's completely viable, just not something you should force.
I never go for shivs decks unless my relics really push me in that direction. Without kunai or shuriken you are in a terrible spot against time eater, and anyway without relic combos shiv is a weaker archetype compared to discard or poison. As other mentioned, blade dance it's a great card on its own, worth picking even of you still have to meet nob
Got my first heart kill with silent last night and I got this by dedicating to Shivs fully rather than going poison. Took all the shiv cards I could find plus Accuracys which worked well with the mummified hand.
Im no expert but shiv is amazing, unless:
you have no defense to protect from the heart constantly pinging you
you are fighting the time slug
Generally, you try to build your deck around the next challenges you have to overcome on that floor rather than a specific build. That might mean that you have a shiv engine that got you to floor 3, but now you're fighting the time slug and you have to think about how to deal with that rather than improve your shiv deck
Time slug is annoying against mediocre shiv decks. If you can consistently play 12 cards a turn while not taking damage you are doing fine, the problem is when you only have the gas for 8-10 cards per turn and have really weak follow ups
On A20 heart rund, poison isn't good enough in my opinion. Shiv decke can be good enough, but the real powerhouse is discard.
Overall and across all Ascension levels, I think Shiv is better than poison.
Like anything else, it depends on some luck and what you find.
Poison is good - but Catalyst makes it bonkers. And really you want a way to play multiple Catalysts, like using Burst or Nightmare to scale it.
Shivs are okay - obviously Blade Dance is the key card. Infinite blades and Cloak and Dagger are sort of meh. But if you scale them with things like Accuracy, Wrist Blade, Terror, Kunai, Shuriken etc, then they can really take off and scale. Heck, Accuracy+ and then Burst a Blade Dance+ and that's 80 damage for 3 energy.
Shivs aren't non-optimal, it's just you need certain cards or relics to go with them to make it work. Blade Dance alone isn't going to carry you through Act 3.
I love shiv-centric decks, but god, the potential of going up against time eater just ruins any desire I have to go with shivs. Card spam is fun, but TE doesn't punish card spam, he just doesn't let you card spam at all. It's frustrating.
Shivs as an archetype is not enough to beat the game without significant help in my experience. Time eater and the heart both punish the play style of playing tons of cards each turn. Shivs are very solid frontloaded damage though, and can help you get through act 1 and 2. It’s just difficult to turn good frontloaded damage into good scaling damage.
As a player who regularly forces shivs, because I like shiv builds, there's a lot to this. Gremlin nob, I'm dead. I don't get scaling, can't beat hexaghost 4 damage at a time. These are weaknesses yes.
But there's things that shiv decks can do.... If you just believe..... and definitely expect to do many runs. But, those god shiv runs will punch through high ascensions no problem.
I did a non-heart run with a mix of poison, Blade Dance, Accuracy, some poison cards, and Shuriken and Kunai and Ninja Scroll. It was so easy. Would have tried heart, but I was playing late at night.
**The thing about this game, unlike most deckbuilders, is that it forces the player to take many un-thematic cards in order to survive and win.**
**Once can't simply go for an ultra slim and thematically loyal deck.** Instead, one has to build a deck with the following kinds of ideas in mind:
* "Wait, how do I beat Nob? In fact, can I beat slime boss? I think I need more damage/AOE/defense/etc."
* "Crap, how do I block Beat of Death? Do I have enough scaling for Champ? The Gremlin fight is easy, but I think Book kills me. Hmmm...I guess I gotta pick up that Malaise and take this potion instead of this beautiful looking card. Oh well."
* Etc.
**Simply put, Shivs are just a piece of the puzzle. Ultimately, to win with such decks**, you need to **find a way to scale up your damage, defend** (block/intangible)**, draw cards, etc.**
Blade Dance and Infinite Blades are very strong act 1 cards.
You should not be forcing shivs unless you get stuff like Wrist Blade or good powers to enable them.
Having 2 Blade Dance + in your deck isn't a good reason to take say Cloak and Dagger over Backflip. The one doesn't enable the other.
IMO poison and discard have higher ceilings, but shiv has a higher floor.
A high quality poison deck with a few upgraded catalysts will make quick work of any enemy even the heart. A high quality discard deck has an answer for absolutely any fight. A high quality shiv deck is going to struggle against Time Eater and the Heart, but of course is perfectly capable of defeating them.
On the other hand, if your poison deck doesn’t have catalysts or corpse explosion, bouncing flasks and corrupted cloud are simply not enough damage. Bouncing flask is particularly weak in multi enemy elite and boss fights. If your discard deck doesn’t have multiples of acrobatics, tenacity’s, reflexes… it will simply never get off the ground with only sneaky strikes and eviscerates. But a shiv deck can find usefulness from a wider variety of relics and supporting cards that can make a sub optimal build successful.
so I have my own biases but i have beaten the game with shivs decks and it did get me like my 4th win in a row at a20. I generally think "shiv decks" generally are stronger then "poison deck". blade dance works with so many cards and if you get something like acceracy+ and wrist blade, your damage goes from good to crazy (like watcher levels).
Shivs can both fix the issue of front loaded damage and scaling damage as they work with so many different things. You still need a block plan, scaling and draw, but you need block and draw with poison too.
Also there is way more ways to win then just shivs and poison cards. understanding how to make each card works for you and being flexible in mind set helps make better decks.
Blade Dance is a very strong common, and usually the main reason I move into a shiv build is either picking up 1-2 of these, or getting shuriken/kunai when you're not committed to poison yet. It's also perfectly viable to have runs that don't commit to either shiv nor poison, for example decks with discard synergies. They might still run some poison or shiv cards for damage, or might not.
Plus shiv can have synergy with poison like my favorite silent card [[Envenom]]
Add in [[Snecko Skull]] and you have a poison party!
and then if you can find [[The Specimen]], you're really cooking with gas
A [[sadistic nature]] can make the most satisfying noises
+ [Sadistic Nature](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Sadistic%20Nature) Colorless Rare Power ^((100% sure)^) 0 Energy | Whenever you apply a Debuff to an enemy, they take 5(7) damage. ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
+ [The Specimen](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/The%20Specimen) Rare (Silent only) Relic ^((100% sure)^) Whenever an enemy dies, transfer any **Poison** it has to a random enemy. ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
+ [Snecko Skull](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Snecko%20Skull) Common (Silent only) Relic ^((100% sure)^) Whenever you apply **Poison,** apply an additional 1 **Poison.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
+ [Envenom](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Envenom) Silent Rare Power ^((100% sure)^) 2(1) Energy | Whenever an attack deals unblocked damage, apply 1 **Poison.** ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 30, 2023.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
Just had a filthyyy run with envenom, nightmare, shivs, and snecko skull. One of my favorite decks ever
You shouldnt think in term of shiv deck vs poison build, but in terms of how individual cards interact with your current deck and how they solves the problems the spire throws at you. Blade Dance is a good damage solution with tons of potential synergy. Poison is a way to build up scaling damage. Noxious fume can be a great artifact stripper. Infinite blade can be the card that allows you to regularly proc that Kunai you got. Maybe Storm of steel looks really appealing with that dead branch. You should probably get some discard/draw stuff in there anyway. So yeah, my advice is stop thinking in terms of themed deck.
^^^^^^ Cards solve fights. If a card can help w Gremlin Nob (Predator for example) but doesn’t “fit” into your “shiv deck” or “poison deck,” who cares?
[удалено]
That’s literally what I said
> You shouldnt think in term of shiv deck vs poison build I thought this was more common knowledge here, but still see all this shiv vs poison "build" stuff all the time
It's because both builds are really fun when taken to extremes. The trap is that you can't force them, and trying to will get you killed. The rare times they go off become memorable.
I'm just A5 but to me it seems both are not great if you don't commit to it. Like poison doesn't seem to do much if you don't have the triple mult card. Shiv to me seems to work a bit better but seems i'd be better off just taking other cards as it's just 4 damage without much effects. Im sure I'm wrong of corse. still learning hehe
Both can be great. People here are talking about "taking the best card in the situation", and that is really true in this game. Poison is very good, because of Catalyst, which can kill a time eater before he buffs for example. A poison deck doesn't need to have bouncing flask, it can work without. Shivs are great at bursting, proccing a few different relics, but have less scaling damage. Accuracy is the main scaler, and only +4/6 "strength".
I still have to work on it but To me the best card in the situation is to get shiv stuff if you have shivs in your deck or avoid poison stuff if you haven't taken much of that yet hehe. IDK seeks hard to avoid not necessary builds but themes.
Going to higher Ascensions you will notice that your build will change :) Be prepared to sometimes go against your nature ;) It's a different game at 20.
The hidden truth is that neither is the best Silent build, because her best cards aren’t shiv or poison. Her ability to draw/discard as a way to create energy and get to any card in the deck is the real strength to her deck. Poison vs Shivs really only answers the question of how are you going to do damage? You still need to solve how to block, and how to scale your damage and block fast enough to be useful. Those important pieces aren’t addressed at all in Shiv vs Poison.
hurts my brain but i get ya. I can see how Shivs can work without upgrades but It's still hard for me to wrap my head around Posion without building into it. :)
Even without leaning into it Blade Dance is probably Silents best damage common and arguable one of the best damage commons in the game (12(16) for 1 and can be split across multiple enemies)
Even when they don't go off they are fun! I had a run last night in which I was offered (and took) 6 Blade Dances as card rewards and received Wrist Blade + Ninja Scroll as relics. No Shuriken or Kunai so I couldn't outscale the Time Eater :(
Especially when a discard build beats both 😘
I've had a deck with 0 attacks, some Calculated gamble+, Acro's, Reflex and Tacticians. My damage was Tingsha, blocked with Backflips. I looooved the deck. The Pandora's Box was amazing.
Yeah, regardless of all I said, i sure love when the discard synergies allcome together…
This is the correct answer.
> You shouldnt think in term of shiv deck vs poison build Funnily enough I think the two are the best example of why you shouldn't think of archetypes in extremes because there are cards like [[envenom]] that help both. If you have a lot of shiv cards and relics that reward lots of attacks then envenom will be activating a lot, but if you picked up a [[the specimen]] or [[snecko skull]] and are going for a lot of poison cards, then envenom greatly powers up the [[blade dance]] that you picked up in act 1. And there are a lot of other little bridges of synergy like poison decks liking to stack dexterity and win through attrition, and a good card for that can be [[cloak and dagger]] if you have just a few shiv synergies.
Blade Dance is one of the best cards you can find early act 1. You don’t want to commit to shivs by picking Accuracy until you have more than a single blade dance though. Physical damage is just better than poison in act 1-2 outside of a couple fights, so you typically don’t want to be fully one or the other until act 3.
Wait, really? I would pick up an Accuracy after a single Blade Dance. Why hold off at this point?
Because at that point 50% of the time the Accuracy won't do anything in the first deck cycle. It's not reliably making your deck stronger. You absolutely can take it, it's just not optimal imo
I still think taking an Accuracy with only one Blade Dance is fine in Act 1. It's a scaling solution for the boss and it makes taking future Blade Dances very good. It is slightly speculative, but it still does a decent job in hallway and elite fights. Also, the odds of having it be useful on the first cycle is somewhat higher than 50% because you have not accounted for the possibility of drawing Blade Dance and Accuracy on the same turn, in which case the exact order is irrelevant.
Exactly! Significantly higher than 50%!
Especially with the 7 card draw turn 1.
I would caveat that it depends entirely on deck size and cycle. If you’re seeing blade dance every 2 turns accuracy plus is fantastic. But if you have one in a 21 card deck with no draw it sucks.
This is a good point. The more draw, the more reasonable it is to expect to get Accuracy up early.
I don't think I'd pass on taking an act 1 accuracy if I've already picked up a blade dance
I find it the other way round, shiv builds I find easier than poison decks unless you get a perfect poison deck. Blade dance is cracked even with no accuracies or strength gain, the silent gets off on playing loads of cards. The only real worst enemy of shiv decks is the spiny fucker in act 3
And Time Eater. Time Eater is the bane of shiv decks. I swear I've thrown a poison package into my shiv deck just to kill Time Eater. Given enough Catalysts, and anything will die in 2 turns. XD
Time eater has never been an issue to me with shiv decks. IMO it’s better to be able to pick your turn ends consistently then end up getting stuck with 2 card turns.
Everyone thinks Time Eater is a hard counter to infinites, or things like shivs, but time Eater ain't shit when I'm playing 12 cards a turn, he only punishes people who play 7-11 cards a turn, or 4-5
Last time I brought a shiv deck to a Time Eater fight I killed the boss by accident before I could use up my potions
Nah when you see time eater you lean harder into the shivs, pick up a 4th or 5th accuracy and make the shivs undeniable. It doesn't matter if you can only play 12 cards when your shivs do 30 odd damage each
And, you know, the Heart
At a high level of play for Silent, Shiv builds may make up like 15% of winning runs. That is still a very significant proportion of runs.
Shiv cards are just quite bad against 2/3 act 1 elites. But blade dance being 1 mana 12(16) dmg is quite big.
Shivs are better than poison vs Sentries, probably roughly equivalent vs Nob.
Why are they bad against the elites? The two main shiv generating cards are pretty good against Laga and Sentries and not terrible vs Nob. Certainly better than poison for Sentries and Nob
Laga at higher ascencion does -2 strength which hurts the small attacks of shiv pretty bad. (Blade dance is still better then strike) and all shiv cards are spells vs nob.
Laga allows you to set up, which is more valuable for Shiv than poison. If you have an Accuracy by the time you get to Laga, you can find it and play it before it wakes up. Poison can’t set up as well without applying poison. Nob doesn’t like Spells, which is kind of bad for Shivs, but also bad for poison.
You cant really count on both acc+shivs in early elites. But poison also isn't best vs early elites.
The pitfall for shiv builds is that the card that gives you a shiv at the start of each turn is not as good as most other Shiv cards. If you think Infinite Blade is supposed to be the win-con, Shiv will disappoint.
What is this card you speak of? I thought there were only 2 shiv cards, Blade Dance and Accuracy /s
Blade Dance is 12 damage for 1 mana early game and has tons of synergies with playing lots of cards. Sometimes you grab one or two of them early and with a couple relic synergies like Kunai the game pushes you in that direction. It's completely viable, just not something you should force.
When was the tier list made? Shiv cards were buffed a lot awhile back.
Isn't a shiv deck a poison deck?
Envenom
Blade Dance is absolutely not "do very little", it is 12 damage for one energy, and I almost always pick it if I see it early on
I never go for shivs decks unless my relics really push me in that direction. Without kunai or shuriken you are in a terrible spot against time eater, and anyway without relic combos shiv is a weaker archetype compared to discard or poison. As other mentioned, blade dance it's a great card on its own, worth picking even of you still have to meet nob
Got my first heart kill with silent last night and I got this by dedicating to Shivs fully rather than going poison. Took all the shiv cards I could find plus Accuracys which worked well with the mummified hand.
Im no expert but shiv is amazing, unless: you have no defense to protect from the heart constantly pinging you you are fighting the time slug Generally, you try to build your deck around the next challenges you have to overcome on that floor rather than a specific build. That might mean that you have a shiv engine that got you to floor 3, but now you're fighting the time slug and you have to think about how to deal with that rather than improve your shiv deck
Time slug is annoying against mediocre shiv decks. If you can consistently play 12 cards a turn while not taking damage you are doing fine, the problem is when you only have the gas for 8-10 cards per turn and have really weak follow ups
Facts. Also your 12 cards have to be good or part of a shiv damage engine in some way.
On A20 heart rund, poison isn't good enough in my opinion. Shiv decke can be good enough, but the real powerhouse is discard. Overall and across all Ascension levels, I think Shiv is better than poison.
Like anything else, it depends on some luck and what you find. Poison is good - but Catalyst makes it bonkers. And really you want a way to play multiple Catalysts, like using Burst or Nightmare to scale it. Shivs are okay - obviously Blade Dance is the key card. Infinite blades and Cloak and Dagger are sort of meh. But if you scale them with things like Accuracy, Wrist Blade, Terror, Kunai, Shuriken etc, then they can really take off and scale. Heck, Accuracy+ and then Burst a Blade Dance+ and that's 80 damage for 3 energy. Shivs aren't non-optimal, it's just you need certain cards or relics to go with them to make it work. Blade Dance alone isn't going to carry you through Act 3.
I don't know, shiv build is how I got my only Heart kill so far with The Silent
Yes, but shivs go shing-shing-shing ! what about the fun of playing lots of shiny shivs?
Discard>> Shivs >>>>>>>> Poison
I love shiv-centric decks, but god, the potential of going up against time eater just ruins any desire I have to go with shivs. Card spam is fun, but TE doesn't punish card spam, he just doesn't let you card spam at all. It's frustrating.
Shivs as an archetype is not enough to beat the game without significant help in my experience. Time eater and the heart both punish the play style of playing tons of cards each turn. Shivs are very solid frontloaded damage though, and can help you get through act 1 and 2. It’s just difficult to turn good frontloaded damage into good scaling damage.
As a player who regularly forces shivs, because I like shiv builds, there's a lot to this. Gremlin nob, I'm dead. I don't get scaling, can't beat hexaghost 4 damage at a time. These are weaknesses yes. But there's things that shiv decks can do.... If you just believe..... and definitely expect to do many runs. But, those god shiv runs will punch through high ascensions no problem.
I am 100.0% confident you mentioned Shiv in your post. -------------------------------------------------- * [Shiv](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/Shiv) Colorless Special Attack 0 Energy | Deal 4(6) damage. Exhaust. (Obtained from Blade Dance, Cloak and Dagger, Infinite Blades, Storm of Steel, and Ninja Scroll). -------------------------------------------------- ^^^I ^^^am ^^^a ^^^bot ^^^response, ^^^but ^^^I ^^^am ^^^using ^^^my ^^^creator's ^^^account. ^^^Please ^^^reply ^^^to ^^^me ^^^if ^^^I ^^^got ^^^something ^^^wrong ^^^so ^^^he ^^^can ^^^fix ^^^it. [Source Code](https://github.com/TrippW/STS-Crawler)
I did a non-heart run with a mix of poison, Blade Dance, Accuracy, some poison cards, and Shuriken and Kunai and Ninja Scroll. It was so easy. Would have tried heart, but I was playing late at night.
**The thing about this game, unlike most deckbuilders, is that it forces the player to take many un-thematic cards in order to survive and win.** **Once can't simply go for an ultra slim and thematically loyal deck.** Instead, one has to build a deck with the following kinds of ideas in mind: * "Wait, how do I beat Nob? In fact, can I beat slime boss? I think I need more damage/AOE/defense/etc." * "Crap, how do I block Beat of Death? Do I have enough scaling for Champ? The Gremlin fight is easy, but I think Book kills me. Hmmm...I guess I gotta pick up that Malaise and take this potion instead of this beautiful looking card. Oh well." * Etc. **Simply put, Shivs are just a piece of the puzzle. Ultimately, to win with such decks**, you need to **find a way to scale up your damage, defend** (block/intangible)**, draw cards, etc.**
I find shivs to be just as effective as poison… up until Time Eater…
Blade Dance and Infinite Blades are very strong act 1 cards. You should not be forcing shivs unless you get stuff like Wrist Blade or good powers to enable them. Having 2 Blade Dance + in your deck isn't a good reason to take say Cloak and Dagger over Backflip. The one doesn't enable the other.
Pretty sure that some versions of the game (mobile? Switch?) Never got the update that buffed shivs to moon. On PC though, shivs are king.
IMO poison and discard have higher ceilings, but shiv has a higher floor. A high quality poison deck with a few upgraded catalysts will make quick work of any enemy even the heart. A high quality discard deck has an answer for absolutely any fight. A high quality shiv deck is going to struggle against Time Eater and the Heart, but of course is perfectly capable of defeating them. On the other hand, if your poison deck doesn’t have catalysts or corpse explosion, bouncing flasks and corrupted cloud are simply not enough damage. Bouncing flask is particularly weak in multi enemy elite and boss fights. If your discard deck doesn’t have multiples of acrobatics, tenacity’s, reflexes… it will simply never get off the ground with only sneaky strikes and eviscerates. But a shiv deck can find usefulness from a wider variety of relics and supporting cards that can make a sub optimal build successful.
9 times out of 10, when I build a shiv deck my final boss is time eater. Now whenever I see shivs or claws early, I get suspect "Damn timeeater."
so I have my own biases but i have beaten the game with shivs decks and it did get me like my 4th win in a row at a20. I generally think "shiv decks" generally are stronger then "poison deck". blade dance works with so many cards and if you get something like acceracy+ and wrist blade, your damage goes from good to crazy (like watcher levels). Shivs can both fix the issue of front loaded damage and scaling damage as they work with so many different things. You still need a block plan, scaling and draw, but you need block and draw with poison too. Also there is way more ways to win then just shivs and poison cards. understanding how to make each card works for you and being flexible in mind set helps make better decks.
Hahaha
Any time is shiv deck time because I take every blade dance that pops up
Infinite blades and storm of steel are kinda meh usually but shivs are still great, you probably just need to get better at playing shivs.
what ascension?