To be honest, I did find the Snecko class slightly overpowered, particularly in the first act, but it's such a jolly new take on Spire staples that a few runs with it are irresitble. And the more mystery cards you have, the higher the multiplier on certain cards - a bit like the Ironclad's '+2 damage for every card with 'Strike' in its name jobbie. Specifically, in that you can add mystery cards to your deck, which temporarily turn into random Attack or Skill cards each combat.
This mod doesn't stop at point-remixing - it strives to make a virtue of the unknown.
Every one of your cards a different cost, every turn, every fight. I.e., with this mod, sometimes it's you signing your own death warrant. Sometimes, this makes it a nightmare opponent - even a single, basic Defend or Strike card can consume your entire turn - but other times it's the Snecko signing its own death warrant, as you spam with it 0-point attack after 0-point attack. The Snecko is one of Spire's most erratic enemies, its foremost power being to merrily juggle the cost of your cards. Or, at least, its lavender-hued cousin, The Snek.
If you feel you've mastered Spire in every which way possible ( liar), then there is only one thing for it: choose chaos. When it's openly declaring that it's maths, I run for the hills. The thing about Spire is that it's stealth maths, to some degree. On the flipside, this card made me do A Big Swear: It's one of those cards that can totally change the nature of a round, without actually upsetting the overall balance of the match. So the dude that's about to lay a 48 damage smackdown on you suddenly adopts a harmless block, or the thingy drowning in shields is suddenly left exposed. The stand-out addition here, for my money, is a card that shunts an enemy forwards in time by one turn. It's also remarkably well balanced, despite involving all kinds of disparate elements - not just the aforementioned time-keeping, but also short-lived item summons that apply small effects per turn or bigger effects when they expire. Clock iconography-based consistency within the card art, even the standard Strikes and Defends, helps build that sense that this is part and parcel with the game proper, rather than a bolt-on. The art's a clean fit, and, like so many things in Spire, there's an implied relationship to other creatures in the game - specifically the fearsome Timekeeper Act 3 boss-bastard. The Disciple, a sort of tentacular time-cleric, feels like such a natural fit for Spire. If there was one mod that the devs should seriously think about officially incorporating into Spire, it's this one. Little touches can do so much heavy-lifting. Also, the floor boss Slime is furious if you encounter it, screeching 'Minion! Betrayer!' on arrival. Honestly, it's all so well tied together, with its own card art and colour schemes and a minimum of reskinning. There's also a whole card-family based around the idea of Licking - coating your foes in 'orrible goo, which in turn opens them up all manner of further special attacks. Unless you build your deck in such a way that you can prevent this health loss, thus earning yourself both a family of gelatinous defenders and oodles of precious hitpoints. It absolutely owns its concept, riffing on The Defect's auto-firing Orbs to employ auto-attacking, defending or HP-regenerating Slime-kids - with the delightful twist that spawning one temporarily consumes some of your health. Probably the most instantly appealing of the new character mods, given that it uses one of the game's more iconic baddies (the self-duplicating Slimes) and that a many-eyed blobbo friend is such an overt departure from weapon-wielding bipeds.īeneath the mugging-for-attention surface, it's also easily the strongest third-party class I've played so far.
So, here are five of the Slay The Spire character mods I dig the most (so far).
Inventive concepts, not too much of a power-trip or too much of a kick in the squishies, and only a little bit of brazenly stolen art. Given the almighty balancing act inherent to a numbers game like this, what I'm truly surprised by is how good some of these are. I don't have to, because the community's taken advantage of Spire's newly officially-enabled mod support to add a weird and wonderful assortment of new card-clobberers to the game. Third character The Defect's relatively new, and the focus is currently on spit'n'polish for this week's escape from early access, so I'm not holding my breath for an official newbie any time soon. "With more planned." For months, that's all we've had to go on, when it comes to the nagging question of whether or not the wonderful Slay The Spire will ever stretch beyond its three playable characters.