You’re welcome. Thank you for this great game!
About five cards decks:
In the beginning I usually throw out cards until I have only 3 strikes, sprint and run left. It’s able to deal with everything on the first level in a quick and effective manner. Then I look at books, but use keyboard walking to leave them behind for later, until I think I have the basis for a good deck, and enough fountains to switch to it.
firebolt, octave, elegant, run, vault
was the first deck that got me to glumgraymore. It can’t defeat him, though. This deck was kind of optimized to make encounters in the dungeon quick and simple.
Later I managed to get
tea, ditto, lifesteal, snipe, blink
but the snipe-ditto bug made me start over. Fights against spider mages can also be lengthy, not sure if this deck would even defeat glumgraymore.
Another one I got was
fireball, octave, elegant, bind, exert
but I accidentally one-shot myself (should have seen that coming, haha). There is exert instead of run, because you sometimes have to jump over one-tile walls to proceed to the next level. It also takes less clicks/keypresses than run.
Finally, I used
ventriloquist, knockout, firebolt, exert, icebolt
and won. Icebolt was there to make fighting spider mages quicker, and could be replaced with something else. It was kind of underwhelming to defeat glumgreymore with knockout, some day I’ll try it again with a deck using bind or lifesteal instead.
Other ideas: two steadfast, two tea, some movement and some attack could give you infinite energy and infinite cards, I think. It’s six cards, though. Some deck with two upgraded clarity darts could spam infinite clarity darts, though they can be resisted. Lotus ends on your turn, so you can attack, and just use lotus again. Maybe clouds would still damage you, idk.
Those seemed op to me, so I didn’t use them.
Of course there are many other possible decks, I’m usually trying to play some kind of wizard.
The thing is, if I’m always drawing the same five cards, it kind of misses the point of having cards rather than skills. But right now, if there just was a greater minimum deck size, it would just make the gameplay more clunky for me. You are also kind of punished for having a bigger deck, as fountains become less likely to remove the card you want to remove.
Equipping cards is just some idea that would preserve some of the comfort of using a five card deck. If then the dungeon would require more versatility than a 5 card deck can offer, there would be a good reason to accept the randomness of a bigger deck.
I didn’t really think about what kind of deck exactly I would use with card equips, I would probably still use 5 card decks until the game really requires more versatility than that.
But it’s ok as it is, even with 5 card decks there is a deckbuilding aspect. This was just some idea.
Other stuff I just remembered:
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“pulverize”, I think, couldn’t target walls when I tried it. Maybe I just wasn’t close enough. But I could target a monster to discard it.
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not sure if “with feeling” works, but maybe you just need to pay the energy cost of the next card twice, in which case it’s just ditto but worse.
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of course some kind of saving feature would be good
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I think it would be better if the effect of shift was reversed, so you walk by default when pressing a direction key. While you are targeting, you can’t walk anyway.