Ironclad Card Unlocks Dilute Card Pool

[Serulin]

The Silent's card pool contains mostly cards that are just generally good. Whether you go the poison route, shiv, card cycle, weaken, etc. most of the cards do not directly conflict with each other which allows for relatively easy deck building. More often than not if you choose the strongest card, you can make a pretty strong Silent deck that will only lose to the luck of the draw.

Ironclad has the problem that many of its archetypes directly conflict with each other. Wound build makes clash useless, 0 cost attack spam without significant card draw, exhaust requires several cards to become useful, and the big one for me is that defensive cards get heavily diluted the more unlucks you gain for the character.

I won my first 2 Ironclad runs and since then have struggled to pick up more wins. Flame barrier and shockwave are such key defensive cards in my opinion, but with the increased card pool, I may or may not see either of those cards on any given run. It feels like Ironclad is relying on too many synergies to work consistently. I would probably change some of the powers and skills so that they are more universally useful even if you cannot fully build towards an archetype. For example the Silent's poisons are still great even if I do not have sneko skull or envenom or even the poison cloud. Shiv spam is also great even without accuracy or choke and finisher. They become even more deadly with these cards and synergies, but each still makes a great standalone card. Then you come to the ironclad side where embrace darkness does literally nothing without exhaust cards and so does exhume. Evolve is really only good if you have multiple/upraded or wounds from elsewhere and even then they can clutter your hand and overfill it.

[Visual Basic]

It’s intended to make you adapt to different archetypes. With any deck building game you can’t really force a build, if I don’t get offered a barricade by the first boss I’m not going to go for a defense build.

Early on the first floor just choose enough damage to kill elites then start going for a real archetype from there. Just skip cards that aren’t going to help you, also many archetypes DO go together.

Evolve + wounds for instance work as a great draw engine for any non clash deck. It’s one of the easiest ways to go for a full hand deck every turn. Clash also obviously works with exhaust as you can remove defends and non attacks. I’ve never had a run where I’ve gotten shafted hard enough by every card choice to not pick a decent card.

[Traveler]

Exhaust requires other cards to be useful? I beg to differ.

Exhausing base card(strikes and block) itself is beneficial. I think what makes ironclad great is that exhaust is always beneficial. (unless you are going for perfected strike/mindblast... well. we all must do what must to beat the game)
Exhaust is equivalent to silent's discard - for silent, you gain some kind of bonus by discarding. For ironclad, you don't see the card until the end of combat. And since significant amount of ironclad card is dependant on exhaust, I think you should learn how to use exhaust to see its true value. You are crippling yourself with this playstyle and unable to see synergy it provides.

Only issue I do have is really crap cards like combust or fire breathing.

[CAROUSEL™]

Others may be surprisd how often I remove or Skip cards and relics that have downsides. I find that a hefty handful of cards just go avoided either because of mana cost, downside, or both.

[Mister Smithy]

i would agree that it dilutes the card pool but at the same time it opens up new strategies. I.E. the strength build uses a lot of powers and then you can build your deck with clash or exhaust mechanics as your deck will be thinned way down. Combust is still bad though.