Your strategies for silent ascension ?

[Firebead Elvenhair]

Hi.

I am currently on ascension 6 with the silent.
I must say I am a bit of a sucker for discard/cycling builds, since I believe that 4 out of 5 of my ascension wins were with discard decks. I just personnaly think they are easier to achieve since you can either go for gamble, thrown daggers or grand finale strategies with essentially the same core cards (prepared, reflex and thrown daggers).

By searching the forum, it seems that poison builds are popular for ascension. But how do you deal with multiple ennemies with poison builds ? Do you need to find specimen or corpse explosion or did you find a way around ? What are your ways of surviving while reapplying poison ?

Shiv decks can be quite potent too, but I admit I am scared of facing the thorn ennemies in act 3 with shivs... What's your strategies when you ran into 3 or more of these encounters ?

[DuckAndCower]

In my experience, thorns aren't too bad with shivs. Either have a hybrid discard deck for some easy defense (Prepared combos well with the card that discards your hand and replaces with shivs), or use something like Blur to get high defense for when you attack. By the time you run into thorns, your shivs should be hitting for like 10 damage or more.

That said, I'm Ascension 7 with the Silent, so the strategy might not work well beyond that.

[iangoth]

For poison decks, having a little non-poison AOE still isn't a bad idea, and Noxious Fumes obviously helps. On my last Ascension 15 run, IIRC my main "AOE" was just Bouncing Flask, but it worked because I had a pretty well tuned deck otherwise.

[Romain672]

I checked my history, and I will comment it :
- ascencion 13 (Astrolabe + Pandora : weird choice)(number of card : 28) : -
Not a good example, I just took only good card (Well laid plan, Dagger Throw, Noxious Fumes, Backstab, Endless agony, etc), and build around that.

- 12 (Lizard Tail + Cursed Key)(30) : 0cost
I just got some early 0 cost card, then took a Choke. I build around that with 2 after image, so there is a some shiv (Cloack and Dagger, Infinite Blades), some 0 cost card (Prepared+, Deflect, Well Laid plan, Malaise, Calculated Gamble, etc), antivenom.

- 11 (White beast statut, Tiny House, Sozu)(33) : 0cost
Again, with Kunai and Shuriken at the start of act 2, I build around that, similar deck than 12, but without After image but more Slice and more draw.

- 10 (Velvet Choker, Orrery)(25) : Noxious Fumes
Noxious fumes deck with defense card (Burst, Footwork, Backflip, Percing wail) and just Noxious Fumes is 90% of my damage.

- 9 (Ectoplasm, Cursed key, Runic dome)(39) : Relics
Interresting deck, with an excellent early game with Ecoplasm, I took all elite for early game. So I got a lot of relics (22), and since I didn't upgraded much my cards (heal), taking non upgraded card was more good than usual.
So you find many random card (damage, poison, weak, draw, etc).

- 8 (Philosopher's stone, Astrolabe, Eternal Feather)(23) : Grand Finale, 0cost
Again a 0cost deck but this time around A thousand cuts and Though Bandage.
Bought a Panache on shop.
And with some draw card (Prepared, Acrobatic, Backflip) and Well Laid plan, I can play Grand Finale easily.

- 7 (Ectoplasm, Black Star)(28) : Defensive
This deck find no good damage on act 3. So I beat Time eater with only 3 Strike.
But this deck wasn't so bad (25 relics), with Footwork+ I could have 35 block each turn, and it's enough against a lot of the encounter with enough draw card for play the 3 strike.

- 6 (Ethernel Feather, The Specimen) : Noxious Fumes
Same than 10.




Didn't have the stats for ascencion 14 et 15.
For me, shiv really need something with it else you will have an hard time against the time eater.
I don't like shiv deck. I prefer deck with 0cost card (since Infinite Blades, Well laid plan, Slice, Terror, Clock and Dagger) are some good early choice for me, and something for extra damage (either a relic, choke, finisher, etc).
But with nearly every deck, you still need some defense card for act 3. You can do easily act 2 (except (or not?) the boss) without defense with some deck.

And affter some ascencions, I was not a fan of Poison deck without a Noxious Fume. But I think it should be still possible.

[Firebead Elvenhair]

Thanks ! Good to hear some more experiences !