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I keep seeing new players do this, although overdosing on unupgraded block cards isn't much better either. You do want both in act 1 but you should already be looking out for cards, relics, even potions that help you scale, i.e. value over time like smooth stone.
Sometimes you draw badly anyway but it shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Minimize draw rng by having a few consistency tools like shrug, backflip, headbutt, well-laid plans, the oh-so influential runic pyramid, then proceed to have a 1 in 30 bad hand anyway, get hyperbeamed, bump this thread to vent, then realize that you had incense burner last run which you could set up to nullify said hyperbeam, so the rng evens out.
This is the first trap players fall into once they start thinking about the game.
"Oh, how should I improve the consistency of my deck?" The obvious starting point is then to find ways to remove cards that you don't need (AKA the starter deck) and to avoid picking up cards you won't need for your archetype. Unfortunately, the amount of available removes tends to only be 2-5 per run (obviously there will be outliers, but uncommon). If you then still want to keep your deck small to fit whatever archetype, you'll then have to skip lots of cards that don't fit that archetype. This is a major problem because you will need to pick up cards that might not be useful in Act 3, but are super useful in Act 1... so that you can make it to Act 3 in the first place.
The real solution to improving deck consistency is to pick up cards that balance your deck and solve immediate (and sometimes future) problems. Treat removes as a luxury. They are nice to have, but not important or necessary (usually). Understanding what cards you need to pick for each situation tends to require a good amount of experience (and a good amount of critical thinking). There are a lot of good examples of how to choose cards in various scenarios (I like JoINrbs' old content (his newer stuff less so) on youtube - see the overexplained guides - it's a little outdated but the concepts are still pretty good).
Like, floor 0 trade 99 monis to remove 2 strikes, run into the event that lets you trade 7 hp for another removal, and then you tackle that floor 6 elite with 2 strikes and like cleave headbutt. Not even bash can bail you out of this one without potions.
Anyway, balance is the most important thing. Cutting down your deck size isn't really necessary, and you can totally end up with a 50+ card deck at the end and have a pretty easy time the whole way through. Optimizing the deck size can be pretty important eventually, but that's a long way off. You want to make sure you have not only attacks and defends, but draws, an occasional energy boost, buffs/debuffs, and cards which sync up and work well with each other and with the relics you pick up. There's a number of similar topics on this board that you can look up that will also give good advice and pointers. From what I've seen, the boards are better for that purpose than several of the guides written for this game, which can be outdated and offer counter-productive advice.
Also why does game always close itself when I minimise it?
Ouch. My guide isn't that bad.
If you try to skip picking up attack cards, you're going to be punished for sure (early by Gremlin Nob, mid game by a Chosen, and late by Giant Head, among others). You can try and brute force your way past that problem (Nob won't gain too much strength from a couple of skills, and if using a double play potion on Catalyst kills him in two turns, it works), but rather than trying to pick a lock with a hammer, you should really just get a lock pick.
I used to have the same problem (still do with some of the more 'gimmicky' classes like defect honestly). In the early game you're looking to just balance your deck out, get some staple cards that will get you through at least one elite fight and cover your bases. If you see a nice rare or something that might lead into a deck archetype later on or just one of those cards that is just why wouldn't you take it (corpse explosion says hi) then yea snag it, but don't HYPER lean into an archetype on floor one. If you see a key piece here and there for synergies (accuracy if you have a blade dance or whatever the add 4 shivs card is) grab it on floor one, otherwise though focus on cards that are basically 'strike-plus' or 'block plus' type cards, or essentially cards that are on par or better than a strike or block that do a little bit extra.
For example, lets say you're on the Ironclad and you get a choice between Demon Form, Pommel Strike and Firebreathing from a hallway combat early in Act 1. Your first reaction might be OOH DEMON FORM, but think about the balance of your deck and energy efficiency for a bit.
Demon form costs 3, and gives you 3 extra strength each turn. In a hallway fight with multiple enemies, odds are something is attacking you turn 1, and demon form basically guarantees you'll be getting chunked for some damage since its ALL you can play in a turn at this point. Even if you do play it, ok you get 3 extra strength, so an extra 9 damage total with 3 strikes = 27 damage by turn 2. In your standard deck setup, you have 5 strikes (I think?) so between turns 1 and 2 you'll get 36 damage out of it, if its only 4 then 24 damage max by turn 2. Since hallway fights only last 2-4 turns anyway, Demon Form is going to be dead weight and a wasted card in the early game until you get some ways to scale energy up a bit.
Now lets look at the other two options. Firebreathing might look like fun, deal damage every time you draw a status or curs. Cool, that can wreck sentries.... IF you get to the point where you shuffle your deck during the elite fight. Aside from that though, unless you're intentionally loading up on curses and cards that cause status cards to get shuffled in, its useless, and even then, you'll have to play it in a deck loaded with curses if you go that route... and if its on the bottom of your deck.... gg.
That just leaves Pommel Strike. Does decent damage (I think something like 9 when not upgraded?) and draws you a card. The damage might trail off a little bit, but its better than a strike, and it gives you card draw even into the late game, which is always nice, all for 1 energy.
This isn't saying Demon Form and Firebreathing don't have their places, but they're usually niche late game pickups for later in the game if you stumble onto them (Demon Form is nice if it's upgraded to be innate and in a deck with offerings, energy relics or with snekko eye to hopefully drop the cost down for example).
Lastly, health. Don't think of it as health, think of it more as a resource. The more you're able to conserve your health, the more you'll be able to use rest stops to upgrade or use relics that add rest stop actions. There's plenty of runs where I saw the 'reach for the relic' event and just blew 25 health just to get unmolded clay or a maw bank which, while perfectly fine relics, and NOT worth 25 health... Especially when the next shop ended up having a Brimstone relic when I was already working towards a strength deck so Maw Bank just kinda got wasted.
tl:dr: When building your deck in the early game, focus on things that will help you in the now, keep defense/offense balance in mind, and only remove strikes or defends when you've added something of equal or better value to replace them for the same cost. Also I tend to remove strikes before I remove blocks. Also keep what encounters you might run into in mind and path accordingly. For example, If you have really good single target damage but no AoE, taking on Act 2 elites might be a run ender because of goblin guy and his minions, or in Act 3 because of Repto. If your deck has a slow start up and needs a lot of time to set up, Stabby Book and its infinite scaling might end you in Act 2 if you decide to risk an elite fight.
I'm by no means a pro at the game (still getting my ass kicked in by Ascension Level 7 and took a break to finish the unlocks of the other classes outside of Ironclad) but once I learned those basics about deck management and not leaning too hard into a gimmick or build too quickly, my runs got a LOT more consistent. Nowadays unless I either totally screw something up or just am horribly unfamiliar with the class's cardpool, I can usually at least make it to Act 3. Personally I'd say stick with the Ironclad and Silent for now until you get the basics of deck management down, since they're a bit more straightforward and unlock a lot of great relics just by playing as them a few times.
When you beat a boss, you heal to full for the next act. It doesn't matter if you beat it at 1 health or 70. It is common for me to enter the act 1 boss in particular at pretty low health because I upgrade instead of resting. This is especially true against the Hexaghost, because his first attack on turn 2 actually scales with your current health.
Upgrading offense allows you to kill enemies sooner so you take less damage. Upgrading defense directly decreases the damage you take. Both are a form of "healing". Resting at a bonfire should always be a last resort.
Lastly, blocking everything isn't always the right choice. If you are losing so much HP to hallway fights, you may be taking them too slow, or just building your deck too slow. Taking a small amount of damage to end the fight a turn or two earlier can save health in the long run. Which is the right choice depends on the makeup of your deck (remember you can check your draw pile to determine your likely upcoming hands), and the actions your enemy is likely to (or simply will) take, but it is always a consideration that should be made.
try to pick up a low cost damage cards first few floors like pommel,twin strike,cleave(this is really good since its aoe),anger(really good in act 1)
spot weakness(really good for scaling your damage),armaments,shrug it off,disarm are really good skills that i usually always pick if i see in act 1.
also removing cards is really helpful. You should remove your basic cards as much as possible so you dont have 6 damage strike against 300 hp enemies in act 3. So if you get remove in first few floors dont remove more than 2 strikes because you need some damage for act 1 elites. my advice is if you encounter removal events always take them.
As you can see from the many responses to this, that's what we like to call "a mistake".
But if you play FTL, you should already know that even if you're building towards a certain strategy, while you're doing that you make do with what you have and just use what works, so that you can survive the upcoming areas. And sometimes, that strategy doesn't come together, maybe you don't get the tools you need or something else happens, so you compensate and have a fallback or two set up. Well, this game is like that, but much more so, largely because you can't sell what you've acquired and often times getting rid of something actually costs you instead of repaying you, but also for a number of other reasons. You just have to take that sort of difference in the mechanics into account and compensate for it.
Lol, I said several guides, not all guides. Trying to figure out which ones are good and which aren't, though, may not really be worth the effort when there's a helpful community already present. Depending on the problem, that is.
Good advice, mostly, but removing cards should be treated as more of a luxury. You don't need to remove all your blocks and strikes asap, and having several in your deck even at the Act 3 boss or in Act 4 is perfectly okay and viable.
Plus, even if you do want to get rid of as many of them as you can, there's better ways to do it than spending an increasing amount of money at a shop. There's relics and events that specifically effect your strikes and defends (Pandora's Box, Strike Dummy, the Vampires event, etc.) that can get rid of those cards for you or sometimes help them be better, and other events or relics where you'll be happy that you have some strikes and defends to sacrifice instead of having to offer a card that you actually want to keep. Junk cards can be just as much a form of payment as money can, and many times the thing you're getting in return can really help you out. Just be on the lookout for anything you can find that will help you in return for changing or getting rid of a card, rather than going out of your way to expel all strikes and defends.
How do you win at Poker or Mahjong? Because despite a lot of randomness, there are many small optimizations you can make to become a better player and over the long haul you'll win more than lose. StS has much less randomness than either of those games.
That's going to happen at least once or twice every game. Over the course of the game, you're going to draw 300-400 hands. One of those is going to be all attacks when the enemy is attacking, and one of those is going to be all blocks while the enemy is blocking. So you need to plan for this contingency. Potions can help. Cards that do both can help. Card draw can help (a lot). Powers can help. Relics can help. Retain can help. Doing such massive DPS (or having so much block you can turtle through anything) can help. Lots of ways to deal with this situation.
It's not that situations like this *might* come up, it's that it's a virtual certainty they *will* come up, so you need to plan around that.
I guess watch some YouTubers or streamers? This is too general a statement for anyone to help with. Honestly, I kinda feel that way about FTL; I just suck balls at that game.
I had an absolute nightmare of a time winning this game. Took me over 100 hours before I finally beat the heart. But after I beat the heart once I went on to beat it again with all the other characters pretty quickly lol. The goal is to plan ahead for what you will be facing. I read some guides that suggested keeping your deck to 20 cards or less, ignore those guides. Instead, you want cards that will make your defense and offense solid enough to plow through the end game.
But RNG, the RNG. Yes the game has heavy RNG but you can mitigate the RNG quite effectively by abusing draw/discard cards and exhaust. Exhaust cards are crappy looking if taken at face value, but they allow you to permanently remove cards you don't know like curse cards from battle which helps you mitigate bad RNG. You should also be taking advantage of card removal options available to you. Sometimes you'll want a card that's useful to you in the beginning but is crazy worthless later. Let's say you went for some shiv cards but found more poison cards later making a poison build the better option, remove the shiv cards.
Like for heart, you're going to want ways to weaken it, reduce its strength and rapidly increase your blocking ability while still maintaining an offense good enough to destroy it before it self-buffs too much.
This brings me to my next point: Know your enemies. Know exactly what they are capable of. Like you know the heart will reduce your HP by 1 every time you use a card, if you're running a shiv deck on Silent you will get destroyed fast unless you have after image. You gotta aggressively tackle battles and events that give you cards until you manage to build a deck that has synergy with what you have.
For example, I was doing Ironclad and grabbed and upgraded several Flex cards to synergize with Limit Break. Basically Flex gives you a temporary boost to STR but if you use Limit Break to double your STR, it will only remove the amount given to you by the card, not the amount gained from Limit Break.
So that brings me to my last point, know what your cards do. If you have a deep understanding on what cards do, you can find patterns and ways to take advantage of synergy.
Game requires some abstract thinking. You will fail a lot if you are looking at everything at face value instead of really considering your options.
...Well, frankly, the RNG itself. You can mitigate it by abusing the crap out of it, because when you save and quit, no matter how far you are into the battle, when you load it up again you start at the beginning of the battle/event. As long as you haven't completed it or had the game save, it takes you right back to the beginning, unlike FTL, where it drops you right back in to the exact point you left at. And, because the RNG is set from the beginning of the run, everything plays out in exactly the same way it did before, AS LONG AS you make the exact same choices as before.
Need to match 5 pairs of cards while avoiding the curse? Easy! Want to see whether you get a good face or a bad face, but don't want to commit until you know which it is? No problem! And in a fight, if you're wondering what would have happened if you played this instead of that, or made a different choice, you can just find out, as long as you don't die. You effectively have the power to see a bit in to the future (making the Frozen Eye relic slightly redundant, btw), and can learn from your mistakes much more easily if you use it. The best use for this is as a learning tool, but it can also help you turn a loss into a win when you're starting out, although the better you get, the less frequently you'll make any mistakes that can be solved simply by restarting the battle. It can still be useful to learn things and as a cheap trick even at that level, though. And if something like that feels like cheating to you, well, think of it like this: you said yourself that you feel the game doesn't play fair, so why should you?
TL;DR: just cheese it. The cheap tricks are always the best (or at least the most satisfying) ones, anyway.