Useless without an upgrade

[Jonah Falcon]

Which cards are useless without an upgrade?

To me, Rage and Body Slam comes to mind. 3 block? Meh. You need the full 5 block.

And Body Slam needs to cost 0 to be of any real use.

[LHGreen]

Those cards can be fine without the upgrade. Body Slam especially can be compensated for quite easily, even if it's not upgraded. Usually, you want cards like Warcry to be upgraded.

[Jimmy Hunter]

There's no card that's useless without an upgrade. Upgrading them just makes what they provide either give more or take away less.

[hebe]

It depends, like all things in spire. There are tons of examples of holo being useful unupgraded way more than upgraded one, for example.

[tiberiansun371alexw]

Evolve and Fission come to mind. I almost want to put wraith Form here. After all, since you need to spend 3 energy to use the thing, that basically means one of your turns of invicibility is useless. If you get it on your next to last turn it's great, but the odds of it appearing too early seem to high. Then I remembered that Act 1 Hallway fights don't last long, and Orange Pellets are a thing. It's not like every fight is against Gemlin Nob, Nemesis or the Taskmaster So it can't go on this list. Rampage comes to mind. In theory it can scale every time you got through your deck. In practice it's too slow without an upgrade.

[Nibbie]

I'm not sure there is anything I'd consider "useless" unupgraded, but there are plenty of things that I wouldn't want to play without upgrading. Prepared is pretty bad without an upgrade, it is literally just -1 card unless it triggers a discard synergy. Uppercut is typically too expensive for what it provides until upgraded, you don't have enough energy afterward to take advantage of the one turn of vulnerable. Lots of the cards that get cheaper when upgraded feel bad to play at full price. Some cards, like Thousand Cuts and Buffer, get literally twice as good when upgraded.

[Zu]

Shoutouts to envenom which is barely playable even with snecko skull.

[LHGreen]

Originally posted by Zu:

Shoutouts to envenom which is barely playable even with snecko skull.

Envenom is great for a very specific purpose. But it's much better upgraded.

[tiberiansun371alexw]

I think almost any card has a place in a deck. I believe if the OP asked "If you had 3 cards in yuor deck you 100% wanted to upgrade before getting to the Act 3 Boss, which cards would you refuse to take unupgraded Act 2." It is possible the OP actually meant useless unupgraded, but I think this is what he actually meant.

[1.2M | Missingno.]

Useless might be a bit of an overstatement, but 'upgrade debt' is a concept you will hear A20H players talk about when it comes to cards that are very high priority upgrades, to the point where you may want to reconsider taking them if you aren't going to be able to upgrade them soon.

Biggest gaps in upgrade value that come to mind that haven't already been mentioned:

True Grit - Extremely potent tool when upgraded, somewhat risky unupgraded. Depends on how reliably you can play the rest of your hand though, but the consistency is undeniably important.

Entrench - If it costs 2 energy, you're probably not going to be able to generate enough block using your remaining energy for this to make sense. It may work if you have Barricade, but it'll still be slow to set up that way, and it's all the more reason why you need to upgrade it ASAP.

Eruption - Obviously. This is the first upgrade on every Watcher run.

Most 3-costs that upgrade to 2-cost - These are often very hard to get into play, especially Powers that don't provide enough immediate benefit on the turn they're played - because you will inevitably draw them on the turn a big attack is incoming. 2-cost is often critical just to ensure you can play them.

Originally posted by tiberiansun371alexw:

Fission

I've actually come around to thinking the upgrade is not nearly as important as it looks, and the card certainly isn't unplayable upgraded. The value in Fission comes from getting it off early in a fight to set up a big turn that gets the rest of your deck's scaling tools online. Getting some evoke effects is a nice bonus, but it's not the card's primary purpose, and since you want to play it early your orbs likely haven't scaled enough for the evokes to do a whole lot. It can sometimes save you a turn in hallways, but that's about it.