Slay the Spire 2 isn’t just one of the most popular new games of 2026, it’s the most popular deckbuilder ever. 574,638 people were playing the game simultaneously at launch, which vaporizes the genre’s record on Steam. It’s the first mainstream-ish deckbuilder, and still the most-played card game on Steam by far (Magic: The Gathering Arena has about 1/7th as many people playing it on average).
With several months of time with its substantial early access release, we’ve brought together a panel of editors to share their sharpest thoughts on Slay the Spire 2’s design, cards, best bits, and annoyances.
Evan Lahti – Strategic Director, PC Gamer: 426 hours, 441 runs as Silent, Monster Train 2 evangelist, 30-minute wins with every character, plays fast and loose
Harvey Randall – Staff Writer, PC Gamer: 212 hours, won at least once at A10 on every character
Austin Wood – Senior Writer, GamesRadar+: 256 hours, won an A10 streak of every character, one by one
Act 1 is too punishing and too boring
The easiest way to clear Act 1 reliably is just to rest at every opportunity. This is the main reason that the Miniature Tent relic is the absolute turbo nuts in Act 1 but just good later on. The entire act is a health check, throwing tons of unavoidable damage at you immediately and forcing you to either high-roll a monstrous build within 10 cards or top up for the HP tax of the final boss. Act 1 almost feels balanced around Ironclad, leaving the other characters to just take their lumps.
The current structure, especially in the godforsaken Overgrowth, sucks the life out of some of the most enjoyable early decisions in Slay and reinforces the snowballing nature of the game. Aggressive pathing and drafting are not even worth thinking about a lot of the time. If you don’t spike within the first five floors—something like Cursed Pearl into a fat shop or Silken Tress handing you an “I win” card—you’re usually in for a tame Act of conservative plays. If you do roll high out of the gate, the Act just becomes a stomp.
All of this skews Neow relics toward explosive options like Silver Crucible, and it results in a lot of dull or short runs. There’s just too much mandatory damage. I’d like to see some difficulty cut out of Act 1 and injected into Act 3. More runs would actually get off the ground, more meaningful decisions would be on the table in Act 1, and there’d be a bigger challenge to measure decks against. —Austin Wood, senior writer at GamesRadar+
Shiv spam & Sly is the most fun basic build
Shiv and sly showcase the simple delight of Slay the Spire 2: playing lots of cards and getting stuff for free. It’s meaningful that this Toyota Camry of a build can produce wins on Ascension 10, mostly thanks to the long list of relic synergies it has. Shiv, by itself, combos with Shuriken, Helical Dart, Ornamental Fan, Kusarigama, Letter Opener, Nunchaku, Pen Nib, Cloak Clasp, and Kunai. Grab a couple of these, and playing three or four Shivs amps your strength or dexterity, and doles out bonus damage or block. It’s the joy of low input, high output: the same feeling of a single click in Peggle that translates to a cascade of points and particle effects.
Sly is a likewise straightforward “something for nothing” mechanic. In a game where energy management is generally a resource-pinching puzzle, sly lets you cheat, playing a dozen cards in a single turn. The Act 3 boss Aeonglass punishes you for being too all-in on shiv, but sly is a solution to the curses it litters your deck with. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
I don’t care if it’s bad, I’m taking Silken Tress every time
(Image credit: Mega Crit)
There’s an argument to be made that Silken Tress is kind of dogwater—for the price of all your gold, every card in your first reward gets replay 1 the first time it’s played during combat. Compared to some of Neow’s other Relics, the Silken Tress doesn’t have a high chance of returning on your investment. If you get three cards that suck, that’s curtains for your run.
But I will take it every time, for a few reasons: Firstly, Glam is fun. Ordinarily weaksauce cards, like Setup Strike, suddenly become powerful for the first round of combat with a free replay. Secondly, A10’s first few floors are usually about solving your damage problem, and even a mid-tier damage card with Glam on it does that.
The third reason is a secret shame: I am not afraid to just drop a run if my Silken Tress reward sucks. Ascension 10 is so hardcore that I’m not all that interested in playing through Act 1 with a dead card, and while it’s a gamble to pick, it’s a gamble you know has or hasn’t paid off after the first combat. —Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
Slay the Spire 2 needs multiplayer-specific fights & relics
(Image credit: Mega Crit)
My opinion on multiplayer shifted dramatically in the game’s first couple of weeks. At first it felt underwhelming: fighting the same enemies with more HP, felt less satisfying because the rhythm of those enemies was totally different: you were no longer making rhythmic decisions about defending, attacking, and scaling, you were making contributions to a group project. As someone who plays a lot of 30-minute runs, I disliked how runs take significantly longer, depending on your teammates.
But as I played more, the experience of being carried by someone else’s absurd build is surprisingly fun. The synergies you get from one player grabbing a relic like Miniature Tent, for example, hit several times harder.
I usually resent “More content plz” feedback when I see it from fans, but in this case multiplayer needs to become more distinct as development continues. My guess is that multiplayer sessions only make up maybe 10% of playthroughs, but the mode is still one of the game’s distinctive pieces. Slay the Spire 2’s co-op is a good foundation, but it won’t fully shine until it gets mechanics, enemies, and relics designed exclusively for teamwork, rather than just scaling up health bars. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
Regent is my least-liked character cards-wise, but my most-liked vibes-wise
The Regent’s “buffoonery,” as Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano described it to me earlier this year, is endearing. He’s a stupid guy from space, a regal fool whose over-the-top personality brings a delightful comic energy to the roster. I love his rotund little kamikaze servants, holding aloft his impractical throne.
But the actual mechanical wind-up of his kit is slow and frustrating. I don’t like being blocked from casting cards in my deck because I haven’t built up enough stars. For a player who prefers direct, punchy action, having to do cosmic accounting over multiple turns just to authorize your cards feels tedious. It gets in the way of the fast-paced flow that makes other characters so enjoyable.
Regent’s playstyle demands a degree of foresight and patience that clashes with his breezy, goofy aesthetic. Clearing A10 with him was the least pleasant of the four characters, turning Slay the Spire 2’s snappy play into an exercise in star-charting that leaves my caveman brain unsatisfied. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
Underhated enemy: Mytes
(Image credit: Mega Crit)
Drab brown carapaces, these generic bug bodies belie pure pain.
I don’t enjoy having three problems to solve each round: unload these stupid Toxic cards, block for another 10-20, and oh right, hit these guys. Most characters don’t have a free discard or exhaust card to manage Toxic, and the fact that these negative cards can cycle through your deck again really punishes you for playing slowly. I struggle with this fight because my goals are split in directions that I usually cannot simultaneously achieve. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
Doom is boring
Storing block on Osty is a neat mechanic, defensive scaling that makes Necrobinder a particularly new-player-friendly character. But her other main mechanic, Doom, puts me to sleep. It doesn’t feel distinct enough from killing an enemy the old-fashioned way.
What’s needed to make Doom more layered are more risk-reward cards (and a relic) that apply doom to yourself in exchange for some benefit. Right now Neurosurge is one of the few cards that plays with this tension, but the rest of the Doom toolkit lacks that push and pull, making it feel more like cooking an elite at a very low temperature than an exciting strat. Doom functions like a delayed fuse, ticking down in the background without giving the player many tactical decisions, turning what should be a signature necromantic power into a ticker. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
Miniature Tent is bad for the game because I specifically never get it
(Image credit: Mega Crit)
I don’t like Miniature Tent. Not because it’s a bad relic, or anything, but because it generates so much straightforward value at higher ascensions that, regardless of your build, it’s an instant buy. The room for error on HP at Ascension 10 is so thin that the ability to rest AND upgrade a card (let alone combos with other “when you rest, X” relics) feels like a batter getting two extra strikes in baseball.
The problem? I don’t get it basically ever, and that makes me sad. Every time I see this tent in a shop, I never have enough gold for it, and it almost never organically drops into my roster of relics. I could count the amount of times it does on one hand, and if I do get it, it’s never with the Shovel or the Girya. And while I think relics should occasionally carry you to victory—I think they should do so under specific circumstances, like a Kunai in a Shiv deck.
Basically, STS2 should remove the tent because it upsets me in particular. —Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
Slay the Spire 2 is too conservative
For being such a whimsical grimsical game, Slay the Spire 2 shaves off a lot of the genre’s edges. You can make a powerful deck, but most combos are just different flavors of basic multiplication: applying a lot of poison, jacking up your strength, accumulating 100+ block, evoking many orbs, playing a ton of cards for free.
The total number of verbs available to you is pretty low. The spikiest things in Spire 2 are probably:
Lord’s Parasol – Auto-buy everything from the shop
Clone – Doubles cards, allowing for exponential deck-filling
Whispering Earring – Lose control of your first turn, which is auto-played for you (but not in an interesting way, just by playing cards from left to right)
The deck-mixing relics, Prismatic Gem and Kaleidoscope
Fighting the Merchant – More of an Easter egg than run-altering
It’s the design equivalent of painting with a palette of three oil paints. Slay the Spire 2 mixes those colors in satisfying ways. But other games in the genre let you color, sculpt, and draw outside the lines more often.
Deckbuilders have high ceilings for weird stuff, and I want more of that in Spire 2. One example: decades before digital deckbuilders emerged, an old Magic: The Gathering set had a card called Shaharazad that would initiate a “subgame,” a new game within the game. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
Monster Train 2 is a better game
Hi, millions of Slay the Spire 2 players, especially those of you who are willing to watch 1.5-hour applied epistemology and machine learning lectures on YouTube to get better at this simple game—you should be playing Monster Train 2. It’s just as replayable, more intricate, more creative, and more more.
As I said just above, I think StS2 contains an elegant but flat set of mechanics. StS2 is cozy checkers. MT2 is 3D chess, laying out a menagerie of units to arrange across three floors, arraying a wider set of variables for your brain to chew on. Fights are spatial puzzles of unit positioning, figuring out who should stand in front to tank damage, how to move key attackers, and when to sacrifice room capacity or even your overall health bar, Pyre health, for advantages.
The Clans are a rich source of depth—you combine two at the start of a run like Magic: The Gathering colors to produce blends of offense, defense, and utility. Pair the Victorian candle people with Lazarus League to create a build that draws its power from dying in creative ways. Team Luna Coven with Stygian Guard to create glass cannon spell bombs. My favorite, the Railforged, melt down cards into a resource spent to boost equipment.
Compared to Spire’s basic actions of attack, block, draw/discard, potion, the list of levers I can pull in Monster Train 2 is pleasantly irregular:
The deployment phase: where and when to play a unit matters
Sacrificing your own units
Repositioning units or enemies for offensive or defensive purposes, or to trigger effects
Using room cards to buff, debuff, or just microwave your problems away
Sacrificing Pyre (train) HP for gold or other benefits
Dazing enemies, or even your own units in some edge cases
Farming kills on permascaling weapons to prepare for later fights (it’s kind of wild that Slay the Spire 2 features no permascaling, other than HP, I guess?)
As Pyreborne, making cost-benefit decisions about generating eggs, a clan-specific currency
I haven’t even mentioned Soul Savior, the mode introduced earlier this year that puts every system in the game on steroids. Overall it’s a toolbox of weird, game-breaking verbs that Slay the Spire 2 restrains itself from offering. —Evan Lahti, Strategic Director
Aeonglass still sucks
(Image credit: Mega Crit)
Not once have I reached Act 3 and thought, “Boy, I hope the Queen isn’t here.” I only ever feel this way about the Aeonglass, a boss so far out of band that it could pass for the first taste of Act 4. Don’t get me wrong, I do want bosses that feel more like a puzzle to solve and less like a block check to clear, but the compounding gimmicks with Aeonglass are just less interesting than the likes of Act 2’s Knowledge Demon.
The brutal irony is that Mega Crit’s replacement for the Doormaker, an earlier boss so unpopular and awkward that it was nuked from orbit after the devs gave up fixing it, has almost the exact same problems. Aeonglass is markedly harder than the other two Act 3 bosses, frustrating and un-fun to fight because it fills your deck with status garbage (that deals ramping damage to you for reasons known only to satan), and inordinately punishes multiple characters and strategies in a way that makes those options feel inferior and warps deckbuilding. Far too many things in Slay 2 feel like they’re punishing you for playing cards in a card game, and Aeonglass is King Punish II. The less of that, the better. —Austin Wood, senior writer at GamesRadar+
Osty is my best friend because he is overpowered
(Image credit: Mega Crit)
Necrobrinder is my favorite and most-played character by a pretty wide margin, so I’ve developed a deep appreciation for Osty, your handy summon. As it turns out, the class that starts with its own version of Barricade and Body Slam is pretty good. Unleash is the strongest starter card in Slay 2 in the same sense that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the strongest member of his class in Kindergarten Cop. Unupgraded, there’s no contest. All you have to do is feed Osty your finest chocolates and he’ll eventually deal a billion damage for one energy.
Archetypes are often a lie in Slay 2 altogether, and Osty is probably the loudest proof. Even without offensive support from cards like Rattle, Squeeze, or Calcify, Osty is always strong. Dirge is fantastic in any deck with energy to spare, Unleash will kill a god given vulnerability and a Lethality or two, Reanimate is a big chunk of permanent block, and Fetch is basically free damage. Even when you just let Osty die to use him as ammo for Bone Shards or Melancholy, he’s always putting in major work. Of course, I would never do that. Not to my boy. —Austin Wood, senior writer at GamesRadar+
