Well done analysis, I'd also add that both roguelikes & deckbuilders involve growing from a basic starter kit to acumulating more power as the (temporary) game progresses, during each playthrough. Which kinda makes deckbuilders the "roguelikes of card games" or vice versa, if you think about it. Or perhaps they both belong to a more generalized category of 'kitbuilder', which also includes whatever Dicey Dungeons is
Truly one of the best roguelikes of this decade, up there with Gungeon and Risk Of Rain. You did a really great job higlighting the strenghts of the game, well done.
i've always felt slay the spire the be a genius game concept even in the early beta before it was playable. to see someone give an actually intelligent breakdown of what makes slay the spire so enjoyable and enthralling makes me pretty damn happy. i'll be sure to send any of my friends to this vid whenever they question why slay the spire is so fun, mate. hope your channel grows so i can see more interesting videos on game design from you!
I clicked on this video, because I was interested in Slay the Spire, but now I've also learned so much about the mentioned game genres, I'm impressed! And I want to play Slay the Spire now :)
A slight correction: Dominion might have been the first *dedicated* deck-building game, but it didn't invent the concept. TCGs have had draft mode tournaments for ages.
I think that creating a deck in one go, and being only interested in the final result, as in a draft mode, is inherently different to building a deck during the game, to continually adapt to the opponents (Dominion) or the RNG (Slay the Spire). Building then playing is different from playing at building.
also, something i just felt like saying after rewatching the video, ice cream doesn't just incentivise picking up high cost cards. it really incentivises energy generation cards (seeing red, adrenaline, TURBO as examples for each character) as theres never a bad time to play a pure energy generating card with ice cream unless you're in a situation where playing that card could make your enemy stronger by a potentially lethal margin (gremlin nob's strength gain) or make you weaker due to a debuff (chosen's hexing). the other card type that ice cream was seemingly created for is X cost cards. for anyone who doesn't know stuff about slay the spire, X cost cards are cards that consume all your energy points and do a certain effect as many times as you had energy. skewer deals 10 damage a hit, and will hit 3 times if you played it with 3 energy. without ice cream it can be difficult to get your energy to something quite high, say, six.with ice cream, you can slowly conserve energy and use energy gen cards to get insane amounts of energy. and when you're dealing 8 damage to all enemies 12 times... yea. TL:DR if you get ice cream take energy gen cards and X cost cards, save some energy up, dunk people with an X cost card by attacking a billion times with it.
I highly disagree on the Meta-Decks are not a problem in Slay the spire^^ Because this is exactly the probleme, once you beat the story mode and try the harder diffucltys. Because there you absolutly need a Meta Deck. And the Decks usaly revolves around 1-2 cards. So if you don't get them early enough, in a game with random drops, you are screwed .. and it's just n fun anymore. But this will only be a problem after ~10h So it's bascly FTL in reverse^^ Where the first hours of FTL are extremly mind grinding, because every new mechanics usually kills you the first time you encounter them. Slay the Spire is much more forgiving in the beginning. Where you learn all the possible solutions for every loadout and for every problem in FTL, in STS you learn that there are only 1-2 solutions. Where in FTL you build your ship up and get ever stronger, in STS you hope for that one card a Meta Decks revolves around, and so long you collect the matching cards. But then you get the Core Card for the other Meta Deck and you are just f*cked ...
2:45 not a particular fan of the choice of words here( strong and creative). every well build deck( or archtype) is strong but that strengh is relative and the perception of it depends on the decks you play against.
too bad graphics are so very ugly, there is a level of ugliness that simply good gameplay wont fix for me unfortunately. Same goes for games with great graphics but the shitty gameplay. The balance of these things doesnt have to be perfect but if the ratio is way too off, then it doesnt work. Pass
In my opinion, the best mechanics in this game is that you discard your hand at the end of each turn. This increases the pacing so much making the game almost feels like an action game.
It also makes cycling through your deck much easier, since you are going through chunks at a time to begin with. Throw some draw/discard in there and you can easily make some insane cycling turns.
@@JimJamTheAdmin My friend asked if you discard your hand then wouldn't that stop you from keeping a key card to pull off a big combo. But like you said you can combo your whole deck instead of your hand.
