Short Term Vs. Long Term Decision-Making In Slay the Spire 

any time there's a powerpoint I click immediately

Feedback: having screenshots of cards filling blank space in slides could help new/lapsed players following without having to open a second window. Otherwise great session as always, I'd watch this type of lecture even if it was about Lacrosse

It feels like big shoutouts to our friend Baalorlord for recommending jorbs to just take Dark Embrace on floor one. That guy is swell

"Solving immediate problems in a way which allows you to solve future problems" is a great way to put it! I think my product owner needs to play more StS

As someone who is much worse at slay the spire than you, I have to say that taking a card in act 1 because it synergizes with a potion you have isn’t as intuitive as you think. When I first saw you stating that was something you were considering in a run, I thought to myself “But that potion is only going to help one card on one turn of one fight, and we have the whole rest of the game to play. Shouldn’t whether the card is pickable on it’s own be much more important?” After watching you play for years, I have a much better understanding of why your logic is correct. Knowing that you will have one good turn on an elite or boss fight can allow you to play greedier in a way that can allow you to sneak in one more elite fight or one more upgrade or take a greedier path without dying. Getting a small, incremental gain in act 1 has an easier time of influencing the rest of the run, because coming out of act 1 with an extra relic could do the same thing for every fight for the rest of the game. Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is I’ve learned a lot from you over the years. Not just about Slay the Spire, but about how to think about large questions through the filter of minute details. Thanks for all the content. ❤

Jorbs, your recent videos got me to finally start putting together a regular stream schedule for some xcom! Thanks for the inspo. Hope you and the crew are doin' well.

3:37 zephyr blesses us with his presence

Hooray for the return of spireside chats, very lovely to see this pop up. It's funny to listen to the section on dark embrace prioritization- I had a run literally an hour before watching this which ended up using (dark embrace + true grit + battle trance) as my entire card draw engine, with (rage + pommel strike) to ramp block, and (headbutt + rampage + body slam) of all combinations to easily smush A20 heart. The rampage actually ended up making a difference in a lot of fights throughout the run, and though another pommel strike probably would've been better, I never saw one. I would never have won that run in that particular way without having gone through years of contextual reassessment of combinations of cards, deck sizes, etc. Granted, I was carried by bag of prep + runic pyramid, some things never change.

So, what I take from this is that Slay the Spire is so complicated, the only thing we know for sure is that if you take Dark Embrace more often you will have Dark embrace in your deck more often.

Interesting discussion! Reminds me a lot of the dilemma around seeking infinites in spire. I used to never go infinite but after watching your arc of very much pushing characters towards infinites I've learned to identify when the pieces are kinda coming together and it's created a really strange mental space where I sometimes end up at a card reward that is an objectively good card for my deck and allows access to a certain direction of win condition but at the same time it doesn't synergize well with going infinite. And like, I don't *have* the infinite yet, but it kinda feels like I could reasonably get it a large amount of the time, and if I do I just win, but taking this card helps give me an option to win in a different way but definitively locks me out of my theoretic infinite but also maybe that different win condition has a higher amount of variance so maybe it's worse than just trying to force the infinite? It's weird lol. Fascinating to me that Spire is a game played at such a high level yet still contains such a high degree of variance between evaluations of different strategies and approaches. I wonder what results using a machine learning algorithm to try and approximate "optimal" play would result, even if the amount of boardstates makes that pretty darn difficult.

Really good presentation, as usual, Jorbs. =] I actually left a decently long comment on one of your recent runs - re current potions changing card choice, it's cool to see you bring it up here. The only thing I'd say could elevate these is a discussion portion: I'd be so hooked if you spent some time discussing it with Baalorlord, for instance (I know collabs are not quite as simple as I'm making them out to be). I started watching him when you had your last discussion with him, and hearing both your thoughts on this kind of stuff (especially since he's now finished his year-long challenge) would be great! :D Have a great day.

Your comment about Pandora’s Box being a powerful enough relic at the end of act I to be keeping in mind how you build your deck is the biggest takeaway for me. Excited to get back into the spire and play around with less card removes in act I to see how it effects my runs.

I think an interesting factor to add to this discussion would be the possibility of skipping early/mid game threats altogether. Imagine you just beat Guardian as the Silent and your deck is still a little slow and lacking damage for Act 2 Elites. BUT you found a Toxic Egg as your free relic from Act 1. It might be perfectly reasonable to take zero Act 2 elites (assuming this is allowed with pathing) because you are able to build a deck that becomes incredibly powerful through regular card rewards. These situations tend to be rare, but they do offer another important axis around which early-game vs. late-game decisions can be made.

You remind me of Perun. I would've never thought that a PowerPoint's going to be interesting and entertaining. But you - exactly like Perun - are making very interesting and entertaining powerpoints. Nice.

Huge fan of you including "tangents" about specific cards you think are interesting in this kind of content. Hearing your thoughts about Dropkick specifically gave me some food for thought that I think will be helpful. Great video!

Now Jorbs lemme tell you about a little underrated card called DEMON FORM baby 😈. Dark Embrace?? Draw a card whenever you exhaust a card? Nahhh... 2 Strength a turn baby all the way!!! 😈😈😈

"Welcome to my Slay TED Spire talk"

I've never been this fast to a video! Love you jorbs!

Professor Jorbs always gets a click

Loving all the spireside chat content recently!

We need "dark mode" option for these presentations. I really love them, but they do be a flashbang.

I'm just not sure whether I should consider my short term bid a "Greedy play" or a long term investment a "Greedy play." Perhaps both are, or maybe I need a second word to describe one of the two.

Loving the general spire content. More please.

It would be helpful to show what Dark Embrace even does

Pro of Not Removing Strikes in Act One: More entertaining for Alex to watch. That's great for me! I am also not a fan of Pandora's box at all, although oddly Astrolabe I like.

Jorbs, can you make a playlist for all PowerPoint videos? I love dem

I really really want more spireside chats. Easily my favorite content no contest

PowerPoints are some of My favorite gaming content

Man that’s a great fucking hoodie. Good video too, ITS BUSINESS TIMEEEE

9:10 - 9:40 Didn't expect this video to turn into a good life lesson

Eyy these are back!!

Great video! Very informative!

We're back!!!

To piggyback on how hard it is to estimate winrate in the future, due to how hard A3 bosses can be depending on your deck. In A1 you don't know what boss you're facing so would a 100% winrate again 2 bosses and 100% loss vs the last boss really increase winrate by say... 35% (it's not 66% due to our deck otherwise would have had X amount of chance to win. But in 66% of the outcomes, given that you get there, it does increase but might be worse than 5% more winrate on all 3 bosses in A3.

It's not as good as a pure spreadsheet, but I still get excited when I see Jorbs with a PowerPoint deck.

Do you have any more information on StS being more complex than chess at the whale? I believe it but am interested on how that conclusion was arrived at.

Love these types of vids. Cheers

I love the powerpoint vids

the goat

yessss more nerd jorbs

I'm not sure I buy the thing about StS being more complicated than chess considering there's no opponent whose decisions you have to predict. Maybe in the sense that finding a literal 100% perfect solution would be harder, but that's probably never going to happen for either of them anyway. If we're talking about solutions that are just pretty good, StS is also simplified by a lot of easy heuristics. For example, more damage is pretty much always better, but in chess there's no obvious sense of like a piece being on a better square. Of course, some moves are still better than others, but you have to find that out by exploring the consequences of each move rather than some kind of simple numerical comparison.

A thing I've noticed about the Slay the Spire community which can annoy me a lot, is that a lot of the good players on discord and such have a very strong believe that Act 1 greed is nearly always bad, and they will they act very smug and mean to anybody who dares skip a crappy damage common in the first few floors. Of course there's a decent chance that they're mostly right, and you should just suck it up and take Quick Slash every time, but I feel like there's a lot of different ways to greed and a lot of them are relatively unexplored. For example, what if you try playing in a way that lets you safely skip shitty cards and good ones. What if you just start skipping elites because that allows you to build a good deck and spend less money on potions, maybe that's worth sometimes. And you can greed in a nearly opposite way too, this vid has inspired me to try out a new strategy, prioritizing early stores more, to increase the chances I find a good damage pot, so I can draft more greedily and still take elites.

If you read this comment, you will become a weeb.

Thank you Jorbs for going into these things in such detail. The ideas that you're putting out are very interesting, and help me expand my own understanding of StS.