Copying over my response from the other post

Originally posted by MulticellVong:

I'll let community chime in for more specific cases. The other dev is the one more focused on designing and playtesting the various possible builds anyways, so this'll just be my personal playstyle.

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I usually run a main tank, and an off-tank. My main spams Wall of Flesh and takes all the hits, and then later down the line the off-tank switches in with either its own Wall of Flesh or a cheaper card with Threaten. Which allows you to attack a bunch, while they're burning through the accumulated block, rather than the switch back and forth between blocking one turn, attacking the next that often happens (well, for me anyways).

As you progress, that does mean you want to settle on a strategy for ramping damage, before the difficulty gets upped. Either hoping for serendipity to RNG you a build-around, checking in at the Academy after every map for inspiration, or just going full Poison build which is one of the lower hanging fruit in terms of builds.

Just switching between more than one Wall of Flesh alone should get you through early poison enemies. And you'll want to get the above in to place to weather poison bosses / harder poison enemies and outramp them in time.

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I also run more bloated decks (the other dev is the one who likes thin decks) so I fare pretty fine against Devour usually. But if the deck is on the thinner side, you'll want to ramp damage fast enough before your deck gets gobbled up. Of the Elites that might devour your entire deck, they slowly ramp up to it, so its very much a timer. Essentially the answer boils down to ramping fast enough, having a sufficiently bloated deck if your ramp is slow, or having a self-thinning deck that you don't thin when you go up against devour enemies, are the usual strategies. having card-generating cards in your back pocket to stave off running out of cards.

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As for difficulty, I used to always stick to the lowest difficulty offered. That said, for the longest time I wouldn't buy cards from the Academy for some reason... which might explain why I needed to stick to Easy for so long, just so I could gain cards organically. Which.. now that I think about it, is pretty much the new player experience anyways, not having enough vellum to purchase a bunch of cards from the Academy from the get-go.

Eventually you get to the point where you start skipping Easy as soon as possible. Enter Hard once your combos are relatively in place. And get forced in to Hellish where you try to survive as long as possible, only to eventually fail.

For tips, I can only speak for the Routine - Hard Difficulty missions. My strategy is to run a deck with consume cards, running them in tandem with High Metabolism, More Protein, and Rabid. With multiple low cost cards, like the common attack cards and upgrading them to cost less. Then you want a card that shuffles all discarded cards into the draw pile, like Reckless Charge. This alongside Adrenaline, Blood Shot, and Grounded will help with Impetus or the cost of cards. With enough consumed cards, you'll be ramping up damage like there's no tomorrow. And as a finisher card, for this setup, you'll want a handful of upgraded Quick Reflex cards and Fetch cards. The Quick Reflex cards will be used to increase your hand size, and the Fetch card will be used for finding the Assault cards if you haven't drawn it already. Using the Assault card after ramping up strength, with a ton of cards in your hand, can unleash a flurry of death when used on an enemy. The best part is, if that didn't do the enemy in. All the cards consumed by the Assault card will have just increased your strength way more.

As a rule with building decks, I like to stay with the max of 4 duplicates to any card. If only to keep myself from going overboard or unbalancing the deck. Another thing is, the "?" spots on the mission's map are totally worth it if you want a chance to get more power. You also can't go wrong buying the Beefy cards when they appear in the Academy. More HP just means your creatures are more resilient to poison, bleeding, or whatever attacks that make it through to them.