This guide focuses on showcasing what I consider to be the best Spirit loadouts, both for general purposes and as 1-Spirit teams. With enough preparation, you too should easily be able to trivialise basically the entirety of Moonstone Island's combat.

This guide is divided into 3 sections:

1. General Combat Tips, Advanced Tips, and Concoction Tips
   
2. Specific builds for the 3 Spirits you'll ever need
   
3. More notable builds that I find kinda fun

* I recommend skipping to specific sections if you're only interested in certain topics.

You can trivialise the combat if you can draw unlimited cards and have practically unlimited energy to play them in one turn, which is easily achievable with 2-Spirit team consist of any Psychic-type and any attacker.

Alternatively, there are several 1-Spirit teams that can reliably defeat any groups of enemies, either with insane damage output or the "infinite engine".

• Spirits differ from each other mainly in 2 ways - Type & Ability
  - e.g. Hopstraw & Womr are both Earth type, so they have access to same set of cards
  - Both their abilities do not affect combat, so these 2 Spirits are functionally identaical there
  
• Keep your deck small to reliably draw the card you need
  - Feed your Spirits Cleanse Talismans to remove cards from their deck
  - This means 2-Spirit teams can be more preferrable because of a smaller deck
  
• Feed Concoctions to your Spirits, prefably with Crops grown with Fertilizaer
  - You unlock the ability in the first Summer
  - You can grow Crops with the Alchemist's Wand from the Spring Temple
  - Concoctions effectively boost the levels of your Spirit
  - If you feed in correct order, you can boost levels by up to 68 (!!)
  
• You can retreat to heal up if you have a bad first turn

• Making a good team usually involves dedicating "roles" to your Spirits
  - e.g. Put the energy cards on your Psychic Spirit, and attack cards on your Electric Spirit
  
• These are the criteria of what I consdier an "optimal team" would be:
  
  1. Team is capable of winning battles within the first turn
     
  2. Strategy is consistent and would not struggle against certain encounters
     - e.g. Poison builds would not work against Puppox
     - e.g. Energy builds would break against a certain miniboss
• Here are more to take into consideration:
  
  1. How many cards are needed to be played each time?
     - The more cards in deck, the longer it takes to cycle through it
     - This means 1-spirit team set things up faster and more reliably
     
  2. How easily can the damage output be increased?
     - e.g. Charge builds can triple damage output with simply another Turn It Up+ card
     
  3. Do the Spirit abilities benefit combat?
     - e.g. Capacibee gives extra safety thanks to its free revival
• Holo Spirits technically have slightly more stats, but they are insignificant compared to Concoction effects, so I wouldn't recommend going after Holo Spirits

* You unlock the ability to brew your own Concoction as soon as the 1st Summer.

• To get more Glass Bottle, keep more Water Spirits in your Barn
  
• To get more Ash, go to any Fire island and start chopping trees
  
• To get better crops, grow them yourself with applicable fertilizers
  
• The random Concoctions are inferior and not worth using on your Spirits, so I usually drink them with my character directly to immediately get an empty Glass Bottle
  
• I would not recommend brewing Concoction for healing or taming if you already have access to a Psychic Spirit, which can easily provide unlimited energy to let you feed raw crops one at a time
  
• Like with crops, the effects on stats cannot go beyond the biggest number listed for each consumable, this is a big reason why Concoctions are good as you can "concentrate" the effect of 2 of the same crops into 1 consumable
  
• Negative stats from Concoctions can be "neutralised" by feeding regular crops, even if they are from the wild and not grown with fertilizers. This means you can feed a few Fuzzballs between a +SPD/-POW Concoction and +POW Concoctions, if you want the effect of both +SPD and +POW
  
• See also the Farming Strategy in my Compendium Guide (linked at the bottom)

1. 🧪 Icicle Root
   
2. Fuzzball x10
   
3. 🧪 Prickly Plant+
   
4. Fuzzball x8
   
5. 🧪 Wingfruit+
   
6. Crescent Plant x3, Fuzzball
   
7. 🧪 Crescent Plant

"🧪 Prickly Plant+" means "Concoction made with 2 Prickly Plant, both grown with Fertilizers".

Most of the fun in this game's combat comes with designing and experimenting with the team compositions yourself IMO, so I highly recommend trying to design your own team first! And by the time you are done, or simply want to focus on enjoying the other aspects of the game, come back for the rest of this guide!

The guide is also not exhausive of course, I am only discussing what I consider to be the strongest or most fun to use. Personally, I prioritise teams capable for a "reliable 1-turn clear", because nothing feels better than bullying the enemy into submission without giving them a chance to attack.

The upcoming sections will cover the teams I've used and found to be most efficient.

Psychic Spirits are the best in generating energy and drawing cards, which makes them the perfect support IMO. With enough Meditate+ to draw more cards for free, as well as Open Mind+ and Enlighten+ for additional energy, you can easily play your entire deck several times within your first turn.

Do note that Mind's Eye is a rare 5★ card so you likely won't find it until end-game. Instead, you can substitute Open Mind+ with it for the time being.

Electric Spirits are the uncontested strongest type due to their ability to exponentially increase their Charge status, allowing them to dish out hundreds to thousands of damage very consistently... That really is it! Charge up once, then keep tripling the value with Turn It Up+, and finally unleash the big attack with massive damage!
(It gives you +3 DMG first, then +9, then +27, then +81, etc. See why it's overpowered now?)

To increase the damage output, include additional Turn It Up+ into your deck. Also worth noting that you can completely ignore the POW stat and instead invest points into SPD without affecting damage output, which prioritise going first more reliably.

This loadout is the main reason why this guide has no dedicated section for Ribbite. As in, the poison-stacking strategy that I've seen being constantly praised is somewhat unreliable. Even when you ignore how certain Spirits are immune to status, Ribbite's ability only allows it to bounce the poison randomly, so you still have a 50% chance whether an enemy can survive an extra turn or not, which introduce risk of your Spirits getting stunned or even defeated. Ribbite is not terrible, just not as reliable and also restrict your choice of Spirit.

Most people would do just fine with a 2-Spirit team using the previously mentioned Psychic and Electric loadouts. But if you want to go the extra mile and further streamline your deck, ditching your Psychic entirely would allow you to dish out just as much damage using this loadout, all while cutting down the number of cards you have to play.

Basically, you Consume your attack card first, meaning when you draw it with Blind Blow+ next, you would have a 0-cost Lightning+ that can hit all enemies. Lightning Spike is less preferred because it only hits 1 enemy, whereas Lightning Storm exhausts so it can be risky. (I also don't like the long attack animation)

Same as before, you can expand the deck with more Turn It Up+ for 3x the damage each, though you do need extra Blind Blow+ to for drawing cards. The best part is that this build doesn't rely on energy generation, and can defeat a certain miniboss quite reliably on its own.

Basically, the "Infinite Engine" works by turning a Blind Blow+, Deja Vu+, and a non-exhaust attack card all into 0-cost, allowing you to keep playing them indefinitely. You do need a 2nd Blind Blow+ to turn the 1st one 0-cost, and a Patience card is a reliable way in setting it up. Additionally, Sacrifice can be helpful in exhausting cards too.

The main benefit is that it is unaffected by the ability of a certain post-game miniboss, which adds a Curse card into your deck for each energy you gain, meaning this loadout still allows you to reliably win on Turn 1. The downside is that you are attacking only once per 3 cards, so each battle can feel super slow.

SPOILER for the final boss, also remember to turn on subtitles.
https://youtu.be/9PVIdShM7mg

This ia a joke build!

The idea is to utilise Dusty's Ability, where you can keep using 0-cost Tackle for infinite energy. (albeit only 1 at a time haha) Ideally you would keep its POW stat low, but luckily Bite exists and scales with the SPD stat instead, allowing you to still deal decent damage. And of course, Momentum and Uppercut help with drawing more cards, while Bash and Rage further increase your damage output.

Sadly it does get countered by the aforementioned ability from the miniboss.

Psychic is good at generating energy by default, but technically the amount is still limited. So by including Deja Vu+, the deck would truly becomes infinite! Though even with how powerful Necronomicon is, it still doesn't scale as strongly as Electric, so fast kill is not guaranteed here haha

Again this loadout gets countered by the aforementioned miniboss.

Explode is the strongest POW-scaling card in the entire game, AND is a 0-cost card. The downside? It also hurts you, so often times, using it would be suicidal. But what if you make yourself Intangible beforehand? Well you can simply keep exploding until nothing is alive!

This loadout is actually viable against the aforementioned miniboss!

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3501497850

I also put together a compendium that contains a wide variety of info tidied neatly into spreadsheet format. The Page Index is in the Steam Guide, so you might find it useful for navigating the spreadsheet.

Google Sheet[docs.google.com] | HTML View Mode[docs.google.com]
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3512136383