Pew Pew

The latest update brings a new Archetype to mix into your playthroughs: The Laser Cannon. This archetype has been designed by a veteran Slay the Spire player and modder, DioBal and I’ve tweaked the card pool for balance and added a few designs of my own.

The new archetype adds two new mechanics into the game, so let’s explore them together.

Fusion is the primary mechanic of this archetype. When two cards with this tag and the same name are drawn in the same hand, they “fuse” together into a stronger single card for the rest of the ordeal. This allows you more “bang for your buck” for the same amount of immersion, while at the same time naturally thinning out your deck. The drawback of these cards is that they tend to be slightly weaker than their more “straightforward” cousins with similar effects. This will probably mean that the fusion deck has a ramp-up period, characterized with a slow-start, but escalating output towards the end of the ordeal. The expectation is that focusing on this mechanic will make the player have to craft deck with some hand manipulation, where you might want to send cards back into your draw pile in order to try to achieve fusion faster, or you might need to tutor cards out of the draw pile etc.

Vivification is the secondary mechanic of this archetype. Cards with this tag have an effect which triggers at the start of the ordeal and does nothing else throughout, effectively acting as sort of dead-weight cards in return for getting an immediate effect without paying any immersion. They act a bit like curios in this regard. Most of them can be played just to remove them from the deck, but they will still take some space in your hand and/or some immersion. To help with that, the archetype also adds a few cards which can get rid of your own cards for various benefits. If you can target your vivification cards with it, it’s a double bonus.

I still need to craft 2 more cards to bring the archetype to the usual card pool of 20, but it should nevertheless be fully playable as is. With this new archetype, the potential card-pool combinations possible is now increased to 4.

Try it out and let me know what you think.