Slaying the Spire for Fun and Profit, Part 5: The Watcher

THE WATCHER

I'll be honest, I have not found a lot of good strategies with the Watcher. Her cards are very conditional. Apply 2 Vulnerable IF the last card you played a Skill. Apply 1 Weak IF the last card you played was an Attack. If the previous card played was a Skill, draw 2 cards. 

It's just a real house of cards that feels very fragile. You need to draw and play the correct cards in the correct order, otherwise they are underpowered. That wouldn't be a problem, accept that the effects don't always feel powerful even after jumping through all the necessary hoops.

The Watcher has, unequivocally, the weakest starting relic in the game. Pure Water adds a single Miracle card to your hand at the start of combat. Miracles, like a lot of Watcher cards, have Retain, meaning they stay in your hand instead of being discarded at the end of the turn. That one Miracle card gives you a boost of 1 energy, once, before being Exhausted and leaving your deck for the rest of the fight. So basically the Watcher gets 1 extra energy per fight, maybe, if she needs it.

The Watcher introduces Stances, which grant her different abilities during combat:

• Calm stance: No effect while in Calm. When you leave Calm, gain 2 energy.
• Wrath stance: Deal AND receive double damage.
• Divinity stance: When you enter this stance, gain 3 energy. Deal triple damage. Leave this stance at the start of your next turn.

Quite a few cards allow you to enter Calm or Wrath. Divinity takes more work. You have to gain 10 Mantra, which is generated by various cards, in order to enter Divinity. When you do, you lose 10 Mantra. It's a lot of work, and hopefully a big payoff; if you don't have very many Attack cards in hand when you enter Divinity, you'll have just spend a lot of turns and cards for very little advantage.

I have found this to be the case with a lot of Watcher cards--a lot of effort, not necessarily a big payoff. She feels very inconsistent. And in a game like Slay the Spire, when you're limited on when you can heal, consistency is important.

I did do well with this strategy, though:

Scry.dek

The Watcher introduces a mechanic called Scry. Scry lets you look at the top few cards of your deck, then dump any number of them into your discard pile. It can let you dig past the chaff, like Strike and Defend, to get to your good cards. 

Cut Through Fate, Just Lucky, and Third Eye are easy to acquire cards which provide acceptable value for their energy cost while letting your Scry as a bonus. Foresight can be more difficult to obtain, but is a nice inexpensive 1-energy Power card that lets you Scry 3 each turn.

There are two important payoff cards for the Scry deck: Weave and Nirvana.

Weave is your damage payout. It's a 0-cost attack that plinks enemies for 4 damage (6 upgraded). It also returns to your hand for more damage each time you Scry. With enough Scry cards, you can Scry two to four times a turn. If you're returning 1 to 3 copies of Weave each time, that adds up to a lot of damage.

Nirvana is your defensive payout. For just 1 energy, you get a Power card that grants 4 Block every time you Scry. Again, with the amount of Scrying you hope to do, you can get 4-12 Block a turn without breaking a sweat, more if you can get multiple copies of Nirvana.

Of the two, Weave I think is the more important payout card to acquire. You can scrounge up Block in other ways, such as with Third Eye, but your damage output is going to be very poor if you don't manage to scoop up a copy or two of Weave with the archetype.

The nice thing about this strategy is that, when the elements come together, you have a great mix of offense and defense. You can consistently dish out decent damage while putting up a good defense. It feels very balanced.

Mantra.dek

I will freely admit that the above strategy is the only one that I have successfully used to beat the game. I have made quite a few Watcher runs in Slay the Spire, and nearly all of them have eventually stumbled. However, Mantra decks seem feasible, if you can get a good mix of three types of cards: Mantra-generators, card draw, and big attacks. 

Prostrate and Devotion are good ways to consistently generate Mantra. Pray feels like a dangerous way to generate Mantra, as it does not provide any attack or defense for its cost of 1 energy; this means that there will be turns when you cannot afford to use it. However, Pray does provide some card-draw, which is important.

Once you generate 10 Mantra and enter Divinity, you want to be able to use the energy and the boost to your attacks. Brilliance is a good damage payoff, easily dealing 70+ damage on the turn you enter Divinity for just 1 energy. However, you need to have your damage payoffs in-hand on the turn that you enter Divinity. This makes any card draw, especially cheap card draw, very important to this deck type.

Wheel Kick is both damage and card draw, which makes it ideal for this kind of deck. 

Ragnarok is a fantastic damage payout.

Cards that generate Insight, like Evaluate, Pray, and Study, let you stockpile 0-cost card drawing with Retain until the turn you need them.

Colorless cards like Secret Weapon let you fetch your best damage cards out of your deck on the turn you go off.

I have found that this decktype can take a lot of punishment while it sets up. There are enemies that just won't give you the three to five turns you need to come online. Thus, reaching the end is very difficult. However, if you are able to assemble a Mantra deck that goes all the way, please let me know in the comments!

Other Ideas

The Wrath deck is an obvious idea and has plenty of good setup cards, like Rushdown, Simmering Fury, and Indignation. 

There are plenty of good inexpensive ways to enter Wrath, and if you're transitioning from Calm into Wrath, you'll have extra energy for throwing powerful attacks at the enemies. Be careful, though. Wrath giveth, and Wrath taketh away. If you don't finish off the enemies right away, you'll likely take a LOT of extra damage. 

Omega decks feel very powerful once you complete your setup. I have found setup to be unbearably slow sometimes, which means that, as with most
Watcher decks, you'll be taking a lot of hard knocks while you build towards your payout. With Omega decks, you want to pick up one or more copies of Alpha.

Alpha puts Beta into your draw pile. Once you draw Beta, you play it for 2 energy to shuffle an Omega into your deck. Omega is a MASSIVE payout--a 3-energy Power that deals a whopping 50 damage each ALL enemies EVERY turn. I keep trying this deck type, and it's never quite come together for me; I just can't find the right mix of card-draw and defense. I'll keep trying, though!

I'm also interested in making Big Energy decks work. The Watcher has a lot of energy generation with cards like Deva Form and Deus Ex Machina. Combine these with payouts like Conjure Blade, Vault, and Omniscience, and you could have a very powerful deck. Again, though, my attempts thus far require too much setup time to withstand all the attacks that enemies can throw in the first few turns.

Final Thoughts

These are by no means the only deck types available for each character. However, I hope this helps give you ideas of new decks to try. Slay the Spire is a very fun roguelike cardbuilding game. I highly recommend you try it out if you haven't already. 

Let me know in the comments what deck types you've enjoyed!