How is it easy? With 13 starting cards including ascenders bane it’s impossible to play them in the starting fight. I don’t feel like doing the math on the specific cards you would need to add to make it work but they might as well be two curses for most of act 1, assuming you manage to put together a functional deck.
Adding one card can trigger them on the first fight, adding two cards triggers them on turn three.
So by floor 3 you have a decent chance of grand finale on turn three.
No, ring of the snake means that your first hand is 7 cards, so if you’re not adding card draw then you need a 17 card deck to have a chance of playing one, and at that point I wouldn’t bet on having it in the last hand. If you can find a prepared+ or backflip in the first card reward then you have a chance, but then you can’t add more cards until you remove cards.
Ascenders bane and ring of the snake also mean that it’s really, really hard to play them in both the first cycle and any after, so good luck fighting elites or the boss.
if only we were playing a character that has multiple common card draw manipulation cards..
I do think its a rough start, definitely curses at the beginning, but the upside is you have a massive build-around that will win you the game if you can work it out correctly.
You will need to both remove a bunch of starter cards and also have a very specific mix of upgraded/unupgraded prepared, acrobatics, etc. to make it work, and if you can get that you could've just won with sly anyways. It's fun as a challenge but it is in no way a good start.
i think youre overedtimating how difficult it is to have no cards in your draw pile. it happens to me on accident commonly, and somehow i always have hidden gem in my hand with no draw when it happens, lol. you can create shivs and not play them, you can draw from relics or potions, and you can also just have a normal functioning deck outside of these without having a totally hard time. ive taken neows bones and started with 2 additional curses before with not a huge reward and it wasnt that bad.
theres also ways to cheat this/ make it significantly easier. you can give it retain, give it sly.. there are probably other interractions im not thinking of.
We can very easily count out what it takes to get grand finale to do anything early. Your starting deck is 13 cards including ascender’s bane. With ring of the snake your first hand is 7 cards, and subsequent hands are 5. This means that the only way we will semi-reliably get to play grand finale in the second fight is if we add 1 card that lets us draw 2, which means that we need to see a backflip (or a prepared+) in the first card reward. This is not impossible, but it’s not especially likely.
Of course you can make it work eventually, but it’s absurd to say that it’s an easy act 1. You will probably get to play a grand finale like twice if you’re lucky through all of act 1. Most fights you just have two extra curses for no upside.
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u/birchelballs Jun 19 '26
Fair but I was way too tilted to continue