guide

Upgrading the class ability provides you with a permanent bonus – usually very interesting and tempting. Its worth needs to be considered carefully, particularly against alternative options. Upgrades are usually expensive and not all of them are worth their price.

The decision is chiefly important on high infernos, where your base deck struggles to survive first encounters and needs urgent boosts. While some upgrades help early on and seem necessary for a class to work properly, others are not that great and might be postponed or skipped entirely (some even should).

Another important factor to consider is when to purchase the upgrade. Some upgrades need to be bought as soon as possible, 1st shop preferably, simply because without them you will not be able to progress. But other ones can wait and won’t lose their value. The deciding factor is what will give you the best chances to survive next couple of encounters until you build a stronger deck – an upgrade, healing, buying card?

When you’re offered a bad card, don’t take it. When you’re offered only bad cards, DON’T take any. Yes, maybe it’ll help in next fight or 2, but in late game it will make you die. You need to build a strong, reliable deck since the beginning.

Gems are usually the best choice you get. And it is good. Don’t be sad to take it, it will allow you to buy skills or other services at merchant. Choosing a bad card weakens your deck. Choosing gem will make your deck stronger.

You can also acquire cards at Merchant. The same rule applies, even more, as it would cost you valuable gold – don’t take bad ones! Merchant offers many ways to spend your gold – healing, removing or duplicating are all valid choices.

Every deck, every class wants and needs boosts. Buffing statistics can be done by skills or cards. Skills provide buffs that are applied automatically when the requirements are met while cards can apply either permanent or temporary boosts when they’re played. You should usually prioritize getting permanent boosts as they are obviously superior.

You need to choose proper boosts for your deck. If your defence relies mostly on immune and daze you won’t need Resistance. If your main source of damage are abilities that don’t benefit from strength (Shaman’s lightning), you most probably won’t need Strength.

Races can be very strong, if well built, but can also make your deck very inconsistent, if you don’t build it properly. Most of the race cards scale based on race counter which encourages you to have many of them. Be careful.

Adding weak race cards in order to boost your strong race cards won’t really be beneficial for you. It’s much bigger harm to draw these weak cards instead of good ones than the profit of dealing couple more damage or gaining some more shield.

One race goes better with one class, while another with other class. There’s not strict division, but some synergies make particular combinations stronger. As example, Fairies will work great for Wizard, as they are mostly magic cards, but for ranger, whose base ability relies on combat cards, they won’t be the perfect choice. Some classes can build very efficient decks without any race.

Very often it’s worth to take particular card belonging to one race for its own effect, disregarding its race synergies. Elder fairy will be a good choice for most classes even if you don’t add any other fairy to your deck. Choosing such cards might but doesn’t have to lead to building this particular race on later stage, even if you didn’t plan it. If you were lucky enough to find 2 or 3 elder Fairies you might want to add Red Bloom too, which you wouldn’t add if you didn’t have any other Fairies in deck.

Always when making a choice which card to add remember about consistency of the deck. Filling deck with too many mediocre cards will make it unreliably and sooner or later will cause your loss.

No matter if you decide to go with races or not, you should always prioritize cards that scale. They are always better than flat value. They grow in strength over time and remain useful until the very end. During your run you boost your strength and resistance by cards and skills. for cards that scale the boost counts multiple times.

Skills are bonuses that are automatically applied when the requirements are met. Many skills trigger simply at the beginning of combat, or every turn, but some have other requirements. They never clog your hand and don’t require an action to trigger the effect which makes them very strong.

The general rule that defence is more important than offence applies, so it’s usually better to choose the defensive skill. There’s a variety of them and some of them will fit your deck better than others. Choose carefully.

Note that the strongest skills in game are either defensive (Frost Nova, Freezing Shot, Ice Block, Circular Shield, Invisibility Potion etc)) or economy ones (Demon Eye, Necromonicon, Dark Sigil).

Some of the very good skills are actually cheap. On high inferno these skills will be your best friend. Invisibility potion or Ice block are very helpful already in w1, where you struggle the most, and remain just as useful until the end of game.

Don’t forget to use the re-roll option in shop if you can afford a good skill afterword still.

When you start the game you don’t have any bonuses available. You need to complete Normal difficulty and Inferno 1 to unlock the first one. That’s why this part is relevant only to experienced players.