Slay the Spire: Defect A20H Strategy, When Is Your Deck “Complete”?

Image credit: © Mega Crit Games, LLC. Slay the Spire (PC/Steam version). This article uses a limited number of screenshots to explain gameplay strategy. The screenshots are from the Japanese version of the game.

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Note: This article is about the original Slay the Spire and assumes Ascension 20 and an attempt to beat the Heart.

When can you say a Defect deck is “complete”? This time, I’d like to write about what a finished deck looks like when your goal is to beat the Heart.

Keep in mind that this is about the most basic, most common case. This game leaves endless room for unusual ways to win, such as special relics or unusual card combinations. I won’t cover those in this article.

You have to deal with the Heart’s attacks and Beat of Death

To beat the Heart, you have to deal with its powerful attacks and the damage from Beat of Death.

For the Defect, the basic strategy is to build Block with Frost Orbs. So you can think of cards that channel Frost as nearly essential.

For defense, you want Frost, Focus, Orb slots, and Loop

To gain a lot of Block, it’s important to increase your Focus and your Orb slots.

On top of that, if Loop lets you gain Block from a Frost Orb at the start of your turn before you act, that’s perfect.

Putting it together, what you want in your deck comes down to these four:

• Frost
• Focus
• Orb slots
• Loop

There are surprisingly few cards for these four pieces

One thing to watch out for is that surprisingly few cards cover these four pieces. If any of them show up along the way, you’ll want to secure them whenever you can.

For example, only five cards can channel Frost: Coolheaded, Cold Snap, Chill, Glacier, and Chaos.

What’s more, against the Heart, Chill channels just one Frost and then exhausts, and Chaos channels random Orbs. So Coolheaded, Cold Snap, and Glacier are cards you should prioritize whenever you find them.

Orb slots, Focus, and Loop are also precious. Loop, along with the Focus cards Defragment, Consume, and Biased Cognition, are cards I definitely want to secure when I see them.

That said, Capacitor, which adds Orb slots, is actually more of a dead card until partway through Act 2, so it’s a tough call. If your deck is strong enough, I’d like to take it.

For offense, you need scaling or an infinite deck loop

On the offensive side, you need either scaling or an infinite deck loop.

For scaling, think of cards like Creative AI. Another common approach is pairing the boss relic Inserter with Consume to keep growing your Orb slots and Focus.

There are also Thunder Strike and Blizzard, which get stronger the more Orbs you’ve channeled, though they aren’t very efficient. By the way, trying to win with Claw is a stretch.

For an infinite deck loop, the idea is to thin your deck and set up endless Energy and draw with cards like TURBO, Skim, and Compile Driver.

As another way to win, if you can generate plenty of Focus and Orbs, you can block huge amounts with Frost so you never go down, while slowly chipping away at the enemy’s HP with Lightning and Dark.

Get the cards you’ve collected out quickly and use them all

Then there’s one more important task: from the start of combat, quickly getting out all the cards you’ve collected and using them.

This is extremely important against the Spire Shield and Spire Spear, and against the Heart. In Defect boss fights, how quickly you can get through your first pass of the deck matters a lot.

Also, in this game, killing fast matters for taking less damage in hallway fights, but the Defect is bad at that too.

To solve these problems, the following become important:

• Draw
  • Compile Driver, Skim, Heatsinks, Seek
• Energy
  • TURBO, Aggregate
• Removing unnecessary cards
• Not taking extra cards

Use the shop to fill in what’s missing in Act 3

To sum up, a complete deck needs the following:

• Defense: Frost, Focus, Orb slots, Loop
• Offense: scaling or an infinite deck loop
• Cycling quickly: draw, Energy, removing unnecessary cards

If the shop in Act 3 sells a card that fills in something you still haven’t covered, I’d definitely buy it.

I hope this helps!