Monster Train Thread: It's Slay The Spire but fresh

Monster Train Thread. How many people here actually know about the GOTY so far this year? It's basically like Slay The Spire but with enough original shit to keep it fresh. It's got 5 colors like MTG and you bring 2 of them each game, so there's 20 combos possible from the start.

The biggest gameplay difference is probably that in STS you need a deck that just consistently can block while dealing damage fast enough, while in this game you're expected to actually break some shit to win. Got an OP as fuck spell with reduced cost and every time you play it you get it in your hand again next turn? You can copy it and now there's 2 in your deck, there's even an event which can add 5 copies of a card to the deck. The game avoids infinite combos for the most part but getting absurdly powerful shit is common because the game is built where scaling ramps up super high.

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Been playing and loving slay since last year, this looks interesting, what's with the floors/levels?

>The biggest gameplay difference is probably that in STS you need a deck that just consistently can block while dealing damage fast enough
Bullshit. In monster train all you have to do is get one guy with a large enough hp and a healing spell and that's it, you win. Not much different then getting lots of defense in StS.

It's got a type of Tower Defense gimmick. Enemies start at the bottom and rise up in turn-based waves, your "character health" is actually just the heart at the top of the "Train". Your goal is to kill stuff before it reaches the top, because when stuff does it fights your "Pyre", which is the actual health of your run. It adds a lot to the strategy, where on top of playing the best cards in your hand, you have to decide which floors to put what units, where to cast spells that are AOE (since they're floor specific casts). It's not complicated at all, but it adds a lot to making decisions, like maybe you take an AOE that will deal massive damage to an entire floor of units including your own and leave 1 floor empty, or maybe you'll put units on all 3 floors to wear everything down, or maybe you go all-in on one floor to try and kill shit that way.

The flying units on the right are the bosses, who can interact in ways other units cannot.

That's not true at all, one guy with even unlimited HP won't kill every enemy since it'll only get 1 attack before the whole floor of enemies rise up past them. You'd lose before the bosses even spawn because any time a group of 4 enemies comes, 3 would get by and hit your HP total.

Ah, here's where you mention you can get overkill damage to kill multiple things, or multistrike, or use spells to send enemies back down the train again, admitting there is strategy to it past big HP totals.

This game is essentially playing Slay The Spire as the Spire, and that's cool with me. It does directly rip off some STS stuff, like one relic (called artifacts here) is literally just Snecko Eye with a new name and lore. The stuff it does that is new is very clever though, instead of upgrading cards being 1 preset path, all cards have 2 gem slots you can upgrade cards with in shops. Do you want this tank to gain armor any time you cast a spell, or just have more HP? Do you want this unit to go back into the deck if it dies so you can spam it, or maybe have it attack before the enemies do? Do you want this spell to cost less, or stay in your had until you cast it, or go back to your hand every turn as long as you keep casting it, or maybe you want both of those last 2 so you can always play that card when you need to.

The depth in the game is great, and the average run time is slightly shorter than STS.

This game is honestly just too easy. At the very least I'm currently at I think covenant 12 or 13 and runs really start feeling like the same thing in different colors. The only difficult boss is chaste and all it does is make sure you aren't playing spell weakness or rage or some shit.

You can say the same thing about the bosses in STS, all the time snail does is make sure you're not playing infinite decks or all weak cheap cards, all the bird does is make sure you're not playing only powers over and over, ect.

Why are you so sure the game is too easy if you're on covenant 12 or 13 out of 25? For people used to STS covenant is just a different word for Ascension, 12 or 13 means you're in essentially median difficulty right now.

>The depth in the game is great, and the average run time is slightly shorter than STS.

That honestly sounds like a plus, I love StS but runs can take a while.

Great game. Giant Bomb had a quick look of it that sealed the deal after a friend told me a bit about it.

Favorite clan combos?
I just finished Cov2 with a Melting/Stygian combo and loved it. I'm a big fan of Umbra/Melted but I've never managed to finish Seraph with it.

One of the big differences is that instead of doing like 30 fights in a run, and making like 50 choices of which path to take, the game has 8 fights every time, and only 1 route split between choices. Like in pic related, on the left there's a geyser to recover HP, a red unit-shop tent, an a treasure box with a choice of 2 relics/artifacts. On the right there's free gold, a cavern event (identical concept to STS events), and a purple spell-shop tent. You can only go left or right, and once you do you just get the 3 things you see, and that smooths down a lot of the time you need to think about choices. Most of my runs are like 40 minutes to an hour depending on the deck.

Awoken anything is fun, Melting anything is fun. Umbra is the only one I don't like mixing much, I'm either main Umbra or I don't see the point in taking them at all because of the way they scale.

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>For people used to STS covenant is just a different word for Ascension, 12 or 13 means you're in essentially median difficulty right now.
Are you actually a shill? This sentence feels extremely unnatural.

I say it's too easy because slay the spire baseline feels much harder than where I'm at in monster train.

As for the bosses I think slay the spire's are more interesting. They each have a few mechanics unlike the others that you have to consider while you get to them. The seraphs all just feel like hp sponges and the only limiting mechanic is chaste's.

I enjoy Umbra.Hellhorned quite a bit and have made that deck work before. Idk if it would be viable for higher Cov levels though.

I really wish they would let you look at other people's decks in multiplayer matches. Honestly, the multiplayer is the biggest letdown for me because it could be so much better with just a few additions.

Melting/Stygian is fucking great, this beast practically won me a run.

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I've only played Melted 5 times but I've never seen that card! Is it unlocked at a higher level? I can only imagine how much you could break the game with it!

I'm not technically a shill but I don't mind praising the game because I've dumped 80 hours into it already. I think most of the time this game feels easy because unlike STS, this isn't most people's first deckbuilder game of this type. It's probably easier to win this game if you make good choices compared to STS, but this game also has more difficulty bumps so there's more room for them to up the difficulty.

The seraphs sort of are all HP sponges, it's the units they have that make the difference. If you can't kill the shit that lowers your mana before it attacks, you're fucked. If you let units slip by because the tanks protected them, you're fucked. The effects the seraph have are secretly less impactful than the units that each Seraph spawns.

You unlock it, yeah. It's fucking crazy in that it splits into 2 which both split into 2 more. It's only so broken in my run because I got the relic for a 3rd upgrade, each upgrade is a lot more important when it applies to 6 units.

Any pro tips for playing multiplayer matches? I assume you just need to accept every trial that comes if you actually want to place first, right?

I see some people finish rounds in under a minute and it always blows my mind how they clear it so easily.

You don't need to take all the trials, it's not always about winning as much as not losing the longest. The timer is very strict, you've GOT to be on the top speed mode or you won't stand a chance.

The most important advice is to focus on strats that win quick. Huge Trample units doing insane damage per hit can win a fight against a boss in 10 seconds, a group of tiny units with damage shields keeping them alive might get into a 30 second fight, losing you the game if there was only 25 seconds left on the clock. That's why survivors tend to finish fights quick, in multiplayer speed is everything. Losing halfway through because you made poor choices is better than losing 2 fights in because you took too log to decide.

rank clans. go.

S tier: melting
A tier: umbra
B tier: awoken, stygian
D tier: hellhorned

I'd put Awoken above Umbra, Awoken can auto-clear easier difficulties if you keep the champ alive

S:Awoken
A:Melting, Stygian
B:Hellhorned, Umbra

Your a looney.

S tier: Melting
A tier: Awoken
B tier: Stygian
C tier: Hellhorned
D (but not necessarily BAD per ce) tier: Umbra

Only take the trials if they won't slow you down, or if you're sure your opponents will be skilled enough to take them. Winning with 20K points is better than 19K, it doesn't matter if you got 20K by winning challenges or just surviving longer.

I won a run I shouldn't have won due to playing a duplicated Shadowsiege with Multi-Attack x2, along with the artifact that makes your cards cost 0-3.

Managed to thin my deck enough to where I was consistently dropping both Shadowsieges on my bottom two floors on the first turn.

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It sounds like you should have won the run if you managed to pull that combo off. Someone who didn't deserve the win wouldn't have gotten that going. They'd never be consistent because shitty players don't skip cards and are ok with bloating the deck with cards by just always picking the best looking of the 3 instead of considering if none is better than any of the 3. They might even miss the opportunity to get the cost reduction while having Shadowseige, or missed the chance to put multiattack on it, or missed the chance to double it.

Thanks for this thread, I looked this up on youtube and saw Trump played it, after 5 minutes of his gameplay I fell in love. Waiting for Steam to finish downloading it now.

Can you imagine...

?

He's talking about TrumpSC, a streamer for card games, especially Hearthstone.

I'm interested but waiting for marketing campaigns to die down before I take any opinions seriously

Why not just watch some gameplay and decide on your own? Plenty of streamers and youtubers have tried it, watching 1 run shows you exactly what the game is. If you like STS you should see in 5 minutes the things this game does just as well, and after 1 run is over you might realize some things actually look better in this game.

Got it, ha!

I'm in the middle of Cov3 with a Melting/Stygian deck. It's so easy to lean into Melting units early on.

Just imagining the donald playing this game is great too though. I bet his favorite clan would be melting, he could craft some better hair and steal from the poor more.

Slay the Spire set up archetypes and then invalidated them through bossfights that you had no way of predicting. i.e. Dirk silent is really fun but you're just not going to win vs timelord, while poison silent is dull but by far the most consistent. I hate this and don't see enough people complaining about it. Does MT have this issue?

Melting/Stygian is just great for the fact that Melting has great units and Stygian has great spells. Hard to go wrong with that combo, they provide high quality cards with no huge gaps. Like, Umbra can give extra space or energy, but if you have no spells or units worth spending space and energy on, who cares?

I guess you're right, user. Sometimes I get it right.

You can see what all the bosses will be at the start of the run.

You actually will be happy, Monster Train tells you the exact gimmick of the final boss before you make a single choice each run, so you can prepare for it and never have to show up to the final fight with a 0-cost defect deck vs the time snail either. There are some fights that can sorta counter you, but in general none of them are as polarizing as a boss that actually cuts off your turn if you play too many cheap cards. You see the final boss from the start, and can see the 2 mid-boss fights gimmick through a symbol (there's 3 forms of each midboss and the final boss) before you make the set of choices leading into that specific fight.

I feel like Umbra/Melting would work reaaaaaally well if you built for Architect III. Imagine all the candles in row.

Of course, sweep bosses would....sweep you.

Why all the hate for umbra? Find a morselmaker or the +2 permanent damage and the game wins itself for you.

I got the game a few weeks back and I cleared with both combinations of Awoken and Hellhorned but I cannot understand how to win with Stygian and Umbra. Like, umbra I've gotten close by putting my champion on second floor but even then it feels slow if I can't kill things fast enough before they move floors, but stygian just feels like ass

Umbra/Melting surprisingly struggles. It can be fantastic in that Harvest works like a turbo-gorge, but outside of Harvest there are huge issues. Reform (that doesn't target, like from the champ) is trash because the pool is full of morsels. Neither class has enough direct damage spells, so you will have trouble dealing with Scourge units, or getting through some tanks to the units behind them if you didn't scale fast enough.

There are some great synergies, but also some gaps the two clans do not cover that well. That's what makes Melting/Stygian so good, they have no huge gaps. Umbra provides space and energy which is great, but you don't NEED extra space and energy like you need good units and spells.