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Slay the spire seeds are wrong12/25/2023 ![]() At that point if you’re doing something wrong it’s going to be pretty obvious because you’re going to die very quickly. Once you reach A20 and you reach the Heart the game doesn’t hold any punches. It turns out if you do everything perfectly you should be able to win 99/100 of your runs at low difficulty, but the game doesn’t violently punish you enough for not not making the absolute perfect decision at the low difficulty so you don’t learn from your mistakes quickly. It’s hard to even see that you’ve done something wrong when you’re just hanging out and playing the game and winning half of your runs - that’s really good actually, winning half your runs when you’re new to the game. So at low difficulty you get far less feedback telling that you’ve done something that wasn’t good as it could have been. I think at low difficulties you’re not being asked to do as many difficult things by the game, right? And even if you’re not doing things perfectly you can still get to the end a lot. Is this a case of players not recognising what they’re doing wrong? Is the game not doing a good job of telling you what your mistakes are? It’s just a much different way to build a deck and have yourself test it over the course of a run. What’s really the point of having your deck do the same thing when it’s being asked to do all sorts of things? That’s what keeps Slay the Spire fresh and interesting for me. In the first fight Area of Effect cards are really helpful, in the second they don’t do anything at all. On one floor you need to kill three enemies with 12hp, on another you need to kill a 500hp enemy. In Slay the Spire, pretty much every single floor you’re going into a fight with the cards you currently have. I think the biggest, simplest lesson you can learn about Slay the Spire in order to start getting better very quickly is to recognise that you don’t build a deck which is an end product which gets tested like you do in Hearthstone or a Magic: the Gathering Draft. What are some concepts you think could help players in general to play Slay the Spire to a higher level of success? His style is calm, friendly, and relaxed, and his cool analytical style comes from his time playing online Poker professionally - he hired a poker coach who instructed him to analyse his own play as a method of learning: “He had me playing sessions of poker, recording myself for an hour and explaining everything I was doing to an imaginary audience and then at the end of my session I’d stop the recording, rewatch the video and take notes and criticise myself and say “hey, that thing you said doesn’t really make sense…” and “hey, right here… do you really know what you’re talking about?” This experience, coupled with a background in Chess, Magic: the Gathering, graduate level Statistics experience, and time analysing some of the earliest written stories - “the messiest but richest data in the entire human experience: looking at how people were thinking and what they cared about before we even had writing.” - has set Stephen up well for a career built around parsing what is essentially complex data, and working out underpinning theories that he can use to explain how to approach not only Slay the Spire, but everyday life in general. Gaming content on Twitch and Youtube has largely passed me by, but in my early days struggling with Slay the Spire, a frustrated google search led me to one of Stephen’s “over explained” runs, where he spoke in length about concepts such as “equity” during his runs, how and why he made decisions, and what the game was actually asking from him rather than what many people (myself included) may believe it is asking from them. It is his job now, to stream daily Spire runs and upload Youtube videos that range from highlights to in-depth, analytical seminars he dubs “Spireside chats” that focus on everything from card analysis, to conceptual discussions of the difference between Nemesis and Optimal players in Poker, and how that maps on to the idea of playing a perfect game of Slay the Spire. Stephen “Jorbs” Flavall has played over 3500 hours of Slay the Spire. “I will never solve the Spire, there’s too much of it.”
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