Highlights
- The Ironclad class in Slay The Spire focuses on strength, defense, and self-sacrifice to enhance their abilities. The strategy is to deal heavy damage, protect themselves, and use their own HP to defeat enemies.
- Building a strong Ironclad deck requires understanding the nature of the cards and identifying the strongest ones for each strategy. It can be challenging, but with the right cards, players can become pros.
- Some of the best cards for the Ironclad include Fiend Fire, Entrench, Corruption, Power Through, Disarm, Burning Pact, Shockwave, Impervious, Second Wind, and Offering. These cards offer powerful offensive or defensive abilities that can greatly aid the Ironclad in battles.
The Ironclad is one of four class types the player can choose at the beginning of Slay The Spire. He favors strength, defense, and sometimes self-sacrifice to further augment his powers. The core strategy is to hit hard, negate damage, and cut into his HP to ensure the enemy loses all of theirs faster.
It can be a tough deck to build with lots of different strategies that are possible to implement, but it’s possible to become a pro for those who understand the nature of the cards and which ones are the strongest for each strategy. To help build the Ironclad deck, here is a listing of the best cards the Ironclad can have for Slay The Spire.
Updated on September 30th, 2023 by Hodey Johns: Of course, there are many elements at play when trying to rank the best cards for any class. Player preference is the first and most simple. Every gamer will have cards that just fit with their mentality and others that don't. This is a game, do whatever is enjoyable so long as it works. Next, players don't get to choose their decks meaningfully. Every run is unique and sometimes decks must allow for variation depending on the type of cards given. Finally, there is a large discrepancy between cards that survive the act and cards that beat the heart. With two different kinds of "winning" in each run, this list attempts to identify cards that are among the most successful for the Ironclad in either kind of run.
11
10 Fiend Fire
The Ironclad is big on defense but sometimes light on damage. That works for him some of the time but other enemies will win in a blow-for-blow battle of attrition. For victory, players will have to get cards that can dish out a burst of damage.
Fiend Fire+1 will exhaust the entire hand but deal ten damage for each exhausted card. This usually ends the fight on the spot and makes exhausting cards no big deal at all, negating the payment. Combined with a large hand size, Fiend Fire is a giant slayer.
9 Entrench
Doubling the Block amount for two points of energy (or only a single point when upgraded) saves the Ironclad from what could be an early death, especially on higher ascension levels. This card gets an even better win rate on more difficult scenarios.
Those who play only on the normal setting will still get enjoyment out of Entrench as they can potentially turn Block into damage or even keep block between turns, depending on their relics, cards, and powers.
8 Corruption
This is easily one of the strongest power cards in the entire Ironclad deck. When played, Corruption will cause all skills to have zero energy cost. This means powerful cards like Shockwave, Impervious, and more can be played while still leaving three energy intact to play other cards.
This makes the job a whole lot easier as now any skill can be played without a second thought and they can still follow up with attack or defense cards. The downside is that this will exhaust the card played but consider that many of the Ironclad's expensive cards will already exhaust, so there is no harm done.
7 Power Through
Wound obviously isn't a card that players want to have floating around in the deck but one common theme for most of the powerful Ironclad cards is that there is truly no substitute for a timely block. Power Through+1 block twenty points of damage and does not exhaust.
Most of the Ironclad's best cards exhaust and that makes sense; the game can't let overpowered cards hang around. But this is a rare exception and a welcome one. Because it doesn't exhaust, Power Through can be used in place of filling the deck up with too many defensive cards.
6 Disarm
A run of Slay the Spire will mean taking blows here and there. The Ironclad's ability to heal a little after each fight helps but it won't be enough. Disarm+1 is the perfect companion for the class, cutting down on those annoying and unnecessary hits.
Taking away an enemy's strength is taking away their damage directly. Roguelikes can feature many playable characters but fans of this game will fall in love with the Ironclad if they use the Disarm card well.
5 Burning Pact
Exhausting a card is often thought of as a penalty; a part of a payment for a card's price outside of its energy cost. However, experts have often found that voluntarily getting rid of a card for a combat session can help them be a bit more diverse.
See, since not every enemy is the same, not all cards will work against all enemies. Knowing this information, exhausting one card that doesn't help out against the given opponent and drawing new cards that might is an easy choice to make.
4 Shockwave
To turn one of the toughest roguelike games into one of the easiest roguelike games, Shockwave+1 applies five stacks of Weak and Vulnerable to all enemies on the map. That's a pretty serious debuff for enemies to try and fight through, cut down by 25% for five whole rounds.
Vulnerable gets fights over with sooner and the best defense is certainly a good offense in a game that tries to wear the Ironclad down before the end of it. The card exhausts after use but that's hardly notable as most fights will be over well before those five rounds are up.
3 Impervious
Some of the strongest bosses are specifically designed around one move that deals so much damage it's unreasonable to block it. Most builds will try to resort to trickery but Impervious+1 is a good, clean block that absorbs forty points of damage.
As one of the best strategy card games ever, being successful means being timely. This card will indeed be exhausted after one use but that's the entire point. Instead of taking up space after doing its job, it allows the Ironclad to get back on the offensive.
2 Second Wind
Second Wind+1 may not be the sexiest card in the game, turning all non-attack cards into block cards and removing them from the remainder of the game. But it comes in clutch; sometimes players need a big block and don't get lucky with the right defensive draw.
New players learning the game will eventually find that exhaust isn't always a bad thing. Players should have a diverse hand for many situations. Yet if the given fight can't make use of a certain utility card, don't be afraid to get rid of it for good, turn it into a block, and then never have to work around it for the rest of the fight.
1 Offering
Offering+1 has the highest win rate against the heart in the game. Even though the card is exhausted after only one use, it helps the Ironclad set up everything early at the cost of just six health points. The card itself gives two energy points instead of costing energy.
The upgraded version gives the Ironclad another five cards instead of three cards but either version is incredibly powerful. When players need that powerful card, Offering can make this feel like one of the best card games on the Nintendo Switch.
Slay the Spire is available now for Mobile, PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.