SLAY THE SPIRE RELICS

Having played Slay the Spire an extremely normal amount — significantly more than one thousand hours of playtime *cough* — we have developed some personal opinions about different aspects of the gameplay, based on our particular favored play-styles and experiences with the game. But you can take everything we say as objectively correct mandates about the proper way to play the game, because of course we're right. :P

This article covers our thoughts about the relics available in the game. Relics are special items that, once obtained, can cause a passive effect, which will interact with the player's strategies and impact the gameplay in lots of fun and often very helpful ways. Relics are obtained by defeating elites, opening treasure chests, making certain choices during special events, and in other rewarding ways.

But at higher difficulties, in order to complete the tri-color key and reach the special ending in Act Four, one gift of a relic will need to be forgone to be able to instead collect the Sapphire Key out of a treasure chest. We can count on encountering at least three treasure chests during our journey up the spire. This means we've kinda needed to subconsciously rank the relics, for us to be able to decide, given the situation, which ones are essential to have, and so we will keep the relic and hope to get the Sapphire Key later, or which relics can be sacrificed with more or less pain. Other relics are potentially available for purchase with our hard-earned gold, and others are from events with their own benefits and drawbacks. Here are our thoughts about each of the relics in the game.

Starter Relics

• Burning Blood: (Ironclad only) At the end of combat, heal 6 HP.

  That free healing each battle helps the Ironclad worry a bit less about taking damage, and focus more on attacking. It also offsets the damage taken if he winds up going the masochistic route with Rupture and such. The Burning Blood is increasingly more invaluable at higher difficulties.

• Ring of the Snake: (Silent only) At the start of each combat, draw 2 additional cards.

  Pulling more cards on turn one means having a higher likelihood of getting the cards you need to set up early. But it's just a likelihood, and it's definitely not as flashy as healing after every battle.

• Cracked Core: (Defect only) At the start of each combat, Channel 1 Lightning.

  The Defect starter pack. If you don't choose a Lighting-focused strategy, you may choose to trade it for the Frozen Core or other things, but it's always helpful, and especially so in the beginning.

• Pure Water: (Watcher only) At the start of each combat, add 1 Miracle into your hand.

  The Watcher is already kinda overpowered to start with, and that Miracle is part of why. One free extra energy each battle, that you can use whenever you want to fix a mistake or perfect a turn.

Common Relics

• Akabeko: Your first Attack each combat deals 8 additional damage.

  When we first found this one, we called it "the pig", but we later learned it's actually a red cow. Every time we find the Akabeko we kinda just go... "oh."

  To be fair, it is helpful, but it doesn't feel very helpful. It would be really good for multi-hit attacks, and once we did have a really fun time using it in combination with Flechettes and Eviscerate, but it's not that likely that we'll have a card like that in our deck and manage to time it as the first attack with the Akabeko's effect. So, more often than not, it's just, welp, we get to do a super Strike+. Okay.

• Anchor: Start each combat with 10 Block.

  Yay! It's always good to have some extra insurance. Even if a lot of elites and bosses don't attack on the very first turn. But a lot of random stuff does, and for those battles, the Anchor is a lot of help!

• Ancient Tea Set: Whenever you enter a Rest Site, start the next combat with 2 extra Energy.

  This is another one that is always beneficial, but we don't feel like it is, so we're always a bit disappointed. Since there's always a Rest Site right before the boss, the tea set means we get guaranteed extra energy for the first turn of boss battles... which can be useful... maybe... if our first hand even needs that...

  But, more importantly, it is cute for us to have the mental image of the characters sitting by the camp fire with this teaset. :)

• Art of War: If you do not play any Attacks during your turn, gain an additional Energy next turn.

  With the right setup, this changes our game. Especially when we play as the Silent, the Defect, and sometimes the Watcher. We can make it happen with the Ironclad, but generally he's too blood-thirsty for that.

• Bag of Marbles: At the start of each combat, apply 1 Vulnerable to ALL enemies.

  On the first turn, as long as the enemies don't have any artifacts, they are made vulnerable for some powerful attacks right away. It goes especially well together with the Akabeko. And it is very useful for the characters that can't apply vulnerable so easily on their own.

  It the enemies do have artifacts, the Bag of Marbles is still incredibly useful, because it can strip one artifact off of each enemy, guaranteed. Which clears the way for us to do other debuffs in other ways.

  So the Bag of Marbles is extremely useful, in many different situations. Always use your marbles!

• Bag of Preparation: At the start of each combat, draw 2 additional cards.

  We'd say it's more useful than it seems. More cards in the first hand means more choices and less waiting to set up. The Silent starts with the Ring of the Snake which has the same effect, but even she may benefit from more cards. Maybe you think it'd be too much but, unless you clog your hand, why not? More, more!

• Blood Vial: At the start of each combat, heal 2 HP.

  THE BLOOD OF THE MASTER! THE MASTER'S BLOOD!

  The Blood Vial never seems to come up in the same run as when we encounter the vampire event, or, if it does, we find it after the vampire event, of course.

  In any case, we never want to say no to the Blood Vial. It's one of the very few ways to heal between fires when we're not playing as the Ironclad, and even the Ironclad appreciates more healing while he's busy setting himself on fire and bleeding all over the place...

• Bronze Scales: Start each combat with 3 Thorns.

  We always want this one. Only the Silent has a point to refuse in favor of taking the Sapphire Key, since she can do the same thing using the Caltrops power, but even there, if possible, we still want the Bronze Scales even for the Silent. We'd always want three spikes without even needing to set them up. Even if we already have tons of spikes, we want more spikes! Some very important enemies are particularly susceptible to the spikes.

• Centennial Puzzle: The first time you lose HP each combat, draw 3 cards.

  Lol. Not quite good enough to house an ancient Egyptian spirit, but it does work a bit like one of his favorite cards... Combined with strategies where we want more cards, the Centennial Puzzle can be useful. The Ironclad can even hurt himself to draw cards during his turn. But it all just feels very underwhelming... But, well, we guess it is only one tenth of the majesty of a Millennium Puzzle...

  For us, it is often a candidate to skip for the Sapphire Key.

• Ceramic Fish: Whenever you add a card to your deck, gain 9 Gold.

  It doesn't seem like much, and we usually eyeroll when it arrives, but to be fair, if we get the Ceramic Fish early enough, it racks up a lot of money for us. And if we manage to also get the Bloody Idol, they work together in such a way that we can heal from getting cards!

• Damaru: (Watcher only) At the start of your turn, gain 1 Mantra.

  Amazing! It's usually not quite enough to achieve Divinity all by itself, but if we have any other source of Mantra, the Damaru is a terrific help. It also does serve as an emergency measure: if the battle makes it all the way to Turn 10 (bad sign), we get a much needed boost!

• Data Disk: (Defect only) Start each combat with 1 Focus.

  Also amazing. A free no-setup extra Focus, which makes everything better. Invaluable, unless we were doing the very rare strategy of completely ignoring our balls. In which case... aw man... now we regret everything.

• Dream Catcher: Whenever you Rest, you may add a card to your deck.

  We never know whether to take it or not. Ideally, we don't want to rest, we want to be badass and survive anyway and use the fires to smith our cards instead.

  But if we do have to heal, the Dream Catcher gives us an added perk of getting another chance to choose a new card, which can increase our chances of finding a card we've been desperately seeking — and in those situations, maybe it helps us more than we ever realize, because we don't know what wouldn't have happened if we didn't have the Dream Catcher. But if the card we want never shows up, in the end, the Dream Catcher was useless. And if we already have all the cards we need, then we don't need any more cards! Wisdom of Confucius.

  So we might take it if we find it early enough in our run, because there's lot of potential healing in our future, or we already suspect that we will be seeking for a lot of cards, like Claw or Flurry of Blows... But we could just as soon pass the Dream Catcher up for the Sapphire Key.

  It does pair really nicely with the Singing Bowl or the combination of the Ceramic Fish and the Bloody Idol, so we might change our tune if we have the matching relics. But yeah, we're always really conflicted about this one.

  Though the concept of dreaming of a card and snatching it from your dreams is pretty cool.

• Happy Flower: Every 3 turns, gain 1 Energy.

  Lalala :)

  We always want the Happy Flower even when we don't particularly need it because it is so cute. But is is almost always helpful also. Especially with the Ice Cream.

• Juzu Bracelet: Regular enemy combats are no longer encountered in ? rooms.

  It's okay, we guess. It lets us know that when we go to a question mark room, it's not going to be a random jaw worm that might bite off half of our health bar if things go poorly. That means that we have a higher chance of getting cool events that give us useful things. But it also means that we have a higher chance of getting cool events that kill us.

• Lantern: Gain 1 Energy on the first turn of each combat.

  The humble Lantern. This one also seems so underwhelming, like the Ancient Tea Set, even though the Lantern is more consistently beneficial. It can be even more useful if we can draw more cards in the first turn, so we think it's best in combination with the Bag of Preparation or as the Silent with the Ring of the Snake. But generally, if this one comes up and we still need the Sapphire Key, we take the key instead.

• Maw Bank: Whenever you climb a floor, gain 12 Gold. No longer works when you spend any Gold at a shop.

  If we get this at the right moment, it will make us really rich really fast. But we always seem to get it right in front of an unskippable shop that has all the stuff we want to buy. :(

  Though, as the relic description says, it is cute. It is so cute. It is so, so cute.

• Meal Ticket: Whenever you enter a shop, heal 15 HP.

  First we imagined that the shopkeeper was always making more waffles for us, but reading the description, we learned that actually he's serving us IKEA meatballs. The Meal Ticket is another one that seems to us like a little thing, but it's very useful actually. It turns every shop visit into a decent amount of healing, and we can plan our route to be able to use the shop for healing instead of needing to rely only on fires.

• Nunchaku: Every time you play 10 Attacks, gain 1 Energy.

  With the right strategy, this is invaluable, and we can wind up having an endless turn. We are very frustrated when we find the Nunchaku and we were not doing a matching strategy (like if instead we were focusing on poison or orbs...).

• Oddly Smooth Stone: At the start of each combat, gain 1 Dexterity.

  We always want the Oddly Smooth Stone. There is almost never a situation in which we don't want to take this one. We have to be doing some freaky shit to not want to defend better. Or, unless we find ourselves at the final chest in front of the final boss and we didn't get the Sapphire Key yet. :(

• Omamori: Negate the next 2 Curses you obtain.

  Similarly to the Blood Vial, the Omamori always seems to come after we've accumulated a bunch of curses. But if we have this one before we are offered the Calling Bell, we can use the bell to get three relics with no downside! :) Usually we have this one and forgot we have it, and then the spaghetti monster tries to gives us a Parasite, and we cover our eyes, but, oh, we're safe! Right, the Omamori, yay!

• Orichalcum: If you end your turn without Block, gain 6 Block.

  Or as we like to call it, the Emergency Block. It's both shaped like a block, and it gives us block. If we get this relic early enough to shape our strategy around it, it might mean that we never actually actively defend, because any block we could make would be less than what the Orichalcum will give us, so instead we just try to kill everything as fast as possible. It stacks really well with the Metallicize power and the Thread and Needle. And even without that sort of strategy, it's very useful to have a little bit of backup block in the event of an emergency.

• Pen Nib: Every 10th Attack you play deals double damage.

  With the right strategy, this is incredible. It can become a whole other game for us to manage to time it right to have the Pen Nib active for our biggest attack. And it's totally saved our ass.

• Potion Belt: Upon pickup, gain 2 Potion slots.

  Why not. When we first started playing Slay the Spire, we thought the Potion Belt seemed almost excessive, but once we reached higher Ascension levels, its importance greatly increased. We also especially want to have it if we have the Alchemize card or the White Beast Statue, because otherwise we wind up unnecessarily guzzling potions just to make room for more potions, and we start to feel like Eliwood with the 99 Vulneraries. Which isn't bad, it means we're over-prepared if anything, but it feels bad.

• Preserved Insect: Enemies in Elite combats have 25% less HP.

  Not only does the Preserved Insect makes the battles against elites easier, it also shrinks them, visually. There's tiny Nob just slightly taller than the player character. The tiny Giant Head. A large head the size of a small head! So, we say the Preserved Insect is worth it, if only just for this visual fun. We're always going, they're so small! It's the teeny weeny little gremlin minions, barely even visible!

  But besides that, it makes fighting elites easier, which means you can more easily get more relics, which makes fighting more elites even more easier, which... you get the idea.

  And it even applies to the two spire fuckers in Act Four. Yay!

• Red Skull: (Ironclad only) While your HP is at or below 50%, you have 3 additional Strength.

  Surprisingly useful. We never want to have less than 50% health, but it will happen, especially since this is for the Ironclad who is prone to losing health left and right. And when it does, at least we get a strength boost.

• Regal Pillow: Whenever you Rest, heal an additional 15 HP.

  The earlier we get it, the more useful it is, but it's still great even late, as long as there's at least one fire left to use (we have gotten this past the last fire, and, yes, we did scream).

  But yeah, if we get the Regal Pillow early enough, our healing is more effective, then we need to rest less often, which lets us smith more cards, which lets us get hurt less, and then we're just doing better in all directions. The Regal Pillow does force us to consider to maybe go on being wounded for longer than we what might be wise, to really get the benefit from the pillow and not waste the extra healing, which is risky. But we don't have to do that. This concern is all in our heads.

• Smiling Mask: The merchant's card removal service now always costs 50 Gold.

  If we want to have a small deck, this is the way to go. When we get it at the end of the game when there are no more shop visits available, it makes us scream.

• Snecko Skull: (Silent only) Whenever you apply Poison, apply an additional 1 Poison.

  If we were already doing a poison-based strategy, the Snecko Skull is the best. But if we weren't already focusing on that, and we get the Snecko Skull, it's like... aw. Should we try to redo our whole deck around the Snecko Skull? No... we can't do that... So, the skull is just wasted... man.

  It is so much fun to use with the Envenom power.

• Strawberry: Upon pickup, raise your Max HP by 7.

  Rosy doesn't like strawberries in real life, but she can't say no to more Max HP.

• The Boot: Whenever you would deal 4 or less unblocked Attack damage, increase it to 5.

  It seems like the difference between 1-4 to 5 is not much, but it adds up, especially if we have a strategy involving lots of little hits, like with Flurry of Blows. But the Boot becomes increasingly more useless the bigger our attacks happen to be.

  The Boot also activates any time that we happen to just barely crack the enemy's defenses by a little bit, so we will get surprised by Boot-improved hits here and there. And it can help counteract being affected by weak or other things that reduce our attack power. Kick down the birds with the boot!

• Tiny Chest: Every 4th ? room is a Treasure room.

  The earlier we find the Tiny Chest, the better. If we get it too late, we won't have enough question marks to step on to make it worth it.

  But even if we encounter it early on, it's still not the best thing to find. It doesn't do anything to help us right away, we just need to hold out for better chances later. Our present is a future present. Hold on.

  It is, however, the only way to know for sure that a particular ? room isn't going to kill us.

• Toy Ornithopter: Whenever you use a potion, heal 5 HP.

  The Toy Ornithopter is so important. It's healing! We always want it, but especially if we have the Potion Belt, the White Beast Statue, the Alchemize card, and other such things that mean we're guzzling potions left and right.

• Vajra: At the start of each combat, gain 1 Strength.

  Unless we literally aren't attacking, we want this. Like, one free strength? Even if we only attack occasionally, it's useful. And it's especially invaluable if we're playing as a character that cannot easily get more strength. The only sad thing is that the Vajra conflicts a bit with the Boot.

• War Paint: Upon pick up, Upgrade 2 random Skills.

  Because the targets of the War Paint are random, we're more likely to not take it, because more often than not, it upgrades two random Defend cards for us. Well, thanks, we guess. It's certainly not useless, but it sure is anticlimactic!

  So we don't really appreciate the War Paint, but it's not as much trouble as......

• Whetstone: Upon pick up, Upgrade 2 random Attacks.

  ......the Whetstone! It has the same drawback as the War Paint, meaning more often than not, it will go and upgrade two random Strikes. When it comes to Strikes, we are usually hoping to remove as many of them from our deck as we can!

  In the early game, having two randomly upgraded Strikes can make a pretty big difference, but as time goes on, they become less valuable. So, we guess, if we need help now, then taking the War Paint or the Whetstone can be worth it.

  Then again, it either of these relics happen to randomly hit something good, that's really really good!! We just kinda personally don't like having to put our trust on luck, heh. Which is maybe a ridiculous thing to say while talking about a game that is a rogue-like deck-builder with procedural elements, but there you go. To be human is to be a contradiction.

Uncommon Relics

• Blue Candle: Unplayable Curse cards can now be played. Whenever you play a Curse, lose 1 HP and Exhaust it.

  This one always makes us go arghh. It is theoretically useful to make the curse card go away for a battle, and then it won't keep coming up and bothering us, but the 1 health point cost makes us not like it. It's one of our favorite things to pass up for the Sapphire Key instead.

  We imagine that the Blue Candle could be useful for the Ironclad with a strategy based on drawing curses, hurting himself, and exhausting cards — yeah the Blue Candle checks all those boxes — but it seems we never manage to find the Blue Candle when we are doing that sort of freaky shit. And for the other characters, we're not sure why they should bother?

  Oh, yeah, right, the Blue Candle might be useful if we took the Runic Pyramid and are getting our hand clogged up with curses. But even there, it seems more like a bandaid for a bigger problem...

• Bottled Flame: Upon pickup, choose an Attack card. At the start of each combat, this card will be in your hand.

  The Bottled Flame can be a bit tricky. Sometimes we don't have anything that we'd necessarily want to have in our first hand, and by making it always be first, we are marrying one particular strategy, and maybe it would have been more useful to have a more random first hand that would have suited a given situation better...

  Our favorite candidate for the Bottled Flame is Neutralize, since it is both an attack, and it can be a bit defensive by making an enemy be weak, so it is more likely to be useful in more situations.

• Bottled Lightning: Upon pickup, choose a Skill card. At the start of each combat, this card will be in your hand.

  The Bottled Lightning has the same challenges as the Bottled Flame. If we use it at all, we tend to put in a good defensive card.

  We usually pick Vigilance for the Watcher, since it is both a big defense and important for initial set-up.

• Bottled Tornado: Upon pickup, choose a Power card. At the start of each combat, this card will be in your hand.

  We think the Bottled Tornado is the most useful of all of these bottle relics, because the point of most powers is that you should set them up as soon as possible. So for powers that cannot become Innate in themselves, we can do this to make sure we can always have the option to set up a particular power on the very first turn.

• Darkstone Periapt: Whenever you obtain a Curse, increase your Max HP by 6.

  Well fuck that. Just like the Omamori, we always seem to get the Darkstone Periapt after we've already accumulated a bunch of curses. Or, even worse, we wind up with the Darkstone Periapt and the Omamori at the same time. One gives HP if we obtain a curse, the other makes it so we can't obtain a curse. That sucks. It's like the ring of both water-walking and water-breathing from the Shivering Isles.

• Duality: Whenever you play an Attack, gain 1 temporary Dexterity.

  Oooooo!

  Duality can be an absolute game-changer, and it is especially useful if we were already setting up to have a lot of Flurry of Blows. It forces us to completely rethink the way we approach the game, but that's not a bad thing. The benefits are just so good.

• Eternal Feather: For every 5 cards in your deck, heal 3 HP whenever you enter a Rest Site.

  Like the Regal Pillow, as long as there's still a rest site left to visit, the Eternal Feather is wonderful to have. In fact, it's even better than the pillow, because we don't even have to rest to get its bonus healing. We can just arrive at the fire and automatically heal. And then we can rest to heal more if we are really in a bind, or else we can take the opportunity to smith a card or get the Ruby Key instead.

• Molten / Toxic / Frozen Egg: Whenever you add a Attack / Skill / Power card to your deck, Upgrade it.

  These egg relics are very useful in the early game, and even more useful at higher levels of Ascension where pre-upgraded cards become rarer and rarer to simply find. But later in the run, these relics are extremely frustrating to encounter, after we've already shed tears choosing to forgo healing in favor of upgrading, or when we're past the point of adding more cards to our deck.

• Gold-plated Cables: (Defect only) Your rightmost Orb triggers its passive an additional time.

  It's kinda like a free built-in Loop. We almost always want this.

• Gremlin Horn: Whenever an enemy dies, gain 1 Energy and draw 1 card.

  

  We especially like it when we win this relic from defeating Nob! The first time, that's how we got it, and we thought it was just the logical prize from Nob in particular, and only later we learned that we could find it at random.

  The Gremlin Horn is very useful, but it's not always easy to reap its benefits. For example, the Defect with orbs and the Silent with poison need to watch out to not kill things mid-turn and just waste the bonus energy and the extra card. And it's no help in battles with only a single foe.

• Horn Cleat: At the start of your 2nd turn, gain 14 Block.

  It feels like the second turn is when we really want defense, at least with most enemies, so we consider the Horn Cleat even more useful than the other nautical items. Even if Denise keeps messing up the name.

• Ink Bottle: Whenever you play 10 cards, draw 1 card.

  This is another relic that can change the game. It goes especially well paired with the Nunchaku: as we use cards, we generate more energy, and now here's another card to employ our newly gained energy! If we can get set it up just right, we can get an infinite turn.

• Kunai: Every time you play 3 Attacks in a single turn, gain 1 Dexterity.

  With the right strategy, this is amazing. We're always mad when we get it when we didn't have the right strategy.

• Letter Opener: Every time you play 3 Skills in a single turn, deal 5 damage to ALL enemies.

  Cute, though not so easy to get it to really work. We need to do some extra considerations here and there.

• Matryoshka: The next 2 non-boss chests you open contain 2 Relics.

  This is another one of those relics that is a promise of more relics in the future. But without a relic helping us now, will we manage to even get to that future? Watch out!

  But if we do make it, the Matryoshka is really awesome, as long as we get it early enough that there are still two chests in front of us to make it really worth it. It pairs really well with the Tiny Chest, but that's two relics that give us no immediate benefit, so we need to watch out doubly as much.

• Meat on the Bone: If your HP is at or below 50% at the end of combat, heal 12 HP.

  It saves our ass and it makes us talk. When we get hit enough to reach the threshold, we like to say: Meat mode activated! You've activated my MEAT. Interact: Meat. It also makes us pay a little more attention to how hurt we really are. Sometimes we want to get a little extra hurt just to get into Meat-mode, and therefore play worse, but get healed more. It also goes really well with the Red Skull.

• Mercury Hourglass: At the start of your turn, deal 3 damage to ALL enemies.

  Unless we need complete control over when the enemies die (like when we have the Gremlin Horn), the Mercury Hourglass is just good. It helps us avoid the situation where we were defending and holding on but we weren't managing to whittle down the enemies' health fast enough. It prevents defend-stalemates, which end up becoming death for us. The Mercury Hourglass just slaps all the enemies at the beginning of each turn. We've had some cool strategies that failed due to too much defense and not enough attack, and maybe we could have made it if we had the Mercury Hourglass chipping away at the enemies in the meanwhile.

• Mummified Hand: Whenever you play a Power card, a random card in your hand costs 0 that turn.

  Almost always good to have, but super good to have if we are relying on a lot of powers, especially high-cost powers, which, now with the Mummified Hand, can essentially give us some energy back. And if we play it right, we can make a particularly expensive card become free, and maybe even chain Powers until our whole hand is free.

• Ninja Scroll: (Silent only) At the start each combat, add 3 Shivs into your hand.

  Most of the time it's useful, even if we weren't doing shivs. But the Ninja Scroll is especially useful if we have a shiv strategy to back it up. It also pairs really well with the Shuriken, the Kunai, and the Ornamental Fan. But watch out to not overfill your starting hand!

• Ornamental Fan: Every time you play 3 Attacks in a single turn, gain 4 Block.

  This one has surprisingly many downsides. It doesn't use dexterity, so if we also have the Kunai, it seems like using three attacks is raising our dexterity and defending us accordingly, but not really, the two things aren't actually related, the Ornamental Fan always adds a flat 4 block regardless of our dexterity. It's not bad, it's just not as good as we would have guessed. It can interfere with the Orichalcum and make us end up with less defense than if we had done nothing. And it's not good with stuff like the Autoshields. But sometimes we've had the Ornamental Fan with the right strategy and it helped us rack up a bajillion defense and that's awesome!

• Pantograph: At the start of Boss combats, heal 25 HP.

  Or as we call it, the fish. This is super duper important, especially at high levels of Ascension, but sometimes we forget we have it and heal at the fire anyway... oops.

• Paper Krane: (Silent only) Enemies with Weak deal 40% less damage rather than 25%.

  The Paper Krane is more helpful than we think it is because its benefits are mostly invisible. If we happen to have a matching strategy where we apply a lot of weak, it can save our entire ass.

• Paper Phrog: (Ironclad only) Enemies with Vulnerable take 75% more damage rather than 50%.

  It's really good, and at least for us, we're probably going to be involving vulnerable debuffs in the Ironclad's strategy, so this is most likely going to be useful.

• Pear: Upon pickup, raise your Max HP by 10.

  Like the Strawbebby but better.

• Question Card: Future card rewards have 1 additional card to choose from.

  Whether the Question card is useful or not depends on how far along we are when we encounter it and what strategy are we aiming for. If the Question Card arrives late, we maybe don't need that many more cards. If we're going for a tiny deck strategy, we certainly don't want more cards. But the Question Card increases our chances of maybe encountering a card we would want. It also increases the chances of there being two cards that we would want in the same set of rewards, and we cannot take them both. We can also use the Question Card to somewhat offset the drawback of the Busted Crown. And overall, the Question Card is never negative.

• Self-Forming Clay: (Ironclad only) Whenever you lose HP, gain 3 Block next turn.

  We could base a whole strategy around this, especially with a masochist strategy to harness the defense for next turn... but it conflicts with the Orichalcum, so watch out.

• Shuriken: Every time you play 3 Attacks in a single turn, gain 1 Strength.

  It's so exciting. And just like the Kunai, it makes us really upset when we encounter it, and we were doing a strategy that can't really use it. :(

• Singing Bowl: When adding cards to your deck, you may raise your Max HP by 2 instead.

  This one seems like not much, but actually it is amazing. We don't realize how often we are going Nah to the offered card rewards and just skipping them. But now we get more Max HP every time that happens? It also helps us keep a more streamlined deck, because maybe in a normal situation, we'd be there and Denise would say, well, we could take that one, and Rosy would be, eeeh, fine, I guess. But with the Singing Bowl, we have to weigh that card against +2 Max HP?? No way, don't take that meh card. And sometimes if we are really hurt, adding those two health points can be the difference between life and death in the next room. And other times, we've managed to get over 100 HP, just with the Singing Bowl, and then all damage matters a little bit less. It's good!

• Strike Dummy: Cards containing "Strike" deal 3 additional damage.

  The Ironclad can make amazing use of this one, since a lot of his special cards have "Strike" in the name, and it goes really well with a Perfected Strike strategy. The other characters only get 1-2 other "Strike" cards each, plus the colorless one, so it's a lot less effective for them, but still never negative, and especially useful in the early game were we still have to use the basic Strike cards whether we like it or not. We're always a bit bummed out when we encounter the Strike Dummy after we've already put effort towards removing Strike cards from our deck. Wahwah...

• Sundial: Every 3 times you shuffle your draw pile, gain 2 Energy.

  Most of the time, we really don't see the point. Once we managed to get it while we were having a strategy that shuffled the deck a lot, so it seemed to be happening a lot and always luckily in the nick of time when we were in danger. But most of the time, we tend to play with bigger decks than that, so three shuffles is an eternity, and for just two extra energy. You could probably make some sort of infinite turn strategy with it, but we personally don't care.

• Symbiotic Virus: (Defect only) At the start of each combat, Channel 1 Dark.

  Even when this isn't too useful for our strategy, we always want to take it because, oh, that's sexy. And it's usually not a bad thing to have an immediate and free Dark orb, which are kinda hard to come by.

• Teardrop Locket: (Watcher only) Start each combat in Calm.

  We always say yes to the Teardrop Locket. We wish the artwork was a bit more distinct from the Darkstone Periapt because for awhile we were confused between the purple pendant that is awesome and the purple pendant that is kinda meh.

• The Courier: The Merchant restocks cards, relics, and potions. All prices are reduced by 20%.

  The Courier has its benefits and it has its drawbacks. And it seems incredible to say it has drawbacks, but it does. So everything we buy is at a discount, so we think it means we can buy more things while we have less money, but actually! When we buy a relic, the slot in the shop is immediately refilled by another relic, and if the next relic is also something we would want, and we can't afford it, it's now unattainable and we fucked ourselves.

  Though The Courier is really good if we've been having trouble getting to a shop, and we finally get to the shop, and we've got a huge purse of bursting with money, and we can just buy tons of stuff from the shop before the end of the game. But yeah, actually, what it means is that we need to consider our shopping trips more and go there with more money, because even if each individual item costs less, we need to be able to spend more to get everything that we want, knowing that we will definitely have to leave some stuff behind.

• White Beast Statue: Potions always appear in combat rewards.

  It doesn't seem like much, but it completely takes away the guesswork of if we should use a potion during this battle to make sure we have room for another potion or not. We know at the end, we'll definitely get a new potion, and if all our slots are full, we can freely use a potion any time when it would be even remotely helpful. There is nothing more wasteful than throwing away a potion unused at the end of the battle. So, this means we are more likely to use our potions when they would be helpful rather than feeling like we must save them. And that helps us do better overall. So the White Beast Statue actually has a lot of psychological benefits. Because if we could manage to think like robots, we wouldn't need to know that a new potion is certainly coming to be able to assess that the potion would be helpful now and we should use it. But instead we have famine-ape brains, and we think we gotta save every potion for the real moment when we will really really be in danger, and then in the end, we do get a new random potion drop, and we throw the potion away unused. What if we needed to save the antidote for the second worst bog of poison?

Rare Relics

• Bird-Faced Urn: Whenever you play a Power card, heal 2 HP.

  Oh, this one is awesome. Though it is probably part of the cult we are fighting against..... Oh well, healing time!

  The power of the Bird-Faced Urn is too awesome to ignore. It does, however, force us to consider if we want to set up the power now or wait. Usually we want to set up the powers as soon as possible, but if we are at full health, setting up the power would be wasting the healing. So maybe we don't set up the power and get hurt first and then use the power to get the two points of health, and that feels smarter, but maybe if we just didn't bother worrying about this, we would have set up the power and had the power active and wouldn't have gotten hurt at all, and would be better off. So this relic sometimes makes us do dumb things. That's our fault though.

• Calipers: At the start of your turn, lose 15 Block rather than all of your Block.

  It's like the Ironclad's Barricade power, but it's automatic and not as good. Barricade is rare and it takes so much energy to set up and that's all very tough, but it lets us keep all of our spare block each turn, which is awesome. A relic can't be that powerful, so the Calipers instead subtract 15 from our block at the end of each turn. So if we over-defended by more than 15, we get to keep what is left. And that sounds pretty dang good, but we find it's almost impossible to over-defend by that substantial of an amount and we only occasionally get to save like, 1 or 2 extra points of block, and, that's... yay?

  The few times that we've over-defended by like 100 block, we didn't have the Calipers, and we go, aw man, we wish we had the Calipers. Whenever we have the Calipers, it seems we can't use them, and we go, wah.

  By the way, once we were playing and we ended up taking the Orichalcum, the Self-Forming Clay, the Ornamental Fan, and the Calipers, and then we realized that all of these relics were fighting each other and it was a complete mess.

• Captain's Wheel: At the start of your 3rd turn, gain 18 Block.

  The rarest and least useful of the nautical defense set. The benefit of the Anchor is that on turn one, maybe we got a bad hand, we definitely aren't set up yet, so the Anchor saves us, if enemies are attacking at all. The benefit of the Horn Cleat is that on turn two, we are likely not fully set up yet, maybe we got a bad hand, and this is usually the turn where we get attacked for sure, so the extra defense is really useful. The Captain's Wheel covers turn three, and short of absolutely abysmal luck, we really should be able to take care of ourselves by turn three, and if not, there's something off with our strategy. We won't say no to free defense though, if possible. Oddly, we've not yet managed to have the full nautical set all at the same time...

• Champion Belt: (Ironclad Only) Whenever you apply Vulnerable, also apply 1 Weak.

  It's the belt that belongs on the Champ! If we get it before we reach the Champ, and then face him while we have his belt, the Champ gets pissed! He goes, THAT'S MY BELT!!! How dare you! That's so much fun.

  It's also an awesome relic for the Ironclad, since we generally are doing lots of Vulnerable debuffs with his strategy, and then an extra Weak gets applied, and that'll strip most artifacts on most enemies, and it helps us protect ourselves as we attack. It's the good shit.

• Charon's Ashes: (Ironclad Only) Whenever you Exhaust a card, deal 3 damage to ALL enemies.

  We see Charon's Ashes so rarely that we haven't really managed to use them much. And the chance that we encounter the Ashes while also having an exhaust-based strategy in the works is even smaller. :( But the few times we've gotten to use them a bit, they definitely seem cool. All enemies get hit. Awesome. It would probably go really well with the Dead Branch.

• Cloak Clasp: (Watcher Only) At the end of your turn, gain 1 Block for each card in your hand.

  The Cloak Clasp is amazing, especially if we are doing a retain-based strategy, though we rarely manage to pull it off. But watch out, it conflicts with the Orichalcum.

• Dead Branch: Whenever you Exhaust a card, add a random card to your hand.

  This is one of the relics we reject the most often. It introduces a level of randomness that freaks Rosy out. One time, Denise was playing while Rosy had fallen asleep mid-game, and she decided to give the Dead Branch a try. She was playing as the Ironclad and also happened to have the Ink Bottle and the Nunchaku. And what happened was, a card would be exhausted, and the Dead Branch would give a new random card, which had a pretty high chance of also exhausting either itself or another card, so then there would be more cards, and as Denise used more cards, the Nunchaku would give more energy and the Ink Bottle would give more cards, so she ended up having super long turns of futzing cards around until being able to win the battle. It was very long and drawn out, and if Rosy was awake she would have hated every second of it. And ultimately, the strategy lost, so, there's that.

  The other characters don't have that benefit of being able to generate cards that most likely cause more cards to be exhausted, so they are more likely to have the Dead Branch creating junk cards that clog up their decks. Like, we've spent all this time fine-tuning our deck, and now we're just going to throw random cards at it every time we try to do stuff? Um. What are we doing here.

  It almost makes us wonder if the Dead Branch was half-designed to be a negative relic, in sense of like, oh, we get an opportunity to pull a relic out of the slime, and we choose to reach in and keep whatever relic comes out, because relics are good... and we pulled out the Dead Branch, and it threatens the stability of our carefully balanced strategy. Meep!

  Though peeking around on the internet, it seems other folks really like using the Dead Branch, so it's definitely not useless, just might not mesh well with our particularly preferred play-styles.

• Du-Vu Doll: For each Curse in your deck, start each combat with 1 Strength.

  It's like a Voodoo Doll, but backwards. Curses make you stronger! The Du-Vu Doll is better than the Darkstone Periapt because it's retroactive. If we just got a curse before, it still counts. The only time it has that sort of frustration is if we just removed a curse (awww), but at least we probably did want to remove the curse, so that's fine. It is a relic that becomes more useful when playing at higher levels of Ascension, and there's not really a downside to having it.

• Emotion Chip: If you lost HP during the previous turn, trigger the passive ability of all Orbs at the start of your turn.

  This one always makes us excited when we see it! If we took even one point of damage in the previous turn, the Defect freaks out, and all the orbs do their passive abilities one extra time. So if those are lightning orbs, they all go off. The only time this is sad is if we were ignoring our orbs completely. The Emotion Chip works wonderfully with the Static Discharge power. We can try to do our defending such that we are always taking a minimum amount of damage, so that we are essentially getting a paper cut, and then freaking out that oh, oh, I got damage, see! Revenge! Massively out-of-scale revenge!!! This means that it's important to take damage sometimes, so we might need our strategy to have some element of healing to compensate.

• Fossilized Helix: Prevent the first time you would lose HP in combat.

  This one is good, but also one with weird psychological impacts for us. It will prevent the first time we would take damage. So we don't want it to just be wasted on piddly damage that we could have maybe defended. So we end up wasting all of our time defending in order to protect the buffer, and not actually achieving anything. And maybe even at the end of the battle, the buffer has gone completely unused, which means there was an opportunity to let the buffer take the hit and that would have been more effective, but we're like this. We're there treating the buffer like a baby we need to hold and protect, and it's not, it's a shield, it's made to be used!! But we're like this.

  Sometimes though, we are faced with an incoming attack that we cannot possibly defend against fully, so we're able to make the call that we shouldn't bother defending, not even one little bit, because the buffer will take it, and we should do something more useful. The most optimal use of buffer is against single-hit enormous attacks, like the big hyperbeam. That's wonderful when we can get that to align. The saddest is when the buffer is wasted on the Byrds pecking our defenses down and then the buffer is used to block 1 measly point of damage. Nooooo!

  We also appreciate the reference to the Helix Fossil.

• Gambling Chip: At the start of each combat, discard any number of cards, then draw that many cards.

  We maybe initially poo-pooed this one, but we quickly came around to realize that it is incredibly useful. It becomes increasingly important to be able to get ourselves set up quickly, and if the luck of the draw gives us a terrible first hand, the Gambling Chip is a chance for a recovery. It can change our destiny. Also, since it can be used to discard cards, the Silent can use it to great advantage with Eviscerate and other strategies related to discarding.

• Ginger: You can no longer become Weakened.

  The Ginger protects us from being weakened, and that is really important if we ever intend to use an attack ever.

• Girya: You can now gain Strength at Rest Sites (up to 3 times).

  Do you even lift??

  Lifting is tough. It needs to be done at a fire, which means we are forgoing healing or smithing or any other fire activities to be able to get one more strength. For contrast, the Vajra is just one flat Strength without needing to sacrifice a time at the fire. But this relic lets us do it thrice. So, if we forgo three whole fires, we get three automatic strength for every battle, and that's a lot. But until we do lift, the weight does nothing. It's (heheh) a dead weight. It's another relic that promises potential future rewards and doesn't do anything to help us right now. While we have managed to get the full 3 Strength bonus from the Girya a few times, more often than not we never get around to lifting at all, and so we consider it a pretty good candidate to leave behind and take the Sapphire Key instead.

• Golden Eye: Whenever you Scry, Scry 2 additional cards.

  If we happen to be doing Scrying at all when we get this relic, it does make a huge difference. Like, with Third Eye+ with the Golden Eye, we're practically seeing our whole deck, and we can fine-tune not just the upcoming turn, but the one after that too. Unfortunately, we tend not to dabble in Scrying strategies all that often, because things just don't happen to go that way, and then we're offered the Golden Eye without a single Scrying card in our deck. Ah well. We also assume this is another Yu-Gi-Oh reference, hehe.

• Ice Cream: Energy is now conserved between turns.

  Yaaaaay! Ice Cream! Denise's favorite. Both because Denise loves ice cream, and also because this relic means no energy is ever wasted, which is awesome. Most often when we get the Ice Cream it is a game changer, because if we've got nothing useful to do, we can save the energy, and later, we'll be able to do so much more with it.

• Incense Burner: Every 6 turns, gain 1 Intangible.

  That's another one that is really useful - if it works. If the Intangible turn happens to be on the turn of the Hyperbeam, that's the jackpot. But it always seems like the sixth turn winds up being the turn that the enemies are not attacking, or just doing their smallest attacks. It's also essentially useless against the Byrds because their thing is attacking for one damage many times, so reducing the damage to one means nothing.

• Lizard Tail: When you would die, heal to 50% of your Max HP instead (works once).

  The Lizard Tail is like a mega-fairy that doesn't even need to take up a potion slot. We get one rescue if things go completely south. Though we hate it when it gets used, especially by a little enemy. How disgraceful. But that's our fault.

• Magic Flower: (Ironclad Only) Healing is 50% more effective during combat.

  We wish we could use this one more. It's so rare, we very rarely encounter it, and while it does boost the Ironclad's Burning Blood and any healing potions used during battle, we think it's the most fun to use with a strategy with Reaper, and Reaper is also rare. It did happen once that we did have the Magic Flower and Reaper and a strategy that worked with them, and we want to point out that we won that one, but that's really a vanishingly rare case.

• Mango: Upon pickup, raise your Max HP by 14.

  Even better than the Pear. Mmmm. Mango. The forbidden fruit.

• Old Coin: Upon pickup, gain 300 Gold.

  This one is a bit anticlimactic again. It's good. It's good to get a fuckton of money immediately, no questions asked. But it's not exciting. And it's also a relic that is a promise of good for the future, because gaining money itself probably doesn't help you in the moment.

• Peace Pipe: You can now remove cards from your deck at Rest Sites.

  Ironically, this one pisses us off. It's another relic that gives us another option at the fires. So we can choose to forgo healing, smithing, or even lifting to instead smoke the Peace Pipe which... removes a card. It doesn't give us anything. It just adjusts the probabilities of our deck. That's important too, but is it worth our precious rest-times to do this? And especially at higher Ascension Levels when healing and smithing and even lifting become all the more important... then again, this might be our own biases showing because we tend to think tiny-deck strategies are boring, so we generally don't do those... Fair enough.

• Pocketwatch: Whenever you play 3 or less cards during your turn, draw 3 additional cards at the start of your next turn.

  We used to think that the Pocketwatch was intended for strategies involving heavy cards, so that we'd always be using few cards and always having the benefits of the Pocketwatch. And while it definitely is good in those situations, it also definitely has benefits even with strategies where we are using a million shivs. In that case, the Pocketwatch winds up being a guarantee that, if we get one hand that's really shit, we'll get more cards the next turn which will make it so that at least the next turn will most likely have the cards we need and go much better.

• Prayer Wheel: Normal enemies drop an additional card reward.

  The Prayer Wheel makes it so that Normal enemies give us two card rewards rather than just one. So, we get to look at three cards and pick one, and also three more cards, and pick one. It's sort of like an answer to the scenario we posited in our discussion of the Question Card (which by the way stacks with this, so if we have both, we get to make a selection from four cards, and another selection from four more cards). And with the Prayer Wheel, it's especially useful for strategies with many of the same card, like Claw and Flurry of Blows. It also means that we are looking at a pool of so many more cards, which just in general means that we'll probably find the card we wanted as one among many. It's good, especially if found early.

• Shovel: You can now Dig for relics at Rest Sites.

  PFFT. Get your own relic! Back in my day, we didn't expect random chests to give us the relics, we would go and fucking dig them up ourselves with our own hands. None of this Neow's presents! Ptooie!

  The Shovel is the ultimate relic that is a promise of future good, that right now doesn't do anything. And in fact, kinda insults us. We've been pointing out these sorts of relics all along this discussion, but we feel the Shovel is the worst, because not only does it do nothing now, it offers us the choice at the fire to forgo recalling, healing, smithing, lifting, and even toking, to instead dig up another random relic. Any random relic.

  There was one time that we started a run, and Neow offered to give us a relic. Thank you, Neow. We open our present, and it's the Shovel. Neow has a present for us: go fucking get your own presents, you useless piece of shit. We made it to our first fire and decided, well, let's get our belated present now and choose to dig... and we dug up the Matryoshka. OH MY GOD. Needless to say, we died long before we ever got any of these promised future rewards.

  So the Shovel does nothing by itself, makes us forgo other good things to use it, and what we get is absolutely random and in no way guaranteed to be in any way useful. So we usually don't bother. Fuck you, Neow, you can keep your stinky Shovel.

• Stone Calendar: At the end of turn 7, deal 52 damage to ALL enemies.

  The Stone Calendar is like what we were saying about the Mercury Hourglass and the Damaru. It's a reassurance that the battle won't just drag on until our inevitable death. If the battle makes it all the way to turn seven, the Stone Calendar will slap all enemies in the face with 52 damage, and, generally, unless things have been going really down the toilet, that means the battle is now over, or very nearly over. Good.

• The Specimen: Whenever an enemy dies, transfer any Poison it has to a random enemy.

  This is cooool. We don't get to use it much because it is so rare, but it is cool. The saddest situation is finding it when we have absolutely no Poison going on in our strategy (to put it in our useless relic collection next to the Snecko Skull). But it means that when an enemy dies, its poison will get transferred to another enemy, so all our efforts poisoning that enemy continue to be useful on another enemy. It's awesome.

• Thread and Needle: At the start of each combat, gain 4 Plated Armor.

  This one is like a good friend. It's a way to get the not-often-seen Plated Armor, which gives a little bit of defense each turn until it wears out. It's especially helpful that we get this Plated Armor at the start of battle, so it helps protect us until we get set up. And although we do try to protect the Plated Armor, it doesn't feel quite as precious as the buffer, because we have several points of it, so if we lose one point here, it's okay, and if we lose two points here, that's okay, and now there's only one point so it's okay that's gone now, and we're all set-up by now, it's fine. So yeah, the Thread and Needle is awesome.

• Tingsha: (Silent Only) Whenever you discard a card during your turn, deal 3 damage to a random enemy.

  We never seem to get this one when we are doing a Discard strategy, but when we do... it's awesome! And it is so satisfying to hear it do the little ding-a-ling sound effect every time it's activated. Ding-a-ling!

• Torii: Whenever you would receive 5 or less unblocked Attack damage, reduce it to 1.

  This one is a game changer again, and anyone needs it. It's maybe the single best relic, in our opinion. There's never a time we don't need it, and it will save all our asses. Maybe we won't even notice how much it's helping us, because any little hit that would have been a bit more damage is reduced to 1, and all those 4 and 3 and 2 damages that would have accumulated, we are spared. So we wind up staying so much healthier. And we can strategize around defending just enough that the Torii will activate and we'll get only one damage, and we can spend the rest of our time doing something more useful, and so the battle ends faster, and we're healthier, and it's just, all around better in pretty much every way. Beautiful.

• Tough Bandages: (Silent Only) Whenever you discard a card during your turn, gain 3 Block.

  Yet another one that we always seem to not find when we are doing a Discard strategy. We have been able to use it a bit sometimes, and it was very very awesome.

• Tungsten Rod: Whenever you would lose HP, lose 1 less.

  If we didn't just say that the best relic is the Torii, it would have to be the Tungsten Rod. It spares us one damage from every single thing that would impact our health points. So, if we would have been hit for 5 damage, actually it's 4. If we would have been hit for 10x4 damage, actually it's 9x4 damage, very different. And if we were going to be hit for 1 damage, actually it's 0 damage. Also it stacks with other things that reduce damage, so if we are Intangible and would have been hit for 1 damage, now it's 0 damage. And we've only ever managed to get both relics one time, but if we have both the Torii and the Tungsten Rod, if we would have been hit for 5 damage, the Torii makes it 1 damage and the Tungsten Rod makes it 0 damage, so we are impervious to anything that tries to take a pot-shot at us. The Tungsten Rod is also critically, critically useful to have during the final, final boss fight.

• Turnip: You can no longer become Frail.

  Possibly even more useful than the Ginger because we gotta defend, and the Frail debuff is a killer.

• Unceasing Top: Whenever you have no cards in hand during your turn, draw a card.

  This one is tough to use, but worth it if we can manage. It's another game-changer. We're now playing a completely different game of trying to use up all our cards and get into an infinite turn, and to find ways around the Curses and Status cards that impede us.

• Wing Boots: You may ignore paths when choosing the next room to travel to 3 times.

  This one affects Denise psychologically. She gets hit by both Choice Paralysis from the exponential increase of path options and also the Need to Conserve the Resource, which is yet another potential option. Usually, Denise would wind up reaching the end of the game with the Wing Boots with jumps left, so lately she's been over-correcting and planning paths to use up all three hops of the Wing Boots immediately, possibly just to be rid of them so that then the number of branching options is reduced back to normal again. (Luckily usually Rosy plots our path, and she is better at it).

  But still, the Wing Boots are not very useful, honestly. Most of the time, when Rosy picks the path, it's because she's already gauged from the beginning that it's a path that is going to be suitable for the situation. Then we get the Wing Boots and they are an emergency rescue tool, like the Lizard Tail, except we ourself need to gauge if now is the time to use it and if the alternate path we jump to is actually going to be any better. And usually, even if things are going poorly, it's not because Rosy picked a bad path and a jump to another path will change things, things are usually going badly for other reasons.

  So maybe Denise is on to something to just burn the Wing Boots immediately to get to three fires in a ridiculous zig-zag and be done with it. Or, at least, we cannot possibly claim that we were killed by the map if we have the Wing Boots.

  The most noticeable "feature" of the Wing Boots is that it causes the cursor on the map to become freed from the current path, and we have to be really careful when we make our selection of the next room, lest we waste a jump by unintentionally bouncing to a different identical fire right before the boss.

Boss Relics

• Astrolabe: Upon pickup, Transform 3 cards, then Upgrade them.

  The Astrolabe is a good way to get rid of some unwanted Strikes and Defends. It's also good that once it's used up, we still get to keep the spent relic, and sometimes later we can meet N'loth who requests to take the used-up Astrolabe from us, and, sure! It's all yours! Enjoy!

• Black Blood: (Ironclad Only) Replaces Burning Blood. At the end of combat, heal 12 HP.

  It's the better version of the Burning Blood. We always want this.

• Black Star: Elites now drop an additional relic when defeated.

  Like a promo Pokémon Card! Or, I guess actually, like a David Bowie song. Or maybe both!

  This is again a promise of future rewards, but we feel good about taking this one, because it's also like a promise to be badass. If we are badass, we will be appropriately rewarded. We'll go fight at least one Elite in the next Act and get two relics. Yeaaaah!

  It's also usually the best of the three Boss relics offered, since so many of them have dramatic downsides...

• Busted Crown: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. Future card rewards have 2 less cards to choose from.

  Sometimes this can be good. Especially if we already feel really confident in our deck as it is, and/or if we have the Question Card to offset the downside.

• Calling Bell: Upon pickup, obtain a unique Curse and 3 relics.

  For the longest time we were very scared by the Calling Bell. ...What do you mean a Curse? A Curse??? Eep! And after we learned about Curses and how they work in Slay the Spire, then we were a bit afraid about, what do you mean, a unique Curse?

  

  And once we finally tried to get it to see what would happen, up on the screen pops this Curse card with a picture of this terrifying ugly bell with a snarling face... Eeeeep!!!

  We were afraid for awhile that there would be some later negative consequences to the Curse of the Bell. But, actually... it's just a Curse card that can't be removed from our deck. It doesn't actually do anything in itself, it simply takes up space and clogs our hand. It's like an Injury Curse, except we can remove the Injury when we get an opportunity to do so, while the Curse of the Bell cannot be removed.

  So, okay, once we got over our fear and horror, the Calling Bell can be a generally a useful trade-off to make. We get three random relics, and when there are three of them, most likely at least one will be worth it! And then we just need to juggle the Curse of the Bell in the same way that we'd handle any other problem card. We can do this!

  And if we luckily already have the Omamori, it can absorb the Curse so we never get it in the first place, and then we can get three relics for a single use of the Omamori, nice!

• Coffee Dripper: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. You can no longer Rest at Rest Sites.

  We have never used this one. The idea of never healing at a fire ever again is not the type of risk or trade-off that we are comfortable making. Sorry. But it's cute. Teehee, too much coffee.

• Cursed Key: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. Whenever you open a non-Boss chest, obtain a Curse.

  Sometimes we have taken this one, especially as the Ironclad and with a strategy based around using Curses to our own advantage, or if we have the Du-Vu Doll or the Omamori.

• Ectoplasm: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. You can no longer gain Gold.

  We've also never used this one. Too risky! Too gross!

• Empty Cage: Upon pickup, remove 2 cards from your deck.

  The Empy Cage is one of the most common ways for us to remove some Curses or some unwanted Strikes.

• Frozen Core: (Defect Only) Replaces Cracked Core. If you end your turn with any empty Orb slots, Channel 1 Frost.

  The Frozen Core is a bit tricky. With the Ironclad, the Black Blood is obviously superior to the Burning Blood so we always want to make the trade. The Frozen Core, on the other hand, is a completely different play-style from the Cracked Core that it replaces. And depending upon what strategy we've been building towards as the Defect, it might be an excellent or a terrible idea. We don't realize how much we rely on that initial Lightning orb until we lose it, meep! That said, we have done some pretty cool (haha) strategies with the Frozen Core, especially when coupled with the Inserter and/or with the Fission card.

• Fusion Hammer: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. You can no longer Smith at Rest Sites.

  Rosy has taken this one sometimes, while Denise looks on in horror. But usually Rosy is right. It is a measured risk that could be taken, especially towards the end of the run and if things have been going well enough that everything we would want to smith has already been smithed. Or if we have other means of upgrading cards mid-battle, such as a strategy involving the Armaments card. And the Fusion Hammer only blocks smithing at the fires, and has no impact on smithing that could happen during random events. Or if we might find a card already pre-upgraded. Denise just doesn't like the idea that we could get another card later that we would want to smith, but then we can't. Ah well, that is the trade-off.

• Holy Water: (Watcher Only) Replaces Pure Water. At the start of each combat, add 3 Miracles into your hand.

  We generally do want the Holy Water as an upgraded version of the Pure Water, so that now we always start with, not one, but three Miracles! And usually that's awesome! But we need to watch out that our hand doesn't become clogged with Miracles, so, paradoxically, this might conflict with a Retain strategy. The Miracles are cards that retain and let us do more things, so we might think they go with our Retain strategy, and they do, up to a certain point, but we can only have ten cards in our hand, and it can get to a point where we can't hold all these limes cards! We can always just use up the Miracles, but what a waste, and what was the point of getting more Miracles if we are just going to waste them? That seems like a good way to get a deity mad at us...

• Hovering Kite: (Silent Only) The first time you discard a card each turn, gain 1 Energy.

  The Hovering Kite is never a bad thing to have, but sometimes it can be really awesome! If we were already building towards a Discard strategy, it's time to cheer if this shows up. It goes especially well with the Tools of the Trade power, aw yeah!

• Inserter: (Defect Only) Every 2 turns, gain 1 Orb.

  This one is really, really neat in concept but really really tough for us to use effectively. Every two turns, the Defect gains another orb slot, which seems like it would go fantastically with a strategy based around the Consume card and/or the Frozen Core... but we normally don't get it to line up where we have the strategy that matches the Inserter at the time when the Inserter appears, sigh...

  Aha, since we initially wrote this, we have had a fantastic run based on the Capacitor power and the Consume card and the Frozen Core, and then we got the Inserter and yeeeeah it was awesome!

• Mark of Pain: (Ironclad Only) Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. At the start of combat, shuffle 2 Wounds into your draw pile.

  Oooh. We generally take this one based on the concept alone. We're easy. It's sexy, and it is a nice way to get more energy with with we consider a relatively small drawback. And if we have Fire Breathing power in our deck, which we usually try to do if we can, the Wounds can even become an asset.

• Nuclear Battery: (Defect Only) At the start of each combat, Channel 1 Plasma.

  In real life, it's scary, but we always say yes to the Nuclear Battery in Slay the Spire. It's tough to get Plasma otherwise. But once we have this automatic source of one Plasma, it's easier to set up more sources of Plasma. And even as the sole source of Plasma, a bit of extra energy in the beginning part of the battle while we are trying to set up is very useful. Yay!

• Pandora's Box: Upon pickup, Transform all Strike and Defend cards.

  No. Scary. We have taken it like two or three times and it worked out, but usually we are way too chicken to risk losing what is probably the bulk of our Defense cards.

• Philosopher's Stone: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. ALL enemies start combat with 1 Strength.

  We've also tried this one like, two or three times, and we died pretty promptly after that. So now we don't.

• Ring of the Serpent: (Silent Only) Replaces Ring of the Snake. At the start of your turn, draw 1 additional card.

  To be honest, we are not quite sure in which cases we would want which ring. The Silent's basic ring, the Ring of the Snake, gives 2 extra cards on the first turn. The Ring of the Serpent, on the other hand, gives one extra card on every turn. Over time, the Ring of the Serpent gives more cards in total and gives a benefit to every turn, yet it gives less of a boost to the very first turn when the boost might be the most important. So usually we hem and haw over it and sometimes we take the Ring of the Serpent, but a lot of times we don't, and we're not quite sure if we are right or not in either case.

• Runic Cube: (Ironclad Only) Whenever you lose HP, draw 1 card.

  There's not really much of a drawback to this one, so unless there's a more interesting relic offered, we generally take this one. It also works well with masochist strategies.

• Runic Dome: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. You can no longer see enemy intents.

  The tin foil hat! It protects us from psychic interference and these newfangled game mechanics like having any idea what we are doing.

  We enjoy the way Slay the Spire plainly shows enemy intents and that the whole game is set up so that, over time, there are no surprises. We are always told what the enemy is doing and what is going on, and it's up to us and our strategy and the luck of the draw to handle the plainly communicated situation. We like playing this way. So we have never once desired to go back to, what if we were playing a less good game? What about no? We've never taken it. We're fine. It's okay.

• Runic Pyramid: At the end of your turn, you no longer discard your hand.

  This one is a game-changer, and sometimes it is awesome, and sometimes it bites us hard in the ass. At the end of our turn, we get keep all our remaining cards. Note that this is not the same as Retaining them so it will not work with the Watcher's Establishment power (as we were very unhappy to discover during one run!). But this means that if we get a cool card that we can't use now, it will stay in our hand, and maybe we can use it next time. Or we can hold onto it until the perfect moment. That's great for cards that are a bit tricky to set up or need to be at just the right time. But if we get a lot of trash in our hand, and our hand is full, the only way to get new cards is to use them or discard them. So we might have to use up a bunch of Defends even if we didn't need to so that we can draw some attacks instead. And if the enemy has been filling our deck with Wounds, and our hand gets all filled up with unplayable Wounds... Game Over, man!

  We like to have some means of disposing of cards before we take the Runic Pyramid, especially the Medical Kit, and theoretically the Blue Candle.

• Sacred Bark: Double the effectiveness of potions.

  Woof! This is a good one. Potions already are a means of saving our ass, and now they are twice as powerful. In fact sometimes they become so powerful that it's an overwhelming amount. We drank the power potion, and now we have two of those powers. Wow! Are we worth this much? The Sacred Bark says yes. Aw.

• Slaver's Collar: During Boss and Elite combats, gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn.

  Hot. And almost always worth taking, unless there's something better yet being offered.

• Snecko Eye: At the start of your turn, draw 2 additional cards. Start each combat Confused.

  We have enough discomfort when we fight the Snecko once. We don't want to be in permanent Snecko mode. So we've never taken this one. But we can see how it might be useful for a strategy involving a lot of heavy cards, which we usually don't do often, so we might be biased. We also tend to shy away from adding more randomness to the game. When we lose, we like to take full responsibility instead of shaking our fist at the random number generator.

• Sozu: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. You can no longer obtain potions.

  No! But potions save our life! Maybe this could be taken towards the end of the run, and if we're really struggling for energy. We only took it like once, and the whole time we were lamenting the loss of our potions. The game will still offer us the potion reward, and we can even go to pick it up, but then the Sozu flashes and it disappears, flowing away... waaaah!

• Tiny House: Upon pickup, obtain 1 Potion. Gain 50 Gold. Raise your Max HP by 5. Obtain 1 card. Upgrade 1 random card.

  Eee, it's the Tiny House! It's an all-around good thing. We get a little bit of gold, and we get one potion, and we get one card, and we get one random card upgraded. So if we're needing some general improvements, the Tiny House is a good choice. We usually take it unless there is something even more exciting in the offerings.

• Velvet Choker: Gain 1 Energy at the start of your turn. You cannot play more than 6 cards per turn.

  It's hot, like the Slaver's Collar, but we very rarely take this one. We often do many-card strategies, so that won't work. Though it's neat how it evokes the idea of expanding too much makes the choker too tight. Kinky.

• Violet Lotus: (Watcher Only) Whenever you exit Calm, gain an additional Energy.

  Man, this one's great.

• Wrist Blade: (Silent Only) Attacks that cost 0 deal 4 additional damage.

  OOOOOH! This one works especially well if we were already building a Shiv strategy, but it also works with any zero-cost card like Neutralize and Slice, including temporarily-zero-cost cards like Eviscerate and cards under the effect of Bullet Time and any card given by the attack potion and so on. So, it's going to be good for many reasons, and with the Shiv strategy, it's awesome.

Shop Relics

• Brimstone: (Ironclad Only) At the start of your turn, gain 2 Strength and ALL enemies gain 1 Strength.

  We have bought the Brimstone once. We lost. It's... a lot.

• Cauldron: When obtained, brews 5 random potions.

  We've done this very rarely, because we're already full of potions in the first place. Also, it makes 5 of them, so unless we have the Potion Belt and it's empty, we're going to have to leave some behind, and that feels bad for us.

• Chemical X: The effects of your cost X cards are increased by 2.

  If only we could ever get this one when we have a single X card in our deck. We have done X card strategies but we've never once seen this relic at the same time. It seems like it would be very good.

  Since we first wrote this, we have finally, finally managed to have an X card in our deck, and purchase the Chemical X, and yes, it was awesome!

• Clockwork Souvenir: Start each combat with 1 Artifact.

  Beyond being useful for fighting the Snecko, the Chosen, and other unpleasant things, we can also use this one in conjunction with the Mutagenic Strength to make its effect permanent, which is pretty awesome (though it means we won't be able to use the artifact from the Clockwork Souvenir for anything else). But in general it's really nice to have.

• Dolly's Mirror: Upon pickup, obtain an additional copy of a card in your deck.

  If we have an already-upgraded rare card that we want a second copy of, wow, yes, please, this is the best way.

• Frozen Eye: When viewing your Draw Pile, the cards are now shown in order.

  A game-changer. Denise can't keep all this going on in her head, but Rosy can. With the Frozen Eye, she can know exactly where all the cards are. And coupled with Scrying, we can literally stack the deck. Though it's not even necessary to go that far. The Frozen Eye by itself lets us make all sorts of considerations.

• Hand Drill: Whenever you break an enemy's Block, apply 2 Vulnerable.

  If possible, it's really nice to have, but usually it's pretty expensive and we may end up not getting it in favor of other things we need more.

• Lee's Waffle: Upon pickup, raise your Max HP by 7 and heal all of your HP.

  Thank you, Lee. We assume that's the name of the shopkeeper. He made us a waffle. Thank you. We almost always buy it, even if we're relatively healthy, because it also gives the boost to max health points. But it's also totally saved us from the brink of death.

• Medical Kit: Unplayable Status cards can now be played. Whenever you play a Status card, Exhaust it.

  This is really important if we have the Runic Pyramid to prevent very sad game over situations. Apart from that, it's also useful in general.

• Melange: (Watcher Only) Whenever you shuffle your draw pile, Scry 3.

  We don't really get it. We guess it's good for a small deck?

• Membership Card: 50% discount on all products!

  We always spring for the Membership Card if it's there. Because anything else that was in the shop that we may have been interested in and that we were able to afford before the cost of the card, now we can probably still afford it at the lowered cost. And even if not, in most cases, we'll want to have the card for the future, even if it means forgoing something now. This discount also stacks with that of The Courier, so when we have both, it's time for a shopping spree!

• Orange Pellets: Whenever you play a Power, Attack, and Skill in the same turn, remove all of your debuffs.

  Not easy to pull it off, but if we can foresee the possibility of using a power, an attack, and a skill in the same turn, we do make a point to get the Orange Pellets, because this is the only way to remove debuffs once we have them. It's great to peel off things like the Snecko's confusion or the Chosen's hex. Suffer no more!

• Orrery: Upon pickup, choose and add 5 cards to your deck.

  The Orrery can be a really cost-effective way to look for cards. It's most useful when we are angling for certain cards and big-deck strategies. Just, this means we're going to be discussing the options for the next half hour...

• Prismatic Shard: Combat reward screens now contain Colorless cards and cards from other colors.

  This changes the game completely. We've not had the opportunity to play with the Prismatic Shard enough, but it seems really fun.

• Runic Capacitor: (Defect Only) Start each combat with 3 additional Orb slots.

  If we want more orb slots, the Runic Capacitor is great. But, yeah, it depends on what strategy we've got so far.

• Sling of Courage: Start each Elite combat with 2 Strength.

  The Sling of Courage works only on Elites, not on Bosses, which is a bit sad. Though, this is good if we specifically want to hunt Elites, especially if we have the Preserved Insect and/or the Black Star. Of course, provided we have an attack-based strategy that benefits from more strength.

• Strange Spoon: Cards which Exhaust when played will instead discard 50% of the time.

  It's a nice surprise when it works, and since most cards that exhaust are powerful things that are meant to be limited, and now we get to use them again, and that's awesome. But sometimes the Strange Spoon will affect things that we actually wanted to exhaust, like Shivs. So watch out!

• The Abacus: Whenever you shuffle your draw pile, gain 6 Block.

  We don't get it, what's the point? It's probably a small deck thing, and we like big decks.

• Toolbox: At the start of each combat, choose 1 of 3 random Colorless cards and add the chosen card into your hand.

  The Toolbox acts like a free colorless potion every battle. That's decent, we suppose. But more often we go nah and spend our money on something else.

• Twisted Funnel: At the start of each combat, apply 4 Poison to ALL enemies.

  We always want to buy this one if possible because it's free poison, even if we weren't doing poison.

Event and Special Relics

• Golden Idol: Enemies drop 25% more Gold.

  This relic causes enemies to drop more gold, and it maybe might be useful for other reasons later on. We think it's generally a good idea to take it, because the extra gold adds up while we don't even notice, and if we happen upon the later events the refer to it, it's very useful to have the Golden Idol on hand.

• Bloody Idol: Whenever you gain Gold, heal 5 HP.

  First and foremost, if we don't have the Golden Idol, the penalties for this particular event are pretty steep. And secondly, the benefits of the Bloody Idol are pretty good. We will no longer get the gold boost, but hopefully by this point we've racked up enough gold. Now any future gold we obtain will heal us instead, which means at the end of any battle, we pick up the gold and heal a little. Yay! Though the picture is scary...

• Cultist Headpiece: You feel more talkative.

  CAW CAW!

  It's useless, but it's not detrimental, so we consider ourselves lucky. And it's funny.

• Enchiridion: At the start of each combat, add a random Power card into your hand. It costs 0 for that turn.

  We're usually too freaked out by the Book event to actually get the book. We also don't like that which book you receive is random, so we pay all the sacrifice without knowing if we even want the book at the end. I think this is the book we disliked the least, but we don't even like this book because it introduces a source of randomness that might clog our carefully balanced deck with an unnecessary card.

• Face of Cleric: At the end of combat, raise your Max HP by 1.

  We could kiss it! Best face!!! Mwah!!!

  One health point added to Max HP adds up surprisingly quickly, especially if we get this early!

  The one time we were lucky enough to get both relics, we were excited to learn that the healing aspect of the Face of Cleric is boosted by the Magic Flower (Max HP goes up by 1, but HP goes up by 2).

• Gremlin Visage: Start each combat with 1 Weak.

  In our opinion, this is the worst face and one of the most detrimental relics in the game. The only way it would be okay is if you don't actually use attacks, or if you have the Ginger (which negates Weak completely, yay!), or if you already have the Clockwork Souvenir, although that means that your artifact is wasted on damage control from your own relics, rather than achieving something more useful.

• Mark of the Bloom: You can no longer heal.

  Whenever we see this event, we wind up wanting to challenge a boss from Act 1, so we've never actually chosen the option that makes it impossible to heal. So we've not gotten this relic. And we're fine with that, since, man, is that a huge trade-off.

• Mutagenic Strength: Start each combat with 3 Strength. At the end of your first turn, lose 3 Strength.

  If we're not doing anything that makes us wants to take the JAX card, and if we don't want to Transform any cards, we take this relic. Because, even in the worst case, it can't hurt (which is kinda weird for a relic that's implied to be steroids... but, yeah, it's true. These are pretty safe drugs, apparently). A strength boost on turn one can be pretty powerful, especially if paired with the Bag of Marbles and/or the Akabeko.

• N'loth's Gift: Triples the chance of finding Rare cards from combat rewards.

  The thing that gets us most about this is the flavor text. There's a box inside the box inside the box, and we can never open it to where it's not just another identical box, and it is somehow never any smaller. Ooooh.

  Its effect is that we are more likely to encounter rare cards, so its impact is kinda invisible and hard to quantify while playing. Also, rarer cards might not necessarily be what we want. And if there's a rare card that we would want, this relic might help. But it doesn't guarantee that we will find a rare card, and it doesn't guarantee that the rare card we do encounter will be the one we wanted. All that said though, we usually do take this one if possible, because we hate to disappoint poor N'loth. N'loth is so cute.

• N'loth's Hungry Face: The next non-Boss chest you open is empty.

  Although we don't like receiving N'loth's face. It's the second-worst face. This is the face that can make the run unwinnable, if we've been putting off getting the Sapphire Key. But apart from that, we don't know what we lost, so it's not as bad as seeing ourselves get Weakened every single time like with the Gremlin Visage.

• Necronomicon: The first Attack played each turn that costs 2 or more is played twice. Upon pickup, obtain a special Curse.

  We don't like this relic. It's like Echo Form for assholes. And it comes with a curse that we really don't like the picture on. And it might be what is gained at the end of the Book event, which requires too much sacrifice to not know if we're going to wind up with this gross thing at the end.

• Neow's Lament: Enemies in your first 3 combats will have 1 HP.

  This is probably the present that we take most often from Neow when offered. It is a present with very little randomness. With it, we definitely will get a jump start into the run, and we can think of it as three free card choices, the reward money, and maybe some potions too. But if the map is aligned just right, and if we get lucky stepping on question marks, we might be able to get an essentially free Elite battle before Neow's Lament runs out. Wheee! Take that, Nob! Once or twice we even managed to get two Elite battles before the Lament ran out, which is awesome and quite a strong start to the run.

• Nilry's Codex: At the end of each turn, you may shuffle 1 of 3 random cards into your draw pile.

  Since we don't like sacrificing for the Book event without knowing what we're getting ourselves into, we generally don't even try for it. Nilry's Codex also adds a lot of potential randomness to our carefully balanced deck, and we do not like that. And what we hate even more is that it interrupts everything we're doing after every single turn to present us with a card choice. When we get a card reward after the battle, we spend a long time deliberating, but that's once per battle. Now we have to do that every single turn? We'll forget what our main strategy even was with all this sidetrack!

• Odd Mushroom: When Vulnerable, take 25% more attack damage rather than 50%.

  Always anger the mushrooms! It's worth it. The benefit is way too big. It feels like everything makes us Vulnerable, and this is the only defense we get against being Vulnerable. And it's not even like the Ginger or the Turnip, because it only lessens the effect of Vulnerable, it doesn't even block it. But this is what we get, so we get it.

• Red Mask: At the start of each combat, apply 1 Weak to ALL enemies.

  The Red Mask is really good if we can get it, but sometimes the challenge is too steep. And it's only 1 Weak on the first turn, and most things don't even attack on the first turn, so it's actually often more useful for stripping the enemies' artifacts. The Red Mask nice to have, but it's no good if we die trying to get it.

• Spirit Poop: It's unpleasant.

  Lol. We've gotten this a few times. Sorry. We brought a curse to the fairy party, we get what we deserve. Actually, frankly, the fairies are too kind about it. The Spirit Poop only lowers our overall score by 1, if we care about that. There are no in-game effects. The fairies could have been a lot nastier than that. We guess we'll consider ourselves lucky...

• Ssserpent Head: Whenever you enter a ? room, gain 50 Gold.

  It looks scary, but it's a good face.

• Warped Tongs: At the start of your turn, Upgrade a random card in your hand for the rest of combat.

  Rosy hates the Warped Tongs for the same reason as Nilry Codex. Now we have to keep track of new things that randomly happen each turn and reset every battle. Denise likes it as like a free Armament every turn, which makes smithing a little less critical. But usually the penalty for stealing the Warped Tongs is too steep, and we could just be normal about it and simply borrow them for one free permanent smithing with no penalty.

• Circlet: Collect as many as you can.

  The circlet is a special relic that is only offered if all other relics have been exhausted from the available pool. While this might be possible to see in a normal run, we've only managed to go through so many relics when we tried Endless mode. The circlets don't do anything, and are probably there mostly as a placeholder to keep the game functioning even in such extreme situations. But they are also like a badge of honor, akin to showing off a high score. More and more circlets means we've gone so far beyond a standard run and into the realm of complete badassry!

  ...Or, well, more likely, the realm of complete boredom. Once we got to the part of our Endless run where we were only getting circlets, a lot of the fun and excitement went away. We kept going until we got to see all the Neow's Blights, and then we wound up eventually quitting the run even though we could have theoretically kept going, because we were too bored. We don't need so many Circlets for bragging rights. Ah well, we suppose Endless mode is perhaps un-featured for a reason.

In conclusion

In conclusion, we love this game. Whee!

Seriously, we made this article intentionally not a ranking of the relics, because each and every one of them has the potential to be awesome in a particular situation, especially in combination with other things. That’s one aspect we really love about Slay the Spire - the game design is really out-of-this-world. There is not one overpowered relic that alone means we win the game, there is not a prize relic that would never ever be useful, there’s not one particular combination that always works and forget about anything else. There are tons of unusual synergies to discover! And we know that if we could just manage to defeat another elite, just climb up to the next treasure chest, bring enough gold to the next shop, it could completely change our game. And the fact that we must sometimes leave relics behind, that we must choose one to forgo, adds so much tension to it all.

The amazing game design of the relics is a big, big part of why we keep coming back to try yet another run up the Spire.