As with all roguelike deckbuilders, Monster Train has its fair share of underwhelming cards that may be able to work in a specialized build, but will more often than not be detriments to the average deck.
Unfortunately, Monster Train is also a special case in that after The Last Divinity DLC dropped, a huge expansion that added so much content to the game that there needed to be more patches to bring certain things up to the appropriate power level, the development team essentially abandoned the game. This has resulted in a multitude of cards which were fine pre-DLC but are simply terrible under the Pact Shards system.
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Clans
- Umbra. This clan pre-DLC was excellent, to the point where at the time of writing, there is still a huge paragraph in the Game-Breaker section about how strong it can be under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, many of this clan's strengths crash and burn under the DLC's new introductions. There are certainly a few units and several standout cards that can still support a strong win (such as Umbra Stone and the Emberdrain package), but even with these taken into account, lines to victory exclusively using Umbra are far too narrow in the DLC. Often, Umbra will simply be supporting your other clan with the few highrolls in its card pool with none of its actual units in play. Possibly worst of all, Umbra's weaknesses don't fully manifest until you get to higher Covenants, meaning that players will develop bad habits with the clan and have to unlearn them once they inevitably start losing runs.
- In the DLC, the more Pact Shards you take, the more likely that a spawned enemy will have an upgrade that gives it various buffs. These range from more health, more attack, or Multistrike, to the most damning of all for Umbra, Spikes and Sweep. Morsels, the Umbra clan's claim to fame, quickly go from a versatile scaling method that can give powerful boons to your units and also block incoming attacks, to merely death fodder when facing one of these enemies. Sweep will bypass your front unit's larger health pool and kill the Morsels before they can be eaten, while Spikes will force any Morsel with a Strength stat to kill itself if your front unit cannot kill them first.
- The Divinity fight itself is also heavily stacked against Umbra. The Divinity itself will perform a Sweep attack every turn on the top floor in that fight, killing all your Morsels before they can be eaten, which is a serious issue because Umbra units generally want to set up on top floor due to their low starting power. Running the vast majority of Umbra units will thus pigeonhole you into finding a handful of solutions, such as the artifacts Winged Technology or Chain of Gems (which can give Morsels Damage Shield to block the Sweep) or a Feast with a Holdover upgrade to eat the Morsels before attacking. Failing that, you may be forced to play on the middle floor instead (which on higher Covenants only has 4 space instead of 5), where you will have to be very careful not to get overwhelmed by the first wave.
- Many Umbra units are also weak in the DLC, incapable of handling the dense waves of enemies in the Divinity fight. The Crucible units are slow-and-steady tanks that specialize in winning Relentless and not wave clearing, the Morsel creators are fragile and easily die under pressure, and the "Eater" units generally have far too low base stats, requiring very specific synergies to scale fast enough. Alloyed Construct, Overgorger, and Morsel-Made are the exceptions, being strong units that can anchor a winning line, with Morsel-Made being seemingly tailored to solve all of the clan's issues with its unique ability to eat Morsels as they spawn. But Construct still has to solve the Morsel issue on top floor, and the latter two require you to find Multistrike or Trample from Umbra Stone to get to a high enough number of hits. Morsel-Made is also a Rare unit, meaning you can't count on seeing it every run.
Units, Champions, and Paths
Hellhorned:
- Hornbreaker Prince got left behind by the DLC. An excellent unit pre-DLC and still great for beginners or lower Covenants, his base stats are simply too low to stand up to the power creep. He suffers from being an intended carry unit who you can't put upgrades or infusions into to offset the low stats, meaning that in many runs, you often simply find something better and exclude Prince from your main floor. To Prince's credit, Brawler is still a strong late-game path due to Brawler III having 5 hits (and thus always at least providing you with a functional unit into the Divinity), and Wrathful is good in the early-game, giving you enough time to snowball the rest of your deck. However, the former is tough to take in Ring 1 due to his pitiful stats unless you have Rage starters, and the latter falls off hard late-game. Cross-pathing them will simply make Prince a Master of None who can't get anything done either way. And this isn't even getting into his Reaper path, which is widely considered to be completely unplayable due to its fragility and inconsistency.
- Queen's Implings are only good starter cards if you have Shardtail Queen as your Champion for the run. If you get Exile Hellhorned as your allied clan, you're in for a bad time. Queen's Implings are mediocre frontline pings that don't scale well into the lategame and take up space on your floors, and no other Champion in the game can make any use of them. This is especially true if your Champion relies on Incants or Inspires - how are you going to get either of them when your starters aren't spells and/or can't be freely played? And worst of all, they cost 1 Energy to play. At least the closest analogue, Rector Flicker's Dreg starters, cost 0, so they can be easily thrown away.
- Demon Fiend and Consumer of Crowns are very poorly designed considering the mechanics of Monster Train. They are both high-cost units with high stats; unfortunately, their costs are so high that you can't play them at all with your starting 3 Ember, or unless you have the Sketches of Salvation artifact to summon them automatically to the middle floor. Well fine, surely you just take them after getting an Ember upgrade! Except that the last time that you can draft a unit is in Ring 4. Well, hopefully you bottom-deck them so that you can play Ember-generating cards first? Banner units all have draw priority, meaning that you will always see one in your draw, as long as one still exists in your deck, meaning that all they'll do is clog up your opening hand. These two units are so bad that they're used to Troll players in challenges. Reset the game constantly until the first banner you see is a Hellhorned banner with these two units, then make that seed a challenge and send it to an unsuspecting player (after which that player will likely die a quick death).
Awoken:
- Wilting Sapwood is tragic. It's a Banner Unit that gives you Ember every time it's hit. It also takes up 3 space, costs 2 Ember, and has absolutely miserable base stats, meaning you won't be able to take advantage of its ability for very long, not to mention that you don't even know if you can use that Ember next turn. And did we mention that this is a Rare unit, taking away the spot from the many Game-Breaker Rare units that you could've seen instead?
Stygian:
- Tethys. Possibly the Champion that suffered the most from having pitiful base stats that weren't increased to match the DLC's standards. She was strong pre-DLC, but all of that immediately goes out the window as soon as you turn on Pact Shards. Her low HP means that she dies to the omnipresent Sweep and Spikes upgrades (made even worse by the fact that the Handheld Totem path gives her Sweep, which instantly kills her on a wave with more than one Spikes unit) and can't be played on top floor Divinity without support, and the payoff for protecting her often isn't worth it unless you're using Conduit (which is typically extremely weak in the first few rings). In many runs, your best bet is to build a strong floor without Tethys and throw her away after the early-game.
- Solgard is a much better Champion, but even he isn't immune from having a bad path. Direchannel is considered one of the most awkward paths in the whole game due to its atrocious base stats (0 Strength and 40 HP at Level 3) and poor payoff for gaining Shards, merely dealing 7 damage to the front unit per Shard each turn, which usually isn't even enough to kill a frontline heavy unit. While a deck that can spam Incants can get this up to a critical mass relatively quickly, it ends up being outclassed by Coldchannel entirely in those decks, which can apply Frostbite to the whole floor and completely shred waves and Relentless phases.
- Icy Cilophyte is considered the worst Sweeper in the game, having awful stats (1 Strength / 15 HP) and applying Spell Weakness to the floor instead of adding more damage to enemies. Part of a Sweeper's job is to take care of backlines, which Cilophyte intrinsically cannot do without support. Plus, if you set up on top floor, there is no way to take advantage of the Spell Weakness she inflicts. She's not as bad as some of the other entries here just because Sweep is such a strong trait to have, but the difference between her and the Awoken Sweep units, and even Coldcaelia, is so drastic that it warrants a mention here.
Umbra:
- Penumbra is an average Champion stuck in a bad clan. He often fails at being a carry as Glutton is simply too slow for the DLC, and Monstrous forces you to either take Light of Seraph for extra space or have an Intrinsic upgrade on a floor expanding card. Even then, Monstrous frequently misses kill thresholds because its stats were balanced around the waves in the base game, not taking into account enemy upgrades or the dense Divinity waves, making his Trample worthless unless you have a very fast source of scaling (or the full Emberdrain package) to power him up. His best path is considered to be Architect, as it has high base Strength and expands your floor by 1 space at Architect III, meaning you don't have to take Light of Seraph to enable a larger floor setup.
Wurmkin:
- Kinhost Carapace is yet another victim of the Banner Unit draw priority mechanic. You want to be playing this unit midway through a fight when you've loaded up a floor with Echoes, not at the start of the fight where it'll just be a 2-cost 10/10. And once you've played it, it expands in size equal to the number of Echoes on your floor, often preventing you from playing any other units. You basically need an Intrinsic Soul Siphon to use this card properly, and for very little reward; plus, if you need to protect Kinhost Carapace with a tank, you better hope that tank is your Champion or that you draw into your tank first before it takes up your whole floor.
- Glugsider. Good luck ever getting this guy into play. Another unit that requires Echoes to be used properly - actually, scratch that, to be used at all, since its Summoning condition is to Extract 4 Echoes from a floor. And once you get it down, it applies Reap to attacking enemies, which might not even damage those enemies because you've likely just removed all Echoes from the floor to get Glugsider in play in the first place. This is another unit that requires Sketches of Salvation to cheat it out so that it can be useful, and even then, you need a pull effect such as Vine Grasp or March of Shields to get it to the front, lest it be completely useless.
Spells
Awoken:
- Spreading Spores is an incredibly underwhelming card. For 2 Ember, it merely gives your unit Regen 2 and Spikes 2. The Regen has as much efficiency as base Restores, while the Spikes is nice but usually hardly enough to justify spending this much on the card. And to make matters worse, it duplicates itself, causing this low-impact card to slowly clog your deck. It is only positive into Seraph the Diligent, where this card is an effective counter to the boss's Consume mechanic, allowing you to consistently play this first and your other spells afterward with no penalty. That is, until you realize that Awoken already has two Artifacts that counter Diligent (Cursed Vines and Thornfruit) as well as a much better card in Preserved Thorns that generates expendable Stings, which help speed through your deck in the first cycle.
Stygian:
- Forgone Power, Solgard's starting card, is one of the few cards in the game that are significantly worse in multiples. A 0-cost card that applies 6 Frostbite is an excellent effect and enables Incants, but it comes at the cost of randomly discarding a card in your hand. Thus, if you have multiple of these in your hand and are relying on them to Incant or supplement your damage in Relentless, Forgone Power discarding another Forgone Power can be disastrous. Not to mention that other strong cards in the clan also discard, such as Drain and Frenzied Swarm, and Forgone Power doesn't play nice with any of them. It's not uncommon for players to remove all but a single Forgone Power by the late-game.
- Hoarfrost Effigy is hilarious. It essentially consolidates all the Frostbite onto the floor into a single unit and doubles the Frostbite. That sounds great and all, until you remember that this card is 3 Ember, and that the point of Frostbite is to kill backline units (which this card actively takes away) or to secure a kill in Relentless (where not every minor ring boss spawns with enemy units for you to take advantage of this card with). Sure, it can quickly beat down flying bosses and Seraph, but Frostbite on its own does a decent enough job of that already. Not to mention, this card is also a Rare, meaning you aren't likely to see it before Daedalus or Talos, reducing the number of fights in which this card can be effective. And the Divinity just removes all the Frostbite at the end of the turn, meaning that if you rely on this card to beat bosses, you'll be crushed in that fight.
Umbra:
- Crucible Extension is a cumbersome card. It increases the space on your floor by 1 at the cost of 2 Ember. You generally don't need to expand space on your floor more than once, so the fact that it doesn't Consume itself like the common Space Prism (which is 0 cost) is actually a downside, alongside the necessity of grabbing upgrades or Ember generation support to be able to handle its cost.
- Cave In might be the worst movement card in the game, as it descends everything on a floor indiscriminately. The benefit of floor manipulation is to split up enemy waves, not clump them all together. It can't be freely played even if you're not using it for disruption and trying to assemble a superfloor on the middle or the bottom. Due to how the 7-unit limit works, any excess units on a floor are pushed to the floor above, meaning that if you're not careful with this card, you could end up letting a dangerous enemy walk freely to the Pyre.
Melting Remnant:
- Memento Mori sucks. It deals damage to the front enemy equal to 10x your friendly unit deaths, for the high cost of 3 Ember. It takes far too long to scale, can't hit backlines, and due to its single-target and single-hit nature, takes upgrades extremely poorly. It's basically only playable if you have a Hallowed Halls, but if you have that card, you're likely already winning by a very large margin and don't need a giant, clumsy ping card clogging your draws. A Fatal Melting is generally vastly preferred over this card.
