There are many cards and relics in Slay the Spire that will not be helpful for your deck or current situation more often than not. That doesn't mean that they are unpickable — Slay the Spire is well-balanced enough that almost every card and relic can shine in the right circumstances, and the below entries will often discuss those cases. However, outside of these situations, they can guide your run to ruin instead.
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Cards
Ironclad:
- Clash. A 0 energy card that does 14 or 18 damage if there are only attacks in your hand; how could that possibly be bad? Except for those times where Elites or Bosses shuffle in status cards into your deck, of course. Or when you start with the Ascender's Bane curse on Ascension 10 and higher. Or when you end up taking high-cost Powers and can't play out your Skills that turn, or when Ironclad picks up Snecko Eye like he often wants to do… Yeah. Clash has its time and place if you can reliably clear out your hand for it, but it's known as one of the biggest noob traps in Slay the Spire for a reason.
- Searing Blow, another giant noob trap. It gets more of a power boost with every upgrade and has decent synergy with Armaments, but this comes at the cost of basically never upgrading anything else in your deck — card draw, energy generation, block, or in-battle scaling — if you want it to be the big damage button it advertises itself becoming. Not to mention that Searing Blow forces you to visit as many campfires as possible to justify taking it, which could guide you down an inferior path devoid of other nodes that could help you. It's a lot better on Endless Mode, though, where you will need that extreme power ceiling to take down the later game cycles or taken in synergy with Armaments to build it up in-combat.
Silent:
- Choke. What a card this is. For 2 Energy, you get to deal 12 damage plus apply a debuff where that enemy takes 3 or 5 more damage for each other card you play. Sounds decent with Shivs or Silent's 0-cost cards, right? Not when the debuff lasts for only one turn and is blocked by Artifact, or when you realize that Silent is often spending energy on card draw and doesn't have that much to pay upfront for such a weak effect. As a damage button in the early-game, it's outclassed by Predator and Dash, which have more immediate output on top of providing some other benefit that isn't contingent on your ability to play other cards. Later on, you'd want to scale your Shivs with an Accuracy instead, which lasts the whole fight and affects more than just one enemy per turn. You take Choke if you have to add damage to your deck early-game, but you're never happy to.
- Riddle with Holes is a joke. Another 2 Energy uncommon that inefficiently deals damage — this time, 3 damage 5 times, 4 with an upgrade. But Silent has no in-class way to scale this multihit, not to mention that if you do find a way to power it up such as with Strength scaling (J.A.X. or a Shuriken), you'd want to lean Shivs instead or have a discard engine with Eviscerate (the latter of which can also let you play J.A.X. multiple times per turn). This card would be significantly better on any other character, but it's stuck on the Silent instead, where almost no one picks it up, not even as a desperation pick like Choke is.
- Distraction is often considered the worst out of the character-specific Random Effect Spell Cards. The difference between Distraction and Infernal Blade on Ironclad, or White Noise on Defect, is that the latter two have some sort of predictable or net positive output. Infernal Blade will always add damage, while White Noise will almost always produce a valuable Power, with the small chance of getting a Game-Breaker such as Echo Form or Biased Cognition. However, Silent's skills vary significantly in terms of what they do, whether that's applying Poison, blocking, drawing cards, or even dealing physical damage by creating Shivs. You're never guaranteed to get something that will help you in a given situation.
- Heel Hook. A tiny amount of damage attached to a conditional draw 1 + energy gain is so ridiculously low-impact that outside of getting extra Shuriken procs, you'd never want to pick this up (and even that case is stretching). Some players may be confused as to why Heel Hook is so lowly regarded when its Ironclad equivalent Dropkick is considered a high-tier card. Shouldn't Heel Hook enable the same infinites? The problem is that Ironclad has significantly more access to Exhaust than Silent does, meaning that he doesn't rely on card removes (which are generally not as strong on the Silent) to build the infinite. Additionally, Ironclad can achieve this infinite by Dual Wielding the Dropkick, meaning that he also doesn't need to fish for two Dropkicks, and can instead naturally just have the infinite as an option in the deck.
Defect:
- Rip and Tear is generally awful. It deals very good upfront damage and hits twice, so you would think it could hold its own. Then you walk into any multi-enemy fight and see how truly awful it becomes when you can't control which enemy it hits. Defect generally doesn't want to rely on physical damage into the late-game, so an Attack that leaves targeting up to chance and doesn't do anything else is generally not something you want in your deck.
- Reprogram, a Defect Uncommon, is generally incredibly niche. It increases your Strength and Dexterity at the cost of Focus, and it's a skill that never exhausts, so this card would be extremely overpowered on any other class. Defect, however, relies so much on orbs that Reprogram is very hard to use outside of some niche deck setups, due to how few cards Defect has that are based purely on a damage-focused build. It's basically only pickable in very specific situations where your orbs don't scale enough for lategame. Even then, it doesn't always solve that problem on its own, and needs an Echo Form to ramp its output enough to take on the final bosses.
- Amplify is considered the worst card duplicator in the game. The issue with Amplify is that Powers remove themselves from the deck for that fight after you play them. Eventually, Amplify will become a curse in a fight, while its equivalents Double Tap and Burst will always find targets to do their dirty work on. Not to mention that you need card manipulation to get Amplify and the Power that you want into your hand at the same time. Echo Form generally does a far superior job of duplicating Powers and has the added benefit of doing so to everything else in your deck as well.
- Thunder Strike is simply a flawed card in execution. It's 3 Energy and deals damage based on how many Lightning orbs you channeled this combat... except if you're channeling that much Lightning, the enemies should all be dead by the time Thunder Strike does any significant damage. The only time Thunder Strike comes in handy is if you have no Focus and your orb generation was all frontloaded.
Watcher:
- The Watcher is notorious for having one of the worst Rare card pools among all characters in Slay the Spire. Some of these rares support very niche playstyles that force a hard pivot if you were to take them, or are simply much less efficient than Watcher's conventional "stance dance" style. Here are some of the worst among them:
- The Alpha -> Beta -> Omega combo. Spend 6 energy total and a mountain of card draw and Scrying for... 50 AoE damage per turn? When Watcher can deal that much damage by stance dancing while staying energy neutral? Alpha is essentially unplayable without multiple copies of Omniscience (which it seems to have been created and balanced around), but unsurprisingly, Omniscience has much, much better targets than this.
- Deva Form is considered to be the worst of the Form cards by far. It provides scaling energy for the rest of the fight for a huge upfront cost. However, this is on a character who has nearly flawless control over her own Energy by switching between Calm and Wrath (and sometimes even Divinity). Why would you ever need Deva Form when you sometimes don't even need to take an energy relic? Snecko Eye, however, makes this card genuinely good — it synergizes very well with it, providing Watcher with a way to mitigate bad rolls and overcoming the opportunity cost of not taking extra energy when it would otherwise be good for her.
- Conjure Blade seems like it was made with Deva Form in mind. For the low, low cost of X energy, you can create an Expunger that deals 9 damage X (or X+1) times. Except… Watcher also doesn't have a problem dealing damage because Wrath exists, and also doesn't turtle well to stall out for Deva Form to generate enough energy. In the time that you waited to get the Expunger up to a critical mass, you probably already killed whatever enemy you're facing, especially so if you're using a deck that doesn't have Conjure Blade and Deva Form clogging it up.
- Judgment one-shots any enemy with at most 30 or 40 HP. As if Watcher needed a non-damage way to finish off enemies when she can just go into Wrath and erase enemies from existence. Not to mention that this card doesn't benefit from Wrath in any way, making it even more pointless on the class with by far the most damage, and it's completely useless if you draw it when no enemy is below 30 (40) HP.
- Pressure Points applies the Mark debuff and makes enemies take damage equal to their Mark upon activation, meaning that multiple plays of it stack up quickly. Then you realize that Pressure Points is the only thing in the entire game that interacts with this mechanic. Not even relics influence how much Mark you apply or how much damage it does, and Wrath and Divinity don't power it up. What you then have is a card where you are always weakening your deck by taking the first copy. To make matters worse, Watcher has possibly the weakest upfront card draw among all characters outside of Rushdown, making it tough to draw into Pressure Points... and if you're using Rushdown, your damage probably should be coming from attacks instead, not Pressure Points. It's overall a very cumbersome card that doesn't play well with the rest of Watcher's kit.
Colorless:
- Transmutation is an X-cost card that adds X random colorless cards into your hand and has them cost 0 this turn. The problem is that the colorless pool is full of stinkers and situational cards, and it's not worth it to spend a bunch of energy on Transmutation hoping for a high roll like Apotheosis. It also suffers from the way X-cost cards work (spending all your energy) making the colorless cards that draw cards, which would otherwise be all right hits, much less useful. Even having the colorless cards cost 0 this turn is less good than it seems because most of them cost 0 anyway.
Relics
Normal Relics:
- Bottled Flame, which allows you to make any Attack in your deck innate, is usually considered the worst out of all three of the possible bottles. While having an innate Skill or Power can help you draw into key combo pieces or set up a long-term damage or block engine, an innate Attack just lets you... hit something on turn 1. Having the Akabeko relic and/or a large source of Area of Effect damage to make this initial hit as large as possible (such as the multi-hitting Whirlwind), or a utility Attack that essentially acts like a Power or Skill (such as Watcher's Talk to the Hand), make Bottled Flame much more useful, but those cases are the exception rather than the rule. Often times, you skip Bottled Flame when it is offered because it will simply make your turn 1 weaker in the long run.
- Darkstone Periapt increases your maximum HP by 6 every time you pick up a Curse. Except… they're curses, you don't want to pick them up, and even if you do so purposely, drawing into them on the wrong turn can lose you much more than the 6 health that it gives you. Not to mention that benefits from other relics you could've picked up besides the Periapt could've ended up saving you much more than 6 health as well, such as fellow uncommon relics Eternal Feather and Meat on the Bone. The Periapt often does nothing throughout the whole run except occasionally protect you from bad Writhing Mass luck by offsetting the HP loss from removing Parasite.
- Similarly, Blue Candle is often a low-tier relic for the same reasons, mostly when it's all by itself. You don't want to put curses in your deck, and the damage done by curses comes from drawing into them instead of something more useful, which Blue Candle doesn't fix in your first deck cycle — it just removes it for the next cycle. The very few times where Blue Candle is good (such as with Centennial Puzzle to trigger first-turn draw upon exhausting a Writhe, or with Necronomicurse to be able to play infinite cards to fuel a litany of Game-Breaker strategies, discussed further in the Spire Game-Breaker page), it can be run-winning. But those synergies don't always line up, and so 9 times out of 10, Blue Candle ends up just sitting in the relic bar doing nothing for the whole run.
- The Boot is laughably underpowered. It raises your Attack damage to 5 if it dealt below 5, which is pretty much never relevant unless you're a Silent who's been Weakened or an Ironclad without Strength, using Pummel. The only other edge case is against Nemesis while it's Intangible, but outside of those two situations you'll never even notice that you had this relic at all. It's got such an infamous reputation that the fanbase likes to joke that the Boot is the most overpowered relic in the game.
Shop Relics:
- Melange is really funny. It allows you to Scry 3 on each reshuffle... except you Scry after you already draw from the shuffled deck, meaning that you can't tailor what you draw on the start of that deck cycle. It's also a shop relic, meaning there's significant opportunity cost in buying it over a potion or a removal at the very least, or even another relic that would be more useful.
- Hand Drill is another shop relic that suffers from opportunity cost. Not very many enemies in the game generate Block, so you're essentially paying for something that can only ever help you in about a quarter of all battles on your way up the Spire. It's only really useful if you have excess money and need to quickly remove Artifact off some of the endgame bosses (such as Donu & Deca or Spear & Shield), and even then, you can't use it to remove the Artifact on turn 1 because they don't start the battle with Block up.
- Cauldron is a shop relic that allows one to brew five random potions. Given the fact that potions are very valuable items (see Sozu below), you'd think this would be great, right? Wrong. The issue immediately becomes apparent once you realize that, unless you have Potion Belt, you can only carry a maximum of three potions, meaning that in the vast majority of cases, you'll be wasting a pretty large amount of this relic's value; and this problem becomes even more apparent on higher Ascensions, since you can only carry two potions at a time. Additionally, while potions are certainly useful, getting random ones also implies that you might get offered a selection of weak or useless brews for your current build, some even repeated several times. And to top it all off, since it's a shop relic, it is usually quite expensive, and its randomness hurts all the more when you could have bought potentially better relics and cards... or, more simply, bought from the selection of actually guaranteed potions that the shop offers. There are some niche instances where this relic can be somewhat useful, like digging for specific potions, or if you desperately need to fill out your potion slots, or if you have some other relics that synergize with potions (Toy Ornithopter, Sacred Bark), but unless you were lucky enough to get Potion Belt before it, even those above-mentioned "perfect" situations usually don't justify its hefty price in gold over any other purchase, making this, in the majority of runs, a very mediocre relic at best.
Boss Relics:
- Non-Energy:
- Tiny House is often considered one of the worst boss relics in the game, if not the worst. Instead of providing any in-battle bonus, it gives a small laundry list of benefits including extra Gold, HP, a card reward, and a random upgrade. This is, of course, better than skipping, but unless the other options would ruin your deck with the drawbacks, you should never take Tiny House.
- Black Blood upgrades Ironclad's end-of-battle healing relic to 12 HP instead of 6. If you take this into Act 2, with how much harder combats get (especially on 3 Energy), you will likely take far more than merely 6 extra damage per combat from the Shelled Parasite or Chosen waiting in the wings for your entry. Having the Magic Flower relic can make Black Blood a lot better, but Ironclad is so energy- and draw-starved in general that unless you have that specific synergy (which often times still doesn't justify taking it) or the other options would ruin your deck, you shouldn't go with Black Blood over something that gives you immediate benefit.
- Ring of the Serpent, Silent's starting relic upgrade, makes you draw 6 every turn instead of 5. Sounds great, right? Except for the tiny caveat that you lose the starting hand of 7 that Ring of the Snake gave you. This means that it takes until turn 3 for Ring of the Serpent to break even in terms of draw. Not to mention that Silent already has great options for drawing cards such as Acrobatics, Prepared, and Backflip in her common pool, meaning that the turn 1 acceleration from Snake is often times better than the prolonged benefit of Serpent. Not the case in the mobile version, however, since Ring of the Serpent is bugged to instead make you draw seven every turn instead, which instead pushes it over to Game-Breaker territory.
- Empty Cage is definitely a letdown of a boss relic, unless the remove 2 specifically takes curses out or pushes your deck closer towards an infinite you're trying to build towards. No extra energy for only a marginal improvement in the deck is far inferior to similar boss relics such as Pandora's Box (which transforms all of those Strikes and Defends you would've targeted with Empty Cage for far superior cards, or can even remove them all from your deck at once with a glitch) or Astrolabe (which transforms only 3 cards instead but upgrades them for even greater value).
- Energy:
- The Busted Crown relic is one of the worst energy relics in the game, such that it is often preferable to take a non-energy relic over it. In exchange for its benefits, you see two fewer cards after each combat. Unless your deck is finished, this is a massively crippling drawback due to the way rare card spawns work and even more crippling if you need to see specific cards to bring your deck together. Plus, being a boss relic means you can only get it in the first two acts, meaning your deck will almost never be done by the time you see it. While Question Cardnote mitigates it some, the rare card mechanics still heavily hold it back and doesn't carry it hard enough to make up for it. Adding to that, you wouldn't want to take Busted Crown after getting the Question Card, since the latter is one of the strongest relics in the game that has its game-winning benefit cut drastically by the Crown.
- Then there’s Sozu, which prevents you from gaining potions. Sozu is often overvalued by newer players as they often forget to use their potions, and some players incorrectly reason that it must be stronger on higher Ascensions as your potion slots are decreased. However, as a player rises in Ascension, they will realize that potions are almost required for taking on the increased toughness of the Spire. Potions are essentially risk mitigation tools that, when used properly, can even be a win condition against elites, bosses, and other particularly tough regular enemies. Just having extra energy per turn is almost never worth losing out on these benefits for the rest of the run, as even 4 energy won't save you from a bricked hand. The only time Sozu is pickable is precisely when: your deck is so strong that bad hands simply won't happen, you already have strong potions in the belt that you plan to carry all the way to the endgame, and the only thing needed to put all the pieces together is one extra energy per turn. You can count on a single hand how many of your runs will look like that in any given month.
- Another low end boss relic is Ectoplasm, which gives you extra energy every turn at the cost of no longer being able to gain gold. The main problem with this relic is that shops are some of the most important rooms in the game, as they not only let you purchase cards, relics, and potions that can easily make or break a run, but they are the only reliable way to remove cards from your deck. What’s more, this boss relic cannot appear as an Act 2 boss reward, meaning that it can only be taken as an Act 1 boss reward or as a boss relic swap from Neow. Losing out on shops for the entirety of Acts 2, 3, and possibly 1 and 4 is an enormous price to pay that typically far outweighs the benefits of extra energy per turn. Ectoplasm is better than skipping or most non-energy relics, since it gives an immediate power boost, but you're never happy to take it and you will feel the value loss as your run progresses. It is worth noting, though, that Silent makes quite decent use out of the Ectoplasm due to her lower reliance on card removes — she can simply draw past her basics and hold the combo pieces she needs.
- Mark of Pain gives the Ironclad extra energy at the cost of shuffling two Wounds into the deck at the start of combat. Thus, this energy relic essentially gives you -2 draw and increases your chances of bricking on at least your first cycle through the deck. No amount of energy will save you from bricking an important draw against an Elite or Boss, and you're not going to be spending that extra energy if that's the case. Even if you have methods to destroy the Wounds like with the Medical Kit, the damage will have already been done when you draw into them the first time. You need tons of upfront card draw (not something easy to come by with Ironclad) or at least an Evolve+ in your deck to even justify taking this over another energy relic that isn't something like Sozu or Busted Crown, and it only becomes genuinely good if you happen to have Evolve+ bottled.
Events
While some events are intentionally punishing and don't belong here, there are a few stinkers among those that supposedly offer something helpful:
- The offer in the Act 1 event "The Ssssserpent". You get 175 (150 on Ascension 15+) gold in exchange for getting a Doubt added to your deck. The problem is that the Doubt is liable to get you in trouble, as it not only clogs your deck, but also gives you Weak whenever you end a turn with it in hand, which sabotages your offense and gives enemies more time to deal damage. Worse, if you take the offer in the early game, you'll see Doubt every 2-3 turns because your deck is so small at that point. In most cases, it's only worth considering if you have something that specifically synergizes with Curses or know you can visit a shop to remove it soon (and even then it's only a net gain of 100 or 75 gold after paying for the remove, not to mention that you lose a chance to get rid of a bad starter card). And since the only alternative to accepting the Ssssserpent's offer is leaving without doing anything, it also tends to be a boring event.
- The Act 3 event "Secret Portal" offers to take you directly to the Act 3 boss, skipping the rest of the act. The problem is that you're unlikely to have a deck that is at the same time good enough to beat the endgame bosses (especially if you're going for Act 4) and struggling so much with the rest of Act 3 that you'd rather skip it than go through it to get stronger. It isn't even good for speedrunning because it's programmed not to appear if you have a particularly fast time.note As a result, its main use is when you're feeling confident in your deck and impatient to finish the run. And, like "The Ssssserpent", the only alternative to accepting the bad offer is leaving without doing anything, so it tends to be a boring event with no impact on your run beyond wasting a floor.
Removed and reworked content
Some cards and relics were so bad that they were reworked, or even removed from the game entirely.
Cards
- Ironclad: Fire Breathing in its original form. It was a Power that caused every enemy to take 1 damage per attack the Ironclad used after his turn ended. Already, this was a less effective version of the Silent's A Thousand Cuts (which does the same thing whenever any card is played, just during a turn rather than after), but it was especially wasted on the Ironclad, who doesn't have many low-cost attack cards. At most it would do an average of 2-3 damage per turn, and its only benefit was being easy to slot into any deck when upgraded to cost nothing. The Watcher update reworked it into much stronger AoE that triggers when drawing a Status or Curse card. This still renders the card quite situational, but it is now at least now a decent damage supplement against Elites and Bosses that shuffle in tons of Statuses, like Sentries, Hexaghost, or Taskmaster.
- Silent: The original Wraith Form had you deal 3 (5) damage every time you played a Skill, which often just ended up being a worse version of A Thousand Cuts, a cheaper card that deals 1 (2) damage whenever you play any card. Wraith From was eventually reworked into an extremely good defensive card that gives you two (three) turns of Intangible, which reduces all damage to Scratch Damage, at the cost of losing one Dexterity per turn (which doesn't matter as long as you can finish the battle in time).
Relics
- Normal Relics: Runic Dodecahedron granted 1 bonus energy each turn... but only while your health was full. As enemies only get stronger in the later acts, it was not uncommon to find this relic useless after one fight on Act 2 or 3, not to mention that you heal only for 75% of missing health after boss battles starting from Ascension 5, and begin the game with 90% health on Ascension 6 onward. The last nail in its coffin is that if you can make use of it, you're probably doing well anyway. It being retired on the Watcher's release was met with much appreciation.
- Boss Relics:
- Before its rework, Hovering Kite was a Silent-exclusive energy relic with the drawback of making you discard two cards per turn. While this was not too disastrous on the first turn thanks to Ring of the Snake negating the drawback, on each subsequent turn you'd be left with only three usable cards from your initial hand. Even with the Silent's access to Draw Extra Cards effects and "gain a bonus when you discard this" cards, this drawback was just too bad. The relic was later reworked to "the first time you discard a card each turn, gain an energy", which worked out much better.
- The game had several underwhelming boss relics that were demoted to a more appropriate rarity on the Watcher's release. Most of them share the issue of giving no immediate advantage in battle:
- Eternal Feather. All it does is let you heal a bit when you enter a rest site, which has the same problems as Black Blood — it offers no immediate advantage in battle, and a better relic is likely to mitigate much more damage than the Feather would let you heal for. Thankfully, it was demoted to Uncommon, where it actually pulls its weight.
- Lizard Tail revives you at 50% health once if you die, which doesn't make up for providing no other benefit and the opportunity cost of not taking a better boss relic. It was later demoted to Rare.
- Orrery gives you five card rewards. While this is a very nice effect on the shop relic it later became, it still lacks the impact you want out of a boss relic.
- White Beast Statue ensures that a potion will always drop after combat. Unlike Eternal Feather and Lizard Tail, this at least offers some advantage in combat, but the fact that you got this instead of a better boss relic means you'll probably be burning a lot of potions just to compensate for the lack of any other increase in power.
