Game:

Inscryption (2021)

Duration: 11:00

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Not too much to say about Grimora's minions here. So much of the Deathly Deck has 1 Health that a Sentry Drone just wrecks its whole strategy. I do particularly like killing the Ghost Ship at 4:00, as I find that card extremely annoying.

My Plasma Jimmy and Shutterbug rip right through Grimora's tricks. And an undead Plasma Jimmy is arguably even better than the original, since it's free. There are several moves I could have played better in this fight but it doesn't matter, this deck ruins Grimora. It wasn't at all necessary, but I took some amount of satisfaction in killing her with her side of the board completely emptied.

Since there's not much to say about the fights here I'm going to talk a bit about the run in general. I honestly had no idea what to expect going into the Techno Deck. I knew it had at least two different ways to approach it, either playing it as a normal Energy deck ala Act 3, or relying on Conduits for specific setups. It seemed like it could easily be the game's most complicated deck, and I was expecting to have as much trouble as I had getting the Deathly Deck going.

Instead I find that this deck is just monstrously overpowered. There's almost no way to play it where you don't wind up riding roughshod over the entire act. I'm pretty sure you could beat all four Scrybes without ever changing from the initial 20 cards. I don't think I've even used a fraction of this deck's potential yet, as I haven't used any Conduits, Mrs. Bomb, or Gamblobot, any one of which I think you could build entire strategies around.

I suspect this may relate to the Energy system being rebalanced for Act 3 at some point during development, perhaps because you're not intended to have a Clover mechanic with Techno cards. Either way, I'm convinced that the Techno Deck is Act 2's strongest, and I don't think it's even close. The Energy system means once you get past the first three or four turns you will never run into mana starvation, and you can play your most powerful cards trivially. The raw power may not hit the highs of the other decks (although if you get a couple of Double Gunners on the board it comes close; and don't forget Gamblobot!), but it doesn't matter when you can so easily form a swarm of 1-2 ATK cards on every space for every battle.

The biggest downside to the Techno Deck is honestly just that the Energy system is so confusing when you're initially exposed to it; probably partly because it seems too good to be true. I gave it a try my first run and quickly gave up and went back to a Beastly/Deathly hybrid, as I'm sure most players did. But once you've been through Act 3 and understand playing with the Energy system well, the Techno Deck is almost certainly the choice for Act 2. Once you start supplementing it with cards from other decks, it only gets even more busted.

This also leaves me forced to conclude that the Deathly Deck is Act 2's worst. It has upsides, especially when mixing decks. Skeletons are often better sacrifices than Squirrels since they can double as attackers and take out enemies like Coyotes (although you lose chump blocking). And with any deck you're going to accumulate Bones, so tossing in a Drowned Soul or Mummy Lord always works. And Skeletons, Revenants, and Skelemagus own the Magnificus fight, who is arguably the hardest Scrybe.

But the Deathly Deck on its own struggles against too many of the game's fights. The Tomb Robber + Necromancer infinite loop is one of the most overpowered techniques in the game when paired with a Bone Heap, but it's tedious, takes more setup to build that deck (you need 3 of each relevant card), and still somewhat difficult to get going properly in any given encounter. My Beastly and Techno runs both took around 50 minutes, while the Deathly run was 60 just because of the time investment on building Bone loops. We'll see how the Magical Deck does, although I've played with it before (it's part of what inspired this video series) so I'm confident it's not as difficult as Deathly was.

Now with all of that said, the Deathly Deck is far more powerful if you pay tribute to the Bone Lord, and the earlier the better. The Bone Lord's Femur gives you 3 Bones to start every fight (if you draw 2 Skeletons/Draugrs and a Revenant this is an instant win), while the Bone Lord's Horn is a card that lets you convert every 1 Energy into an additional 3 Bones, which is just crazy. Add in the Drowned Soul and the Deathly Deck might be a match for any in the game. To see getting this setup going early, check out my video here: https://youtu.be/uY4xDerYtCU

0:00 World map
0:27 Kaycee
2:03 Sawyer
3:58 Royal
5:31 Crypt puzzle
6:53 Grimora

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