Slay the Spire 2 patch v0.109.0 is already being broken by the community

Mega Crit dropped beta patch v0.109.0 for Slay the Spire 2 this morning, and it might be the wildest balance update the game has seen yet. A mix of boss tweaks, new relics, and some eyebrow-raising card changes has the community already finding ways to snap the game in half.

On the boss side, Act 3's Aeonglass got damage nerfs so it no longer obliterates you on turn one, while the Torchhead Amalgam minion in The Queen fight now hits harder on its first turn. Two new Neow relics arrived with the patch: Neow's Sacrifice adds a Guilty curse to your deck but hands you an Ambergris potion — a new item that restores 50% of your max HP and grants you a free extra turn immediately after use, which sounds like a near-automatic boss kill. The second relic, Dowsing Rod, adds an unplayable Dowsing card that transforms into Abundance after you enter five event rooms; Abundance is a 1-cost skill that lets you pick one of three free power cards to add to your hand. On the nerf side, Ironclad's Dominate got bumped from uncommon to rare, and Regent's Pillar of Creation now gives 5 block once per turn when you create a card rather than 3 block every single time.

The change drawing the most attention is to Silent's Well-Laid Plans. It was a 0-cost uncommon that let you retain up to two cards per turn — now it's a 0-cost rare that retains your entire hand for the rest of the fight. Runic Pyramid, a relic widely considered one of the best in the original Slay the Spire, does essentially the same thing, and it's particularly powerful on Silent because her kit rewards a large hand and has built-in ways to avoid hand clutter. The buff also makes enabling Sly cards easier. The funniest chaos, though, comes from Necromancer's Eidolon: instead of exhausting your hand for 1 Intangible, it now replays all Ethereal cards in your Exhaust Pile. Players have already found that with the right setup, Eidolon can scale The Scythe — a card that gains 4 permanent damage each time it's played — infinitely. Sentry Mode also gets replayed by Eidolon, opening up further loops the developers almost certainly didn't intend.

Slay the Spire 2 has been in Steam Early Access since earlier this year, and Mega Crit has been pushing frequent beta patches to iterate on the new classes and mechanics introduced in the sequel. The community on Reddit is having a field day with the Eidolon exploits, and given how quickly these loops were discovered, a hotfix or follow-up nerf for at least some of these changes — especially Well-Laid Plans and Eidolon — seems likely sooner rather than later.