I try to aim for cycle, low-size decks. My deck sizes that get to floor 3 or win are generally between 17–23 cards. Mostly, a general tip for a deck like this is to pass on rounds of cards that seem sub-par. A run I just had offered me absolute garbage on most fronts, so I made it to floor three with 15 cards before dying to lack of AoE.

I know it seems like heresy, but I pass on Barricade, Metallicize and Juggernaut quite often as they don’t really feel satisfactory to me. Combining all of them works, but they seem to synergize with each other and not with other cards.* In addition, high-cost power cards like Demon Form or Corruption can also be passed on almost always as they tend to just eat up space without achieving much.

My general strategy is to hit up merchants and ? locations to remove as many basic cards from your deck as possible. Starting with the transform 2 cards can be nice- transform on even Bash isn’t all too bad if you get unlucky, but obviously putting the deck down to 3/2 (or 3/1 if you have 1–2 Armaments) strike/defend is ideal by the middle/end of floor 2. Starting with remove-a-card is ideal and taking up the cleric on removing a card for 50g every time is vital.

Upgrading is generally Feed → any strength boosters → Twin Strike/Clash/Armaments → the rest. Boosters are priority number one and Feed only becomes priority zero if it can be obtained extremely early.