Slay the Spire 2's daily runs have turned me into a spoiled brat

The Slay the Spire 2 daily has ruined me. I'm usually such a good boy. I read tutorials. I study tooltips and glossaries to ensure I understand every keyword. I carefully calculate my turns to ensure I'm getting the most juice out of every card I squeeze. Unfortunately, after a week of gorging myself on the delicious combos and ultra-sleek loadouts that Mega Crit's challenge mode has to offer, I've become a monster, petulantly banging my fists on the digital table and whining to mommy Neow that I don't want any Strikes and Defends in my deck.

Like the rest of Slay the Spire 2, its daily runs are an evolution of the mode Mega Crit gradually honed over the course of the original. They force you into a preset character selection and Ascension level, but with three modifiers that can dramatically alter the way that you play. The most significant of these are Draft and Sealed Deck, which both have you building a ten-card deck that replaces your normal starting cards: the former through a sequence of three-card drafts, the latter by letting you take your pick from a list of 30 options.

Any roguelike deckbuilder expert worth their salt will tell you that trimming your deck down to its very best cards is one of the most reliable routes to success in Slay the Spire 2, whether by enabling infinite combos or by simply allowing you to get to your game-winning cards as often as possible. While Mega Crit's sequel does offer some rather satisfying ways to go in the other direction, such as cloning potentially hundreds of copies of a single card, the 'thin' build still largely reigns supreme, and these modifiers set you up for success from floor one.

The daily runs where I can replace my starting deck and get rid of all the 'boring' basic moves are my favorite. I was able to quickly escalate one into a 16-card Ironclad build that stacked impenetrable levels of block and then used it to Body Slam my foes into oblivion. Another turned into a 23-card Necrobinder that used her companion Osty solely to block while she pumped up the enemies' Doom debuffs to fatal effect. Both of these also had the benefit of Flight, a daily modifier that allows you to jump around the map with no path restrictions, letting you greedily snatch up as many upgrades, events, shops, or elite fights as you fancy.

Even when Neow firmly tells me that I must have some default cards in my diet today, I'm still treated to make up for it. A daily Silent run sets me up for discard glory with five copies of Abrasive (a power that grants me one Dexterity and four Thorns, and is played for free if I discard it). Then it grants me relics for every normal enemy encounter I beat, and makes it more likely that question-mark rooms contain either treasure chests (great) or elites (a little harder, sure, but with better payouts to match).

By the end of that particular playthrough, I'm frequently ending my first turn with each Defend card granting me 30 block and at least half of my enemies either dead or near-fatally poisoned - and the deck only gets stronger as fights continue. It's immensely satisfying to play, and I suppose I am getting in some good practice with the discard mechanic that I could theoretically transition over to my regular attempts. The daily runs are certainly a good opportunity to experiment; I deliberately set up that Necrobinder run I mentioned earlier to see how viable not using Osty to attack was, and got a resounding answer.

The problem is that Slay the Spire 2 runs take long enough that I can often only fit in one per session, especially if they go all the way. Weaned on a diet of hypercharged matchups, I'm finding it difficult to go back to the normal mode. There's a glut of good games on my plate right now (and some, like Mewgenics, are every bit as time-hungry). I know I should eat my StS 2 vegetables; I'm even well aware that there's a good chance they'll taste every bit as delicious by the end. Yet I fear the lure of instant, combo-ready gratification straight out of the packet is just too tempting to pass up.