Slay the Spire

The Silent

Background

"A deadly huntress from the foglands. Eradicates foes with daggers and poisons."

The Silent is the second playable character in Slay the Spire. She specializes in defeating her foes with many cuts and poison, while avoiding attacks with agility and underhanded tricks. She starts with 5 basic attacks, 5 basic defends, a slightly better defend, and an attack that inflicts weakness. Her starting relic is the Ring of the Snake, which draws 2 extra cards on her first turn.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The Silent accels in prolonging and maximizing her turn. She offers easily understandable strategies, with attacks and skills that whittle away an enemy's health over time. With proper deck construction, she is capable of having a turn go on indefinitely. She can make use of poison that damages enemies every turn, and she can create Shivs, which are 0 cost cards that are strong in great numbers. Silent's greatest strength is her ability to draw and discard cards effectively. She possesses many cards that can draw additional cards, allowing her to rapidly go through her deck. When her hand gets full, she can use various cards that discard others and grant bonuses.

Strategies

Silent has 3 main builds, with all of them being mostly offensive. There is a strategy that focuses on improving defense and weakening enemies, but it can be incorporated into the other builds.

Poison Build

This build is centered around poison. Poison is a stackable debuff that deals damage based on how much of it the enemy has. If a foe has 10 poison, it will take 10 damage at the end of your turn. After each turn the poison reduces by 1, so it has to be actively kept up to be effective. Basic poison cards like Deadly Poison, Bouncing Flask, and Noxious Fumes are good to start up the stack. Catalyst is crucial to an effective poison build, as it can double(triple if upgraded) the current poison value of an enemy. One major issue with the poison strategy is that it struggles against groups of enemies. This can be mostly solved with either Corpse Explosion, which deals damage equal to the max health of a deafeated enemy to all others, or The Specimen, which is a relic that transfers all the poison that an enemy had to another upon death.

Shiv Build

This strategy embodies the saying "Death by 1000 cuts". Shivs are no cost cards that do little damage, but are easy to accumulate. The goal is to continuously create shivs and chip away at the enemy's health. Cards like Infinite Blades, Cloak and Dagger, and Blade Dance are required for producing the main damage method. Relics are very influential in how well this build performs. Relics that give buffs when playing multiple attacks in one turn like Shuriken and Kunai generally make the process easier. Envenom allows for a hybrid playstyle of shivs and poison, as it inflicts poison whenever you land an unblocked hit. With many shivs comes a lot of opportunity to poison.

Draw/Discard Build

The most powerful and versatile build involves cycling through your deck with draw and discard cards. This strategy allows you to go through all your cards quickly, letting you pick and choose what you want to use in the moment. Acrobatics, Backflip, Prepared, and Calculated Gamble are some of the most useful cards to use when drawing in large amounts. You cannot have more than 10 cards in a hand at a time, which is where the discard feature comes in. Cards that can discard allow you to free up your hand, or in some cases, fill your hand. Some cards benefit from discards. Reflex draws extra cards and Tactician grants energy when discarded, allowing for a longer turn. Eviscerate and Sneaky Strike are attacks that decrease in cost and refund spent energy while in your hand when a card is discarded, leading to cheap, sometimes free, damage.