Slay the Spire 2: eight rules the tutorial never explains
Six months into Early Access, Slay the Spire 2's sharpest rules live in Mega Crit's patch notes rather than the game. Here are eight that change how you play.
Slay the Spire 2 has been in Steam Early Access since 5 March 2026, and six months on it is still one of the ten most-played games on the platform. Valve's own most-played chart placed it tenth on 12 September, off a daily peak of 101,585 players. It is also close to undocumented: Mega Crit ships no manual, the in-game tutorial covers only the opening fights, and the rules that actually decide runs are scattered through Steam patch notes. These eight come straight from those posts.
Start with the build you are actually running
1. There are two versions of the game, and they are months apart. Mega Crit develops on a public beta branch and merges it into the main branch in batches. The most recent main-branch release the studio has announced is Major Update #2 (v0.107.1), from 19 June 2026. The beta branch has had four patches since, ending with v0.111.0 on 14 August. If a balance change you read about does not match your game, that gap is usually why.
Opting in is spelled out in Mega Crit's v0.99 notes: right-click Slay the Spire 2 in your Steam Library, then Properties, Game Versions & Betas, public-beta. Two catches. Beta players submit scores to a separate leaderboard, a split introduced in v0.103.0. And the August 2026 Neowsletter says the next batch of content is at least a month away, because the team has moved onto an alternate Act 2 and a new character. Neither has a published date.
- Developer and publisher: Mega Crit
- Early Access release: 5 March 2026, $24.99 on Steam
- Platforms: Windows, macOS and Linux
- Latest announced main-branch build: v0.107.1, 19 June 2026
- Latest announced beta build: v0.111.0, 14 August 2026
2. Seed-correlation tricks stopped working in June. Every run derives several separate random number generators from one twelve-character run seed. Mega Crit engineer Ed confirmed in the Major Update #2 notes that those derived generators were correlated, so knowing one outcome narrowed down unrelated ones: the roll that decided whether your first act was Overgrowth or Underdocks also constrained which curse Neow's Bones could hand you. v0.107.1 replaced the generator with xoshiro256**, and the studio published the before-and-after scatterplots. Any correlation table you learned before 19 June is now noise.
The opening choices that quietly cost you
3. Some Ancient blessings take your gold as part of the deal. The Ancients set up your run before the first fight, and their offers are not uniformly generous. Major Update #2 added three Neow relics, and their wording is exact. Silken Tress reads "Enchant all cards in the first card reward with Glam. Upon pickup, lose all gold." Kaleidoscope gives two card rewards drawn from other characters' pools. Fishing Rod upgrades a random card in your deck every three normal combats. The same patch removed the gold penalty from Neow's Scroll Boxes, so an older guide telling you to avoid it is out of date. Tezcatara's Pumpkin Candle was reworked too: it now burns out after five combats and can be re-lit at rest sites, rather than dying at the start of Act 3.
4. Enchantments never stack. This is the single most common misread of the new enchantment system. If one source puts +2 damage on a card and a second source offers the same enchantment, the second is wasted. Mega Crit confirmed the rule in the August Neowsletter Q&A, in response to a player asking whether the Self Help Book event and the Gnarled Hammer relic would combine. Spread enchantments across different cards instead. On the beta branch, v0.111.0 also took away your ability to aim them from one source: Nonupeipe's Beautiful Bracelet now enchants four random cards rather than letting you pick.
Enemy turns are scripted, and the notes publish the scripts
5. Skulking Colony caps the damage it will take each turn, and the health bar tells you. Major Update #2 added a health-bar colour change that fires once the enemy cannot take more damage this turn, and fixed the cap so it resets at the start of both turns, which means Poison ticking on the enemy's turn no longer eats into your own turn's allowance. The same patch raised its HP to 75, pushed Hardened Shell from 15 to 20, removed its Smash move in favour of Zoom on turns one and two, and stopped it gaining Block. Burst damage is the wrong answer here; consistent chip damage across both turns is not.
6. Several other enemies have fixed openers worth memorising. These are all from the v0.107.1 and v0.111.0 notes:
- Haunted Ship applies 3 Weak on turn one rather than when it attacks, and after Haunt it alternates Swipe and Stomp, always starting with Swipe.
- Punch Construct runs Ready into Fast Punch into Strong Punch, and applies Frail, not Weak.
- Zapbot's High Voltage gains Strength at the end of its turn, so the number you see is not the number that lands.
- The Axebots fight is now a single, tougher Axebot, and on the beta branch it gains 10 maximum HP every time it respawns.
The Bestiary, added to the main branch in Major Update #2, lists every monster you have met along with its moves and animations. Mega Crit says stats and lore are planned for it but has not shipped them, so the patch notes remain the only place those numbers are written down.
“We explicitly disallow stacking of enchantments as the probability of snowballing with a single card goes up. We want our players to experience deckbuilding rather than cardbuilding!”Casey Yano, Mega Crit co-founder, in the August 2026 Neowsletter
Two timing rules that decide close fights
7. "Next card is free" beats "cards cost more". Effects such as Unrelenting and Void Form now correctly take precedence over effects that raise every card's cost, including Entangled, Spiked Gauntlets and Borrowed Time. That precedence was a bug fix in v0.107.1, not original behaviour, which is worth knowing if you learned the interaction the hard way in March.
8. Exhaust-pile and end-of-turn cards resolve around your draw, not before it. The Ironclad's Howl From Beyond and the Regent's Bombardment both play from the Exhaust pile after your hand has been drawn, so they interact with the cards you are actually holding. The Regent's I Am Invincible triggers before your hand is discarded. The Necrobinder's Funerary Mask shuffles Souls into the draw pile before the hand is drawn, which means those Souls can come up the same turn. Howl From Beyond was also moved from a start-of-turn trigger to an end-of-turn one in Major Update #2.
How hard it is meant to get
Ascension 10 is the current ceiling, and Mega Crit has said it expects to keep it there rather than extending to 20 as in the first game, because there are more characters to grind through this time. Enemy health is tuned in both directions around that curve: v0.107.1 lowered HP slightly at low Ascension and raised it at high Ascension, moving the Owl Magistrate from 234 to 231 at the bottom and from 243 to 247 at the top.
Two absences are worth planning around. Steam achievements are not in the game and, per the same Q&A, are scheduled for the 1.0 release. And the five-character roster of Ironclad, Silent, Defect, Necrobinder and Regent has no official difficulty ranking; nothing Mega Crit has published says which is the beginner's pick, so treat any claim otherwise as opinion. Co-op for up to four players, multiplayer-only cards and Steam Workshop mod support are all live, the last of those since Major Update #2.
The Spire awakens once more in Steam Early Access on March 5, 2026! ⚔️ New characters, enemies, environments & more await you in Slay the Spire 2, the sequel to the iconic roguelike deckbuilder. Will you attempt the climb alone... or enlist the aid of your fellow adventurers?
— Mega Crit (@MegaCrit) on X
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Sam writes about small studios and the games they ship against the odds, and turns the hardest parts of them into guides that get to the point.
