[moomin]

A really important point with card choice: even ignoring your current deck (and you shouldn't ignore your current deck), the best cards are Act dependent. At the start you want to pick flat high-damage cards that are immediately useful. In act 2 you need cards that scale with the number of enemies, because mobs are common. In the final act it's all about card synergy and things that enable you to manage your deck.

With that said, as the Defect, Defragment and Capacitor are nearly always a no-brainer. Capacitor not so much in Act1, because nothing lasts long enough for it to pay off. And if you've got anything that adds orb slots, Consume becomes really powerful (even without, you can do 10 damage a turn from two orb slots instead of 9 from three, which isn't nothing).

Loop builds are very strong as well, but trickier to get right because you need to pay close attention to your front orb. Finally focus+frost can easily give you so much block most enemies can't cut through. (Watch out for Reptomancer, though, she doesn't respect anyone without DPS.)

[cableshaft]

I had 1 Loop+, 2 Defragments, and 1 Capacitor that last game I lost this morning :) I got 'All for One' as my random rare card to start with, so I was doing my best to get a bunch of 0 cost cards, and I also ended up with 2 relics that let me pick cards to shuffle in every battle (Nilry's Codex and the Toolbox), along with a Jack of All Trades card, so I got to pick cards to help whatever my situation was each battle and turn.

But I was a little too weak on my defense that go (had some frost generation, but not enough), and I made a dumb mistake attacking the Masked Bandits instead of losing all my gold, who did 50 damage to me before I killed them, bringing me down to 18 health, then I couldn't get to a campfire until I fought 3 more regular enemies, and the next enemy brought me down 6 more, then the second enemy after that got me down the other 12. Oops.

[moomin]

Ouch, that's a nice deck, but I suspect I wouldn't have bothered with the 0 cost cards (Silent's 0 cost cards are amazing, Defect's are meh). Glacier I _highly_ recommend. Autoshield and Stack are great too. (These two are brilliant for surviving early turns before you've got enough frost up.) Use your upgrades on Defragment, then Loop. Upgrading Zap and/or Dualcast from your starter deck is great because they become zero-cost. Creative AI, especially upgraded is amazing. Oh, and don't sleep on Biased Cognition. You can only use it right at the end of a battle, but it can end a battle very quickly. (Unless you've got a source of artifact,

I'm a bit tapped out at A8, but it's amazing how the base game goes from nailbitingly impossible to seeming pretty straightforward. (The mechanics contribute to this: the easier a battle is, the more upgrades you do and the more likely you are to grab an elite relic.)

[Riverheart]

I finally beat defect using, among other things, darkness plus recursion. It never occurred to me that recursion would retain the power generated by the dark orb you just evoked. All for One to pull upgraded 0 cost recursions to hand.

[moomin]

Nice. Darkness+Recursion is quite nice in the base game, but I've never found it very effective in Ascension. (I'm sure someone with more experience could analyze why, exactly.)

Good luck with Watcher. The biggest advice here is: play it safe until you have multiple cards to get out of wrath. Watcher is super-powerful and _very_ easy to mess up.

[strken]

Note that this is a general tendency and not a rule. Act 1 benefits from an AOE card for the sentry elite and the slime boss, damage scaling will help against most bosses at any time, and so on through act 2.

For the ironclad, you might take a cleave, or a whirlwind, or a spot weakness, or an inflame in act 1. The first two give you AOE, and the last two will help scale damage if you find a limit later on.