[ridiculous_fish]

I used to take the "best cards", then went through a phase of "have a plan and skip drops which don't advance that plan." But A20 streams take nearly all drops, but very thoughtfully; they are flexible and their plan adapts to what they are offered. There's no objectively good cards, it is always relative to your deck and relics, and the upcoming boss fight, yet with the Heart fight always in mind.

[shadytrees]

I agree with this. As a player gets better at the game, they should be skipping less and taking more cards. A beginner player looks at the four options (three cards, and skip) and is able to assign (bad, good, bad, ok) to the four options. A more advanced player can maybe assign integer values (-1, +2, 1, 0). And a fantastic player can get down to an even finer resolution (-0.7, +1.8, 1.2, -0.1) -- once someone can value cards at that level, they can begin taking more of them because they can foresee how all the different mechanisms in a run make a card (at this current point in the run) stronger or weaker. You end up, for example, taking Bouncing Flask even when the deck already has three Shiv-based cards because you need scaling damage later in the fight; you take Well-Laid Plans and Piercing Wail even if the deck is killing everything on turn one because Act 4 fights will go much longer.

(I can't take any credit for this. I just watch Jorbs content all day.)

[b450]

> There's no objectively good cards, it is always relative to your deck and relics, and the upcoming boss fight

This is really the key. A card always has value in context. A good player will take, for example, a Disarm, and say "this solves Book of Stabbing". The important point is that Disarm doesn't have to be useful in every fight, but it adds a solution for _some_ fights to the deck. Good players focus on the specific set of problems the deck has to solve, discounting future challenges relative to imminent ones, and add tools for those fights. Good players also tend to highly value card draw and deck manipulation to enable searching the deck for the right card when it's needed. Depending on how effectively you can cycle the deck, adding tons of cards to a deck is often a good strategy. For example, a deck with Corruption and Dark Embrace basically doesn't need to worry about the deck bloating at all because the whole deck can be searched in one turn.