Slay the spire was not the first ever deck building rogue like. It was maybe the first one that hit the recent zeitgeist and it was one of the first to be widely streamed on twitch.
Doom was not the first ever first person shooter, but nobody called the genre "Wolfenstein clones" after Doom came out. Dark Souls wasn't the first punishing action RPG with limited save/load functionality, but nobody calls them "King's Field-likes"
There's something to be said for genre-codifying releases, even if they didn't straight up invent the genre.
There's something to be said for genre-codifying releases, even if they didn't straight up invent the genre.
The issue is that the GP of your reply used the words "Slay the Spire invented the entire genre" which is simply not true. If they said "Slay the Spire popularized the genre" there wouldn't be a problem.
I think we as a society have this problem in general: giving too much credit to famous people/things and burying/diminishing that which influenced those people/their creators. Doubly relevant in this case because this entire discussion thread started with someone not properly giving credit to StS for influencing Balatro.
Slay the Spire is pretty clearly influenced by Dream Quest [1], a rather obscure game which does not even have its own website, just a fandom wiki page.
Edit: here's a fun Reddit post where a Dream Quest fan talks about the release of Slay the Spire [2].
Slay the Spire invented the entire genre.