'It's kind of like you're a butcher': Hundreds of Slay the Spire 2 card ideas were cut during development in an 'incredibly destructive process'

Even in early access, Slay the Spire 2 contains more stuff—cards, enemies, and so on—than the original Slay the Spire, according to the developers at Mega Crit. Yet studio co-founder Anthony Giovannetti has described refining the hit roguelike deckbuilder as an 'incredibly destructive' process.

Speaking to PC Gamer in an interview last year, Giovannetti said that 100-200 cards were considered for each character before paring their collections down to around 60 each.

"It's kind of like you're a butcher," Giovannetti said. "You generate thousands, tens of thousands of different ideas and then you look at them all and you go, 'these are bad,' and you just cut them all away. There's this constant culling process. Very rarely is there this golden idea you keep from start to finish. Most of it is this incredibly destructive process."

There's more carnage to come: Mega Crit plans to keep Slay the Spire 2 in early access for one to two years, or "until the game feels great," and will add new "cards, events, environments, enemies, and more" as it approaches that 1.0 release.

My first run felt pretty great already, but it has to be a wildly complicated game to balance with so many possible interactions between cards, temporary status effects, relics (objects that apply permanent effects to a run), and the special abilities of its peculiar and sometimes dastardly monsters. One boss I faced tries to suck you into a sandpit, which can only be avoided by playing special cards that appear only in that battle, as an example.

I also at one point held onto a useless egg card through several fights so that I could hatch it into a bird that sinks its talons into my enemies with a 0-cost attack card, and which I'm now going to seek out in every subsequent run because I love that bird, probably ruining my chances at developing coherent strategies.

Broadly speaking, Slay the Spire 2 is a 'more of what you liked' kind of sequel: A new campaign with new ideas, but the same basic format as the original, outside the addition of a four-player co-op mode.

That was clearly a good choice: Just a day after launch, Slay the Spire 2 has peaked at 430,456 Steam concurrents. It's an astonishing start for the early access roguelike, which is seated above even Arc Raiders on the Steam Most Played chart as I write.