Monster Train 2 update details and Q&A: developers share info on 4 new cards

Monster Train 2 is 2025's best card game, a moreish menagerie of mushroom people, Frankensteinian experiments, moon faeries, and creatures who I'd describe as "Peaky Blinders but candles." I love the splashiness of Monster Train 2's card combos, and its three-tier floor system makes each fight a series of filters that enemies are sifted through.

Tomorrow the game will get its first major update: The Lost Arsenal, a free, 15-card set of new equipment and rooms. Shiny Shoe shared with PC Gamer exclusively four of the cards appearing in the update, and provided commentary on each of them. Some significant balance changes to existing cards are on the way too, outlined in this post on Steam.

I asked the devs some questions about the looming update, as well as what can be learned from Monster Train 2's player data now three months after release.

The new cards

The Great Decay

PC Gamer: This card seems tailor made for Morel Mistress. Are there any other combos that you had in mind while making it?

Shiny Shoe: We knew we wanted to support the Etch mechanic a bit more since it's a small subtheme in Underlegion right now, with Morel Mistress and Madame Lionsmane having Etch, as well as Twin Minds, Verdant Cycle, and Fertile Ground having triggers with Consume cards. Granting 'Consume' was meant to combo with those cards/artifacts in mind. Reducing the ember cost of ALL spells in your deck gives the card some even broader use. It can combo especially well with expensive spells that already have Consume or cards that have the Eternalstone upgrade that removes and prevents Consume being added to the card.

Iron-tongue

Sweep is one of the most powerful or useful keywords in the game. Is this card about giving clans without a sweeper access to this form of backline removal, or is the equipment limited to one clan?

You’re right that Sweep is one of the most powerful keywords in the game, and consequently it's also one of the hardest to balance. Iron-tongue is a clanless card, so anyone can receive it or purchase it at the shop. Up until this point, there hasn't been ANY way to grant sweep to a unit because of how strong it can be. So we figured it would be an interesting design space to figure out a way to let you grant Sweep, without breaking the balance of the game. We could have plopped Sweep on an equipment and made it REALLY expensive, but the cost would have needed to be pretty high to offset its value. We decided that letting you grant Sweep but with a constraint would be the way to go. Iron-tongue fills an interesting niche, because unlike most equipment, you want to put Iron-tongue on the weakest unit you have instead of the strongest.

Heavensward

What was the line of thought that led to this card?

The card came out of a few ideas. There were a lot of ways to move units individually within the clan, but there weren't any ways to move several at once. The only other card in the game that does so is Cave In, which descends ALL units. It also came out of a theme, of this idea of Banished swarming upwards into Heaven to reclaim their former home, similar to Rising Rage, but with an entire army of angels instead of just one.

Exile's Diadem

One of the interesting uses of this equipment might be applying it to a champion with deployable, since champions can't accept Smidgestone. What other scenarios do you have in mind for Exile's Diadem?

One of the playstyles we see players using is drafting a really strong three-capacity unit, and then heading to the shop to try to get Smidgestone as soon as they can. Reducing capacity, like gaining ember and increasing card draw, is universally strong. So a lot of it was a desire to give another clanless way to reduce capacity when you don't have Smidgestone. And unlike Smidgestone, as a card there are other ways to manipulate it, such as duplicating it or reducing its ember.

More Q&A

Bonus: About Monster Train 2's strongest clans and bosses, and other questions

PC Gamer: Three months after launch, what player data points stand out to you as the most interesting? Which clans are the most powerful, and which Seraph has proved strongest so far against players?

Shiny Shoe: You would be surprised at how most of the clans have a similar win rate despite how varied their playstyles are. We generally aren’t inclined to explicitly share our own opinions on which clans are strongest or weakest because it can influence what clans people pick, sometimes even changing those results entirely!

That said, one interesting data point we can share is that generally the lowest winrate champion paths are the ones that perma-scale in some way, such as Unchained Fel, or Hive Minder Bolete. This might be surprising to a lot of people, and it certainly doesn't "feel" that way—we hardly see anyone calling for buffs for these paths. We think the reason their win rates are the lowest is that they're the weakest paths early game, but the strongest paths late-game, and most runs lose in the early game. Also risk vs. reward mechanics like these are generally compelling since it can pay off big if it does succeed.

As far as the strongest Seraph goes, this may also surprise some people, but the variants are nearly identical in terms of winrate. It can depend on the clan though, for example Awoken is weaker to Dominion Seraph compared to other clans, but stronger against Savagery Seraph. It also depends on how new you are to the game. At Covenant 1, the strongest Seraph is actually Entropy, and the weakest is Savagery. At Covenant 10, the strongest Seraph tends to be Savagery, and the weakest is Dominion. But even then those differences are relatively small, and when taking everything in aggregate, they are nearly identical.

To that end, is there anything your data is strongly telling you one way or another that you hope to change or ameliorate either with Lost Arsenal, or a future update?

Both player feedback and data pointed towards a few of MT1 clans and cards being a bit weak compared to MT2 cards. That's why, along with introducing new cards, we're pushing a pretty big balance update in Lost Arsenal to a lot of MT1 cards. In addition to numerical updates, we also reworked several cards to take better advantage of mechanics introduced in MT2, like Equipment and Room card types.

Building on that question, is there a clan in particular that the studio sees as needing attention, buffing, or support of some kind?

Awoken and Hellhorned in particular needed the most buffs. Healing in general was a bit weak, and there were a few champion paths for Hellhorned that needed some help. We’ve aimed to address that in the updates in Lost Arsenal.

A question among newer players that I've seen again and again in MT2's first months is "How do I defeat Dominion? Corruption seems so strong!" I had to go on my own journey in figuring out the best way to win (usually it's just Inferno Room), and I don't see it as some kind of unfair threat, but I'm wondering how you're thinking about corruption now as a mechanic, and this boss in particular, which seems like a test that a lot of players grappled with.

That's a good question, we've seen some sentiment about Corruption feeling like the hardest variant. Although each Seraph variant is statistically equally as strong, it's reality that sometimes data doesn't map on to how certain things feel to play. Things can feel unfair if you don't know what you could have done to avoid a loss, and Corruption is one of those mechanics that can kill your units in a way that players might not be used to at that point, compared to just regular enemy attacks.

It means status effects such as Damage Shield are less effective, and Seraph applying it to all units means your backline is at greater risk of dying. The game gives you a lot of tools to be able to play against this though, and we find that having a boss that sort of demands a different approach and some more deliberate planning is a compelling obstacle once you reach this point in the game’s progression.

For the bosses that are planned in Free Update #2 coming in Q4 2025, can you say anything about what sort of threat they'll pose to players? Is your intention to deliver enemies that will disrupt existing, effective strategies, or something else?

We’re still doing testing on these and don’t want to talk too much about them before they’re locked down. That said, our goal is to provide different challenges in the mid-run with some extra variety, but not swing too hard since they’re still early and mid-run challenges you might not be fully prepared for by then. We’ve also created a little new tech to give them a twist players haven’t seen yet.

About a month ago on Reddit, a thread asked the important question, "Who is this game's cutiest patootie?" Funguy received the most upvotes, with Bone Dog coming in second place. Can you ratify the results of this important vote?

We officially accept Funguy as Monster Train 2's cutiest patootie. Bone Dog, however, still holds its spot as Monster Train 1's cutiest patootie and is still number 1 in many of our hearts.