Slay The Spire: Best Builds And Relics To Use With Ironclad (2024)

Slay the Spire combines deckbuilding with roguelike mechanics to produce one of the most addicting strategy games of the last few years. With such fine margins between success and failure, it makes sense that you'll look to optimize your builds as much as possible.

The Ironclad is the first class you'll use in Slay the Spire and is simple to come to grips with, but has a lot of depth to it. The starting relic with this class is Burning Blood, which heals 6HP at the end of each encounter; he also has the highest starting HP of the four with 80HP. Here are four of the best builds for Ironclad, including which relics to use and different playstyles you can use to beat this incredibly tough game.

Updated July 9, 2022 by Matthew Pentleton: We've given this guide an update to add more information and refresh it so that it has everything you need to know for all your Ironclad deckbuilding needs.

How To Build Decks For The Ironclad

The key to a good build is to not go in with any expectations. This is true of all Slay the Spire's characters, and while it's very helpful to know what the main builds are, it's a bad idea to choose one beforehand, due to the nature of RNG.

You'll always want to skip any cards that don't really fit your deck, as adding them would basically just mean drawing dead cards in fights. However, if you've decided before your run that you want to do a strength build, and are skipping any cards that don't really fit that, you might be passing up strong status cards, and there's no guarantee of ever seeing the strength cards you need, and you'll be left with no deck at all.

Strength Build

Strength adds additional damage to your attacks, equal to the value of strength you have.

This is a useful buff regardless, but works particularly well with multi-hit attacks like Whirlwind (which hits all enemies multiple times) as the strength bonus is added to each hit of the attack. It also works well with Heavy Blade, which gains three (five upgraded) times the usual bonus from strength.

Using those as your attacking cards, focus on scaling strength using:

• Spot Weakness, which gives three (four upgraded) strength if the enemy intends to attack.
• Inflame, which gives you two (three upgraded) strength.
• Demon Form, which gives you two (three upgraded) strength per turn.
• Limit Break, which doubles your strength. Ordinarily, Limit Break exhausts, but if you upgraded it, it doesn't, making it by far the best way to scale strength.

Good relics in a strength build are the Vajra, which starts you off with one strength each fight, the Red Skull, which gives you three strength if you're below 50 percent HP, and Mutagenic Strength, which gives you three strength only on the first turn of a fight.

Also worth mentioning is the Akabeko, which adds eight damage to the first attack you play in a fight. Like strength, this works with multi-hit attacks, letting you get some early damage off with a Whirlwind.

There are plenty of defensive options with the Ironclad, as these are actually what most of his builds centre around. With this in mind, combine this build with one of the defensive builds described below to sort both the offensive and defensive aspects of your build.

Barricade Build

See Also

Slay The Spire: The 10 Best Relics For The Defect Class

As the name suggests, this build is centred around Barricade, a power that prevents block from being removed at the end of your turn.

This allows you to build up massive amounts of block, utilising high-block cards like Impervious and Power Through, as well as Entrench, which doubles your block. It's completely possible to scale block well into the hundreds with just these cards, meaning you never have to worry about taking damage.

If you don't feel like using strength for your offence, this deck has one very easy solution - Body Slam, which is a one-cost card (that upgrades to be free) and deals damage equal to your block. This means you can focus on getting set up defensively, build up hundreds of block, and then just play Body Slam for hundreds of damage to end the fight on the spot.

Corruption Build

Corruption is a power that reduces the energy cost of all skills in your deck to zero, with the caveat that they exhaust when played. This deck is just as often called an exhaust deck, as it revolves around making things happen when cards are exhausted.

Dark Embrace draws a card whenever a card is exhausted, giving you the potential to replace your zero-cost skill with another, or bring in a powerful attack, while Feel No Pain gives block for every exhausted card. Since the majority of skills provide block, running Corruption is already a defence-oriented deck, so Feel No Pain makes it even stronger.

Fiend Fire exhausts every card in your hand and deals seven (ten upgraded) damage for every card exhausted. It won't be free with Corruption, but it'll take advantage of the same synergies.

Second Wind does the same thing but grants block, meaning its five (seven upgraded) block could potentially be a better deal than playing what block cards you do have. These cards can actually work as exhaust decks on their own, though Corruption is such a strong card that few Ironclad decks don't benefit from it.

As for relics, Charon's Ashes deals three damage to a random enemy every time a card is exhausted, but by far the best relic for an exhaust deck is Dead Branch, which adds a random card into your hand every time a card is exhausted, letting you replenish your hand as you get rid of cards - and if Dead Branch gives you a skill, Corruption will make it free, too.

As for offence, strength is still a reliable option, though some other notable offensive strategies with Ironclad are:

• Searing Blow, which you can upgrade an unlimited number of times, making it deal huge damage.
• Rampage, which increases in damage for the duration of a fight every time it's played.
• Perfected Strike, which deals additional damage for every card in your deck with "Strike" in its name - stack up on cards like that and Perfected Strike becomes seriously strong.

Status Build

This deck is a damage-dealer that focuses on adding status cards to your deck to hurt enemies, using Fire Breathing, which deals six (ten upgraded) damage to ALL enemies for every status or curse card you draw.

Making this work as a full deck can be tricky, but it's never a bad idea to pick up a Fire Breathing as the extra damage can be really nice in status-heavy fights like the Chosen or Sentries.

Another card that's great in this deck is Evolve, which draws an additional card whenever you draw a status card. This can either be another status for more damage, or an actual card you can play, as while statuses are effective damage dealers in this deck, you still need to be able to block when necessary.