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i loved it when matt said its ranking c̶a̶r̶d̶s runes time and ranked them all over the place

I don't even have it unlocked yet but that Soul of Lazarus placement is insane considering it's like, the only revive that can appear for Tainted Lost aside from Birthright or using Death Certificate

The best part of black rune is that you can still get stats from voiding actives

One thing that I like about cracked key and soul of Cain is that carrying them is basically blue map in a card form because you now know exactly where the secret rooms are due to the walls not giving the viable red room outline

For soul of Samson you put it at 0 for non enemy rooms but I've used the rune specifically for the bone swing on pickups a ton.

honorable mention to the one thing soul of laz can do, it helps with tainted lost since its basically an extra life which is a godsend for T. Lost

Soul pf Laz is basically a Damocles failsafe if you don't have any other revive items. Also it actually allows suicide king to be useful, if you have polydactyl or smth

Random thought: imagine a Challenge run where you're forced to play as Jacob and Esau, and upon entering an un-cleared room, Jacob is forced to use Soul of Jacob and Esau, and normal Esau is forced to use Soul of the Forgotten.
Just imagine having to play as one player controlling four characters every room. (also no item rooms, and any damage any of the four take counts against Devil/Angel chance)

Probably a useful note of soul of J+E; if he rolls into any items that drop stuff on getting them (eg squeezy) he'll instantly drop those pickups. Popping the soul when youve got a lot of items usually results in a ton of free pickups; mainly hearts and trinkets. So even if you dont wanna use it for bosses to avoid getting screwed by him getting dr fetus or something, its pretty damn good for that.

Tiny benefit of rune shard is it does something basically nothing else in the game does - it can reveal the Ultra Secret room if it's within the radius
But that's very rarely useful

technically… you can open secret rooms and break tinted rocks with soul of blue baby so it shouldn’t be a 0 for non-combat

Rune shard can spawn crawlspace trapdoors, you just gotta stand on a floor decoration like ethwaz or we need to go deeper

12:26 I used a rune shard in the secret room during my run the other day and it rerolled an item into R key, probably best case scenario that rune is able to have

I'd say the only one I disagree is Soul of Laz, there are enough of instances where revive will be useful, especially on certain characters or certain items, so I would've bump it up to 2/5, and it would be fair since all soul stones, runes and rune-adjacent items are useful enough so you are always happy to see at least one of those.

Something that Ansuz does that the world and sun dont do is reveal the super secret room.

I cant explain how annoyed i am that both soul of the forgotten and soul of jacob and esau are so simular like for jacob and esau makes sence but for the forgotten? Like they could have made it you get the bone club for 7.5 sec or you can leave your body like he does with the soul with ctrl or give him the t forgotten body to throw one time or for one room like its boring that its a copy paste from jacob and esau and on that topic that soul is also kinda boring bc there is an item for that straw man, soul of jacob and esau could be like a one dash of dark esau from your poaition to the furthest part of the room and he cant damage you but does the damage to the enemies

I feel like some runes need a note about how good it is as one specific character, if it's significantly better. Cracked Key and Soul of Laz are two items that are so good on (T.) Lost. Cracked Key for getting Inner Child as an Extra Life, and Soul of Laz for more of the same.

One extremely niche thing the rune shard does that has actually came up in my one of my newb runs is show the ultra secret room if you roll Ansuz.

I am a newb to Isaac but I don't know if anything else can reveal the ultra secret room.

the reason i always hesitated using soul of J&E is because 60% of the time it out right crashed the game
still to this day have the fear it will crash me but always use it as Esau very VERY often drops consumables