the concept of shuffling in/out cards is probably the biggest bang for your buck improvements to make for micro

1:45 that is a clip of a lifetime

"Winning the turn" vs "winning the fight" also applies without card draw being factored in. During the act 1 easy pool encounters, it's easy to lose additional hp during the fight by over-defending. If you play a strike instead of a defend now, you can kill next turn. Always look at your draw pile.

When I started watching videos of top players, one of the first things I noticed was that they check their draw pile way more often than I ever did. But it took me much longer to really internalize why they did. "Do I full block now, or do I try to sneak in some extra damage?" is one of the most common questions you're faced with in StS, and a lot of the time, it can be answered by just asking "do I have lethal next turn?" because if you do, then the enemy scaling up for another turn doesn't matter. And the answer to that question lies in checking your draw pile!

Something I need to get better at is paying attention to when I should shuffle my draw pile and when I shouldn't. Great video!

In defense ODISeth, the eel gains vigor after this attack. By stunning it now this makes the big attack after the debuff weaker. It also shuffles out the dark shackles for the post debuff attack.

I love videos like this because I will watch the best players and everything will make sense and I will be like “I totally get it!”, but then I will play and there is OBVIOUSLY a ton of subtle stuff I’m doing wrong.

Sts is a deceptively mechanically heavy especially in higher ascensions where mistakes are punished heavily (still not as hard as StS1 yet). But, what I've always enjoyed about spire the most and similar games is that it is really just economics. Whoever makes the most, best decisions with the available information will do the best.

These short, but informative tactic videos are nice to breakdown, I really like the "pro" short clip breakdowns for a different perspective.

0:41 LEAVE ME ALONE-DUUUNG-AKIRA—Akira-akira

As someone who has come from games that don't let you look at what's in your draw pile (AND don't reshuffle your whole discard back into your draw pile very often if ever), I really do need to get in the habit of checking it more in the context of using draw spells and also using it to do longer-term planning for the fight. I think I've only ever done it to see whether it's worth taking a chance of drawing a specific card from the pile and/or stuff with shuffling statuses back in.

Liner notes:
I thought this turn from ODISeth was really interesting because it entangled tactical card draw with strategic implications. Optimal Spire play accounts for both, and I definitely think it's a hard thing to master.

Probably the biggest reason you see people "winning the turn" so much is because it's easier. It's easy to compute which line takes the least damage this turn. Harder to guess how your decisions will affect your HP at the end of the fight.

There's also a bit I cut from the video about resource exchange (when looking at the scrapbook "snapshots"), like whether it's worth 2HP to advance Happy Flower, but this is probably a topic for another video so I cut it out since this video already had a bit of a split focus.

Thanks as always for watching! Constructive feedback still more than welcome!

Seeker strike taught me to look at yo Draw pile. Soul taught me to always look at yo draw pile.

As someone named seth this thumbnail was threatening

The one (and only) time I made a grand finale worked, I learned how useful it is to both retain and shuffle cards like no other strategy forced me to

Great concept to point out. I was reading comments and someone already pointed out the vigor gain for eel, and I thought the same thing. But when I thought about it more critically, it would most likely still be better to put him at 71 and cycle out. The deck is so thin that drawing unleash enough times certainy would kill with no damage, and we can thin the deck even more by using shackles to block this turn for the multi-hit.
There a few enemies that are also good examples of this. The deer boss (forgot it's name lol) getting a free damage turn is nice. Theres also the bug thief that tries to run from combat, as well as that underdocks hardpool fight with the goblins.

Playing Severance has taught me the importance of this by a large margin. The amount of times I used to blindly draw with no plan in mind was staggering compared to now. Now it feels very rewarding to see things like Soul Storm, Unleashed, and any other important cards more and more often all because of taking 2 seconds to look at my pile and understanding that I can essentially "discard" my current hand out of the next draw cycle.

Everyone makes mistkaes

This.

I will also note that when playing a deck around souls it is very important to let some souls shuffle up instead of playing them all when you get them, but it is spesific to that arctype, and this video was about shuffling up in general.
(Great video btw. Never saw someone explain this concept so well)

how did the twitch clip URL "Blatant Acceptable Armadillop Arson No Sexy" become the highlight for me

also thrid hand

I NEED to see long-form content from you, I just love your video style so much. You've really become my favorite STS channel