Pay attention to the pattern of the heart too. it's very hard to plan ahead a build that will win, you just have to see what you get in the first and second acts, and work to focus on that and get rid of the rest by the end of the 3rd. it usually DOES involve a bit of luck from my perspective. I'm sure one could calculate the break even point where it's worth the point cost vs other ironclad offense cards, if one wanted to.Īs far as beating the heart. I think that run also had my char with over 140 health base too, so could tank the first couple of rounds of attacks easily.īut yeah, if you don't have huge strength, then heavy blade isn't terribly good. Heavy blade was doing around 300 per hit on turn 4. by turn 3 my strength was 14 or 15, IIRC, and then I used two double strength cards (so 56 strength!).
When I last beat the heart with ironclad, I had double demon running on turn 2, 2 +5 strength pots and artifacts to keep the strength boost, plus multiple strength boosting cards. REcall that upgraded it adds 5 x strength damage to the attack. It depends on how much strength you can stack as to whether heavy blade is good or not. In very rare cases, it can be Rampage or Searing Blow as well. This is generally either Juggernaut + Feel No Pain, Body Slam + Barricade (can theoretically operate without Barricade, and do keep in mind that you'll have a very hard time stacking excess block against the heart without Corruption), Limit Break, or Demon Form. The other thing you need is scaling damage. so you ideally want to use it to erase positive strength buffs. Disarm is an extremely valuable pickup as well just keep in mind that the heart cleanses negative strength on turns 4, 7, etc. You still need to get block cards in either case, of course. Feed just does absolutely wondrous things for improving consistency through the virtue of having 40+ additional max HP.
That sounds stupid in a vacuum, but Corruption with Feel No Pain or even just a bunch of skills reads, "You now block for 0 every turn and can focus on doing other things with your energy." You would be surprised at how much you can get done with even a dozen or so skills in your deck if you are free to use all your energy on other things. The strongest Ironclad cards against the heart are Feed and Corruption. It's one of very few Ironclad cards that I'd say is worth taking less than 1% of the time it's offered.
2 energy for the amount of damage it does when compared to Anger, Twin Strike or Sword Boomerang is just not a good deal for the inflexibility you get. Heavy Blade is a particularly bad card and shouldn't be drafted in almost any Ironclad runs.