Obviously the correct way to find what the best card is to see what percentage of your winning runs contain a particular card. Ascenders Bane is the best card in slay the spire
@@IntrusiveThot420 actually... If your deck has no strikes it means you are probably act 3 or took bites, and there is a chance you are already winning
@@josephward4918 Ah that's true. Maybe some other combination where he has to use the spreadsheet as a guide. Can also lower difficulty if need be. Just thinking of some fun things to do with all this information.
Content like this is what makes you the best StS contest creator in the world. You're one of the best players, but this high-effort analysis here is so much better than what anyone else in the community puts forth. Exceptionally great. Thanks!
Justin Cabreira I think a better idea would be to add an unplayable ethereal curse to the deck per skip. So it takes up one card draw through your first cycle through the deck but then is exhausted and out of the way. Still don’t think it’d ever be worth an extra energy unless your deck has a very strong and consistent turn one. Extra energy is used to satiate strong card draw, so you’d get diminishing returns on that extra energy throughout the run.
@@jonweisensale227 Curse runs would benefit from that. Same happens with Cursed Key, calling Bell and Mark of Pain from boss relics. Besides, runs with good card draw can mitigate curses anyway.
Bill K you’re right about the idea of a deck that could benefit from curses. With and early duvu doll it could be strong. But regarding the comment about strong draw mitigating curses, you also have to understand that it works backwards as well. Curses mitigate good draw. Let’s say this relic existed, and you pick it up with ironclad. Well, ethereal curses work really well with a Feel No Pain and maybe some other cards because ironclad can do really powerful things with exhausting cards. However, yo have to play those powers before you die, which can be pretty tough in Act II or III. And any curses that exhaust before those powers are in play no longer exist in your deck and now that extra energy has saved you less HP than it would have without curses in your deck. It’s hard to take it in the same way it’s hard to take hovering kite.
One thing this analysis really sheds a light on is what cards are "conditional good". Cards with abysmal ELO and pick rates but around 60-70% win rates. For a beginner, or just an enthusiast, to try to figure out what else must have been going on in the run for those cards to be so complimentary is a great way to understand the synergies in the game. I know, there is no such thing as a synergy though :)
So, pizza hut has a 65% pick rate, with 80% satisfaction rate While dominos has 85% pick rate with 75% satisfaction rate So the best one is burger king
@@honque3063 but the pizza hut on kilroy, has a better pizza than the pizza hut on Hudson so we have variance there and need to call this one Pizza Hut+
No wonder singing bowl is rated so high with Silent, what else are you supposed to do with all those cards that don't have intangible, retain, poison or lose strength written on them ?
Great video as always. The point that having access to a lot of data doesn’t necessarily mean we are drawing useful conclusions is an important thing to understand in the Information Age. That’s what makes this game so great to me... you can’t just autopilot through and expect great success. You have to thoughtfully engage with the game. If you didn’t have to do that every time...eventually the game would get old.
Stefan Kojadinov lol Egg’s vid was kinda goofy but it was made in good fun. He wasn’t trying to measure the cards objectively. Jorbs’ goal with these videos is to educate and share data, NL’s goal was to have fun.
haselni id urge them to watch the first 2 mins of his video where he clearly says not to listen to literally anything he says ever. Because NL knows that his ratings are extremely silly. That’s what he does.
@@jonweisensale227 nah, I personally think that if you can't do some job effectively you shouldn't even start it. That "it's all in good fun" is something that doesn't click with me over net, do that in privacy of your home, but I digress. I don't hate Northenlion nor I think his viewers are dumb children, I just think that 1-5 star rating was incredibly dumb and pointless to even attempt to do, so I made a joke based on it, that's all.
Really appreciate the in depth look at skepticism of stats, looking at context etc as ways of dealing with bias and why things are performing etc. It's something that has absolutely driven me crazy about mtg stat usage, I will probably link this to some of those people on how to look at groups of statistics and what they mean. And like in any balanced deck building game of course it's "it depends" and context needed outside pick 1. And in slay the spire with the whale you don't even get that. Great job making a seemingly clickbait title into a in depth discussion on the how and why of stats.
mtg is a fascinating place where a lot of very smart people with little practical or academic experience with statistics and game theory try to use statistics and game theory to get better at a game which is too complicated for people with post-graduate degrees in statistics and game theory to publish many meaningful conclusions about.
@@Jorbs Great summation, this video is a nice reminder of why as well. Spire collecting a years data on 3.25 different characters starts to produce sample sizes worth diving into, but over that time in magic there are 4 standard sets that change a ton as well as the pvp aspect meaning the value of data from any given game varies wildly. I love that neither game is really solvable because my favorite response to questions is "Well that depends".
Great guide to metrics! As someone who's not usually into statistics and elo and whatnot it was nice having them all lined up and explained so thoroughly. You really did a good job making this video accessible. The ability to upgrade cards at campfires does screw around with the pick rates for upgraded versus unupgraded cards a bit though, doesn't it? Especially for cards you don't want many of that you find early on in their unupgraded forms.
The rain sounds /white noise is soothing lol, I fell asleep multiple times while watching because I haven't slept much last few days lol. I did finish the video same day though! Very interesting data!
Great stuff! Thanks. Having watched this, I've realized I'd really like it if you've created a separate TH-cam playlist for the runs that you've tried hard in and really concentrated on winning (no matter the outcome). That's the most interesting content for me. Like the time when you were going for a A20 streak.
@22:50 While you were counting down the 3 ways a card can end up at 100% win rate, I was thinking exactly that: There's the fourth possibility that a card is only good (and thus picked) in certain deck "archetypes". You could already tell just by looking at the stats for Heavy Blade early on in the video. I see you mostly pick it when you have strong strength scaling unlocked. And since strength scaling, at least the way you play it, is a strong archetype with a high win percentage, it makes sense that Heavy Blade is a really strong card... in such a deck. Most of the time it's either very good OR pretty bad.
Would definitely be interesting to distinguish your first pick from your second, third, or beyond. Piercing Wail is a common, so it'll show up a lot. I bet you take one Piercing Wail more often than you take three.
It would be interesting to see ELO for each act. I would assume that dagger throw would have a higher act 1 ELO then piercing wail, but that would change by act 3
Kind of goes back to what he meant when he said people are really bad at identifying what they want. Is dagger throw better in Act 1 because it makes it easier to survive until later, or is it worse because the games where it lets you survive longer are more likely to be lost later? Lot of things that complicate the analysis and make it hard to say
I think something beneficial you could make would be a list of cards that are synergistic together. Ones that when building your deck you prioritise if you have another card in its synergy group. Also I'd love to hear about relics and the gold economy in the game. Thanks so much for making this video it was really really informative.
One metric that I think is important for this analysis is how many times you've already picked that card in a particular run. I would think that maybe the second Noxious Fumes, for example, would not be as strong as the first Noxious Fumes. Probably the first two or three Piercing Wails are very strong, but the fourth or fifth would probably be significantly weaker, and so by grouping the fifth Piercing Wail with the first, this data might be implying that Piercing Wail is weaker than it is.
Youre giving preference to the same card being picked twice as relevant data, but EVERY card you picked affects this balance. The 1st piercing wail is also worse if you have wraith forms and apparitions.
What I take away from Jorbs video, and might be a bit of my confirmation bias but, in games or in life, it matter little what the big shinny stuff is being offer. They are good and helps a lot, but it is the small things you do everyday that does much more for you overall. And I think that it is neat that it is somewhat proven by data in a game.
Jorbs, thanks for this really interesting and insightful video. I think what’s missing, though, is a semi-analytical approach instead of a purely datat-driven one. You already know about synergies like Panacea + Wraith Form or Spot Weakness + Limit Break; I think a better analysis would be evaporated eluating a lot of those hype interactions based on things like how likely they are to occur and how well they are expected to do against certain fights/overall. Cards that are strong enough to stand alone, like Wraith Form, can also be judged by the same metrics.
Very important stat that didn’t seem represented here is % of winning decks that contain card. A look at that combined with the card’s win% in some way would seem very valuable. Would get rid of the situational picks, and would emphasize cards that are ‘required’ to be successful.
Something I think you could try is using what cards you choose to upgrade at campfires as a way of comparing upgraded vs base level cards. The power jump between Defrag and Defrag+ vs the jump between Reaper and Reaper+ is very different, which is why I see you upgrade Reaper a lot less often compared to Defrag or Biased Cog.
Wow, Jorbs has a sub 40% win rate! That makes me feel much better about myself! Jorbs- "My win rate is clearly much higher when i'm trying my hardest" ... Cool.
Plus of course the issue that you play on A20 and in the Beta version of the game - I suspect most people asking simply "what is the best card" play on A0 or certainly less than A5 on the 'normal' version. Different cards will be "better" or "worse" as you're literally playing a different ruleset.
The lessons of this video are largely the same as for many other disciplines, including programming: 1. The answer to almost all general questions is “it depends” 2. Correlation is not causation
its funny how you can do all these calculations and data charts and in your head its already all calculated in one go and gives a simple feeling like good or bad
Wont help you so much, an ai with no memory of the previous floor or whats in your deck would be absolutely terrible at this game, so looking at the pick rate and saying "good card" or "bad card" is not useful
I think another way to determine which cards are "the best/worst in slay the spire" would be to look at different roles a card can fill and then within those categories how efficient and effective certain cards and/or groups of cards are at what they do.
I just found his streams and been watching a couple of his youtube videos. Is he like a data/computer scientist? when talking about these kind of things he just seems so incredibly knowledgeable. is this just enthusiasm for things like data and AI or does he have a formal education in the field?
i've done some statistics (up to graduate level). never ended up with a degree because i kept finding other things that were more important than finishing. past applications of this sort of analysis have been to ancient storytelling, poker, and now here.
This is a public service announcement: Elo is the last name of Arpad Elo, who devised the rating system used for chess. ELO is Electric Light Orchestra, a rock band who are not involved in rating systems for games.
PSA: "rock band" is singular and an object, meaning it's referred to with "which is" or "that is" instead of "who are", which is reserved for plural and persons.
PSA: Some collective nouns can be used as plurals when referring to all the members of a collective taking action individually. Ex: The band played each of their instruments.
This is my favorite video of yours. Would you consider a follow-up that uses data to analyze the equally-complicated question of which upgrade is most valuable in StS? Oh and for what it's worth, when people ask me what card is best I usually mentally frame it as 'if all cards were offered, which would I pick on floor one?' Then they get the troll answer of Omega :)
This is so accurate it's surreal! Can you do a series on how to analyze game data from other game? Like how to build a deck in magic or which hero to pick in a moba style game using data.
I'd like to point out that choosing to not pick Offering+ has a 100% winrate as well. The only thing we can understand here is that Offering+ is a game-winning blessing whether we use it or not.
Question: would you recommend playing on lower ascension levels for people still learning the game? (after a few hundred hours, but still...) I play all characters except Watcher at A20, but my winrates are very, very low. I wonder if I'd learn more playing on for example A15, where I'm more likely to proceed further into a given run and thus see a larger variety of enemies and how the decks I build function against each one. TL;DR What do you think is a more effective way to learn, playing on the highest difficulty or playing on the highest difficulty that lets you progress far into your runs?
i think it's just a matter of whatever is fun. also keep in mind that if you want to get "good" it probably means playing slowly, thinking really hard about lots of different turns, maybe opening up spreadsheets and doing math on the side. but like, there's no reason you need to do any of that if it isn't appealing - nobody has to do things they find boring to try to get better at a game like this, the entire point is to have fun.
@@Jorbs Yes, I've already noticed I have more success if I just give myself a lot more time thinking about turns, I'm working on that. I think I'll see how far I get without spreadsheets first and if I feel like I still want to improve after that, I'll go from there. :-D Thanks for the reply!
I have no idea if anyone will ever see this, but there's a bit of discrepancy in the SpireChat playlist: This is episode #58, and episodes 55-57 aren't in the playlist. (Those would be the Northernlion card rating video, the video on Busted Crown, and the video on Equity)
Yet another comment by me, but this is a separate albeit correlated topic: does the ELO rating take in account if the run you took the decision in was won or not? I'm assuming the latter and that means that rating is a very good answer to the question "what do you think is the best card in the game?", but for the more general question of best card in the game or in general to get some interesting rankings on them should take into account that maybe you don't play optimally, and the only way I see this done is giving less value of the victories in the card being picked if the run was a losing one, since there's an higher chance that it was a mistake and should have been valued as a loss(not that we can prove that it was a mistake). I feel like another effect of such a system where cards you choose in losing runs would be valued less is that cards chosen because they were the "least worst" option would be valued less, so cards that have just been chosen because they were okish in an unlucky run where your deck was worse than okish would weight less, but I guess that's already dealt with in a way by the elo's system of increasing less if opponents were rated lower.
A lot of thoughtful analysis. Judging from Jorbs' comments, it seems like the best way to look at these data is to find out how this or that card compares across metrics. Also, a little disappointed that the table doesn't split the cards by category. Jorbs has mentioned before that one should pick cards that improve your chance to win in various scenarios. I'm considering downloading the data to split cards by whether they're damage cards, defense/mitigation cards, or utility cards. This approach still has a huge weakness in that some cards get better if you have other cards to go with them, but I still think it could be useful. Is crippling poison the same as deadly poison? Steam is the same as steam barrier, right? What is undo?
12:00 Ironclad has Feed, Reaper, and likes to take Bites sometimes, so often has meta scaling, so it makes sense to me that he’d prioritise hallway fights over Silent who has no meta scaling.
In basketball they use "score differential per second the player is on the floor". If you calculated the per-fight average result (win, loss, including damage) of each card on each floor, you'd have a natural way to compare cards. i.e. decks with card X win floor 10 fights at N%; card Y on the same floor wins at M%. This still conflates mixed strategies but at least would make individual cards more comparable.
One of my issues is I never know when to pick a card or skip, also what % of my deck should be atacks, skills, power cards? I often end up picking cards and end up with a bloated deck, should i try to keep my deck around 15? 20? 25? 30? Cards? Also when scrying I have trouble choosing what to discard, any tips? Great videos! I love watching you stream!
Can you elaborate on what the ELO is based on? Is a "win" determined by being chosen at a card choice (i.e. this stat has many of the same properties as the pick% stat)? Or are there other factors involved? Thanks again for all the effort that you put into all your vids/streams.
i believe the exact way it's coded is that if card1, card2, and skip are on offer and card1 is picked it records two "games", card1 W - card2 L and card1 W - skip L, with k-value 16, updating with card1 having its starting elo for both of the games. you can look up elo ratings on wiki if you need the mechanics broken down, i think the article does a good job.
Me seeing this in recommended: "Yeah I guess I'll listen to another spireside chat on my way to work, I don't really remember this one?" Me seeing the upload date: 🤤🤤🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤤🤤🤤🤑😤🤤🤤🤤🤤😇😇😱😱😱🤓
I think win percentage when offered is a little more accurate than win percentage when picked. It still has some problems like flash of steel only showing up in act 3 or if you play poorly, but I think it’s a decent enough measure overall.
Zephyr waits for claw to be integrated into this spreadsheet, because it is clearly superior to reaper in all measures and has a win percentage of 101.
Next time you do this I think it should be split by classes, it would make it cleaner to look at and account for things like your lower defect winrate.
An interesting idea would be to play a game purely picking cards based on the Elo values, showing that the context of the deck is what really determines a cards value
For a more on topic comment, shouldn't win rate for this table have been divided by the class's win rate for this to be a fair comparison between classes? I guess if the point was to find the best card in general this is accurate, but in we wanted to branch in(as we did) the relative value of cards and find a ranking for how often you should/do pick it when shown the relative effect on winrate should be more important than the absolute effect. For an example let's say you had an 80% winrate on watcher, in that case no matter the specific card in the win%(picked) column watcher cards in general will show up much more often than other classes', and we show at the start how there's a relatively relevant gap in the winrate of classes. EDIT: oh you talked about that point right after I paused to make this comment, welp. Still it was in favor of the ELO metric, which is fine but I feel like the suggestion I made for the other column is still relevant.
It actually doesn't matter if you deck is small or not. The problem with flex usually is that 1: it's a skill rather than an attack. This makes it very bad against chosen and nob 2: it doesn't do very much unupgraded. You need to play 3 attacks for it to be as good as anger (or tripple dip the strength scaling) so what if you draw it with no strikes? It's better to have cards that can consistently deal damage when you draw them. It also take up a draw, so it's not free at all.
I think also keep in mind skip shows up every time so like 40 ish times per run on average, you may not see a rare one time and even uncommons. So while it shows the importance of skip it is hardly indicitive of being the best choice. And it's pick rate is low relatively to other strong cards(~20%vs 50plus)
biased cognition + has to be best card all around...I know many would argue that adrenaline is the best,but the thing is,adrenaline doesnt win games by itself,biased cognition does..Reaper is close,really close to being the best,but it can be a dead card unlike biased cognition where you almost always want to pop it
I hope Jorbs returns to this topic in December, with only runs from December 16th of last year through whenever he does the video, and compares numbers between 2019 and 2020 (with a big asterisk on Watcher 2019) before giving an aggregate
I have a question Jorbs: What card in StS has the most "swing" from its Unupgraded form to it's Upgraded form in terms of power level? (Searing Blow upgraded 30 times, excluded, of course.)
Maybe warcry. It goes from actively bad to good enough. Hemokinesis is also a huge deal. For silent noxious fume impact on upgrade is significant. The amount of poison on the 5 first turns (if you have no other sources) are: non upgraded 2/3/4/5/6, ugraded 3/5/7/9/11. That's almost twice as much for a 50% power upgrade. (the longer the fight the best it gets) For defect of course defrag is a huge one I would say also the intangible for one card from the event (don't remember the name for some reason) is game breaking
I feel like combining unupgraded with upgraded and look at times it was upgraded with picked upgraded as a sub category on a card. As where upgrades go seems about as relevant.
So I’m pretty sure you said this is cards you got from card reward screens, is there a way to also add cards from whale bonus or cards from stores into this data?
I feel exlusive with this exlusive content. Thanks for the video and the explanation jorbs! I bet there's gonna be less questions about 'card a, b, c' now. Kappa
Obviously the correct way to find what the best card is to see what percentage of your winning runs contain a particular card. Ascenders Bane is the best card in slay the spire
defend is pretty up there too.
Roberto De Gasperi defend? Pfft. Try winning a run without Strike!
@@IntrusiveThot420 actually... If your deck has no strikes it means you are probably act 3 or took bites, and there is a chance you are already winning
Please. The data shows that not even scrubs will take it to carry them through Ascension 9 and below.
@@IntrusiveThot420 I got rid of all but 1 strike somewhat accidentally by half way through the first act an hour ago.
Computer, what is the best card pick?
SKIP
No, I mean actual cards.
DEFEND
So what we can extrapolate from this data is that callipers could be useful here
He should've used his potions
"Calipers would be good here." is a joke that never gets old imo.
!called
crowman PogU saw you at some of the gachi videos
!cwbgh
Jorbs, you gotta do a few runs where you have to choose cards solely by their ELO rating and see how far you can go.
(dies in Act 1 by picking too many defensive cards with Silent)
@@josephward4918 Ah that's true. Maybe some other combination where he has to use the spreadsheet as a guide. Can also lower difficulty if need be. Just thinking of some fun things to do with all this information.
@@SamTheEagle the spreadsheet is his head though. So he's basically playing using it all the time.
The problem is that many good cards are rated below Skip
Content like this is what makes you the best StS contest creator in the world. You're one of the best players, but this high-effort analysis here is so much better than what anyone else in the community puts forth. Exceptionally great. Thanks!
Facts
Boss relic idea: Gain one energy, you can no longer skip card rewards.
Justin Cabreira I think a better idea would be to add an unplayable ethereal curse to the deck per skip. So it takes up one card draw through your first cycle through the deck but then is exhausted and out of the way. Still don’t think it’d ever be worth an extra energy unless your deck has a very strong and consistent turn one. Extra energy is used to satiate strong card draw, so you’d get diminishing returns on that extra energy throughout the run.
@@jonweisensale227 Curse runs would benefit from that. Same happens with Cursed Key, calling Bell and Mark of Pain from boss relics. Besides, runs with good card draw can mitigate curses anyway.
Bill K you’re right about the idea of a deck that could benefit from curses. With and early duvu doll it could be strong. But regarding the comment about strong draw mitigating curses, you also have to understand that it works backwards as well. Curses mitigate good draw. Let’s say this relic existed, and you pick it up with ironclad. Well, ethereal curses work really well with a Feel No Pain and maybe some other cards because ironclad can do really powerful things with exhausting cards. However, yo have to play those powers before you die, which can be pretty tough in Act II or III. And any curses that exhaust before those powers are in play no longer exist in your deck and now that extra energy has saved you less HP than it would have without curses in your deck. It’s hard to take it in the same way it’s hard to take hovering kite.
I think it'd be too good, not big enough of a downside
@@p0kem0nlvl1 lol hi 2 years later. depending on the deck and relics, ~50 cards could be miserable. other relics could make it OP
One thing this analysis really sheds a light on is what cards are "conditional good". Cards with abysmal ELO and pick rates but around 60-70% win rates. For a beginner, or just an enthusiast, to try to figure out what else must have been going on in the run for those cards to be so complimentary is a great way to understand the synergies in the game. I know, there is no such thing as a synergy though :)
I expected this to be 50 minutes of Jorbs saying 'Its wraith form' Im dissapointed
This dude must be the worst person to ask 'where do you want to eat?'
**Takes out spreadsheets**
So, pizza hut has a 65% pick rate, with 80% satisfaction rate
While dominos has 85% pick rate with 75% satisfaction rate
So the best one is burger king
@@honque3063 but the pizza hut on kilroy, has a better pizza than the pizza hut on Hudson so we have variance there and need to call this one Pizza Hut+
i'd be pretty cautious too if i thought thousands of people would take my word as near to truth
No wonder singing bowl is rated so high with Silent, what else are you supposed to do with all those cards that don't have intangible, retain, poison or lose strength written on them ?
Great video as always. The point that having access to a lot of data doesn’t necessarily mean we are drawing useful conclusions is an important thing to understand in the Information Age.
That’s what makes this game so great to me... you can’t just autopilot through and expect great success. You have to thoughtfully engage with the game. If you didn’t have to do that every time...eventually the game would get old.
Unless your me going for nothing but rush down loop on watcher lol
New player: what are the best cards?
Jorbs: do you have 100 hours?
"I'm salivating because these are all good cards." - Jorbs 2019.
"Like, I'm salivating right now as I read these card names."
C'mon, man. Get your quotes straight.
Viewer: "Is X a good card?"
Jorbs: "No, but yes, but no."
Northenlion: I rate cards from 1 to 5
*Jorbs laughs in spread sheets*
Stefan Kojadinov lol Egg’s vid was kinda goofy but it was made in good fun. He wasn’t trying to measure the cards objectively. Jorbs’ goal with these videos is to educate and share data, NL’s goal was to have fun.
And what do you say to those people that take such ratings at face value, in their endeavour to understand the game better?
haselni id urge them to watch the first 2 mins of his video where he clearly says not to listen to literally anything he says ever. Because NL knows that his ratings are extremely silly. That’s what he does.
@@jonweisensale227 nah, I personally think that if you can't do some job effectively you shouldn't even start it. That "it's all in good fun" is something that doesn't click with me over net, do that in privacy of your home, but I digress. I don't hate Northenlion nor I think his viewers are dumb children, I just think that 1-5 star rating was incredibly dumb and pointless to even attempt to do, so I made a joke based on it, that's all.
Jon Weisensale thank you for this reply.
Really appreciate the in depth look at skepticism of stats, looking at context etc as ways of dealing with bias and why things are performing etc. It's something that has absolutely driven me crazy about mtg stat usage, I will probably link this to some of those people on how to look at groups of statistics and what they mean.
And like in any balanced deck building game of course it's "it depends" and context needed outside pick 1. And in slay the spire with the whale you don't even get that.
Great job making a seemingly clickbait title into a in depth discussion on the how and why of stats.
mtg is a fascinating place where a lot of very smart people with little practical or academic experience with statistics and game theory try to use statistics and game theory to get better at a game which is too complicated for people with post-graduate degrees in statistics and game theory to publish many meaningful conclusions about.
@@Jorbs Great summation, this video is a nice reminder of why as well. Spire collecting a years data on 3.25 different characters starts to produce sample sizes worth diving into, but over that time in magic there are 4 standard sets that change a ton as well as the pvp aspect meaning the value of data from any given game varies wildly. I love that neither game is really solvable because my favorite response to questions is "Well that depends".
Skip is obviously the best card, pick it every time you see it.
I lack the words required to express how much better you went about this than those reductive and innumerable """tier lists"""
Great guide to metrics! As someone who's not usually into statistics and elo and whatnot it was nice having them all lined up and explained so thoroughly. You really did a good job making this video accessible.
The ability to upgrade cards at campfires does screw around with the pick rates for upgraded versus unupgraded cards a bit though, doesn't it? Especially for cards you don't want many of that you find early on in their unupgraded forms.
The rain sounds /white noise is soothing lol, I fell asleep multiple times while watching because I haven't slept much last few days lol. I did finish the video same day though! Very interesting data!
Great stuff! Thanks.
Having watched this, I've realized I'd really like it if you've created a separate TH-cam playlist for the runs that you've tried hard in and really concentrated on winning (no matter the outcome).
That's the most interesting content for me. Like the time when you were going for a A20 streak.
Omg @ 40:30 I just noticed the cat! Its so adorable. Cat also wants to learn and improve at Slay The Spire
@22:50 While you were counting down the 3 ways a card can end up at 100% win rate, I was thinking exactly that: There's the fourth possibility that a card is only good (and thus picked) in certain deck "archetypes". You could already tell just by looking at the stats for Heavy Blade early on in the video. I see you mostly pick it when you have strong strength scaling unlocked. And since strength scaling, at least the way you play it, is a strong archetype with a high win percentage, it makes sense that Heavy Blade is a really strong card... in such a deck. Most of the time it's either very good OR pretty bad.
2:58
HE DID IT
HE SAID THE WORD
GRAB THE STICKS
jorbsBird Dig! jorbsBird RELIC jorbsBird DIG! jorbsBird
Would definitely be interesting to distinguish your first pick from your second, third, or beyond. Piercing Wail is a common, so it'll show up a lot. I bet you take one Piercing Wail more often than you take three.
It would be interesting to see ELO for each act.
I would assume that dagger throw would have a higher act 1 ELO then piercing wail, but that would change by act 3
Yeah, disaggregating those seems particularly useful for analyzing damage commons.
Kind of goes back to what he meant when he said people are really bad at identifying what they want. Is dagger throw better in Act 1 because it makes it easier to survive until later, or is it worse because the games where it lets you survive longer are more likely to be lost later? Lot of things that complicate the analysis and make it hard to say
"We"ll take thirty minutes..." Look at the lenght of the video : riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight... =D Love your content, Jorbs! Cheers!
I think something beneficial you could make would be a list of cards that are synergistic together. Ones that when building your deck you prioritise if you have another card in its synergy group. Also I'd love to hear about relics and the gold economy in the game. Thanks so much for making this video it was really really informative.
One metric that I think is important for this analysis is how many times you've already picked that card in a particular run. I would think that maybe the second Noxious Fumes, for example, would not be as strong as the first Noxious Fumes. Probably the first two or three Piercing Wails are very strong, but the fourth or fifth would probably be significantly weaker, and so by grouping the fifth Piercing Wail with the first, this data might be implying that Piercing Wail is weaker than it is.
Youre giving preference to the same card being picked twice as relevant data, but EVERY card you picked affects this balance. The 1st piercing wail is also worse if you have wraith forms and apparitions.
Really nice to listen to jorbs with the rain in the background
What I take away from Jorbs video, and might be a bit of my confirmation bias but, in games or in life, it matter little what the big shinny stuff is being offer. They are good and helps a lot, but it is the small things you do everyday that does much more for you overall. And I think that it is neat that it is somewhat proven by data in a game.
TH-cam exclusive content... truly, a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for all the content, Join Ribs!
Jorbs, thanks for this really interesting and insightful video. I think what’s missing, though, is a semi-analytical approach instead of a purely datat-driven one. You already know about synergies like Panacea + Wraith Form or Spot Weakness + Limit Break; I think a better analysis would be evaporated eluating a lot of those hype interactions based on things like how likely they are to occur and how well they are expected to do against certain fights/overall. Cards that are strong enough to stand alone, like Wraith Form, can also be judged by the same metrics.
Very important stat that didn’t seem represented here is % of winning decks that contain card. A look at that combined with the card’s win% in some way would seem very valuable. Would get rid of the situational picks, and would emphasize cards that are ‘required’ to be successful.
Yep, that's the stats I was looking for.
I don't think that's useful at all, that metric would say that Ascender's Bane and Defend are among the best cards in the game
@@user-wz3bs8oy5i perhaps win% of decks which at the end of the run contain that card would be more fair
@@user-wz3bs8oy5i Ascender's Bane and Defend aren't offered as card rewards, so they are excluded.
Something I think you could try is using what cards you choose to upgrade at campfires as a way of comparing upgraded vs base level cards. The power jump between Defrag and Defrag+ vs the jump between Reaper and Reaper+ is very different, which is why I see you upgrade Reaper a lot less often compared to Defrag or Biased Cog.
Wow, Jorbs has a sub 40% win rate! That makes me feel much better about myself!
Jorbs- "My win rate is clearly much higher when i'm trying my hardest"
... Cool.
It's ascension 20 & act 4 completed tho
@@jeanmarabou9774 the only way to play
If a win counts as just beating the double boss in A20, I'm barely at 10%... :(
The rain sound in the background is so soothing lol
Plus of course the issue that you play on A20 and in the Beta version of the game - I suspect most people asking simply "what is the best card" play on A0 or certainly less than A5 on the 'normal' version. Different cards will be "better" or "worse" as you're literally playing a different ruleset.
As Jorbs stated a couple of times during runs, decks that beat A20 most certainly beat lower ascensions :)
The lessons of this video are largely the same as for many other disciplines, including programming:
1. The answer to almost all general questions is “it depends”
2. Correlation is not causation
I honestly think ALL the cards are trying their best!
its funny how you can do all these calculations and data charts and in your head its already all calculated in one go and gives a simple feeling like good or bad
Is it just me, or did anyone else value Jorb’s pick percentage far more than any other metric?
nah it's quite reasonable, I do the same
Wont help you so much, an ai with no memory of the previous floor or whats in your deck would be absolutely terrible at this game, so looking at the pick rate and saying "good card" or "bad card" is not useful
I think another way to determine which cards are "the best/worst in slay the spire" would be to look at different roles a card can fill and then within those categories how efficient and effective certain cards and/or groups of cards are at what they do.
Watch at 1.5x speed, you can go higher if you’re comfortable
I just found his streams and been watching a couple of his youtube videos. Is he like a data/computer scientist? when talking about these kind of things he just seems so incredibly knowledgeable. is this just enthusiasm for things like data and AI or does he have a formal education in the field?
i've done some statistics (up to graduate level). never ended up with a degree because i kept finding other things that were more important than finishing. past applications of this sort of analysis have been to ancient storytelling, poker, and now here.
@@Jorbs Thanks for the reply. Again, you seem incredibly competent in these kinds of analysis. Gonna keep watching for more of your insights.
This is a public service announcement:
Elo is the last name of Arpad Elo, who devised the rating system used for chess.
ELO is Electric Light Orchestra, a rock band who are not involved in rating systems for games.
ELO is a pretty rad band and Elo is a pretty rad rating system, so I can see why people get them confused.
PSA: "rock band" is singular and an object, meaning it's referred to with "which is" or "that is" instead of "who are", which is reserved for plural and persons.
PSA: Some collective nouns can be used as plurals when referring to all the members of a collective taking action individually.
Ex: The band played each of their instruments.
@@undeniablySomeGuy Are you saying "... a rock band which are not involved in rating systems..." would be correct
This is my favorite video of yours. Would you consider a follow-up that uses data to analyze the equally-complicated question of which upgrade is most valuable in StS?
Oh and for what it's worth, when people ask me what card is best I usually mentally frame it as 'if all cards were offered, which would I pick on floor one?' Then they get the troll answer of Omega :)
I love when Jorbs makes these types of videos!
This should be done annually.
This is so accurate it's surreal! Can you do a series on how to analyze game data from other game? Like how to build a deck in magic or which hero to pick in a moba style game using data.
I'd like to point out that choosing to not pick Offering+ has a 100% winrate as well. The only thing we can understand here is that Offering+ is a game-winning blessing whether we use it or not.
It points out an interesting stat missing in fact, %win when not picked
Question: would you recommend playing on lower ascension levels for people still learning the game? (after a few hundred hours, but still...)
I play all characters except Watcher at A20, but my winrates are very, very low. I wonder if I'd learn more playing on for example A15, where I'm more likely to proceed further into a given run and thus see a larger variety of enemies and how the decks I build function against each one.
TL;DR What do you think is a more effective way to learn, playing on the highest difficulty or playing on the highest difficulty that lets you progress far into your runs?
i think it's just a matter of whatever is fun. also keep in mind that if you want to get "good" it probably means playing slowly, thinking really hard about lots of different turns, maybe opening up spreadsheets and doing math on the side. but like, there's no reason you need to do any of that if it isn't appealing - nobody has to do things they find boring to try to get better at a game like this, the entire point is to have fun.
@@Jorbs Yes, I've already noticed I have more success if I just give myself a lot more time thinking about turns, I'm working on that. I think I'll see how far I get without spreadsheets first and if I feel like I still want to improve after that, I'll go from there. :-D
Thanks for the reply!
This was a super pleasant video to draw to. Thanks, Jorbs!
Would love one for relics too! amazing video, enjoyed it
I have no idea if anyone will ever see this, but there's a bit of discrepancy in the SpireChat playlist: This is episode #58, and episodes 55-57 aren't in the playlist. (Those would be the Northernlion card rating video, the video on Busted Crown, and the video on Equity)
Yet another comment by me, but this is a separate albeit correlated topic: does the ELO rating take in account if the run you took the decision in was won or not? I'm assuming the latter and that means that rating is a very good answer to the question "what do you think is the best card in the game?", but for the more general question of best card in the game or in general to get some interesting rankings on them should take into account that maybe you don't play optimally, and the only way I see this done is giving less value of the victories in the card being picked if the run was a losing one, since there's an higher chance that it was a mistake and should have been valued as a loss(not that we can prove that it was a mistake).
I feel like another effect of such a system where cards you choose in losing runs would be valued less is that cards chosen because they were the "least worst" option would be valued less, so cards that have just been chosen because they were okish in an unlucky run where your deck was worse than okish would weight less, but I guess that's already dealt with in a way by the elo's system of increasing less if opponents were rated lower.
I would love to see this again with 2020's data!
A lot of thoughtful analysis. Judging from Jorbs' comments, it seems like the best way to look at these data is to find out how this or that card compares across metrics. Also, a little disappointed that the table doesn't split the cards by category. Jorbs has mentioned before that one should pick cards that improve your chance to win in various scenarios. I'm considering downloading the data to split cards by whether they're damage cards, defense/mitigation cards, or utility cards.
This approach still has a huge weakness in that some cards get better if you have other cards to go with them, but I still think it could be useful.
Is crippling poison the same as deadly poison? Steam is the same as steam barrier, right? What is undo?
12:00 Ironclad has Feed, Reaper, and likes to take Bites sometimes, so often has meta scaling, so it makes sense to me that he’d prioritise hallway fights over Silent who has no meta scaling.
In basketball they use "score differential per second the player is on the floor". If you calculated the per-fight average result (win, loss, including damage) of each card on each floor, you'd have a natural way to compare cards. i.e. decks with card X win floor 10 fights at N%; card Y on the same floor wins at M%. This still conflates mixed strategies but at least would make individual cards more comparable.
So basically it's 42.
Great video.
One of my issues is I never know when to pick a card or skip, also what % of my deck should be atacks, skills, power cards? I often end up picking cards and end up with a bloated deck, should i try to keep my deck around 15? 20? 25? 30? Cards? Also when scrying I have trouble choosing what to discard, any tips? Great videos! I love watching you stream!
Can you elaborate on what the ELO is based on? Is a "win" determined by being chosen at a card choice (i.e. this stat has many of the same properties as the pick% stat)? Or are there other factors involved? Thanks again for all the effort that you put into all your vids/streams.
i believe the exact way it's coded is that if card1, card2, and skip are on offer and card1 is picked it records two "games", card1 W - card2 L and card1 W - skip L, with k-value 16, updating with card1 having its starting elo for both of the games. you can look up elo ratings on wiki if you need the mechanics broken down, i think the article does a good job.
You should make one of these for the most difficult enemy in the game
Me seeing this in recommended: "Yeah I guess I'll listen to another spireside chat on my way to work, I don't really remember this one?"
Me seeing the upload date: 🤤🤤🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤤🤤🤤🤑😤🤤🤤🤤🤤😇😇😱😱😱🤓
I think win percentage when offered is a little more accurate than win percentage when picked. It still has some problems like flash of steel only showing up in act 3 or if you play poorly, but I think it’s a decent enough measure overall.
The other argument on a card is how many you already have. A card could be awesome, but if you already have 2, a third would be crazy.
Lesson, SKIP and CLAW are both OP
Zephyr waits for claw to be integrated into this spreadsheet, because it is clearly superior to reaper in all measures and has a win percentage of 101.
If you assume knowledge of StS, this would be a fantastic first lecture of an introductory statistics course
Next time you do this I think it should be split by classes, it would make it cleaner to look at and account for things like your lower defect winrate.
Defect has a lower global wr? I'm about 20 hours in and have yet to with with Ironclad.
Thanks alot for this one.I love Content like that.
An interesting idea would be to play a game purely picking cards based on the Elo values, showing that the context of the deck is what really determines a cards value
i hope his cat is thinking about how he's talking to no one
For a more on topic comment, shouldn't win rate for this table have been divided by the class's win rate for this to be a fair comparison between classes?
I guess if the point was to find the best card in general this is accurate, but in we wanted to branch in(as we did) the relative value of cards and find a ranking for how often you should/do pick it when shown the relative effect on winrate should be more important than the absolute effect.
For an example let's say you had an 80% winrate on watcher, in that case no matter the specific card in the win%(picked) column watcher cards in general will show up much more often than other classes', and we show at the start how there's a relatively relevant gap in the winrate of classes.
EDIT: oh you talked about that point right after I paused to make this comment, welp. Still it was in favor of the ELO metric, which is fine but I feel like the suggestion I made for the other column is still relevant.
I'm actually really surprised by how low the ELO is on Flex. It seems like a very straightforwardly good card, especially if your deck is small.
It actually doesn't matter if you deck is small or not.
The problem with flex usually is that 1: it's a skill rather than an attack. This makes it very bad against chosen and nob 2: it doesn't do very much unupgraded. You need to play 3 attacks for it to be as good as anger (or tripple dip the strength scaling) so what if you draw it with no strikes? It's better to have cards that can consistently deal damage when you draw them.
It also take up a draw, so it's not free at all.
This is super cool! How did you pull your data from the game
Defining 'best' by Act probably would help here like mentioned. Or even by floor.
The biggest problem is the Relic synergy with cards picked......that is the biggest data that is hard to show here....
This is great! Will there be an update; would be interesting content, especially for Watcher?
My sub box was hiding this from me. Rude. jorbsGlare
Nice Christmas gift btw.
Have you considered a metric of (floors beaten with card after picking) / (floors left in run at time of pick)?
We already have access to a trained neural network - his name is Jorbs
Oh! He said it! MORE CLAW
i thought all your content was youtube exclusive, youtube jorbs?...
It's mostly stolen from twitch jorbs or twitch Joinrbs, actually.
@@matthewkaseman7457 That still doesn't explain... what's the role of mini Jorbs in all of this?
@@cachotognax3600 Mini Jorbs is involved in nothing and everything.
I think also keep in mind skip shows up every time so like 40 ish times per run on average, you may not see a rare one time and even uncommons. So while it shows the importance of skip it is hardly indicitive of being the best choice. And it's pick rate is low relatively to other strong cards(~20%vs 50plus)
Elo rating surprised me as a metric but I feel it is by far the most accurate one
I'd be super interested to see an n-grams approach to this data, where pairs of cards are given the same treatment as these are!
biased cognition + has to be best card all around...I know many would argue that adrenaline is the best,but the thing is,adrenaline doesnt win games by itself,biased cognition does..Reaper is close,really close to being the best,but it can be a dead card unlike biased cognition where you almost always want to pop it
Jorbs can you thank Zephyr for his insights for me
I hope Jorbs returns to this topic in December, with only runs from December 16th of last year through whenever he does the video, and compares numbers between 2019 and 2020 (with a big asterisk on Watcher 2019) before giving an aggregate
I have a question Jorbs: What card in StS has the most "swing" from its Unupgraded form to it's Upgraded form in terms of power level? (Searing Blow upgraded 30 times, excluded, of course.)
Quick guess would be fission
Also Maybe catalyst?
Defrag
Maybe warcry. It goes from actively bad to good enough. Hemokinesis is also a huge deal.
For silent noxious fume impact on upgrade is significant. The amount of poison on the 5 first turns (if you have no other sources) are: non upgraded 2/3/4/5/6, ugraded 3/5/7/9/11. That's almost twice as much for a 50% power upgrade. (the longer the fight the best it gets)
For defect of course defrag is a huge one
I would say also the intangible for one card from the event (don't remember the name for some reason) is game breaking
My take away from this is that Singing Bowl is the best card. Kappa
I feel like combining unupgraded with upgraded and look at times it was upgraded with picked upgraded as a sub category on a card. As where upgrades go seems about as relevant.
So I’m pretty sure you said this is cards you got from card reward screens, is there a way to also add cards from whale bonus or cards from stores into this data?
It’d be really interesting to see what cards were picked first in the run, which ones were skipped, etc
This is great! Thanks.
Ogbomosho to xXMomentumXx as well.
I feel exlusive with this exlusive content. Thanks for the video and the explanation jorbs! I bet there's gonna be less questions about 'card a, b, c' now. Kappa
you should collect data on how often you play a card and how often you win fights while playing that card