Too bad there's so much placeholder art; this guy is great fun to play with.

Ah, thanks for the quick reply. That is indeed more useful. I'm actually having a fantastic run with him right now, comboing that with the Black Hole from Hubris.

@DeNarr
At first it might appear that it does the same thing, but if you read the wording carefully, it draws a card whenever you exhaust a card. This means that you can trigger the additional card draw off of ANY form of exhaust now, instead of only being able to trigger it off every 3rd card played.

What's the deal with the Trigon of Trickery? It replaces your starting relic, but does the exact same thing...

Thanks! I worked with Raz, the creator, and supplied all of the assets my artist made to help that boss fight happen. I was super honored they deemed Showman a unique enough character to be a boss. They deserve all the credit though! They coded an insane monster AI to play like a real character, and it brings a depth to the fight that makes it very interesting.

love this guy in Pale of the Ancients

Yup! Showman is still seeing updates, both balance and to maintain playability.

Hey was just playing some of the old mods Ive played and noticed this got an update, glad to see you still maintain it to some degree and just wanted to say I appreciate it!

Newest patch has temporarily broken the Showman. We're working on a fix, as well as changing Toro! and potentially adding a replacement for the deprecated Object Permanence.

The Vulnerable archetype can definitely get some crazy numbers out there, being particularly punishing to multi-attacking enemies due to how Toro! works. I've been meaning to rework that card for a while now because it really is the biggest offender in the Vulnerable archetype, but haven't gotten around to it.

As far as the Up My Sleeve loops, the card was made with that kind of functionality in mind, where as something like Curtain #3 was made for more general value play. The card was made to fulfill that role of bridging the gap of Showman from pure finesse to potential combo, if you were careful in how you order the starting relic.

Very fun character! Turns get very long and very complicated, but it feels like that's the whole point. I like the stacked mechanic in combination with his other mechanics, they're satisfyingly hit-or-miss cards with a lot of ways to manipulate them into being hits. The improvise mechanic is also really fun.

Vulnerable stacking is way too strong though. With a few vulnerable-focused powers I was able to beat Pale of the Ancients my first time playing the character, taking 3 damage during the leadup and ~30 during the final boss. Some kind of cap for anything that scales with the number of vulnerable stacks would make it a bit more balanced.

Also, Up My Sleeve+anything that draws for 0 energy+anything that restores energy is an infinite combo if you can get your whole deck into your hand. It feels like a fair combo given all the setup, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

All good friend. We're working on updating the character over time with improvements, bug, and balance fixes as we deem necessary. Updates will vary over time in speed, but we'll make sure the character always works as intended in the current live version of Slay the Spire.

ha sorry just was able to finish reading your comments on art sorry about that lol

Absolutely had a blast playing this character! It took me a few runs to understand exhaust mechanics but the more I play it the more I enjoy it! I like this character better than the originals lol.Hope to see this mod uprated. If I had anything to wish for would be maybe some upgraded art on some of the cards (example prestidigitation) Anyways great job!!

@PRL

Treat Columbify as a way to stun an enemy for 1 turn, and remove any "damage cap / damage prevention" powers on it.

Debuffs and buffs applied to the byrd don't transfer over to the affected monster once it wears off, and any buffs / debuffs the monster had before becoming columbified don't transfer over to the byrd either.

The card is highly situational, but also extremely useful against specific targets, due to its ability to bypass damage caps.

The effect of the card itself is not the most well explained since "replace an enemy with a byrd" is quite vague as to what effects the card actually has. I hope this helped clear up what the card actually does.

yeah I understand the idea behind columbify it just doesnt do what it says on the card when used in encounters with scripted triggers, randomly makes debuffs disappear and so on.

Awesome! Thanks for all the input PRL

The upgrade Strike and Defend event was an oversight from early development when I had Left Click add the tags that allowed the Vanishing cards to be upgraded. As a result, I'm having him remove that tag. The Apparition event is trickier, and we may just have to black list it entirely, because you're right in that it makes you practically invincible.

We'll start with a small nerf to Prop Show, removing the 2 additional damage on upgrade until we can do a more serious reword. Paradigm is going to have the energy generation removed from the card entirely. As far as Columbify, think of it as a one turn stun, as that's practically what it is. Ventriloquism will be reworked to not allow unplayable cards to be played too.

Paradigm shift is probably the most OP card in the class, why does this card GIVE you energy for executing your gameplan? Like I understand that if you time it poorly you can kill yourself but there is an abundance of ways to get it back out to just flip over your deck and exhaust pile all over again, even with just a single payoff for exhausting cards it becomes incredibly powerful as a buildaround, and you can easily have 5-8 payoffs.

I also think you should probably look into reworking columbify and ventriloquism as they either dont work or have incredibly confusing interactions as soon as you play it in anything but the most vanillla situations.

Overall I really enjoyed the climb and will probably come back to this mod if development keeps up. 2/2

Having finished my climb to A20 I can confidently say I like the mod a lot. It does however have some clear balance issues both in how it interacts with certain events and some of the cards.

The upgrade strike and defend event lets you remove upwards of 4 basics, which is just straight up 4 times more powerful than the even is intended to be, with possible additional upside.
Apparitions being able to be cloned effortlessly makes you just be immortal in almost all fights.

Prop show is just way too strong as is. Even just an AoE pommel strike would be an incredible card, the improvise on top of that makes it super overwhelming. 1/2

Very nice mod. It's interesting to play a character that seems to do much better with large decks. "Is THIS your card?" is a game-changer when you've got twenty cards in your exhaust pile.

Nice Mod ;) The Squirrel will go on with it :D

My apologies! I do hope you tried the class anyway!

Read title as "The Snowman." Was very disappointed when I checked again...

"Van de Graffee's Revenge" has too many characters in the name so the V is covered up by the Energy cost.

"Kibler Flick" is missing a period at the end of the card text.

Just finished my first successful run. Great mod!

@PRL that was an intentional design decision to allow builds that used colorless cards. Sleeve Aces allows you to do that too! Have fun finding synergies!

@trelian5 Glad you like them. A lot of care was put into making the character visually distinct with his VFX's and such.

great fun and will definetly try and ascension climb with the class. Is it intended that Up My Sleeve can get back non-class cards? It made for a hilarious run with ritual dagger but most other cards have class only restrictions on them.

The animations are really cool

After the recent bevy of broken, ludicrously overpowered classes, I have to say I love this guy. Stacking powers is for some reason something I really like in this game - it creates a rather direct sort of progression that's somewhat rare in StS characters. More daze, more Misdirection, more streaming exhaust procs. I love it.

You you hate the exhaust pile and would like to see it being used until it begs you to just let it die? Do you like seeing enemies kill themselves? Do you enjoy incredible art and well-designed modded characters? Then this class is most definitely for you!

This character will make you think more about how you'll play your hand than how to counter enemy intents. Which may seem like a detriment but let me assure you, it's not. Making sure not to exhaust your winning strategy is just as much of a riveting experience as making sure to to blow your payload on an intagible turn of the Nemesis.

@TCSyd I'll definitely take that into consideration. In testing at 3 cost it was far too prohibitive, and we wanted it to be a powerful glue holding a loose temporary Strength/Buffer/Strength Loss archetype together, so we ultimately erred on the side of making it powerful.

Show of Strength+ double dipping on dazed wasn't something that occurred to me when we made the card, but I liked that it pushed the Dazed cards a little bit in terms of power, so we left it as is.

Object Permanence is far too strong, I think. Consider that all you really need to make it busted is Sleighted Hand, which is a Common. It either needs an Energy cost adjustment, some kind of drawback, or it shouldn't affect the temporary effects of enemies.

Also, I'm not sure if this is intended or not, but Show of Strength+ double dips on Strength gain with Dazed.

That's hilarious

I'll be honest, I saw the black silk hat image and thought this class was called "The Snowman". I was wondering why this description was relevant to Frosty the Snowman and it wasn't until I was nearly done reading it that I realized what was wrong.

Thank you for trying him out! He's been a character I started developing as a proof of concept earlier this year, and had an absolute blast leading design, and helping to make the character happen.

Sleeve Aces and Up My Sleeve are extremely powerful cards with other mods, but for the most part we decided to develop in a vacuum. Having to design around everything that was already implemented through mods was never really something we wanted to do or take into account, so just enjoy the occasional power spikes you'll experience!

Definitely a fun character. Felt a little iffy early on, but when I picked up his Form things started to snowball out of control and it was great. Cannot imagine how silly he'd get with dead branch.
Sleeve Aces and Up My Sleeve might be a little too strong if you get your hands on an Apparition, or if playing with other mods any number of colorless or black cards.