After a few more runs, I managed to make it to Act 3 bosses on an incredibly lucky set of relics, where I died to Awakened One.

A few new notes:
Starting off with THREE Ceremony is too much. 1 is enough. Three get in the way, and actually feel like curses you have to draw through to get to the strikes and defends that you need to survive in early fights.

Tucking Feathers is strictly worse than Backflip, as Backflip gives you 5 block straight up, while Tucking Feathers would require you to get lucky and draw 3 and 2 cost cards in order to generate the same block.

Evade is strictly worse than Seeing Red, as Seeing Red gives you the energy straight up, while Evade requires an attacking enemy. Also, Seeing Red exhausts, which is a good thing, because it thins your deck after helping you ramp, allowing for infinites.

Awakened Form is unusable in act one, and it still might be very difficult to use in act 2 if you didn't get an energy relic as a boss reward. It doesn't matter how strong a card is if it's only viable with an boss energy relic. Beaked isn't like Defect which has tons of RELIABLE ways to generate energy, and so can play high cost cards like Meteor Shower.

Mantra, because of the fact that you want to have as few wither cards in your deck as possible, is worthless, even as a 1 cost card. It requires you to already have 3 wither cards in your deck in order to be better than 2 Strikes. Compare this to Streamline, a common (!), which deals 15 damage without requiring any other cards, and self-buffs. On that note, Deep Focus isn't strong enough to enable more than one extra wither card.

Lift Off is incredibly dumb against basically any of the difficult elites and bosses; The Heart, Spire Spear, Time Eater, Awakened One, The Collector, Hexaghost, The Guardian, Reptomancer, Nemesis, Book of Stabbing, Taskmaster, Gremlin Leader... all of these either have a triple+ attack or can summon enemies that will be attacking you together. Losing a turn against the Heart is death. I wouldn't play this if it cost 0. I wouldn't play it if it gave me energy. I wouldn't play it if made me completely invulnerable to damage instead of 50%.

Dark Pact is Metallicize, but worse. I would MUCH MUCH rather have only 3 block every round if it doesn't go away when I take damage, and without adding a Regret to my deck (the deadliest curse in the game btw).

Shadow Fade is a severely flawed card. Even if you manage to play two Ceremony on turn 1 (requires 4 energy and draw luck), and reach 10 strength by turn SIX (the earliest, which means it's useless against kill-or-die enemies like Nob, Transient, Reptomancer), why the hell would you sacrifice six turns of scaling for a single turn of intangible? And it costs 3 energy?! Ok sure let's say you're in a difficult situation and you need to play it to survive; congratulations, you no longer have any strength and you're dead anyway because now you can't kill anything. This goes back to the problem with cards which completely remove your strength; they might give a temporary solution, but in the long run you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥ without strength, because enemies scale too.

Replenish is 3 energy for replenishing a card... for a single use... that you also need to have in hand? And it does literally nothing else? Just straight up spend your entire turn to undo the effects of one wither? If this card FULLY replenished it might be worth 3 energy. As it currently functions, 1 energy would be fine, 0 upgraded. It would still barely be worth drawing.

Final point; I'm not saying every card in the class has to be worthwhile; Watcher is a perfect example of how you can make a broken character which has tons of useless cards. I'm saying at least *some* of the cards should be powerful enough to compensate. Right now not enough cards qualify.

The few cards which actually feel good are Blood for the Gods, which ironically is better unupgraded than upgraded (less dangerous to use, and thus can be used more), and Feel My Pain, which both together are essential in order to scale fast enough to beat elites and bosses. Honorable mention to Survival Instinct, which did save me on many times, but tends to get drawn from card-draw cards, making it impossible to play and getting exhausted without use. Survival Instinct combos with Feel My Pain and Blood for the Gods really well, allowing you to heal and scale really fast in a safe way. Sacrificial Scars, while strong enough to be an automatic-grab, forces you to take *even longer*, because you now not only have to heal to full before ending every fight, you have to then use Sacrificial Scars to get the max HP, and then wait 3 rounds, and then heal back up to full. Very tedious, very boring. Huntress Spirit and Warrior Spirit are decent enough in act 1-2, but become useless in act 3-4 when you get Awakened Form, which at that point is usually mandatory if you find it.

Again, I have no idea how this character beats the heart. I see no way in which it can possibly generate enough block to survive the beat of death with all the cards it needs to setup and scale, let alone generate enough block in a single turn to survive +50 damage turns.

Well, it can be done.[imgur.com]

An insanely lucky run. Still took me 3 hours because I was restarting fights when they went badly. Yes, it's necessary with this class.

Apotheosis because Apotheosis. Feel My Pain to ramp STR quickly. Resilience + Dark Tribute to heal back to full. Deep Focus to allow for multiple casts of maxed Cursing Blood. 3 Vigor Burst, Machine Essence, and a ton of card draw to heal instead of blocking. Card draw in the form of Master of Strategy, Full House, Insight+, and 2xPoke+. Awakened Form to go infinite. Survival Instinct to sometimes use Feel My Pain for free, and to protect against dangerous turns. A single unupgraded Stick Smack for finishing off enemies; what's important isn't it's scaling, you get your scaling from Strength, but Stick Smack lets you play it 5 to 10 times in a row thanks to Awakened Form and card draw.

Got pretty lucky with relics too. Early Pocket Watch carried me through act 1. Throat Lozenge + Deep Focus means I don't even have to restore wither at campfires. White Beast Statue and Toy Ornithopter almost made me not take Sozu, but I knew I would need the energy for when I found Awakened Form. Clockwork Souvenier sometimes saved my ass by allowing me to first turn Dark Tribute to heal back to full. Tiny House because didn't want Cursed Key (need relics) or Philo Stone (suicide vs heart). Molten Egg only gave me 1 Poke+, but that was good enough. Singing Bowl gave me 8 bonus max HP. Gambling Chip and Centennial Puzzle absolutely saved the run. Would have died to Act 3 Bosses without it, the card draw is what helped me find the key parts of the deck when I needed them. Every single relic was amazing. Even White Beast Statue, which gave me a Fairy in a Bottle which I kept till the very end and saved me from the Heart.

I still believe the class is incredibly underpowered, and I am certain nobody can achieve more than a 5% winrate without reloading.

Yeah, I don't think this little guy can reliably win A20 without Awakened Form - he's incredibly weak without it, but if you pick it before you have a way to cheat it out, it's a dangerous brick. (I still pick it all the time, since not having it is a death sentence).

I would say he's weaker than the base characters, by a large margin. Each of the base characters has at least a few compositions that let them win. Having three two-cost cards in the starting deck, which are very slow to wind up, is really an obstacle. All his good cards either have ruinous downsides or Wither, and the counters to Wither are themselves bad. There's a stab at Wither synergies, but those are all extremely weak. So your only hope is going infinite, which is very luck-based and doesn't feel fun to play.

There are a lot of really broken modded characters, but this is the first one I've played that just needs an overall buff.