5 Elements in a Genre That Avoids Them

Slay the Spire doesn’t have elements. Balatro doesn’t. Inscryption doesn’t. Monster Train sort of does, but it calls them clans and limits you to two per run. The biggest roguelike deckbuilders on Steam, with 15+ million copies sold between them, all avoided the classic fire-beats-ice triangle.

I built one anyway. Soul Strip has five elements: Fire, Holy, Ice, Shadow, Void. Not as a matchup chart. As a draft tension. Here’s what happened.

Every Top Deckbuilder Avoids Elements

I considered character-based pools first, the way Slay the Spire does it. Pick Ironclad, see Ironclad cards. Clean, simple, no interaction matrix to manage. Anthony Giovannetti explained at GDC 2019 how they balanced individual cards using player metrics from Early Access: win rates and pick rates, not element matchup tables. I liked the elegance, but Soul Strip doesn’t split its cards by character. The leader you pick sets your starting deck and a small boon every turn, yet card rewards come from one shared pool whoever leads, so that axis wasn’t available to me.

Monster Train’s clan pairing tempted me more. Hellhorned + Awoken plays nothing like Stygian + Umbra. Mark Cooke described designing for “poggable moments” — runs where drafted synergies align into something absurd. I thought about limiting each run to two element factions the same way. Decided against it because I wanted all five in play every run. Maybe that was a mistake. The jury’s still out.

Then Balatro shipped and sold 5 million copies on a standard 52-card deck. No elements, no classes, no factions. LocalThunk told TouchArcade the deck is “this shared cultural game design tool that has evolved over hundreds of years.” Hard to compete with free onboarding.

And Inscryption proved you don’t even need variety. Daniel Mullins prototyped the core in 48 hours at Ludum Dare. Sacrifice costs ARE the interaction system. One mechanic, all the heavy lifting.

The message from the market: constrain the interaction space. Pick one axis of complexity, go deep.

The Draft Tension I Wanted

Most element systems create a matchup chart. Fire beats Ice, Ice beats Lightning, everyone memorizes the triangle and counter-picks. I didn’t want a lookup table. I wanted every card you draft to cost you something.

Soul Strip’s synergies reward concentration. Play 2+ cards of the same element in one turn, and that element’s synergy fires. Each one does something different:

The live synergy reference lists every threshold and payout; the status-effect reference covers the effects those synergies create.

Fire triggers Inferno: +3 bonus damage. Ice triggers Frostbite: +4 Block. Shadow triggers Eclipse: 1 Weak on the enemy. Holy triggers Divine Light: +1 healing. Void triggers Void Storm: draw 1 card.

The scaling rewards commitment. A synergy fires on the second card of an element and again on every card of that element after it. The second Fire card triggers Inferno for +3 bonus damage. The third triggers it again at ×2: +6 more. The fourth also pays +6, because the multiplier stops at ×2. Three Fire cards in one turn deal +9 bonus damage on top of whatever those cards already do. Four deal +15.

Here’s where the draft tension lives. You draw 6 cards per turn. The starting deck is 10 cards, 7 of them in your leader’s element, so any six of them include at least three: the synergy fires from the first battle. Then every off-element pick dilutes those seven. In a 20-card deck, seven Fire cards put 2+ Fire in your hand on roughly 72% of turns. Keep ten Fire cards out of 20 and it’s about 93%. But now half your deck is Fire, and the Block, healing and Weak that Ice, Holy and Shadow would bring shrink with every Fire pick.

A mono-Fire deck hits hard on good draws and dies on bad ones. A rainbow deck adapts to anything but rarely triggers synergies. Every card you draft during a run shifts that balance. The question isn’t “which element is best.” It’s “how deep do I go.”

What Broke First

Void Storm, back in the early builds. It drew one card per trigger, and the multiplier had no ceiling: the second Void card drew one, the third two more, the fourth three. Sounds harmless until you do the math.

With a lean deck heavy on Void cards, those extra draws pull more Void cards into your hand. Play those, draw more. With 8 Void cards in a 15-card deck, I was seeing 8-9 cards per turn instead of the five a hand held back then. The energy system (3 per turn) was the only thing keeping it in check.

Then I added Flame Crystals, an Epic relic that back then did two things: it multiplied synergy payouts by 1.5 AND fired them twice. With it active, Void Storm’s draw more than doubled. On a good draw, the entire deck cycled in a single turn. Mono-element builds with Flame Crystals weren’t a strong option. They were the only option.

Shadow’s Eclipse is the other synergy the Crystals double: every extra Shadow card puts Weak on the enemy, twice. That one stays safe for a reason that is easy to miss. Weak cuts the enemy’s attack damage by 25%, and extra stacks only make it last longer; the cut itself never deepens. Eclipse can keep an enemy weak all fight, but it can’t disarm one.

Side note: the interaction I didn’t predict was Ethereal Lantern with Soul Collector. Soul Collector is a Void Power that draws 1 card whenever you Exhaust a card. Ethereal Lantern makes unplayed Ethereal cards go to the discard pile at the end of your turn instead of being Exhausted. I expected them to combo — Ethereal cards cycling back through your deck while Soul Collector keeps drawing. Reality: with the Lantern those cards are never Exhausted, so Soul Collector never triggers on them. A relic and a Power that look like a dream combo actually cancel each other out. Found that one at 3 AM when a build I was sure would dominate just… didn’t.

Constraining Access, Not Power

Some payouts did come down over time: Holy’s healing went from 3 to 1, and Flame Crystals stopped multiplying. But most of the work went into how easily players could assemble mono builds.

Hand size cap: 10. Void Storm’s draw engine hits a hard ceiling. No matter how many Void cards you chain, your hand can’t exceed 10. This single constraint killed the infinite cycling problem.

Multiplier cap: ×2. The second card of an element pays ×1, the third ×2, and every card after that stays at ×2. At the base 3 Energy this rarely matters. It’s there for later: Max Energy upgrades let a mono deck play four or five cards of one element in a turn, and without the cap the bonus would compound with every one.

Energy: 3 per turn. 44 of the 60 cards cost 1 or 2 Energy. Playing 4+ same-element cards means running the cheap ones or getting lucky with draws. The energy constraint forces a choice between quantity for synergy and quality for raw power.

Exhaust. Some of the hardest hitters leave the fight after one play: Blazing Sacrifice (11 damage, 3 Burn, plus 3 damage for each card played earlier that turn) and Shadow Queen (two hits of 11, 6 Poison, 1 Envenom). One shot per combat. You can pair them with Soul Collector’s draw-on-Exhaust power, but that means investing in Void on top of your primary element, diluting your synergy odds.

Cursed cost. Five cards carry the Cursed keyword, three of them Shadow. Blood Pact deals 9 damage and applies 2 Mark, and costs you 3 HP per play. Early on that cost shrank as the card levelled up. Now it stays at 3 at every level, so stacking Cursed Shadow cards is a health gamble for the whole run.

Relic rarity. Navigator’s Hat is Rare and makes synergy payouts 50% stronger. Flame Crystals is Epic, one of 14 epic relics among 50, and makes every synergy fire twice. Until mid-August it also multiplied the payout, so with the Hat on top two relics were pumping the same number. Now one strengthens and the other repeats. A build can’t count on finding the Crystals, and without them synergies are strong but not game-ending.

Starter deck. In the early builds the first deck was ten cards, two of each element: you started as a generalist. Now the leader decides it. Seven cards of her element make the synergy fire from the first battle, and three from another element cover what hers lacks: Fire borrows Frost Barrier for Block, Holy borrows Flame Slash for damage. Void is the exception at six of its own and four Frost Barrier, because none of Void’s commons block. So the run starts committed, and staying mono means skipping every off-element card across three acts of 15 floors each. A deliberate, risky commitment.

The key insight from studying the competition: constrain access, not power. Let the ceiling be absurd. Make the floor dangerous. The best Slay the Spire runs feel broken too. That’s the point.

What I’d Tell Another Solo Dev

The roguelike deckbuilder genre has over 1,100 entries on Steam. Most of the successful ones skip element systems, and they’re smart to. The balance work is brutal, and you’ll be debugging synergy edge cases at 3 AM more often than you planned.

I built one because I wanted every draft pick to feel like a trade-off. Not “is this card good?” but “does this card help my Fire synergy enough to justify one fewer Ice card when I need block?” Whether that tension holds up depends on thousands of player-hours I haven’t logged yet. My testing so far: my own runs, a handful of friends, and a simulator that plays full runs through the real battle code.

Right now Soul Strip has 60 cards across 5 elements, 25 status effects, and 50 relics. The synergy system is live and breakable.

If you’re considering elements for your card game: prototype the constraints before the synergies. I did it backwards and spent two weeks fixing Void Storm’s draw engine. The synergies are the fun part. The constraints are the engineering.

Find a mono build I missed. Tell me what breaks.

Soul Strip: Waifu Card Battler

A deckbuilding roguelike where every card is a waifu with her own element and personality. Battle through dark fantasy, craft combos, collect and level up your favorites.

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