Soul Strip Ascension System: 20 Levels That Change How You Build Decks

What Is Ascension?

Ascension is the endgame difficulty system in Soul Strip. Win a full run on the base difficulty, and you unlock Ascension I. Win at a level, unlock the next one. All the way up to Ascension XX. The game writes levels as Roman numerals; here I’ll call them A1 to A20 for short.

Every ascension level adds a modifier, and they stack. Playing at A12 means all twelve modifiers from A1 through A12 are active at once. There’s no picking and choosing. It’s cumulative pressure.

The system exists because base difficulty has a shelf life. After a handful of wins, an experienced player has enough game knowledge to build strong decks consistently. Ascension is what keeps the game challenging past that point. The full list with the in-game wording is on the ascension page of the wiki.

The Five Tiers

Instead of 20 levels of “enemies get bigger numbers,” the ascension system is split into five tiers. Each tier attacks a different part of your strategy.

Tier 1: Stat Pressure (A1–A5)

Enemy stats go up across the board:

• A1: Normal enemies +22% max HP
• A2: Elite enemies +25% max HP
• A3: Normal enemies +22% damage
• A4: Elite enemies +25% damage
• A5: Bosses +25% max HP and +25% damage

These are the values on the level that unlocks each modifier, and they keep growing on every level above it: normal and elite enemies gain a little under 1% per level, bosses 1.5%. By A20 normal enemies have +40% HP and +38% damage, elites +42% and +40%, bosses +47.5% to both.

Early versions of the ladder opened at +7% and +10%. I moved the pressure to the front: A1 now hits noticeably harder, the growth per level is flatter, and A20 stayed exactly as hard as it was. If your deck was solid on base difficulty, it still works here, with far less margin for error.

Tier 2: Resource Pressure (A6–A8)

Now the game starts cutting your safety net:

• A6: Starting max HP −5, and 1 more for every second level above A6, up to −12 at A20
• A7: Battles give 20% less gold
• A8: Healing at Hot Springs and in events −25%

The same deck, the same fights, but you can’t afford to take as much damage, you can’t buy as freely, and you can’t heal your way out of mistakes. Resource management becomes a core skill, not an afterthought.

Tier 3: Adaptation Required (A9–A12)

This is where strategies start breaking:

• A9: A Wound is shuffled into your draw pile at the start of every battle
• A10: Event rewards reduced by 30%
• A11: Starting gold halved
• A12: Every status an enemy puts on you gets +1 stack each time

A9 is subtle but persistent. The Wound can’t be played, and if it’s in your hand when the turn ends, you take 1 damage. It clogs your draws in every single fight. A12 is where you feel real pain: every Poison, Vulnerable and Weak the enemy applies hits harder. Builds that relied on tanking debuffs and healing through them stop working.

Tier 4: Expert Territory (A13–A16)

Build strategy itself changes:

• A13: Card rewards offer 2 cards instead of 3
• A14: Elites appear from floor 4 instead of the middle of the act
• A15: Shop prices +25%
• A16: First turn of each battle: draw 1 fewer card

A13 means worse drafting luck: fewer options, harder to find that key card. A14 means elites show up before you’re ready. A16 is the one I feel most: your opening turn is weaker in every single fight. Combos that needed a full hand to set up on turn 1 no longer work.

Tier 5: Mastery (A17–A20)

Core mechanics get altered:

• A17: Bosses start the battle with 1 turn of Barrier
• A18: Synergy bonuses reduced by 25%
• A19: Ascender’s Bane in your starting deck: Unplayable, Innate, and it can’t be removed
• A20: All enemies start the battle with 1 Strength

A17 means you can’t burst a boss down on turn 1. Barrier halves attack damage, and it holds until the boss takes its first turn, so your opening turn against a boss is better spent on setup than on damage.

A18 changes the synergy math; it gets its own section below.

A19 adds permanent deck pollution. Ascender’s Bane can’t be played and can’t be removed, and since it’s Innate, it’s in your opening hand in every battle. Together with A16, that’s five opening cards instead of the base six, and one of them does nothing.

A20 is the last turn of the screw rather than the wall itself. Every enemy opens with 1 Strength, so its first turn hits 1 harder per hit; Strength decreases by 1 each turn, so the bonus is gone after that. What makes A20 hard is the nineteen modifiers before it, all at their highest values.

Why Tiers, Not Just Numbers

The most common approach to difficulty scaling in roguelikes is linear stat inflation. Enemies get X% more HP per level. It works, but it’s boring: the optimal strategy stays the same, you just need to execute it better.

Soul Strip’s tier system means the optimal strategy shifts every few levels. What works at A5 breaks at A9 because Wounds change your draw consistency. What works at A12 breaks at A16 because your opening hand is smaller. What works at A17 loses part of its engine at A18, because Fire and Ice synergies pay less.

This is intentional. Each tier targets a different pillar of deckbuilding:

Tier	What It Attacks	Player Response
1	Raw power	Build tighter decks
2	Resources	Manage HP and gold carefully
3	Consistency	Adapt to deck pollution and weaker rewards
4	Flexibility	Win with worse cards and earlier elites
5	Core assumptions	Rethink synergies and plan around a dead card

A18: The Synergy Cut

A18 deserves its own section, because it’s the modifier I rebuilt from scratch.

The synergy rule: play a second card of the same element in one turn, and that element pays a bonus. Every further card of the element that turn pays it again, doubled from the third card on. Fire’s Inferno deals 3 damage to the enemy, Ice’s Frostbite gives 4 Block, Shadow’s Eclipse applies 1 Weak to the enemy, Holy’s Divine Light heals 1 HP, and Void Storm draws 1 card.

Early on, A18 raised the threshold from 2 cards to 3. That stopped being difficulty once I re-costed the cards: a typical turn now plays about three cards, so “three of one element in one turn” wasn’t pressure, it was an off switch for the whole mechanic. It also made the card tooltip lie, because the tooltip printed the base threshold and knew nothing about the modifier.

Now A18 keeps the threshold at 2 and cuts every payout by 25%. The bonus is rounded and never drops below 1, so the cut lands unevenly. Inferno goes from +3 to +2 (from +6 to +5 on the third card), Frostbite from +4 to +3 (from +8 to +6). Eclipse, Divine Light and Void Storm keep their numbers. Measured in simulation on a fully upgraded account, the cut costs about 5 percentage points of win rate: a dial where the old version was a switch. The card tooltip shows the bonus you’ll actually get at your level.

How Hard Is A20

I tune the ladder with a simulator that plays full runs through the real battle code (more on it in this post about measuring balance). On a fully upgraded account, the target for A20 is 12–30% of runs won: a wall, not a farming lap and not a lottery. The measurement on version 1.0.2, 300 runs per level, put A0 at 68%, A15 at 20% and A20 at 9%, so for now A20 sits slightly below the target and is harder than planned. Those are a bot’s numbers on a maxed collection, not a promise for a fresh account.

The growth per level in tier 1 came out of an earlier mistake. When the stat modifiers were still flat, a maxed account cleared A20 in every simulated run and finished with more HP than at A0. The ladder was a farming lap, so the modifiers now grow with every level.

What Climbing Pays

Harder runs pay more, in three ways:

• Souls: every battle won pays 10% more souls per ascension level, up to +200% at A20.
• First clear: the first win at each level pays a one-time bounty of 20 souls per level, 400 souls at A20.
• Card packs: the three bosses of a run give better packs every five levels. From A15 on, the final boss gives an Ultimate pack.

Try It

Ascension opens after your first full win: three acts, three bosses. Soul Strip is on Steam, where you can add it to your wishlist.

More about the game: Soul Strip landing page

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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