"The remaining soldier of the Ironclads. Sold his soul to harness demonic energies."
The Ironclad is one of four playable characters in Slay the Spire. He wields an arsenal of powerful strikes, boasts formidable defensive options, and draws fiendish strength from his demonic benefactors to empower himself in various ways. He starts off with 80 hp, highest of the playable characters, and can manipulate Exhaust.
The Ironclad's starting Relic is Burning Blood, which heals 6 HP after combat.
These are the standard types of decks that may give you an idea of direction for your deck, or what you want to go for. Keep in mind that none of these builds are mutually exclusive. Many of them are more of a general strategy, which can be adapted or combined into multiple builds in a single deck.
This strategy focuses on building up Block over multiple turns, potentially eliminating incoming damage. Plated Armor is an excellent fit in this build.
Barricade may be substituted by Calipers, provided that you have a consistent Block per turn.
Keep in mind that Barricade+ costs 2 energy and won't instantly boost your damage/block, so playing it may weaken you on the turn played.
Body Slam and Juggernaut are excellent sources of damage, which is still important to win.
Though not an intuitive choice, Second Wind can be used to thin out extraneous Block cards once enough Block is built up, letting the player more reliably draw attacks and rely on Entrench to maintain their Block.
This build focuses on increasing Strength and multiplying its power through the choice of attacks. Attacks that hit multiple creatures, or hit multiple times scale more effectively with Strength.
Reaper becomes a very powerful healing tool with high Strength, especially when paired with a Magic Flower.
If Limit Break is upgraded, you can cast it multiple times for exponential strength gain. Headbutt and a small deck size help you cast it more often. Relics and potions that grant some initial strength are very helpful in case you draw Limit Break within the first few turns.
Corruption makes all Skills cost 0 in exchange for exhausting them upon use, but Dead Branch would generate a replacement for used skill. If Dead Branch generates another Skill, then you can use another Skill again for free.
Most of Ironclad Skills grant high Block, allow you to easily tank damage once you use multiple of them. If possible, use Barricade beforehand to allow Block you've gained not to be wasted between turns.
Some of Ironclad Skills grant Energy. Special notes goes to Seeing Red which normally cost 1 un-upgraded. With Corruption, it becomes a free 2 Energy generation. Spend Energy gained on other crucial cards on your hand, such as Power card or Attacks.
Fiend Fire can generate a lot of random cards with Dead Branch, which gives more chance to generate random 0-cost Skills cards
Unlike the normal exhaustion and defense strategies above (which focus on building up power over time), your goal here is to try and make your deck almost entirely out of skills, get out Corruption and Dark Embrace together, then burn through your entire deck in one turn to raise your defense, with doubling effects from Entrench played last, finally followed by one or more Body Slams to kill the enemy in one hit.
The essential cards are Corruption, Dark Embrace, Entrench, and Body Slam, plus cards like Impervious,Shrug It Off, and Sentinel to build defense before you double it with Entrench. Provided you keep your deck overwhelmingly tilted towards skills and fill it with lots of card draw, you should only need to draw Corruption and Dark Embrace before you start comboing off; the rest of the combo will be found as you draw your deck. Multiple copies of Entrench or Body Slam (or things that duplicate them) are still extremely valuable; you also want to upgrade Corruption, Dark Embrace, and Body Slam to reduce the cost of the combo so you can deploy it faster.
It's also important to have cards that let you dig for your combo, such as Shrug It Off, Burning Pact, and Offering. Beyond just letting you dig for your combo, these let you draw past attack cards when comboing off.
Hitting your hand maximum is a serious problem, especially if you obtain multiple copies of Dark Embrace or large numbers of card-drawing skill cards.Bloodletting can help you play other cards to get them out of your hand and can provide the energy you need to play Corruption and Dark Embrace as soon as possible. Burning Pact allows you to get unwanted cards out of your hands while drawing a large amount. Once the combo is deployed, Sentinel will both provide additional Block and a large amount of free energy to play out the rest of your hand. True Grit can be used to avoid cards getting clogged in your hand, but it's extremely important to upgrade it to avoid the risk of having it hit your combo pieces. Offering both draws you cards and gives you energy to play your non-skills.
Powers that provide persistent benefits to your defense or exhaustion intended to help you over multiple turns or which give you minor benefits for exhausts and blocks are somewhat less useful to you, since your goal is to combo off in a single turn for overwhelming damage rather than slowly accumulating benefits; but they're still worth collecting, since they give you a backup strategy in case you can't get all your combo pieces or something else goes wrong.Barricade is particularly useful because it allows you to, if necessary, split your combo over multiple turns, or to accumulate Block slowly before you finally get everything you need to go off.
An alternative but similar strategy is to use Juggernaut, Corruption, and Feel No Pain. Each defensive skill played is worth an additional 10-14 damage.Iron Waves are good fallbacks.
Removals should focus on getting rid of your Strikes rather than your Defends; while your Defends aren't as good as your other Block cards, they can still be cycled through for free once you have Corruption and Dark Embrace out.
Prayer Wheel works very well with this deck as it gives you twice as many occasions to add Strike cards.
Dual Wield increases the power of the deck a lot more than usual, increasing the damage of each Perfected Strike by up to 6, and increasing the amount to be drawn.
A 4th energy is particularly important to be able to play multiple copies if desired.
True Grit and Evolve are your high-priority targets for upgrades, as True Grit+ lets you decide which card to Exhaust, and Evolve+ increases your draws instead of replacing them, greatly speeding up your deck.
Top it off with Fire Breathing for a nice passive AoE damage. A normal draw full of Status can easily turns into 30-50 damage to ALL enemies. With multiple copies this can easily be your main source of damage.
Only run multiple copies of Fire Breathing if you're quickly and consistently getting out Evolve, or you'll only slow your deck down.
This build mitigates the power of most Status inflicting enemies, and synergizes well with many other deck types.
Medical Kit greatly improves your ability to manage your Status cards, improving your performance in long-term fights. It also negates the self-damage from Immolate.
Card draw like Battle Trance and Pommel Strike+ is important for digging through your deck and getting Evolve set up as soon as possible.
Masochist Deck
Utilizes Rupture and cards that deal damage to you, aiming to finish fights quickly.
Each use of Rupture increases Strength gained per trigger. You may stack it 2 or 3 times to quicken your Strength growth.
Unless you want additional card draw or AoE damage, you would not need more than 1 copy of these two, as stacking them increases health loss but not Rupture'sStrength gain.
Strength gain from Rupture is consistent if built for, but it can be slow. Limit Break+ can help multiplying your Strength to finish fights before you lose too much health.
TheBlue Candle allows you to hurt yourself by exhausting curse cards.
Reaper benefits from the Strength gain and provides some much needed healing.
J.A.X. is a chance encounter, but grants you both health loss to trigger Rupture while also grants you Strength on its own.
Any cards that benefit from gain are good here.
Draw to get your combo together is very helpful. Make sure to get some defense to keep outside damage taken low.
Blood for Blood does significant damage and will quickly become cheap or free with Brutality or Combust. Having a solid 0-cost attack lets you take advantage of the extra cards drawn from Brutality, and can tide you over if you don't find Rupture early on (or draw it early in the fight).
Get Dropkick and remove as many other cards as possible. Once you have 2 Dropkicks or 1 Dropkick + Dual Wield, you can play Bash + lnfinite Dropkick. Upgraded Offering is very useful in this build because it can draw 5 cards, which means that you can infinite kicks with a 10 card deck.
This is an easy to assemble but strong build. It can be done with restarting short games to get Dropkick early.
If you manage to get Snecko Eye during first Boss fight, you can go for cards with high energy costs as main damage dealer: Bludgeon, Carnage and Immolate are the best, while Sever Soul and Fiend Fire can help with clutter.
Dual Wield is what makes this build shine: getting two zero cost Bludgeons is usually enough to finish a fight.
Defensively it's possible to focus exclusively on Flame Barrier.
Going for Perfected Strike build is a sound strategy prior to getting Snecko Eye, since Boss rewards are rather random.
Keep the deck small with cards to support your Rampage, preferably upgraded one, and use it repeatedly.
A balance between draw power like Battle Trance, Warcry, etc. and defense is good as Rampage can scale up quickly as main damage source with appropriate support cards, Shrug It Off is a great card as it provide both.
Best support card for Rampage is Double Tap, which ram up the power twice, and Headbutt can allow you to search for Rampage to be used more frequently.
If possible, Vulnerable relics and cards can be devastating for enemies if combined with a well scaled Rampage.
Avoid cards that give Status like Wild Strike, Reckless Charge, or Immolate. It can make Rampage become inaccessible or less likely to be drawn later in fight, which defeat the purpose of the card. Only take them if you have Evolve+, and even then just reckless charge unless you have Medical Kit or Second Wind to prevent situations where your hand is full of status cards.
Burning Blood, which heals 6 HP after combat.
Red Skull
Paper Phrog, 
Self-Forming Clay
Champion Belt, 
Charon's Ashes, 
Magic Flower
Black Blood (replaces 
Mark of Pain, 
Runic Cube
Brimstone
High Defense Deck
High Strength Deck
Dead Branch Deck
Snecko Eye Deck
Omamori, 
Prayer Wheel, 
Shovel
Blue Candle, 
Singing Bowl
