Basic Guide To Guarantee Wins In Late Game.
This guide is intended for players in the final levels of the game (difficulty 6+). I discovered this build naturally while playing through the final level and have found it very easy to force into any level. For example the screenshot in this post was taken on floor 2 of a run. This build assumes that you have unlocked most colored wildcards and have the ability to bring in 3 crawlers at the start.
TLDR:
Do high combo, make big damage, make brain happy.
Town Setup Pre-Game:
The basis of the build is to utilize the card draw abilities of Poe, Giovanna, and Pugnala. With all three of these character crawlers in your team, you will get passive card draw when playing any blue, purple or yellow card.
Pugnala will be chosen as our main of the group as choosing her will allow us to start with both a duration card and a tome.
I heavily reccomend the "Make a Scene" arcana as it will allow you to essentially start with a bonus 3 hand after your first encounter of a run.
you do not need to worry about the blacksmith in order to make this build work. Using this build I was able to beat the final boss without any added slots save one slot added on the 0 cost tome, which did not make too much of a difference. you will want to focus your money on upgrades like crawler slots, hand draw, magnet, cooldown, and rerolls/skips.
Build Core:
The main source of damage in this build will come from cycling massive combo numbers that will allow us to clear any fight in our first turn. The combo multiplier increases almost every number effect on all of your cards, this can mean that tomes will provide substatially more mana, one time use yellows can be made to max stats in one use, and most importantly damage cards will scale their damage to absurd numbers.
The way we will do this is by abusing wild cards to "reset" our combo number back to 0. In the early floors of a run your main goal will be to aquire wildcards and tomes. These tomes and wildcards will allow us to start each encounter by running a 0 cost tome into a 1 cost tome etc up to 3 cost, then "reset" with a wild card and repeat. Becuase tomes are purple, each use will pull more cards to your hand until you get to the point that merely using the tomes will pull them straight back into your hand as they are being used. once a significant combo has been built up, you can then combo into your damage cards which will decimate the screen.
The most important game mechanic for this build:
As you cycle your cards you will notice that they will begin to crack from repeat usage, continued usage will break the card removing it from your deck completely. Once a card is cracked do not continue to use them until the encounter is over, they will reset to normal after the end of an encounter. You can very easily crash your run by breaking important cards. alternatively this mechanic can be used to remove cards you do not want later in the run as you will likely end up with a bloated deck of over 50+ cards.
Boss Fights:
I know that it is strange to discuss boss fights before explaining the stages of the build but this advice can be applied to any strategy or build in the game. As you get further into the game, bosses will begin taking an action during your turn every few cards you play. The best way to mitigate these actions is by using the Clock Lancet on the boss. Using the Lancet will freeze the boss for an amount of turns, or until damaged. when frozen the eye ticker will continue to progress, however no action will be taken upon completion of the circle. This means that you can effectively dodge any attack from a boss as long as you save a lancet when they are about to attack. This works on all bosses, including trickster and reaper. In the case of this build, you can use a Lancet once some combo has been stacked up to freeze the boss for up to thousands of turns. Additionally you will do more damage on the first hit on a boss after freezing to make sure to use your highest damage cards first when waking them back up.
Early Game:
Early game you will want to prioritize tomes 0-3, wildcards and various yellow cards. You will want to mostly avoid red cards early on as damage can be handled by the guns you start with.
The early game is when you will need your important cards fast. Do not be afraid to use your rerolls and skips to get what you want and avoid early bloat.
For tomes I generally reccomend having 2-3 0-cost, 1-2 1-cost, and 1 of the 3 and 4 cost tomes
it is very important in your first encounters to use the duration card you start with to build up the stacks of your three active crawls until you are able to build a combo that all but ensures they'll be active well past the end of your run (for example the screenshot on this post shows me having over 300 stacks of each crawl in floor 2 of a level).
There are a few great cards that you can use in order to allow you to snowball as the run progresses. I prefer to focus on getting a Crown early on which when used at high enough combo numbers can put your xp bonus at the cap of 1000% in a sigle use (Though I tend to use about 2-3 in order to level up quicker early on). You can use this same principle on stone mask for gold gain, and tirajisu to get to 4 revives. Multi-use yellows are also very good to max out stats like bonus damage with spinach and spellbinder to never have to re-prime crawlers.
Another great card to get early on is attractorb as it can save your skin early in encounters to get the cards you need into your hand by its natural card draw effect stacked on top of Pugnala's crawl draw.
Mid Game:
For our build mid game will take place around floor 2-3 of a run. At this point you should have a good basis to consistently stack up combos into the 30-40 range. At this stage you'll want to focus on replacing your guns with their evolution by combining them with a tirajisu. you should have about 2-5 wildcards and be leveled to around 30-40 by abusing Crowns. Your main goal now will be to get 2-3 lancets for boss fights along with focusing on getting weapon evolution peices to start pumping damage late game. I highly reccomend looking to fuse the birds together as their damage potential is massive.
Late Game:
At this point you will likely be able to run the build with whatever weapons or combos you prefer. As you get into the latest portions of the final dungeons you will now be required to cycle through all of your cards not just your tomes and yellows. You will want to focus on cycling your tomes first, then yellows, then damage cards. For example: in the final boss fight of the last dungeon I had around 40 cracked cards in my hand by the time I was finishing off the boss. You will want to focus heavily on finding a good "sweet spot" for deck bloat as you will want enough cards to stack high combos while also ensuring that you are able to get the cards you need in your initial draw. I find that the 50-60 range is best but you may prefer lower in order to avoid the instant death draws. Continue stacking your combos well and you will be able to easily beat the final boss with no damage taken.
Misc Tips:
Its very helpful to use Holloow Hearts to stack up your health to generate a buffer in the event of a bad initial card draw. You can stack your health into the multiple hundreds with high enough combos, and replenish said health with high combo uses of pummarola and pummadora.
I find the twin gun and twin bird evolutions to do the most damage but you should play around with evolutions and stamp combos to see what works best for you.
For a safer setup during bosses, avoid killing the waves of mobs that come before the actual boss as this will allow you to not need to worry about the eye cycles, once a significant combo has been stacked up you will be able to clear all of the mobs and possibly even the boss with one damage card allowing you to mostly ignore the eye cycles if done correctly.
I highly recommend using a controller when using this build as it becomes very difficult to locate cards fairly early on into a run. the ability to more easily look through cards on the dpad is in my opinion much much easier than trying to use a mouse.
Final Notes:
As always this is a game with lots of choices so don't be afraid to modify or completely ignore this strategy. I believe this may be the strongest non-rng build possible but there are likely many more ways to abuse the game mechanics. Have fun, experiment, and enjoy the game crawlers!