I have yet to find the energy to write up a full review of my thoughts on the mechanics, but I can at least share some of the more important things:
1. The game is at its most fun and interesting when you're acquiring cards. The fact that you don't do this against the bosses is a letdown. This is mostly because a lot of the fun coming from seeing what your options are to improve your deck and how to spend your resources, but it's also because there are a number of cards that see huge swings in value (mostly negative) from not being able to contribute to acquiring more cards. I do like that the bosses have their own unique mechanics, though. Per #3 below, I think this might be less of an issue if the pacing were rebalanced to have more fights before the boss.
2. The lack of any type of action/energy/mana limit (ala Dominion, Slay the Spire, Hearthstone) limits the design space substantially and makes draw too powerful. it's also a big contributor to the boss fights being a letdown - there's almost no choices to be made once you're fighting the boss, it's just a question of whether your deck is good enough. I realize that moving in the direction of the games I mentioned is potentially asking for a lot of additional complexity, so I could understand if that's not a reasonable scope, but I do think the game would benefit a lot from this kind of mechanic. Even just a limit of (non-basic/starter?) cards played per turn could push things more in the direction of building for value rather than just spinning to win.
3. I'd be in favor of substantially modifying the game's pacing, though I'm not exactly sure what this should look like. But compare the number of combats in Slay the Spire to TF Card Battle. Obviously, you don't want TF Card Battle runs to take as long as those in StS, but I think you could have keep the run length similar but have more, shorter, higher-intensity fights. Currently, the pre-boss fights are basically only threatening if they have either the anti-draw or armor piercing modifiers. Even in these cases, it's rarely important to pay attention to what the enemy is doing - outside of the occasional situation where card sequencing substantially effects your block value, all that really matters is your deck state and how it interacts with your desired purchases for the turn. If the enemies were more threatening but also substantially faster to kill (and there were more of them), there'd be more of an ongoing sense of danger, and you might also be pushed into prioritizing having damage in your deck early. As it is, damage is an afterthought compared to econ and draw (and even block).
It occurs to me that this probably demands some kind of narrative contrivance, for which my suggestion would be that once you make a certain amount of progress against a particular enemy, they retreat, and then come back later after you've made some other enem(y/ies) retreat in similar fashion. And of course, one natural way to ramp up fight intensity that follows from that would be having more than one of them fight you simultaneously, which at the very least would increase the demand on your block output, but could also mean you can't deal damage as quickly if your damage is all single-target (and if you get to choose which enemy you're targeting, hey, more player choice).
4. One-shots are a particularly disappointing type of card given the game's structure. I can't both use them to build up for the boss fight, and also during the actual boss fight. This is also a problem that e.g. the money cards have, but at least I can use the money cards multiple times during the building phase. I think the big thing that could fix this is to make it more like StS, where exhaust cards remain part of your deck, and are just removed for the duration of the current fight. I realize that this is at odds with out Ditz cards work, but maybe those could be treated separately/there could be a difference between "remove for the fight" and "remove permanently"... or maybe it actually makes sense for the Ditzes to be "remove for the fight", too. Anyway, with this change in mind, I think these cards would also be helped by the change to pacing I suggested with #3, because then you get to play them more often in absolute terms (because there are more fights), and more often relative to other cards (because you don't shuffle your deck as many times after having used the one-shot, since the fight ends faster).
1. The game is at its most fun and interesting when you're acquiring cards. The fact that you don't do this against the bosses is a letdown. This is mostly because a lot of the fun coming from seeing what your options are to improve your deck and how to spend your resources, but it's also because there are a number of cards that see huge swings in value (mostly negative) from not being able to contribute to acquiring more cards. I do like that the bosses have their own unique mechanics, though. Per #3 below, I think this might be less of an issue if the pacing were rebalanced to have more fights before the boss.
2. The lack of any type of action/energy/mana limit (ala Dominion, Slay the Spire, Hearthstone) limits the design space substantially and makes draw too powerful. it's also a big contributor to the boss fights being a letdown - there's almost no choices to be made once you're fighting the boss, it's just a question of whether your deck is good enough. I realize that moving in the direction of the games I mentioned is potentially asking for a lot of additional complexity, so I could understand if that's not a reasonable scope, but I do think the game would benefit a lot from this kind of mechanic. Even just a limit of (non-basic/starter?) cards played per turn could push things more in the direction of building for value rather than just spinning to win.
3. I'd be in favor of substantially modifying the game's pacing, though I'm not exactly sure what this should look like. But compare the number of combats in Slay the Spire to TF Card Battle. Obviously, you don't want TF Card Battle runs to take as long as those in StS, but I think you could have keep the run length similar but have more, shorter, higher-intensity fights. Currently, the pre-boss fights are basically only threatening if they have either the anti-draw or armor piercing modifiers. Even in these cases, it's rarely important to pay attention to what the enemy is doing - outside of the occasional situation where card sequencing substantially effects your block value, all that really matters is your deck state and how it interacts with your desired purchases for the turn. If the enemies were more threatening but also substantially faster to kill (and there were more of them), there'd be more of an ongoing sense of danger, and you might also be pushed into prioritizing having damage in your deck early. As it is, damage is an afterthought compared to econ and draw (and even block).
It occurs to me that this probably demands some kind of narrative contrivance, for which my suggestion would be that once you make a certain amount of progress against a particular enemy, they retreat, and then come back later after you've made some other enem(y/ies) retreat in similar fashion. And of course, one natural way to ramp up fight intensity that follows from that would be having more than one of them fight you simultaneously, which at the very least would increase the demand on your block output, but could also mean you can't deal damage as quickly if your damage is all single-target (and if you get to choose which enemy you're targeting, hey, more player choice).
4. One-shots are a particularly disappointing type of card given the game's structure. I can't both use them to build up for the boss fight, and also during the actual boss fight. This is also a problem that e.g. the money cards have, but at least I can use the money cards multiple times during the building phase. I think the big thing that could fix this is to make it more like StS, where exhaust cards remain part of your deck, and are just removed for the duration of the current fight. I realize that this is at odds with out Ditz cards work, but maybe those could be treated separately/there could be a difference between "remove for the fight" and "remove permanently"... or maybe it actually makes sense for the Ditzes to be "remove for the fight", too. Anyway, with this change in mind, I think these cards would also be helped by the change to pacing I suggested with #3, because then you get to play them more often in absolute terms (because there are more fights), and more often relative to other cards (because you don't shuffle your deck as many times after having used the one-shot, since the fight ends faster).
