Turn Count Is the Resource: The Case for the Fastest Deck in the Game
The Ceremonial Beast gains 2 Strength every single turn for 252 HP. You do not beat that boss with a clever plan; you beat him with a clock, because every setup turn you buy is a turn he gets stronger and your block gets relatively worse. That is the entire thesis of the Claw archetype. Our builds page calls it the fastest kills in the game, and in a run where enemy intent is fully telegraphed and every boss runs a fixed loop, killing a fight before its dangerous turn arrives is a form of defense that no Block card replicates.
Look at what turn count actually buys you. Mecha Knight, widely considered the deadliest elite, runs a fixed loop ending in Heavy Cleave for 35 on turn four, and the bestiary advice for undercooked decks is to skip it entirely. A Claw deck that ends the fight on turn three never meets the 35. Owl Magistrate's Verdict lands 33 damage plus 4 Vulnerable on a fixed cycle; if the fight lasts half as long, you block half as many Verdicts. The beginner guide says HP is a resource and anything above 1 is spare. True, but turns are the scarcer resource, because HP regenerates at rest sites and turns do not regenerate anywhere.
Position this honestly. Claw Zero-Cost sits at A tier with a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5, one of the lowest bars on our builds page, which means the piloting load is light and the drafting discipline is the whole skill. Its listed core is Claw plus All for One plus FTL, with Scrape and Beam Cell named alongside them as the 0-cost cycle family. The ceiling is real and the floor is low: marathons like the 600 HP Test Subject #C10 expose the archetype, and the same build page names Dark-orb control as the polar opposite built for exactly those long fights.
One version note before the mechanics. This guide reflects v0.111 beta. The Defect of StS2 is not the Defect of the first game: the character page is explicit that permanent Focus stacking is gone, replaced by active channel and evoke play, and that the 0-cost Claw archetype returns and kills faster than anything else. Your starter relic, Cracked Core, channels 1 Lightning at combat start, which quietly matters more than it looks, and the evoke section explains why.
The Snowball Math: Why a Free Card That Grows Itself Compounds
Claw is a 0-cost common Attack that buffs every Claw for the rest of the combat when you play it. Two properties are doing the multiplying, and neither is impressive alone. Free means playing it never competes with your energy budget: a hand of five Claws empties into damage while your energy pays for everything else. Permanent means each play raises the ceiling for every copy you draw for the rest of the fight, not just the one in your hand.
Put the two together and you get compounding rather than adding. The first Claw of a fight is the weakest Claw you will play all fight. The second is stronger, the fifth stronger again, and by the time you have cycled your deck twice, every copy in the stack is carrying the accumulated growth of every prior play. Compare that with a flat card: Ball Lightning deals 7, upgraded 10, on cast one and on cast twenty identically. Claw's damage per shuffle grows every cycle even if you never add another card, which is the definition of a snowball and the reason commons, not rares, carry this archetype.
The deck-size lever follows directly. If you hold C copies of Claw in a deck of D cards, you draw each copy more often as D shrinks, and every extra sighting is another growth event. This is why card removal is not deck hygiene in this build, it is a damage multiplier: taking Strikes and Defends out of the deck raises your Claws-seen-per-shuffle, which raises both the per-copy damage and the speed at which the buff accumulates. Skipping card rewards is often correct in general, per the beginner guide, and in this deck specifically, a skipped mediocre card is worth more than a taken good one.
Upgrades and enchantments ride the same logic. Upgrading a Claw raises the floor for every future copy you draw, so early Claw upgrades are never wasted and Blessing of the Forge, the potion that upgrades every card in your hand for the rest of the combat, has its single best home on this deck if you drink it on turn one of a boss with a fistful of Claws. The Self-Help Book event, empowering a card in your deck, should point at a Claw for the same reason. When someone asks why a deck of commons beats a deck of rares, this arithmetic is the answer.
Zap and Dualcast: The Evoke Rhythm Every Defect Player Needs
Before the archetype makes sense you need the two starter cards to click. Zap channels 1 Lightning for 1 energy, and the database calls it the foundation of every orb deck. Dualcast evokes your rightmost orb twice for 1 energy. Channeling builds a line of orbs; evoking cashes them for their effect. The rhythm of this deck is channel on the cheap turns, evoke on the kill turns, and never confuse the two jobs.
The targeting detail is what separates adequate Defect play from good Defect play: Dualcast fires the rightmost orb, which is the most recently channeled one. Sequencing is therefore real. If you channel a Lightning with Zap and then channel another with Ball Lightning, the second one is what Dualcast will fire. Orbs are ammunition with an order, and you load the chamber last.
Cracked Core makes the opening automatic. It channels 1 Lightning at combat start, so Dualcast is live on turn one of every fight in the run before you have spent a card or any energy. That free turn-one evoke is why the speed line gets moving faster than any other deck in the game: turn one is Zap or Ball Lightning into next turn's Dualcast, or just Dualcast the starter orb immediately against 42 HP Nibbits that need to die before their Strength stacks grow.
A tempo rule worth internalizing: end fights at zero unspent orbs where the fight allows it. An orb left channeled when the last enemy dies is damage you banked and never withdrew. On kill turns, resolve your evokes before you dump Claws if the evokes are the bigger numbers, or weave the free Claws in between so each subsequent cast grows before the bigger plays resolve. The exact order depends on which is larger, and knowing which is larger is most of the micro-skill in this deck.
One classification note that becomes huge in Act 3: Dualcast is a Skill, and Test Subject #C10 phase one punishes skills with 2 enemy Strength per skill played. Claws are Attacks. In that specific fight you flip the usual rhythm, spam the free Claws freely and ration each Dualcast against what the Strength gain costs you. The card text calls Dualcast the key to Dark orb burst turns, which is also your escape hatch if the Claws never come, and the final section covers that pivot.
The Support Cast: Ball Lightning, Cold Snap, Compile Driver, Glacier, Defragment
Ball Lightning, 1-cost common Attack, deals 7 damage, 10 upgraded, and channels 1 Lightning. It is the mainstay of Lightning decks per its own text, and in this shell it does two jobs in one card: damage now, and ammunition queued for a later Dualcast. On turns where you cannot kill, Ball Lightning is how you bank tempo instead of losing it, which is the difference between a fast deck and a feast-or-famine one.
Cold Snap, 1-cost common Attack, deals 6, upgraded 9, and channels 1 Frost: offense and defense in one card, as the text puts it. The speed line still has turns it must survive, the Vantom turn-3 swing, the Verdict turn, and Cold Snap blocks without spending an entire turn only blocking. Against Fossil Stalker, whose Suck grants it 3 Strength on every unblocked hit, Frost passive output is exactly the leak-plugger that fight demands.
Compile Driver, 1-cost common Attack, deals 7, upgraded 10, and draws 1 card for each different orb type you have. With Lightning and Frost both online it draws two, and that is the cycle that finds your Claws. Its text calls it the draw engine of mixed-orb decks, and a mixed two-orb setup is precisely what this archetype wants: Cold Snap early gives you the second orb type, and Compile Driver converts that diversity into cards. In a deck whose engine lives in card count, a common that draws two is close to a second copy of the engine.
Glacier, 2-cost uncommon Skill, gains 6 Block, 9 upgraded, and channels 2 Frost. It is the heaviest defensive card available and mostly a sideboard piece: take one when the boss pool contains telegraphed killers like Mecha Knight's 35, and skip it when your kill speed makes such turns rare. Defragment is the interesting judgment call. Post-rework it is a rare, it grants 1 Focus, 2 upgraded, and the database notes it is the only stable Focus source left and that every orb deck wants it. But it spends a turn not killing, so the speed line treats it as a luxury: correct in Act 3 when Tempest has your orb count high and each Focus point multiplies more orbs, greedy before then. The pick order for a normal draw, in short: Claw first, Ball Lightning and Cold Snap next, Compile Driver once two orb types exist, Glacier for a specific danger, Defragment late.
Tempest, Echo Form and the Anatomy of a Kill Turn
Tempest is an X-cost uncommon Skill that channels X Lightning, X plus 1 upgraded: one card, a full board of orbs, as the text says. It is the reload. Everything cheap in this deck, the Claws, the Ball Lightnings, is spending orbs or making small numbers; Tempest is the moment you convert a whole turn's energy into next turn's ammunition, and then Dualcast cashes it twice per cast. Because it scales with the energy you have, every energy relic and every banked energy point is a direct multiplier on one card. Note again that Tempest is a Skill: against Test Subject #C10 phase one it feeds the skill punishment, so plan around it there.
Echo Form is the ceiling: a 3-cost rare Power where the first card you play each turn is played twice, Ethereal, and the database's own instruction is that it is the top upgrade priority in every Defect deck. What doubling means in this shell is specific. Lead with a Claw under Echo Form and you have played two Claws: double the damage and double the permanent growth, because the replay is another cast for buff purposes. Lead with Dualcast and you have four evokes' worth of the rightmost orb. The replay is a second copy of whatever you value most, every turn, for the rest of the fight.
Now assemble an actual kill turn. Say the fight is the Owl Magistrate, 234 HP, on its Ascend turn, the defensive step of its fixed 4-turn loop where it deals you nothing. You banked energy with Ice Cream, or you simply held cards. The sequence: Tempest at X equals 3 or 4 fills your orb line, Dualcast fires the newest orb twice, Dualcast again if drawn, and then every Claw in hand resolves free, each one buffed by every Claw played this entire fight. That single turn is where the snowball's accumulated value is paid out, and the Ascend window is why the speed line hunts for turns like it: enemies hand you free turns on fixed loops, and a deck that can dump its whole hand for free converts those turns into kills.
Commitment rule: spend everything inside the window the loop gives you, and hold your burst one turn for a telegraphed safe turn rather than firing into a turn you must block. Against Bygone Effigy, the sleep phase is the Tempest turn. Against the Owl, Ascend is. Reading the loop and cashing into it is the piloting skill this deck actually rewards, and it is why an easy-rated archetype still has a ceiling worth learning.
Assembly Order: Act 1 Picks, Skips and What to Remove
Your first three card rewards decide the run's shape. Claw is the first pick in almost every offering, and you keep taking them: this is the one archetype where the commons are the engine and a fourth Claw outranks most uncommons. Ball Lightning and Cold Snap come next as the damage-plus-orbs package, and Compile Driver jumps in value the moment you have two orb types, which usually means one Cold Snap early. Defends matter more than usual in Act 1a if the boss pool scares you: Vantom's turn 3 is a 25-plus swing and the site's counter note says full-block that turn, so keep enough defensive cards to actually block 25 once.
The skip list matters as much as the take list. Skip slow setup powers that pay off over ten turns, because this deck plans to end fights in four. Skip a second Glacier; one is a sideboard answer, two is a different deck. Skip expensive finishers that compete with Tempest for the same role at worse rates. And refuse Affliction-priced rewards categorically: our synergy page warns specifically that this deck fears Afflictions because debuffs stick to your cards permanently and a thin Claw deck can ill afford a single polluted card, and the map guide reminds you Afflictions cannot be shop-removed the way Curses could. A single Affliction latched onto a Claw is a permanent tax on the exact card your engine runs on.
Removal order: Strikes before Defends. The logic is asymmetric. Strike costs 1 energy for mediocre damage and competes with your 1-cost support cards; your 0-cost Claws make it strictly obsolete as an attack. Defends at least block the telegraphed turns you genuinely need to block on a 75 HP body. Every Strike removed raises Claws-seen-per-shuffle, which, as the snowball math showed, is a damage multiplier and not just hygiene. Spend shop gold on removals first, cards second, which the beginner guide rates as the best gold sink in general and this deck rates even higher.
Upgrade order: Claw first and repeatedly, because an upgraded Claw raises the floor of every future copy, then Compile Driver or Ball Lightning for the draws and damage. Bellows, the relic that upgrades your first hand each combat, and the Blessing of the Forge potion both spike in value here for the same reason. Campfire discipline follows the beginner guide's rule: if the next fight cannot kill you, upgrade instead of heal, because this deck's HP losses are concentrated in fights it was too slow for, and upgrades are what make it fast.
The Speed Line Act by Act: Every Timer and How to Beat It
Act 1a. Vantom is your dream matchup: 9 stacks of Slippery mean every hit deals 1 damage, and the site's counter note says to strip the stacks with cheap multi-hit attacks, which is a literal job description for a hand of free Claws. Full-block turn 3, kill inside the turn-4 self-buff window. The Kin wants the low-HP acolytes dead first while the priest debuffs from the back; free Claws split damage across bodies better than any expensive card, so kill the acolytes before their Strength stacks grow. Ceremonial Beast is the clock fight that named this playstyle: 2 Strength per turn means you race, push it through the stagger below 150 HP, and during Ringing, when you may only play 1 card per turn, play your single best card, an upgraded Claw or a Dualcast with a full orb line.
Act 1b. Waterfall Giant is a pure DPS race before its Steam Eruption stacks turn into a giant blast; the tip is to save your best Block and potions for the explosion turn, but the speed line's answer is simply to never let the stack count get there. Soul Fysh stuffs Beckon statuses into your deck, 1-cost cards that deal 6 unblockable damage if left unplayed; your 0-cost spam leaves energy free to play Beckons alongside it, and its Intangible on turns 4 and 5 means push damage before turn 4, because Intangible turns reduce your hits to trivial. Lagavulin Matriarch starts asleep and worsens the longer the fight runs, the opposite of a reason to slow down.
Act 2. Knowledge Demon forces a permanent debuff every round, 6 damage per turn or minus 1 draw, escalating into card and energy caps, while healing itself and gaining permanent Strength. Caps shrink turn size, which is a direct tax on a flood deck: kill it before the caps arrive. The Insatiable might be the archetype's best fight in the game: a Sandpit death timer starts at 4 and each Frantic Escape card in your deck buys a turn, so the fight wants you playing Escape cards constantly, and a deck whose damage costs 0 energy can play Escape cards and full offense in the same turn. Kaiser Crab's lethal move is the Rocket claw's 31 Laser: focus that claw and kill both within 1 or 2 turns to shrink the revenge window. Infested Prism at 200 HP is the litmus test of whether the engine is online; if it is not, skip elite paths and go upgrade.
Act 3. Frog Knight unleashes a one-time 35 beetle charge below half HP, so either hold 35 Block or kill it from above half. Owl Magistrate: dump during Ascend, block 33 plus on Verdict turns. Test Subject #C10, the 600 HP marathon, is this deck's limit test: attacks in phase 1, which favors Claws over Dualcast, perfect Block in phase 2 against the Wound shove, and strikes only on vulnerable turns in phase 3. The Queen punishes slow kills once the Torch Head Amalgam dies and she Enrages into an Execution loop; kill the Amalgam first and set up scaling in phase one.
Relic Fit: Unceasing Top, Brilliant Scarf and the Affliction Warning
Unceasing Top is the single best relic in the game for this archetype, and it is not close. Whenever your hand is empty during your turn, draw 1 card. A deck whose core card costs 0 empties its hand almost every turn as a matter of course, so the Top effectively converts your natural play pattern into a draw engine, feeding you Claws mid-turn while the growth is still compounding. The database calls it a draw engine for fast-cycling decks, and no deck cycles faster than this one.
Brilliant Scarf, the Ancient that makes the 5th card you play each turn free, was practically designed for this shell. Claw turns routinely play five or more cards, and while the Claws are already free, the discount lands on your 1-cost support, Ball Lightning, Cold Snap, Compile Driver, Dualcast, which is exactly where energy actually goes. Gremlin Horn, 1 energy and 1 draw whenever an enemy dies, chains through multi-body fights like the Wrigglers that spawn when Phrog Parasite dies or Entomancer's endless bees. Ice Cream conserving energy between turns is a direct Tempest multiplier, the biggest single-turn spike available. Lantern's first-turn energy starts the engine a turn early, and Emotion Chip, the Defect rare that triggers all orb passives at turn start if you lost HP last turn, converts the chip damage you inevitably take into free orb output.
The mid-tier picks still pull weight. Centennial Puzzle draws 3 the first time you lose HP each combat, which in a deck that sometimes skimps on block is a refuel trigger you will hit constantly. Festive Popper's 9 damage to all enemies at combat start deletes the margins on eggs and small pairs. Mercury Hourglass adds 3 to everything each turn, passive race damage that compounds with your own clock. Pen Nib doubles every 10th Attack you play, and a Claw deck reaches its 10th attack within two turns; the doubled hit keeps getting better as the buff grows. Akabeko's 8 Vigor at combat start boosts your opening attack, modest but free. Bag of Preparation and Gambling Chip fix opening hands, and this thin deck wants that fix more than most.
Two cautions. Snecko Eye draws 2 extra per turn but starts every combat Confused, randomizing card costs, and the community's 93.8 percent win rate on it does not transfer to a deck whose entire identity is that its engine costs 0; letting variance reprice your Claws is trading your edge for a generalist's relic. Fiddle, drawing 2 extra at turn start but no more draws that turn, directly fights Compile Driver chains and Unceasing Top. Pass both when something else is on the table.
Where the Speed Line Dies, and the Dark Orb Alternative
Know the four walls before you commit a run to this. Wall one is the marathon: Test Subject #C10 at 600 total HP across three phases, with DoTs resetting between phases and phase 3 alternating Intangible, is long enough that a snowball deck that finishes scaling by turn six hits a long flat stretch, and the build page's own advice is that Dark-orb control is the polar opposite built for long fights. Wall two is stacking Block: Tunneler burrows for 32 non-decaying Block and strikes for 23, and breaking all its Block stuns it, so your burst turn must crack 32 in one go or you settle into blocking 23 forever, which the speed line is not built to do before Tempest arrives. Wall three is pollution: one Affliction latched onto a Claw is a permanent tax, and events that attach debuffs to existing cards should be refused on sight. Wall four is variance: a thin deck that draws its five Defends against a telegraphed killer loses a race turn it cannot afford, which is why Bag of Preparation, Gambling Chip and Centennial Puzzle rate so highly here.
The pivot, when the draft refuses to cooperate, is inside your own starter kit. Dualcast's card text names it the key to Dark orb burst turns, and the Dark-orb control deck is the same rhythm with different ammunition: channel, bank, evoke twice, repeat, trading the Claw deck's turn-four kills for late-fight inevitability. If you have reached Act 2 with two Dualcasts, orb support and no Claws in sight, stop forcing the snowball and let Tempest and the evoke engine carry you as a Lightning-and-Dark hybrid. The Frost turtle, Glacier plus Cold Snap behind stacked Frost, is the defensive fallback for high Ascension climbs where HP floors are tight and the map punishes greed.
The honest tier framing: Claw Zero-Cost is A tier, not S. Exhaust Block and Doom Execute out-scale it in the longest fights, and Sly Discard owns the single-turn damage ceiling. What nothing else on the roster does is kill the median fight this fast, and on a map where every telegraphed loop punishes slowness, being the fastest deck in the game is a win condition in its own right. Draft the commons, thin the deck, cash into the free windows, and let the bosses meet their dangerous turns already dead.