Why Exhaust Block Is Rated the Strongest Ironclad Deck at High Ascension
The premise is one sentence from the site's build database: Corruption makes skills free but Exhaust, Dark Embrace draws off Exhaust, Feel No Pain blocks off Exhaust, Barricade keeps Block forever, and Body Slam converts it to damage. That is the whole deck. Every skill in your deck becomes 0 cost. Playing those free skills exhausts them. Exhausting them draws you cards and grants you Block. Barricade means the Block never goes away at end of turn. Body Slam hits for the size of your Block pool. Five pieces form a loop where your resources regenerate each other, which is why the database rates it S tier, calls it widely considered Ironclad's strongest high-Ascension deck, and stamps it a difficulty 3 out of 5 to reflect how much judgment the assembly takes.
Why does it dominate at high Ascension specifically, where fights stretch and enemy damage compounds? Because the deck's output scales with fight length rather than energy. A normal deck has 3 or 4 energy a turn and converts it into maybe 15 block and 10 damage. This deck spends 0 energy on most of its cards, so the same 3 energy becomes draw, block, and damage simultaneously, and Barricade banks whatever you did not need this turn into every future turn. Long fights, elite stacking, and Ascension's inflated enemy HP punish decks that run out of scaling. This deck cannot run out of scaling; it can only run out of cards, and Dark Embrace is the piece that answers that.
The host character matters too. Ironclad starts at 80 HP, the highest in the roster, and Burning Blood heals 6 HP after every combat. That combination funds the greedy route this deck wants: more elites, more relics, more chances to find the missing engine piece, with the HP pool absorbing the bad fights a greedier path occasionally walks into. A 66 HP character trying to play this route dies to variance; the Ironclad shrugs it off by design.
What the deck is not: fast. It does not spike a boss on turn two the way a Claw or Star deck can. It wins by making the enemy's damage irrelevant around turn four or five, then grinding with Body Slam until the number is big enough. That profile has one soft counter-pattern, fights that punish you for the passage of turns or for exhausting cards, and this guide spends a full section on those matchups because they are where otherwise-winning runs go to die. Everything here reflects v0.111 beta, Early Access, after the August balance pass.
The Five Core Pieces and What Each One Is Actually For
Corruption is the engine block: a 3 cost rare Power, skills cost 0 but Exhaust when played, per the database the engine of the Exhaust-Block archetype. The card text is short and the implications are long. Every Shrug It Off, every True Grit, every defensive and utility skill in your deck becomes free, permanently, for the rest of the fight. The price is that none of them come back. Corruption converts your deck from a renewable resource into a one-time pile of fuel, and the next cards are what make that trade good.
Dark Embrace is the fuel pump: it draws cards when you exhaust them. Under Corruption plus Dark Embrace, every skill you play is 0 cost and draws a replacement, so your hand never empties and your deck cycles several times its natural size in one fight. The database's one line summary, draws off Exhaust, is the entire economy of the deck: exhaust stops being a cost and becomes a draw trigger.
Feel No Pain is the armor plating: it grants Block whenever you exhaust a card. Now every free skill under Corruption is not just a free effect plus a draw, it is also block generation, and the enemy status cards that get shoved into your deck stop being liabilities and become raw material. A Wound in your hand under Feel No Pain is a block card in disguise.
Barricade is the storage tank: block no longer expires at end of turn; the database's phrase is keeps Block forever. Without it, your Feel No Pain output is capped by the incoming damage of a single turn. With it, surplus block compounds across the whole fight, 8 leftover this turn, 15 the next, until you are sitting on 60 block in front of a 25 damage attack and spending your energy on offense.
Body Slam is the cannon: an uncommon 1 cost Attack that deals damage equal to your Block, and the database flags the upgrade as the point, because it costs 0. This is the card that converts the entire defensive machine into a win condition. Forty banked block plus a 0 cost Body Slam is a 40 damage attack that costs nothing, every turn, for the rest of the fight. Learn the pieces as a pipeline: Corruption feeds exhaust, exhaust feeds draw and block, Barricade stores block, Body Slam spends it. Any adjacent pair is a functional deck. All five is the machine the S tier rating is about.
Assembly Order: What to Pick First and What to Leave in the Pile
Act 1 does not care about your five card combo. The act's job is to kill you with 12 to 14 damage attacks while your deck is still starter cards, and the Act 1 rule for this archetype is the same as for every Ironclad run: damage first. The good early targets are the site's own staples: Bash applies Vulnerable for +50 percent attack damage taken, Anger is a 0 cost attack that fills out your hand for free, and Pommel Strike damages and draws, drawing twice when upgraded. Those cards carry floors 1 through 6, and since v0.101 floor 6 no longer spawns elites, you have room to collect them before the first real check.
Then the exhaust picks, in order of what you can safely run. True Grit first: a 1 cost common, gain 7 Block, 9 upgraded, and Exhaust a random card, with the upgrade letting you choose. The database calls it the starter motor of Exhaust decks, and the reason is that it works with zero other pieces: it blocks, it exhausts, it thins, and it teaches you the mechanic before you have the payoffs. Shrug It Off, 8 block and a draw, 11 upgraded, slots in beside it as the best common defensive pick in any Ironclad deck, engine or not.
Body Slam is the next priority, and it is a low pressure one, because it is only an uncommon. Take it early even with modest block, because the upgrade to 0 cost is the single largest spike the deck ever gets, and a campfire spent on Body Slam is never wasted. Between an early Body Slam and an early flashy rare, the correct pick is usually the Body Slam you can use today.
The rares are where discipline starts. Barricade you can take almost any time you can pay for it: it asks nothing of the rest of the deck, it just stops your block from decaying. Corruption is the one that demands respect: with no draw or block payoff for exhaust yet, playing it in a long fight burns your deck for tempo that runs out mid-fight. The assembly heuristic in one line: payoffs before engine. Dark Embrace or Feel No Pain in hand makes Corruption a monster; Corruption alone makes it a countdown timer on your own resources. If the rares never come, the same Act 1 front-load pivots cleanly into Strength: Inflame at 2 Strength, 3 upgraded, Demon Form at 2 per turn, 3 upgraded, both rated premium pieces of the class's other S tier build.
The Danger Window: Playing Half an Engine Without Dying
Every Exhaust Block run has a stretch, usually mid Act 1 through mid Act 2, where you own some of the machine and are drafting for the rest. This is where runs die, and the deaths are specific enough to name.
Corruption without Dark Embrace or Feel No Pain is the classic. You play it, your skills go free, the fight feels amazing for three turns, and then you are topdecking while the Terror Eel, at 140 HP one of the beefiest Act 1 elites, keeps hitting you. Corruption without payoffs converts card advantage into tempo, which wins short fights and loses long ones. The fix is sequencing: if Corruption is your first rare, either find the payoff fast or hold the card for the fights where it matters and win the filler fights normally.
Barricade without block generation is quieter and equally dead. You pay 3 energy for a power that preserves block you were not generating anyway. It is fine to draft early because it never rots, but do not let it substitute for actually picking up Feel No Pain and block commons; preserved 8 block is still 8 block. Body Slam without a big block pool is a 1 cost attack dealing whatever your turn's block happened to be, playable but unexciting, so treat it as a bonus damage card until the storage comes online.
The general rule for the window: keep drafting for the machine, but keep playing for the fight in front of you. Test the half-engine on one normal fight per floor, never on the elite, and watch what actually happens to your hand size. And use the shop, because the site's economy advice, that removing a starter Strike or Defend is usually the best gold sink, applies double here: under Corruption you will eventually play every skill in the deck for free, and starter Defends are the worst fuel in the tank. Trim them before Act 2.
One more window note that is easy to forget: campfire upgrade slots are scarce, and the order matters. Body Slam first, since 0 cost is the whole card. The payoff powers second, since their numbers are what the machine runs on. Corruption last of all, because the base version already does the entire job the day you draft it. Runs that upgrade in that order come out of the danger window two floors earlier than runs that upgrade whatever they drew that morning.
Act 1 Plan by Variant: Earning the Right to Draft the Engine
Check which Act 1 you rolled before pathing, because the two variants share almost nothing. Overgrowth offers Bygone Effigy at 127 HP cycling asleep and awake, Byrdonis at 91 HP, and Phrog Parasite at 61 to 64 HP. Underdocks offers the Phantasmal Gardener fight, four bodies at 26 to 31 HP, Skulking Colony at 79, and Terror Eel at 140. Same principles, different execution, and the routing note about rest sites before elites applies to both.
The matchup that actually instructs this deck is Skulking Colony, because it is a direct counter to your finisher. The Colony caps the damage it takes per hit, and the database says it hard-counters single-big-hit decks. Body Slam is a single big hit; a 60 damage slam into the cap deals cap damage and nothing more. The answers, in order: Whirlwind, X cost, 5 damage to all enemies X times, 8 upgraded, converting any Strength you drafted into multi-hit; Charon's Ashes, the relic dealing 3 to all enemies per exhaust, ticking through everything; and plain attrition, because Feel No Pain block plus a modest slam every turn outlasts a 79 HP elite if nothing else works.
Phrog Parasite is the mirror image, a fight this deck eats. It alternates Infect, shoving 3 Infection statuses into your discard, with a 4 by 4 Lash, and on death triggers Infested, spawning 4 stunned Wrigglers with the fight only ending when all of them die. The database tip says save AoE for phase two and clear Infections with Exhaust or Transform effects. You are the exhaust deck. The Infections are fuel for Feel No Pain and draws for Dark Embrace, and Charon's Ashes sweeps the Wrigglers while you do it.
Bygone Effigy wants setup during sleep and block held for the wake-up turn; with Barricade you can bank block during the sleep phase and be nearly unkillable on the wake. Terror Eel at 140 HP is the staying power test, and a functioning draw-block loop is exactly staying power. The Gardener fight's Skittish 6 grants them Block on the first hit each turn, punishing multi-hit, so spend single big plays, one gardener at a time, and note that a Body Slam is a single big play.
The Act 1 bosses are this deck's easiest stretch. Vantom's loop puts a 25-plus swing on turn 3 and a self-buff window on turn 4. The Kin is an ordering exercise, acolytes first, priest last. Ceremonial Beast staggers below 150 HP into Ringing, where you may play one card per turn, and a 0 cost Body Slam in front of banked Barricade block is exactly one very good card per turn. Burning Blood refunds 6 HP per combat, which quietly pays for the whole route.
Act 2 in the Hive: The Litmus Test and the Status-Card Bonanza
The Hive is the litmus test, and the site's act notes say it directly: your engine must be online before Act 2, or skip elite paths. Infested Prism at 200 HP is the gatekeeper that checks whether the build came online; if the machine is assembled it is a long slow win, and if it is not, path around elites and buy time. Since this deck's power scales with fight length, Act 2's inflated elite HP is less scary for you than for aggro decks, provided the pieces exist. That proviso is the entire act.
Act 2 is also where enemy status cards start flowing, and for every other deck that is harassment while for you it is lunch. Haunted Ship rams for 10 and shoves 2 Wounds on turn 1, then Haunts with debuffs and no damage on turn 2, the all-out turn. Mecha Knight's Flamethrower puts 4 Burns in your hand, and the tip is to play or exhaust them immediately. Entomancer summons bees all fight, so Whirlwind with a couple of Strength sources is the plan. Every Wound, Burn and Infection shoved at you is another Feel No Pain block and another Dark Embrace draw once the engine is live, which flips the usual Act 2 misery into your best act.
The bosses, matched up. Knowledge Demon at 321-plus HP is the hardest in the game per the site: every round forces a permanent debuff choice between 6 damage per turn and one fewer drawn card, later escalating into card and energy caps, plus self-healing and permanent Strength. The strategy line is to race aggressively, and to punish its multi-hit turns with retaliation effects like Thorns or Flame Barrier. The drawn-card debuff specifically attacks Dark Embrace's value, so convert draws early before the choice lands.
Kaiser Crab at 209 plus 199 claws: you are Surrounded, hits from the claw at your back deal 50 percent more, the Rocket claw's 31 damage Laser is the kill move, and when one claw dies the other gains Strength and a huge Block bonus. Focus the Rocket claw, then kill both within a turn or two to shrink the revenge window. Your big single hits care nothing for the facing penalty as long as they land on the correct claw.
Then the matchup this guide has to name in bold letters: The Insatiable, 321 HP, with a Sandpit death timer that starts at 4, and at zero you lose, period. Each Frantic Escape card in your deck buys one more turn, and the database tip says always play Escape cards, never exhaust cards carelessly, and spend everything. A deck whose entire mechanic is exhausting itself is the worst possible profile here. Consider simply not playing Corruption in this fight, hoard instead of burn, and let Feel No Pain and Body Slam carry the race.
Act 3 in Glory: Where the Finished Machine Pays Out
Glory is where the machine pays out, and its elites are a fixed syllabus. The Knight Gang has a strict order: Magi Knight first at 82 HP, because while it lives all your cards are Downgraded and it cycles toward a 35 damage Magic Bomb; Spectral Knight second at 93, because its Hex makes every card in your hand Ethereal, discarded at turn end if unplayed; Flail Knight last at 101, tankiest of the three, so block the Rams and mop up. A Barricade deck handles all three comfortably, because banked block makes Downgrade and Ethereal pressure survivable, and Body Slam cares nothing for card quality debuffs, only the block number underneath.
Soul Nexus at 234 HP always opens with Soul Burn 29, then cycles it with a 6 by 4 Maelstrom and an 18 damage Drain that applies 2 Vulnerable and 2 Weak, never repeating back to back. Entry fee: 29 block on turn one, which for you is an investment rather than a tax, because Barricade keeps it for the rest of the fight. Mecha Knight at 300 HP, 3 Artifact, fixed loop of Charge 25, Flamethrower Burns, Windup, and 35 damage Heavy Cleave, is called the deadliest elite in the game; the database says undercooked decks should skip it. Yours, if online, is not undercooked: hold 40-plus block for the Cleave, skip attacking on Windup turns, and let Ashes tick the whole time.
Test Subject C10 is the boss that reads like it was written to examine this deck: 100, 200, 300 HP phases. Phase one punishes skills with +2 Strength, and under Corruption you are flooding skills, so pivot that phase to attacks and Body Slam. Phase two shoves Wounds for unblocked damage, which Feel No Pain converts into armor. Phase three alternates Intangible, so strike only on vulnerable turns. DoTs reset between phases, and the tip line says scaling powers win; Corruption, Dark Embrace, Feel No Pain and Barricade are four scaling powers, which is the whole matchup in one sentence.
The Queen, around 400 HP plus a 199 guard: kill the Torch Head Amalgam first or she Enrages into an Execution loop; turn 2 slams 99 stacks of Weak, Vulnerable and Frail, and Artifact is the listed answer; her Chains bind the first cards you draw each turn, allowing only one Bound card per turn, while mid-turn draw stays unrestricted. This deck is nearly immune to the Bound restriction because its turns are two or three large cards, not ten small ones. Aeonglass rounds out the Act 3 pool alongside C10 and the Queen; treat it with the same respect and pre-plan the burst window rather than improvising it.
Relics That Multiply the Machine: Charon's Ashes and Friends
Charon's Ashes first, and it is not close: a rare relic where whenever you Exhaust a card, you deal 3 damage to ALL enemies, which the database names the Exhaust deck multiplier. The site's synergy page does the arithmetic: with Corruption cycling 5-plus cards a turn it becomes a free damage multiplier. Call it 15-plus AoE damage per turn for doing what you were doing anyway, which patches the deck's one genuine weakness, that Body Slam is single target and swarms make you look silly. In the Phrog Parasite Wriggler phase or against Entomancer's endless bees, Ashes is the difference between a sweep and a siege.
Energy relics still matter, because Corruption only makes skills free and your attacks and powers pay full price. Lantern, S tier, plus 1 energy on the first turn of each combat, pays for the Corruption turn itself a turn early. Ice Cream, consensus S tier, conserves energy between turns: bank on a cheap turn and spend a 5 energy turn with Body Slam and Whirlwind both in it. Ectoplasm, plus 1 per turn at the cost of never gaining gold, pairs well with a deck that wants relics from elites rather than shops.
Consistency relics make the machine start on time. Bag of Preparation draws 2 extra on turn one. Gambling Chip, at the start of each combat discard any number and draw that many, is the relic version of choosing your opening hand, and this deck more than most lives or dies on seeing Corruption or its payoffs early. Unceasing Top draws whenever your hand empties during your turn, and under Corruption plus Dark Embrace your hand empties on schedule.
Two underrated fits. Razor Tooth, whenever you play an Attack or Skill, upgrade it for the rest of this combat, on a deck playing five-plus free skills a turn snowballs absurdly: your Shrug It Offs and True Grits upgrade themselves mid-fight toward the numbers you wish you had drafted. Pen Nib, every 10th attack deals double damage, and Body Slam is your biggest single attack; if you can count to ten and hold the procced play for a 50-plus block bank, it ends fights outright.
Defense and sustain: Anchor's 10 block start, Sai's 7 block per turn, Pantograph's 25 HP at boss start, Beating Remnant's 20 HP per turn loss cap at high Ascension, Gremlin Horn's energy and card refunds on kills for the swarm floors. What to decline: Affliction-priced blessings. Afflictions attach debuffs to your existing cards and cannot be shop-removed, and this deck's fuel is its skill cards, every one of which needs to stay clean to be worth exhausting.
Fallback Pieces, Potion Timing and the Strength Pivot
When the rares ghost you, the commons carry more than people expect. True Grit upgraded is the choose-your-own exhaust outlet: pick the worst card in hand, bank the Feel No Pain block and the Dark Embrace draw on demand. Shrug It Off is 8 block plus a card for 1 energy. Pommel Strike upgraded draws twice. A deck of those three plus Body Slam plus one payoff power is a legitimate mid-game deck that wins Act 2 fights honestly, and it becomes the full machine the moment a rare shows up.
The pivot, if Act 2 arrives with no Corruption and no payoffs, is the class's other S tier build: Strength Scaling. The database core is Demon Form plus Limit Break, which doubles Strength with no cap, plus a Vulnerable package, and new card Hellraiser auto-plays every Strike you draw for free. The beauty is that your Act 1 picks mostly transfer: Bash, Anger and Pommel Strike front-load into Strength perfectly, Inflame at 2 Strength or 3 upgraded and Demon Form at 2 per turn or 3 upgraded are the pivot cards, Whirlwind converts Strength into AoE, and Paper Phrog, where Vulnerable enemies take +75 percent instead of +50 percent, is build-defining for that version. Brimstone from the shop, +2 Strength a turn for you against +1 for enemies, is the Strength dream. Decide by early Act 2 at the latest: half-committing to exhaust payoffs with no engine wastes rewards a committed Strength deck would be converting into wins.
Potions are part of the fallback plan, and the site's timing advice maps cleanly onto this deck's fights. Block Potion, 12 block, before telegraphed spikes: Soul Nexus's turn one 29 opener, Owl Magistrate's 33 Verdict, Frog Knight's one time 35 beetle charge when you push it below half. Weak Potion at boss openers. Duplicator on Body Slam for a doubled slam, or on the key Power turn. Blessing of the Forge on turn one upgrades the whole hand for the longer fights. Fairy in a Bottle is never drunk; it is insurance you carry into elites and bosses.
Shop discipline, last: remove starter Strikes and Defends before buying anything shiny, and mind Ascension 6, Inflation, where removal starts at 100 gold and climbs by 50 per use after the v0.102 change. Trim the deck in Act 1 while removal is cheap, not in Act 3 when it is a luxury the run can no longer afford.
How Exhaust Block Runs Die: Five Repeating Loss Patterns
Loss one: zero front-load. The deck's rares are Act 2 cards, and the player who drafts Dark Embrace on floor 4 and Feel No Pain on floor 8 with no damage in between loses to Nibbit loops and Mawler Tears with a beautiful engine inside a dead run. The counter is mechanical: floors 1 through 6 are for damage and commons, and any reward screen without damage is a skip. The site lists taking every card as the number one mistake for every character; it is doubly true when your payoff cards do nothing on curve.
Loss two: Corruption fired into the wrong fight. It is a long-fight card played into a short fight, or worse, into The Insatiable, whose Sandpit timer at 4 makes careless exhaust a loss condition. The discipline is asking one question before playing it: does this fight end before my deck does? If yes, save it. If the timer is ticking, save it harder. There is no participation trophy for playing your combo card into a fight that punishes the combo.
Loss three: no draw bridge. Corruption plus Feel No Pain with no Dark Embrace blocks well and draws nothing, so you topdeck one skill a turn while the banked block decays, because without Barricade it always decays. The bridge cards are cheap and common: Shrug It Off, Pommel Strike, the first Dark Embrace, and shop removals that make every draw live. If you notice yourself passing turns with unspent energy and two cards in hand, the bridge is the missing piece, not more block.
Loss four: bloat by rationalization. The argument goes: everything exhausts anyway, so extra cards are free. They are not. Every non-engine card is a card you drew instead of the machine's parts, a turn spent on filler, and a body that arrives five blocks short against the 35 damage Heavy Cleave. Deck thinning rules apply with full force; under Corruption, the starter Defends you never removed become the worst cards in the deck precisely because you will eventually play all of them.
Loss five: Ascension disrespect. At Inflation, removal costs spike exactly when you were planning to trim; at higher Ascension, elite damage punishes the half-engine window hardest; and the comfort pickups, Beating Remnant, Sai, Pantograph, stop being optional. The deck is rated strongest at high Ascension precisely because its scaling is internal, but only runs that survive the assembly get to cash that. Close on the arithmetic that makes the route work: Burning Blood refunds 6 HP per combat, roughly one extra elite per act, and every elite is a relic pull with a chance at the missing piece. Build in order, respect the two fights that hate you, and Act 3 pays the bill.