One Deck, One Resource: The Rule New Regent Players Break First
Floor 12. Your Regent deck contains Falling Star, Venerate, The Smith, Astral Pulse and two leftover Strikes. On paper, six playable cards. In practice the turns alternate between holding The Smith with one Star when it wants four, and sitting on nine Stars with no spender in hand. Both turns are losses in slow motion, and both come from the same root: a deck split between two resources that refuse to help each other. The database entry for this character does not soft-pedal it: never mix Star and Forge cards in one deck. It is also the final item on our common-mistakes list, which tells you how many players do it anyway.
Who he is: the new face of StS2 Early Access, an astral mage carried on a throne, and the third link in the unlock chain. Start a run as Ironclad to unlock Silent, start a run as Silent to unlock the Regent, then the Necrobinder, then the Defect. He starts at 72 HP, squarely mid-roster, with Divine Right as his starter relic: gain 3 Stars at combat start. Every fight therefore opens with three units of spendable currency before you have played a card, and that quietly defines his whole play pattern. Regent turns are about spending, saving and timing a second currency, not just rationing energy like everyone else.
The two resources do different jobs. Stars are an attack economy: they persist between turns with no cap, so unspent Stars roll forward, and Star cards spend them on damage and effects. Forge is a scaling economy: it permanently empowers his Sovereign Blade, the weapon that swings every turn for free, and The Smith-style cards convert resources into permanent Forge stacks. One is a battery, the other is an investment, and a deck has to know which one it is funding.
Version context, because the Regent has moved a lot: sweeping buffs in the v0.103.2 merge to main, and Meteor and Parry buffs in v0.101 that pushed him up to A tier per our patch log. Any tier list from the March launch describing a weak, clunky character is describing a different game than v0.111 beta. What has not changed is the design brief: the highest decision density on the roster, a difficulty rating of 4 out of 5 on his flagship build, and one hard rule about deck purity that this guide keeps returning to from different angles.
The roadmap from here: what to take on floors 1 to 5, how the Star engine is actually assembled and priced, why mixing kills runs, when Forge is the right commitment instead, the boss windows where a banked dump wins the fight, which relics to prioritize, and the three collapse patterns, overdraft, mixing and greedy banking, that end Regent runs before Act 3. If you read only one section, read the one on mixing; it is the mistake that cannot be recovered from cheaply.
Stars Persist and Stack: How Banking Actually Works
Stars are not energy, and internalizing the difference is the entire character. Energy resets every turn: spend it or lose it. Stars persist between turns with no cap: a Star banked on turn 2 is still there on turn 8. That single property creates a resource no other character has, the ability to save attack power across turns and release it exactly when a boss gives you a window.
Where Stars come from. Divine Right seeds 3 at combat start, so every fight begins with either a spendable Astral Pulse or a third of a Seven Stars before your opening hand resolves. Venerate, 1 energy, gains 2 Stars (3 upgraded): the baseline generator, cheap enough to play while doing other things, and a starter card, so every run owns it from floor 1. Solar Strike, 1 energy, deals 9 damage (10 upgraded) and gains 1 Star (2 upgraded): income stapled to a playable attack, usually the better early pick because it never costs you a turn of tempo. Genesis, 2 energy, a Power granting 2 Stars at the start of each turn (3 upgraded), is the run-defining version; our card data says seeing it defines the Star archetype for the run, and it should, because Genesis converts every future turn into income whether you draw well or not.
Banking, concretely. Divine Right gives 3. Turn 1: Solar Strike adds 1 or 2 while you play Block. Turn 2: Venerate adds 2 or 3. By turn 3 you hold 6 to 8 Stars without ever having spent a card on doing nothing, because the income cards were dealing damage or blocking the whole time. That bank is what makes Astral Pulse free AoE every single turn in multi-enemy fights, or one decisive Seven Stars against a boss that just showed you its window.
The constraint nobody prices correctly: your Star income per shuffle dictates how many Star-spenders the deck supports. That is straight from our Star Burst build notes. If one pass through your deck produces roughly 8 Stars, from two Venerates, a Solar Strike and a Genesis tick or two, then a deck asking Astral Pulse (3), Seven Stars (7) and a second Astral Pulse (3) for 13 Stars per shuffle is overdrafted. It will work sometimes and brick sometimes, and bricking on this character feels uniquely bad because the dead cards in hand are your best cards. Count income, then count spenders, and hold the ratio near two income sources per spender.
Two fight-type notes to close. Fast fights, Knowledge Demon races and Insatiable timers, punish greedy banking: spend Astral Pulse on cooldown instead of hoarding for a Seven Stars that never gets cast. Slow fights, Doormaker's loops and the C10 marathon, reward patient banking plus Genesis, because time is the one resource you have in surplus. And in co-op the community role for Regent is literally burst DPS banking Stars across turns: the party holds the line while your bank grows, then you delete the threat in one turn.
Spending Stars: Astral Pulse, Seven Stars and the Alignment Conversion
The spending side of the ledger is where Regent decks are won, because spenders are what the income was for. Four cards define it, plus one starter that punches far above its rarity.
Astral Pulse, 3 Stars for 14 damage to ALL enemies, a common. Our data calls it one of the strongest commons in the game, full stop, and the reason is what the cost actually is: not a single point of energy. In a three-enemy fight it is 42 damage from a resource you generate passively, playable alongside whatever your energy was already doing. Two copies is the single best Act 2 purchase most Regent decks can make, because the Hive throws multi-enemy fight after multi-enemy fight at you: Ovicopter and its three eggs, Decimillipede's three segments, Entomancer's endless bees.
Seven Stars, 7 Stars for 49 AoE damage, a rare and the signature finisher. Respect the math: 49 to everything is a board clear in Act 2 and a third of most Act 3 health bars. Learn the discipline: 7 is most of a natural early bank, so the turn you cast it is a turn you are not casting two Astral Pulses plus Block. Cast it when the AoE actually lands on multiple bodies, or when a single target must die right now.
Alignment, 0 cost, converts your Stars into 2 energy (3 upgraded). This is the heart of the engine and the least intuitive card in his kit: it spends the attack currency to buy tempo, which then buys draw and plays. Our relic page spells out the consequence: Stars only pay for Star-spenders, so extra energy relics are what fund Alignment itself plus card draw. Alignment into Prophesize is the standard late-game turn.
Prophesize, 2 energy, draw 6 (9 upgraded). One of the strongest draw cards in the game, take on sight per our data. In this deck it has a specific job: digging for the spender your bank is sized for. Nine cards deep on an upgraded copy finds Seven Stars with remarkable consistency, which is exactly what a bank-and-dump deck needs in order to not brick.
Falling Star deserves its own paragraph because it is in your starter deck: 0 cost, 8 damage (12 upgraded), plus 1 Weak and 1 Vulnerable. The strongest starter Strike in the game per our database, and it stays good all run. Zero cost means it strips Vantom's Slippery stacks for free, and the two debuffs mean it multiplies whatever follow-up you have lined up. Upgrade it early: a free 12-damage card that plants Weak and Vulnerable is silly value in every act.
Assembling the engine, then: income (Venerate, Solar Strike, Genesis), conversion (Alignment), spenders (Astral Pulse, Seven Stars), and draw (Prophesize). A functional Star deck is roughly that list plus Block cards plus almost nothing else. The almost nothing else is the subject of the next section, because on this character off-plan cards are not neutral additions, they are negative ones.
Why Star and Forge Cards Dilute Each Other: The Actual Math
Here is the question every Regent player eventually asks. The card reward shows a strong Forge card, your deck is Stars, but a good card is a good card, right? No, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of taste.
A Star deck is a supply chain. Generators mine Stars, spenders consume them, Alignment reroutes them. Every card in the deck either produces currency, spends currency, or helps you find one of those two. A Forge card does none of those things. Dropping one into a Star deck does not add a good card; it subtracts an income or draw slot and adds a card asking for a currency your deck does not generate. The mistakes list in our database names the behavior exactly: mixing Star and Forge cards on Regent, they dilute each other, commit to one.
Run the numbers on a 20-card deck carrying 4 Forge cards. Your Star income per shuffle comes from roughly 8 cards; the 4 Forge cards are blanks in that accounting, so effective income per shuffle drops by a fifth to a quarter while your spenders still cost the same. The bank you were counting on for Seven Stars arrives a turn late, or never. The mirror deck has the mirror problem: Forge payoffs like The Smith, 1 energy plus 4 Stars for Forge 30, literally consume Stars, so in a Forge deck every Star generator is feeding a competing plan, and The Smith competes with Seven Stars for the same bank in whichever deck tries to run both.
Void Form's card text makes the rule explicit from the other side: the core of Void burst engines, never mix with Forge cards. When a card's own reminder text carries a deckbuilding warning, believe it the way you would believe a caution label.
The practical test at every reward screen: does this card produce Stars, spend Stars, convert Stars, or find cards? If the answer is no, skip it, however good it looks in a vacuum. The card that tempts worst is The Smith, because 1 energy plus 4 Stars for Forge 30 is genuinely huge. It is huge in a Forge deck. In your Star deck it is a 4-Star tax on the Seven Stars you were saving, payable in the exact turns you needed the bank.
What about Act 1, before you have committed? Early on, take the best income and spender commons and defer the choice, since Venerate, Solar Strike and Astral Pulse are all strong on curve. The commitment point is the first Forge payoff you are offered: if The Smith arrives before floor 8 and your Star spenders have not, going Forge is a real plan, and the next section covers it. If both plans already have pieces, pick whichever holds more pieces, then start removing or transforming the strays. Doors of Light and Dark, whose Door of Dark removes 1 card, and the Amalgamator, which removes 2 starters for an upgraded replacement, are exactly the cleanup tools this character needs more than anyone else in the roster, because on Regent a stray card is not merely weak, it is misaligned.
Committing to Forge: The Smith, the Sovereign Blade and Its One Hard Counter
Sometimes the right Regent deck builds the weapon instead of the battery. Forge permanently empowers the Sovereign Blade, and The Smith is the big payoff: 1 energy plus 4 Stars for Forge 30. Every copy compounds, because the blade hits harder every turn for the rest of the combat, and unlike Stars the investment never gets spent down. A Forge deck's damage is automatic and rising, which makes it the lower-decision-density of the two builds: no banking calculations, no dump timing, just fund the weapon and defend while it works.
When to commit: The Smith before roughly floor 8, with your Star spenders thin or absent. That is the honest fork in the run. Taking The Smith early reassigns your income cards: Venerate and Solar Strike are no longer feeding Astral Pulse, they are feeding Forge 30s. The same income cards power both plans, which is why the transition is cheap if you commit early and catastrophic if you commit late; a deck that adds The Smith at floor 15 has already spent its campfires and rare picks on the other plan.
What the Forge plan gives up, concretely: AoE. Astral Pulse and Seven Stars are the board clears, and a Forge deck owns neither. The Hive is the most multi-enemy act in the game: a Forge Regent clears Ovicopter's egg clutch with a worse toolkit and plays single-target focus lines all act long. Block cards and draw carry more weight than in the Star build, and every point of the blade matters more per swing.
The matchup that defines the archetype's ceiling is printed in our bestiary: Skulking Colony, an Act 1b elite at 79 HP, caps the damage it takes per hit, and the entry explicitly says it hard-counters single-big-hit decks like Sovereign Blade. Multi-hit and damage-over-time bypass the cap. A pure Forge deck into Skulking Colony is the single worst scripted matchup on this character: your big hit lands for the cap, every turn, while it grinds you down. If you are Forge and the map shows Underdocks, plan around it, with Falling Star's cheap hits, any multi-hit you were offered, or by pathing somewhere else entirely.
The mirror example is instructive. Phantasmal Gardener, four bodies carrying Skittish 6, gains Block from the first hit each turn, punishing multi-hit decks, which means single big hits are exactly what it does not punish. Forge's profile is inverted versus the Star plan: excellent into Gardener, miserable into Colony, while a multi-hit Star deck is the reverse. Neither build is strictly better; they are strong into different pools, and part of Regent skill is knowing which elites your Act 1 variant contains before you commit at the fork.
Daily practice for the Forge plan: upgrade your income, Venerate to 3 Stars and Solar Strike to 2, so each Smith arrives faster, and treat Alignment as a Smith accelerant that converts banked Stars into the energy to play everything in one turn. Alignment works in both builds; almost nothing else does.
Floors 1-5: Two Generators, One Spender and the Discipline to Skip
Floors 1 to 5 on Regent have a specific shopping list: two income cards, one spender, Block as needed, and the discipline to skip everything else, including good cards from the wrong plan.
Start by appreciating what you already own. Falling Star is the strongest starter Strike in the game: 0 cost, 8 damage (12 upgraded), 1 Weak and 1 Vulnerable. On floor 1 that single card does three jobs, damage, two debuffs, free, and it keeps doing them in Act 3. Venerate is in the starter deck too, 1 energy for 2 Stars, so your opening hand plus Divine Right reliably contains both halves of the engine before you have taken a single card reward. That is why Regent's Act 1 is smoother than his reputation suggests: unlike most characters, the kit starts assembled and the rewards are for improving it, not completing it.
The rewards that matter. Solar Strike, a common: 9 damage plus 1 Star (2 upgraded). Take freely; it is income that never costs tempo. Astral Pulse, a common: 3 Stars for 14 AoE. Take it over almost anything, since Divine Right alone funds the first cast. Duplicate Venerates: yes, the second and even third copy are fine early, because income density is the binding constraint on this engine. Prophesize, an uncommon: 2 energy, draw 6 (9 upgraded), take on sight; it is one of the strongest draw cards in the game and this deck specifically wants to dig for spenders. Alignment, an uncommon: take one when you hold 3-plus income cards, since it is the late-game conversion.
What to skip even when it sparkles: Seven Stars before the income exists to charge it, because a 7-cost card cast once per three shuffles on floor 4 is a liability; Genesis on floor 2, since 2 energy for future income loses the races you are trying to win this week; The Smith unless you are committing to Forge right now; and any second spender before a third generator.
Floor-by-floor plan: floors 1 to 3, take damage and income while fighting the normals. Overgrowth offers Nibbit's 12-ram loop and Mawler's roar-then-Tear; Underdocks offers Fossil Stalker's Suck, +3 Strength per unblocked hit, and Haunted Ship's 10-ram-plus-2-Wounds opener. Falling Star's Weak matters immediately: 12 damage becomes 9, which on 72 HP is the difference between a free fight and a real one. Floors 4 to 6, finish the shopping list, remove nothing yet, and check the map, since floor 6 has spawned no elites since v0.101 and the first elite decision arrives with a full plan in hand.
First elite, with the list complete. Bygone Effigy, 127 HP, cycles asleep and awakened, and the sleep phase is a free banking window: Venerate and Solar Strike while it naps, Astral Pulse when it wakes, Block ready for the wake-up hit. Byrdonis, 91 HP, alternates Dive and Peck: land Falling Star's Weak on the Peck turns and race. Terror Eel, 140 HP, is the staying-power check, and if your Block is thin this is the elite to skip. Skulking Colony, 79 HP, is trivial for a multi-hit Star deck and brutal for Forge, so check which one you are before pathing into it.
Boss Windows: Dumping Banked Stars at the Right Moment
Regent's boss plan is uniform across the roster: read the loop, bank during the safe turns, dump in the window. What changes is how much banking each boss allows before the window closes.
Vantom, 173 HP, opens with 9 Slippery stacks and takes 1 damage per hit until they are stripped: Seven Stars is exactly wrong here, a 7-Star AoE that deals 1. Strip with cheap attacks like Falling Star on turns 1 and 2, full Block on the turn-3 swing of 25-plus, then dump the bank into turn 4 when Vantom self-buffs and stops dodging. The lesson: the biggest card is not automatically the right card.
Ceremonial Beast, 252 HP, gains +2 Strength every turn, a pure race where banking is a luxury: spend Astral Pulse on cooldown instead. Below 150 HP it staggers and then applies Ringing, only 1 card per turn, so arrange the endgame so the one card you play is either the finishing Seven Stars or the surviving Block.
Waterfall Giant, 240 HP, is the DPS race with a twist: at 0 HP it turns invulnerable and self-destructs next turn for damage equal to its Steam Eruption stacks, which climb with almost every action it takes. The clean line per our boss page is killing it at 0 stacks; the realistic line is a big bank dumped early, plus full Block and potions for the explosion turn: a 49-damage Seven Stars two turns running is exactly the burst profile it rewards.
Soul Fysh, 211 HP, stuffs Beckon statuses into your deck, 1-cost cards dealing 6 unblockable damage if unplayed, and Regent has no native discard: play them or eat 6 apiece. Its Intangible turns 4 and 5 are defend turns; dump on turns 3 and 6 instead.
Knowledge Demon, 321-plus HP and the hardest boss in the game, forces a permanent debuff each round, 6 damage per turn or minus 1 draw, later card and energy caps, while self-healing and gaining Strength. It punishes slow banking most: establish Genesis early, then race. Alignment matters here too, since energy caps bite while free Star-spenders do not care.
The Insatiable, 321 HP, starts a Sandpit death timer at 4, and Frantic Escape cards buy turns. Our tip line for it is blunt: spend everything, including the bank; hoarding Stars into a timer loss is the most Regent way to die in Act 2. Kaiser Crab, 209 plus 199 with you Surrounded and +50 percent from behind, wants the Rocket claw and its 31-damage Laser dead first, both claws within a turn or two; Astral Pulse and Seven Stars hit both claws, which is why the Star plan is comfortable here.
Act 3. Doormaker's phase-2 one-turn stun is the dump window, so save across the door phase rather than spending on cooldown. Test Subject C10, 100/200/300, is a 600-HP marathon that rewards per-turn income, Genesis and Venerate loops, over one big bank, and its phase 1 punishes Skills with +2 Strength, so lead with attacks, which your spenders are. The Queen, roughly 400 HP behind a 199 guard, Chains the first cards you draw each turn so only one Bound card is playable, but mid-turn draw is unrestricted: Prophesize after the Bound cards arrive sidesteps the cap entirely. Aeonglass, nerfed in v0.109, completes the pool.
Relics for the Regent: Energy, Draw and the Ancient Picks
Relic priority for Regent comes down to one documented synergy plus a lot of energy and draw. The documented one, from our relic page: Star Burst prioritizes energy relics like Ectoplasm, because Stars only pay for Star-spenders, so the extra energy funds Alignment and card draw. Read that carefully and the whole shopping list falls out of it.
Energy first. Ectoplasm, an Ancient at +1 energy per turn but no more gold gained, is the flagship: it turns Alignment turns into full hands and pays for Genesis and Prophesize while your Stars handle the damage. The gold clause is real but survivable, especially since Ancient picks happen at act start, when you usually know what shopping you are giving up; take it after your removal errands or accept the loss. Ice Cream, energy conserved between turns and a consensus S tier, is the ceiling energy relic: it lets you bank energy alongside Stars for a double-dump turn, Alignment plus Seven Stars plus Prophesize in one go. Lantern, +1 energy on turn one only and S tier, makes openings explosive: Venerate plus Solar Strike plus a Block card on turn 1 without cutting anything.
Draw and consistency. Bag of Preparation, drawing 2 extra on turn one, stacks with Divine Right, so more opening hand means the plan is online immediately. Snecko Eye, drawing 2 extra at turn start but starting each combat Confused, carries the highest win rate on the community Ancient Elo ladder, 93.8 percent, despite being picked only 13.1 percent of the time, which our relic page calls criminally underrated. For Regent there is a structural reason it is good: Confused randomizes energy costs, and most of a Star deck's damage cards cost Stars rather than energy, so the downside lands on fewer of your cards while the extra draw digs for spenders. Brilliant Scarf, the 5th card you play each turn is free, rewards decks that play many cheap cards, and Alignment costs 0.
Snowball and defense. Black Star, elites drop an additional relic and an Ancient, is strongest taken early, and a Regent with a working engine should be fighting every elite he can safely reach. Arcane Scroll, a random rare card, is the community's runaway number one Ancient, take on sight; a rare spender or a Genesis is a run spike. Yummy Cookie upgrades 4 cards on pickup, and upgrading Venerates is exactly what this deck wants. The defensive floor: Sai, 7 Block at the start of each turn with a 92.3 percent win rate on the Ancient ladder; Anchor, 10 Block at combat start, always online; Red Mask, 1 Weak to all; Gorget, 4 Plating at start, decaying by 1 each turn.
Think twice about Fiddle, drawing 2 extra at turn start with no more draws that turn: it fights your draw engine mid-turn, and Prophesize decks want to keep drawing after the opener. Akabeko, 8 Vigor at combat start, is fine but narrow, and Seven Stars is exactly the attack worth boosting. Shop policy mirrors the rest of the roster: removal before purchases, and note that Ascension 6's Inflation makes removals start at 100 gold and climb by 50 each, while Membership Card, at 50 percent off everything, compounds hardest for a character with a shopping list this specific.
How Regent Runs Collapse: Overdraft, Mixing and Greedy Banking
Regent runs collapse in three characteristic ways, plus the universal ones. Learn the signatures and you can diagnose a dying run in real time instead of at the death screen.
Overdraft: spenders outnumber income per shuffle. Signature: opening hands containing Seven Stars or two Astral Pulses plus 1 or 2 Stars, turn after turn. The deck is not unlucky, it is mispriced, with 13-plus Stars of spenders drawing from an 8-Star engine. Fix by addition or subtraction: add Venerate, Solar Strike, or Genesis if the run is long enough for it to pay off, or cut the second Seven Stars and a late Astral Pulse. The ratio to hold in your head is about two income cards per spender, and recount it every time you add to either side of the ledger.
Mixing: a Forge card slipped in around floor 10 because the reward screen flashed something shiny. Signature: The Smith sitting in hand uncastable at 4 Stars, or worse, castable only by cannibalizing the Seven Stars bank you were holding for the boss window. Every turn it sits there, it is a drawn card that did nothing. Fix it immediately rather than rationalizing it as flexibility: transform or remove it via Doors of Light and Dark, the Amalgamator, or shop removal. Earlier is cheaper.
Greedy banking: dying with 15 unspent Stars. Signature: you held Astral Pulse and Seven Stars through two telegraphed 20-damage turns because the dump was not optimal yet. Stars have no cap, but your 72 HP does, and the resource you were protecting was not being converted into anything at all. Fix: spend on board control whenever the intent shows real damage, because banks rebuild and HP does not. The Insatiable's Sandpit timer is the extreme teacher of this lesson, spend everything, but every elite teaches it too.
Universal mistakes, Regent edition. Taking every card: on this character off-plan cards are negative, not neutral, the mixing rule seen from the other side. Never removing: resource decks feel every blank twice, once as a dead draw and once as missing income. Only resting at campfires: upgrade Venerate to 3 Stars and Solar Strike to 2 first, because income compounds across every remaining fight. Hoarding potions: an Energy Potion kicks off a dump turn and a Duplicator doubles Genesis or a Smith. Dodging elites: the engine wants relics, especially energy ones. And playing like it is StS1: Ancients replaced boss relics, Afflictions attach to your cards and cannot be shop-removed, and Void Form ends your turn when played, which is not a reflex anyone carried over.
Void Form deserves its own caution because it looks like a Star card and behaves like a contract: 3 energy, end your turn, then your first 2 cards each turn cost 0, and it is Ethereal. It is the core of Void burst engines per our data, and its own text repeats the warning to never mix it with Forge. Play it only when passing right now is safe, and build the following turns around the free cards.
Where to go next: the Star Burst build page for the full engine breakdown, and the Ascension guide for when overdraft stops happening and you need a harder problem.