The moment Verdict lands: reading status math before your next card
You are at 44 HP in Act 3 and the Owl Magistrate just resolved Verdict: 33 damage plus 4 Vulnerable. You survived on 11 Block, and now every attack the Magistrate lands deals 50 percent more. The printed 16 damage Scrutiny threatens roughly 24, and its 4x6 peck loop becomes a sequence you can no longer tank casually. Reading status math fast enough to re-plan the next turn mid-fight is the single biggest skill gap between players who clear Act 3 and players who stall there, and this guide exists to close it.
Every status in Slay the Spire 2 answers three questions. First, what does it change numerically: Vulnerable makes the target take 50 percent more attack damage, Weak makes the target deal 25 percent less attack damage, Intangible drops incoming damage to 1, Vigor adds a flat number to your next Attack and then expires. Second, when does it apply: Poison and Doom tick on their own timers, Block disappears at the start of your next turn unless a retention effect like Barricade holds it, and Stars never expire at all. Third, what removes it: Artifact eats debuff applications before they land, Waterfall Giant clears every debuff on itself the moment it hits 0 HP, and a handful of Orange Pellets-style cleansing relics can strip stacks that would otherwise end your run.
Statuses arrive from four places, and v0.111 has all four flying at you constantly. Cards apply them directly: Bash applies Vulnerable on the Ironclad, Defy applies Weak on the Necrobinder, Scourge slaps 13 Doom on a target and draws you a card for your trouble. Relics automate them at combat start: Bag of Marbles opens every fight with 1 Vulnerable on all enemies, Red Mask opens with 1 Weak on all enemies, Akabeko hands you 8 Vigor for your first attack. Potions give burst access: Vulnerable Potion applies 3 stacks and Weak Potion applies 3, both tuned for boss openers. And enemies run the same systems against you: the Owl Magistrate Verdict we opened with, Haunted Ship Haunting you for 2 Weak, 2 Vulnerable and 2 Frail in one action, Soul Nexus draining 18 life and attaching 2 Vulnerable plus 2 Weak.
The rest of this guide walks the full family: the offense multipliers, the damage-over-time clocks, the defense layer, the status cards that get shoved into your deck, the character resources that behave like statuses, and finally which bosses resist, clear or punish each one. Numbers throughout reflect the v0.111 beta branch of Early Access, so patch drift between now and 1.0 will move individual values, not the underlying rules.
Vulnerable: the +50% damage multiplier that became a full archetype
Vulnerable is the most efficient damage amplification in the game: the target takes 50 percent more attack damage, and unlike Strength it costs almost nothing to maintain. In the first game it was a support keyword; in StS2 it is a full archetype on the Ironclad, and that changes how you draft it.
The engine starts with Bash, the 2-cost basic Attack that deals damage and applies Vulnerable, the named opener of the Ironclad Vulnerable engine. Around it sits a package you can assemble by Act 2: Paper Phrog turns the multiplier from +50 percent into +75 percent for as long as you own the relic, Bag of Marbles opens every combat with a free stack on every enemy, and the Strength Scaling build core of Demon Form plus Limit Break converts the amplified window into a kill. The math compounds hardest on multi-hit cards. A Whirlwind played for X equal to 3 with 5 base damage per hit lands three amplified hits; under Paper Phrog each of those hits is worth nearly double its printed value.
Vulnerable is not an Ironclad monopoly. The Regent's basic Strike, Falling Star, is a 0-cost card that deals 8 damage (12 upgraded) and applies 1 Weak plus 1 Vulnerable, and the community rates it the strongest starter Strike in the game precisely because it fronts two statuses for free. Vulnerable Potion applies 3 stacks, and the correct timing is the start of a boss fight, right before your heavy hitters come online, rather than as a panic button at half HP.
Enemies run the same debuff against you, and the telegraphs are learnable. Mawler roars once for 3 Vulnerable in its opening loop. Ovicopter's Softening strike applies 2 after it hatches its eggs. The Owl Magistrate Verdict applies 4 alongside 33 damage. Haunted Ship bundles 2 Vulnerable with 2 Weak and 2 Frail on a turn where it deals no damage, which is your cue to spend that turn attacking instead of blocking. Soul Nexus's Drain Life attaches 2 Vulnerable and 2 Weak to 18 damage. The counterplay is identical for all of them: full Block on the telegraphed application turn, because your Block was computed against the pre-debuff number and the debuff is priced to make the following turn hurt.
Two limits matter. First, Artifact absorbs debuff applications: Mecha Knight carries 3 Artifact, so a fresh application chain has to burn through those stacks before your Vulnerable engine does anything. Second, Waterfall Giant clears all debuffs on itself the instant it drops to 0 HP before going invulnerable, so time your amplification windows for the stretch before that threshold, or bypass the problem entirely with a Doom execute.
The takeaway is a draft rule: on Ironclad, Vulnerable support pieces rank just below raw damage in Act 1 and above almost everything else once Paper Phrog is in the relic tray.
Weak: the best-value mitigation in the game and where it fails
Weak cuts the target's attack damage by 25 percent, and nothing else in the game converts one energy into more effective HP. The Necrobinder's Defy is a 1-cost common that just applies Weak, no rider attached, and the card database calls it the best-value mitigation in the game. One energy, 25 percent off every attack the target makes until the stacks run out.
The floor for Weak access is remarkably low. The Silent starts with Neutralize, a 0-cost Attack that deals 3 damage (4 upgraded) and applies 1 Weak (2 upgraded); it is free value every single fight and the strongest starter card in the game. The Regent's Falling Star applies 1 Weak alongside 1 Vulnerable at 0 cost. Red Mask opens every combat with 1 Weak on ALL enemies, which is a permanent team-wide damage reduction in co-op where the debuff is shared across the whole party. Weak Potion applies 3 stacks and belongs at the start of boss fights, before their big attacks rather than after.
Where Weak overperforms is fixed enemy loops with multi-hit turns. The Owl Magistrate's 4x6 peck gets shaved on all four hits. Byrdonis alternates Dive and Peck, and the fight plan is literally to Weak its Peck turns. Mecha Knight's Heavy Cleave is a 35-damage single hit, and 25 percent off that is 9 damage you did not have to block.
Where Weak fails, you need to know in advance. It modifies attack damage, so anything that is not an attack ignores it. The Waterfall Giant's self-destruct deals damage equal to its Steam Eruption stacks, and the bestiary is blunt about it: Weak does NOT reduce the blast. The same logic covers Beckon penalties and other non-attack losses. Weak also does not stop on-hit triggers from landing: Fossil Stalker carries 3 stacks of Suck, and every unblocked hit grants it 3 Strength whether that hit dealt 12 damage or 9. Against Suck, Block is the real answer and Weak is only a brake.
One more bundled status deserves attention: Frail. Haunted Ship and Frog Knight apply Frail alongside Weak and Vulnerable, and like the other two it lands as stacks on you. Treat any Frail application as a signal that the following turn is the enemy's damage turn, and answer it with Block rather than hoping to race.
The draft rule for Weak is the mirror of Vulnerable: take the cheap sources on sight (upgrade Neutralize early, grab Defy, keep Red Mask) and skip the expensive ones unless your deck has no Block plan at all. Weak and Block layer beautifully in practice, because you get to block the reduced number instead of the printed one.
Poison and Doom: damage over time that ignores Block and enemy HP scaling
Damage over time is the third pillar of the status system, and StS2 splits it into two mechanics with completely different ceilings: Poison, which stacks flat damage per turn, and Doom, which executes.
Poison remains the Silent's reliable engine, rated A-tier, extremely consistent and explicitly great in co-op. Noxious Fumes is the 1-cost power that applies 2 Poison (3 upgraded) to ALL enemies at the start of each turn, meaning one card pressures every body on the board forever. Snecko Skull adds 1 stack to every Poison application and is considered mandatory for the archetype. Catalyst is the finisher: it doubles an enemy's Poison, or triples it when upgraded, which is why a modest 10-stack clock becomes a 30-damage-per-turn clock off one card. The v0.110 patch reworked the wider poison package, with Haze, Outbreak and Mirage redesigned and Mirage no longer Exhausting, so if your instincts are from launch, re-check those cards.
Poison's weakness is patience: it is slow against high-HP bosses, and in a game where bosses heal (Knowledge Demon) or race you (Ceremonial Beast gains 2 Strength per turn), patience is sometimes not on the menu. Two boss interactions define the edges. Doormaker cycles door and creature phases, respawning the door at full HP, and Poison persists across those phases, which is why DoT decks shine there: your stacks keep ticking while the boss reshuffles. Test Subject #C10 resets DoTs between its three phases, so over-stacking before a phase break is wasted; in that marathon you want scaling powers instead.
Doom is the Necrobinder's stacking debuff with a rule attached: at turn end, any enemy whose Doom is greater than or equal to its max HP is executed. Read that again, because it is a percentage mechanic wearing a flat-mechanic costume: the threshold is defined by the target's own HP pool, which is exactly why Doom is the community's S+ answer to co-op HP scaling. The stackers are efficient. Scourge applies 13 Doom (16 upgraded) and draws 1 card (2 upgraded), so it never costs tempo. Countdown is a 1-cost power applying 6 Doom (9 upgraded) to a random enemy every turn. Reaper Form is the ceiling card of hybrid decks: whenever your attacks deal damage, they apply that much Doom, converting a damage engine into a Doom engine. End of Days is the payoff: massive AoE Doom that immediately executes anything under threshold and can end fights on the spot.
Two timing facts decide whether Doom carries you or bricks. Since v0.108, the end-of-turn resolution order changed and Doom no longer kills first, so sequence your burst around the new order instead of assuming the execute pre-empts everything else at turn end. And Waterfall Giant can only be killed at 0 Steam Eruption stacks, with a Doom execute as the named example, because at 0 HP it clears every debuff on itself and goes invulnerable before detonating.
Finally, both mechanics ignore two things that wall everyone else: Block, since the Tunneler's 32 never-decaying Block does nothing against a ticking clock, and per-hit damage caps, which is why the official counter to Skulking Colony is literally multi-hit and DoT.
Strength stacking: your engine and the enemy's, in the same fight
Strength is the flat damage add-on, and in StS2 both sides of the board race with it. Knowing your own packages first: Inflame is a 1-cost uncommon power granting 2 Strength (3 upgraded), the premium-value core of every Strength deck. Demon Form is the 3-cost rare granting 2 Strength (3 upgraded) at the start of each turn, and taking it commits you to the archetype, so treat it as a build decision rather than a card decision. Limit Break doubles your Strength with no cap, which is why Strength Scaling remains the most consistent climb in the game. On the relic side, Brimstone gives you 2 Strength per turn while giving all enemies 1, a trade a Strength Ironclad signs up for gleefully, and Rainbow Ring grants 1 Strength and 1 Dexterity each turn you manage to play an Attack, a Skill and a Power.
Raw Strength only matters through converters and hit counts. Whirlwind deals 5 damage (8 upgraded) to ALL enemies X times, so every point of Strength is multiplied by X and by the number of enemies on the field. Pommel Strike lubricates the engine by drawing, upgraded it draws twice, and Hellraiser auto-plays every Strike you draw for free, turning starter Strikes into a semi-automatic engine. Strength Potion adds 2 Strength and wants turn one of a multi-hit deck, where every subsequent hit benefits.
Now the enemy side, because Strength races are the most common way runs die. Ceremonial Beast gains 2 Strength every turn: a pure DPS race, and below 150 HP it staggers into Ringing, limiting you to 1 card per turn. Fossil Stalker carries 3 stacks of Suck, and every unblocked hit grants it 3 Strength; one leak starts a snowball, so block every single hit. Nibbit hisses for 2 Strength in its fixed three-turn loop, which is why you focus one down before the stacks grow. Flail Knight cycles Breaker for 3 Strength between Rams. The Kin's acolytes hit hard and scale Strength, which is why you kill the low-HP acolytes before the priest in the backline. Kaiser Crab's surviving claw gains Strength and 99 Block when its partner dies, so you kill both claws within a turn or two of each other. Knowledge Demon gains permanent Strength all fight on top of self-healing, the clearest do-not-stall warning in the bestiary.
Counterplay comes from the earlier sections: Weak shaves 25 percent off every one of those amplified attacks, Vulnerable speeds up your side of the race, and Block covers the telegraphed spikes, whether that is Frog Knight's one-time 35-damage beetle charge below half HP or Mecha Knight's 35 Heavy Cleave. And when the race is truly unwinnable, Doom is the exit ramp: an execute threshold does not care how much Strength the boss stacked while you were setting up.
One drafting nuance separates good Strength decks from great ones: hit count beats hit size. A deck that lands six amplified hits per turn with modest Strength outperforms a deck that lands one huge hit, against every multiplier in this game and doubly so against per-hit caps.
Block, Plating and Intangible: the defensive status family ranked
Block is the default defensive status and the game prices it aggressively. Shrug It Off is 8 Block (11 upgraded) plus a draw, the best common defensive pick for any Ironclad deck. True Grit is 7 Block (9 upgraded) plus a random Exhaust, chosen when upgraded, which makes it the starter motor of Exhaust decks. The Defect's Glacier is 6 Block (9 upgraded) plus two channeled Frost orbs, the core of the Frost turtle deck. Body Slam converts Block into damage equal to your Block and costs 0 when upgraded: it is the finisher of the Exhaust Block build, where Corruption makes skills free-but-Exhaust, Dark Embrace draws off each Exhaust, Feel No Pain blocks off it, and Barricade keeps Block from ever disappearing.
Two enemies teach you the edges of Block. Tunneler burrows for 32 Block that never decays, then strikes for 23 from below every turn; breaking all its Block stuns it, so the counter is saving burst specifically to crack the shell rather than grinding 23 Block forever. Enemy Block also scales up in co-op, where v0.108 cut the 2-player multiplier to a flat 2x, one more reason DoT carries parties. On the relic side, Anchor is a plain 10 Block at combat start, and Sai grants 7 Block every turn, a 92.3 percent win rate on the community Ancient ladder.
Plating is flat mitigation applied to every hit, which makes it the mirror image of Block: strong into multi-hit enemies, weak into single big ones. Frog Knight carries 15 Plating, quietly taxing every chip attack you throw at its 191 HP. Gorget starts each combat with 4 Plating that decays by 1 each turn, and Heart of Iron grants 7 Plating as a potion, timed for multi-hit fights where Plating blocks every single hit. The draft implication is direct: against hatched Ovicopter boards and pecking loops, Plating is premium; against a single 33-damage Verdict it is nearly irrelevant, and Block or Intangible is the answer.
Intangible is the ceiling of the defense family: all damage taken is reduced to 1, and the standard advice is to defend, not attack, while it is up, because your offense is worth nothing into it too. Your access is Wraith Form, raised to the new Ancient rarity in StS2: 2 Intangible (3 upgraded) with the ongoing price of losing 1 Dexterity at the start of each turn, which makes it a splashable defensive answer for any deck and a slow disaster if you lean on it for ten turns. Ghost in a Jar grants 1 Intangible as a Silent potion for one turn of massive incoming damage. Enemies use it too: Soul Fysh gains Intangible on turns 4 and 5, so defend through those turns, and Test Subject #C10 alternates Intangible in phase three, meaning you strike only on the vulnerable turns.
Two defensive relics round out the family. Beating Remnant caps HP loss at 20 per turn, anti-one-shot insurance at high Ascension. Diamond Diadem halves enemy damage if you play 2 or fewer cards in a turn, which quietly pays you for the 1-card turns Ceremonial Beast's Ringing forces on you anyway.
Vigor, Beckon, Ringing, Bound: status cards that attack your deck, not your HP
The nastiest statuses never touch your HP bar; they sit in your deck and hand. This family decides more Act 2 and Act 3 fights than any raw damage number.
Vigor is the friendly one: it adds its value to your next Attack's damage and then expires. Akabeko grants 8 Vigor at combat start for a harder-hitting opening turn. The rule is simple: spend Vigor on the biggest Attack you will actually play that turn, because it does not carry over, and an expired 8 Vigor is 8 damage you never banked.
Beckon is Soul Fysh's status card: it costs 1 energy, and if you end the turn without playing it, you take 6 unblockable damage. Soul Fysh stuffs these into your deck all fight, so the boss plan is to pack discard and exhaust answers; every Beckon you cannot answer is 6 HP gone with no Block possible. Beckon is why the Soul Fysh matchup is a deckbuilding check, not just a piloting check.
Ringing is Ceremonial Beast's phase-two debuff: you may only play 1 card per turn. The important part is that you control when it starts, because it triggers below 150 HP. That control is the strategy: cross the threshold on a turn when your board is already set up, then play only your best card each turn while the boss is staggered.
Bound is the Queen's chain mechanic: the first cards you draw each turn arrive Bound, and only one Bound card can be played per turn. The escape hatch is that mid-turn draw is unrestricted, so cards that draw during your turn, Acrobatics or Offering style, get your real hand online past the cap. Her turn 2 also slams 99 Weak, Vulnerable and Frail in a single action, which Artifact answers completely, so hold an Artifact charge for that turn.
Infection comes from the Phrog Parasite: three statuses into your discard pile at a time via Infect, and on death it triggers Infested, spawning 4 Wrigglers, so the fight only ends when all of them die. Clear Infections with Exhaust or Transform effects, and save your AoE for the second phase.
Wounds and Burns are the classics. Haunted Ship rams for 10 and shoves 2 Wounds into your deck on turn 1, then Haunts with no damage on turn 2, which is your all-out attack window. Mecha Knight's Flamethrower puts 4 Burns into your hand, and the counter is to play or exhaust them immediately, skip attacking on its Windup turn, and hold 40-plus Block for the 35 Heavy Cleave.
Frantic Escape is The Insatiable's clock: a Sandpit timer starts at 4, at zero you lose, period, and each Frantic Escape card in your deck buys one more turn. Always play Escape cards, never exhaust cards carelessly, and spend everything.
Finally the permanent versions. Afflictions replace Curses: debuffs attached to your existing cards that cannot be shop-removed, which is why Calling Bell's 3-relic payoff carries a real price and why thin decks should avoid Affliction-priced blessings. Enchantments are permanent in-run card modifications, such as +50 percent damage or lose 3 HP when played. Quest Cards, tied to the two Neow relics added in v0.109, are still being documented by the community; treat them as upside you plan around, not math you trust yet.
Stars, Forge, Summon and Souls: resources that behave like statuses
Four character resources behave like statuses in practice, and misreading them is the most common way to waste a character's ceiling.
Stars are the Regent's second resource: they persist between turns with no cap, which makes them a bank rather than a per-turn budget. Income: Divine Right grants 3 at combat start, Venerate grants 2 (3 upgraded), Solar Strike deals 9 (10 upgraded) and grants 1 (2 upgraded), and Genesis, a rare power, grants 2 (3 upgraded) every turn; seeing Genesis defines the Star archetype for the run. Spending: Astral Pulse converts 3 Stars into 14 AoE damage and is one of the strongest commons in the game; Seven Stars spends 7 for 49 AoE, the signature finisher. Alignment is the engine's heart, converting Stars into 2 (3 upgraded) energy, which is why Star decks can afford to bank. In team terms this is the burst DPS role: bank Stars across safe turns, then dump them into a window someone else created.
Forge is the other Regent lane, and it permanently empowers his Sovereign Blade. The Smith is the big payoff: 1 energy plus 4 Stars for Forge 30. The golden rule from both the character page and the common mistakes list is to never mix Star and Forge cards in one deck, because the spenders and the generators dilute each other and neither engine reaches critical mass. There is also a boss interaction to know: Skulking Colony caps the damage it takes per hit and hard-counters single-big-hit decks like a fully Forged Sovereign Blade, so multi-hit and DoT are the answers there.
Summon is the Necrobinder keyword that adds or restores HP for Osty, the summoned skeletal hand that attacks on command and body-blocks. Bodyguard is Summon 5 (7 upgraded), the baseline growth card, and Bound Phylactery grants Summon 1 at the start of every turn for free. Osty's output scales with its HP pool: Unleash has Osty deal 6 plus damage equal to its current HP, so the bigger Osty grows, the harder it hits, and Poke is a 0-cost Osty command every Summon deck wants. In a party, Osty is effectively a shared damage sponge absorbing hits aimed at players.
Souls are 0-cost tokens that draw 2 cards and then exhaust. Reave deals 9 (11 upgraded) and shuffles 1 (2 upgraded) Soul into your draw pile as the baseline engine. Haunt is the pivot: whenever you play a Soul, a random enemy loses 6 (8 upgraded) HP, turning each Soul into a free drain and the whole package into the S-tier Soul engine. The failure mode named on the Doom build page applies to the whole character: balance Soul generation against Soul spending, or you stall out precisely when the boss bar is largest.
Boss debuff resistances: who clears, who blocks, who punishes
Bosses do not resist statuses uniformly, and several of them hard-counter specific debuff plans. This is the checklist to run before every boss fight.
Artifact walls: Mecha Knight carries 3 Artifact alongside its fixed 4-turn loop of Charge 25, Flamethrower, Windup and Heavy Cleave 35. Every debuff thrown first feeds the Artifact stacks, so burn them with cheap applications before committing real Vulnerable or Weak. In co-op, Artifact stacks higher still, which is why the v0.104 patch specifically nerfed co-op Artifact, Slippery and Skittish scaling.
Full debuff clears: Waterfall Giant clears all debuffs on itself at 0 HP, turns invulnerable, and self-destructs next turn for damage equal to its Steam Eruption stacks unless it dies at 0 stacks, with a Doom execute as the named way to manage that. So Poison and Doom are excellent against it, Weak does nothing to the blast, and your best Block and potions belong on the explosion turn.
Hit caps and damage floors: Vantom opens with 9 stacks of Slippery, so every hit deals only 1 damage; the fix is cheap multi-hit attacks to strip stacks, full Block on its turn 3 killer swing of 25-plus, and attacks on turn 4 when it self-buffs. The Insatiable does not care about your debuffs at all; it cares about the Sandpit timer and how many Frantic Escape cards you play.
Debuff immunity by phase: Soul Fysh gains Intangible on turns 4 and 5, when you should defend rather than attack, while stuffing Beckon into your deck all fight, so bring discard and exhaust answers. Test Subject #C10 resets DoTs between its three phases, punishes skills in phase one with 2 Strength per skill played, shoves Wounds in phase two, and alternates Intangible in phase three: attacks in P1, perfect Block in P2, strike only on vulnerable turns in P3. Doormaker is the opposite case: Poison persists across its door phases and the door respawns at full HP with Strength carrying over, so DoT decks shine and the 1-turn stun at phase 2 is your best window.
Debuff punishers: Knowledge Demon forces a permanent debuff choice on you every round, 6 damage per turn or 1 fewer card drawn, escalating into card and energy caps, while self-healing and gaining permanent Strength. You cannot out-debuff it; you race it, and you punish its multi-hit turns with Thorns or Flame Barrier style retaliation. The Queen binds the first cards you draw each turn, only one Bound card playable per turn, with mid-turn draw as the escape hatch; her turn 2 applies 99 Weak, Vulnerable and Frail at once, which Artifact answers outright. Kill her Torch Head Amalgam first or she Enrages into an Execution loop. Kaiser Crab's Surrounded means hits from the claw you face away from deal 50 percent more, so the party focuses the Rocket claw, whose 31 Laser is the lethal move, kills both claws quickly, and uses AoE, which hits both.
Aura elites round out the list. Magi Knight Downgrades all your cards while it lives, so kill it first: lowest HP of the Knight Gang, and its death removes both the Downgrade and the 35 Magic Bomb. Spectral Knight makes every card in your hand Ethereal, punishing combo and banking hands alike, so kill it second to free your hand.
Which status package to draft first: a practical ranking
With the full family on the table, here is a practical ordering for what to draft first, act by act, and the reasoning behind each slot.
Tier 1, the Vulnerable and Weak package. Cheap, universal, and it multiplies whatever damage you already have rather than asking for a build. Neutralize and Falling Star bring Weak for free in two starter decks; Bash and Bag of Marbles front Vulnerable; Paper Phrog doubles down for Ironclad. The only walls are Artifact bosses and the Waterfall Giant clear, both of which you can plan around with timing.
Tier 2, the Poison engine. Noxious Fumes plus Snecko Skull plus Catalyst is a self-contained win condition that pressures every enemy simultaneously, ignores Block, and persists through Doormaker's phases. The costs: it is slow against the highest HP bars, Knowledge Demon heals through it, and C10 resets it between phases, so by Act 3 you want a second damage plan alongside it.
Tier 3, Doom. Mechanically the strongest scaling answer in the game because the execute threshold reads the target's max HP, and in co-op that is the whole ballgame. Solo it is still a Necrobinder commitment, and the Soul economy has to stay balanced or you stall. Scourge is the take-on-sight common; End of Days is the fight-ender; Reaper Form is the card that turns any good attack turn into Doom progress.
Tier 4, Strength. The highest ceiling with Limit Break and the most consistent climb on Ironclad, but it demands archetype commitment, Demon Form is a build decision, and it does nothing the turn you play it. Strength without a converter like Whirlwind or multi-hit support is just numbers waiting for a vehicle.
Tier 5, the character banks: Stars and Forge. Powerful, but Regent-only, and the never-mix rule means you must choose a lane early and draft inside that lane only, which makes them the least flexible status-adjacent resources to splash.
Tier 6, Vigor and friends. Akabeko's 8 Vigor is a real upgrade to your opening turn, but Vigor expires by design, so it never becomes a plan, only a bonus.
Two cross-cutting rules close the ranking. First, defense scales with knowledge rather than draft order: knowing Owl Magistrate's Verdict turn, Frog Knight's 35 beetle charge below half HP, and Soul Nexus's 29 Soul Burn opener is worth more than any single card pick. Second, statuses layer, and the winning turns in this game are usually Weak on the boss, Vulnerable on the boss, Block on you, and Doom ticking underneath everything. Build the package your character already wants, then buy the pieces that make the package cheap, and check this page again after each balance pass, because v0.107 touched 84 cards and the next major drop will move numbers again.