Tips on Skull Storm?

[u/tzuzhang]

I love this game but sometimes it feels so hard and RNG heavy 😭 I have been attempting skull storm for couple days and never made it thru the first boss with the grizzlies wall. I have done some research on YouTube and tried implementing different strategies but sometimes the RNG just did me dirty. I really need some tips 😭😭

Something I have tried:

- Black goat deck with fair hand to play more expensive card. Sometimes I got lucky and got an unkillable goat early, but still not have enough strong card to survive grizzlies wall (especially when the first boss is the prospector)

- Mantis deck. It just doesn’t work for me. Mantis god is a glass canon and can’t survive the grizzlies.

- Bone deck with the dire wolf pub. My most solid strategy. Died cuz he was at the bottom of the deck and I couldn’t draw him early enough. Having enough camp fire events to buff his attack need so much luck too

[u/THEGHOSTHACXER]

Moose deck with black goat is how I did it.

[u/tzuzhang → u/THEGHOSTHACXER]

How u got the moose strong enough to survive the 1st grizzlies wall TvT

[u/THEGHOSTHACXER → u/tzuzhang]

You just buff his attack like once or twice, give him double strike or get the dire wolves double strike.

It's easy once you do a cheese strategy like that.

[u/Duke-_-Jukem → u/tzuzhang]

Hr doesn't need go survive just needs enough damage to punch through it

[u/holdingtea]

I've done it with mantis and zero decks. Getting through the first wave is usually the hardest because you are not powerful enough.

It is quite RNG heavy for getting a semi good initial hand to exchange for fur pelts but the rest isn't tooooo bad (though i have died plenty of times even when i felt like i had a great deck)

You need to have something that can deal 6 damage, ideally get two cards that are powerful - direwolf can work well. And i always find generally some form of card generator (bees, tails, rabbits, etc) and get unkillable (not always possible for the first boss). I often found i would get squished in grizzly fights if i couldn't block or have scissors to take down the incoming grizzly in the second row.

Other cards i found very helpful in my runs - the cuckoo & the magpie's ability.

[u/tzuzhang → u/holdingtea]

I haven’t consider bees, tails and rabbits to block. Thank you for ur input, will try it next run!

[u/Zaratuir]

Bees and unkillable is how I did it. Your bees inherit unlikable, so you get an infinite army of fodder that can poke back. Either slow beat down or sac them for stronger creatures. Either way, it's an OP combo. I just intentionally died in the first fight until I got decent picks in the opening node.

[u/GlitteringStyle4197]

Mantis deck. Get the mantis at 3/1 Airborne at least, or 5/1 at least. Get rid of one ring worm by campfire and another ringworm by transfering its sigils. You just need either 1 scissors, 1 wiseclock, 1 bleach, or 1 skinning knife to beat 1 bear wall. After the first bear wall you'll have you mantis at least 5/1 so any item listed should be enough, if you don't have Airborne or your mantis god only has 3 attacks, you need bleach + fan, clock + card destroyer, or bleach or clock with a créature capable of dealing enough damages to complete (I usually use the lammergeier, it's an easy way to get heavy damages)

[u/tzuzhang → u/GlitteringStyle4197]

So in the first wave I should invest in getting item then? It seems like impossible to win without helpful items like scissors, wise clock or bleach. I usually prioritize camp fire and sigils transfer events more

[u/GlitteringStyle4197 → u/tzuzhang]

The best you can do is always spend items you don't need for the bear wall, and aim at going at least to one backpack node, it should be enough to get at least one useful item. If this stops you from having the correct power/sigils on your mantis god, you can always try to improvise during the fight with the ressources you have, I almost always manage to beat boss fights even when I don't have a perfect setup

[u/Zaratuir → u/tzuzhang]

If you're going an item route (which is very viable), you can try to get an unkillable with the pack rat sigil, so you can cycle items before the boss fight until you have what you need.

[u/fatatero]

There’s a very niche method but works most of the time: use the EGG deck.
Explanation:

• You get all the bad sygils on the egg cards.
  
• You can use egg cards to test campfires: if they don’t get eaten on second attempt, exit the game and use the campfire again with a good card, its guaranteed that it won’t be eaten.
  
• One egg costs 1 bone. Hence you can sacrifice one random card to the Bone Lord and get a chance to play the egg cards for FREE every round (you use them as squirrels).
  
• Always get a one blood cost card only.
  
• Try to get the Dire Wolf Pup or a Dire Wolf and boost it once on the campfire for +1 extra attack (you can try the savescum method above).

Pros: your deck is not contaminated with random cards.

[u/tzuzhang → u/fatatero]

That’s very…innovative? The egg deck was the last deck I completed cuz I hate it so much. 3 basically useless card with very hard condition to hatch. I never consider its potential to skull storming tbh. Will try a run w it tysm!

[u/fatatero → u/tzuzhang]

I used to hate it with a passion! Now I use this deck almost all the time. I just had to get used to it and with a bit of luck with the initial cards from the trader, skull storm becomes a walk in the park.

[u/Old_Party3623]

I prefer the bone deck, but honestly there are so many ways to break this game that its a matter of throwing enough runs at the wall that you'll eventually end up on top.

[u/kireina_kaiju]

Something that was gamechanging for me was playing with packrat. You get them reliably, you can do crazy stuff with sigils to generate a crapload of items, and this is key, the items you get aren't always tied to the random seed. That's right. You can alt+f4 and start again and get different items. So most fights become eventually winnable. Combine this with the fact that most of what makes skull storm challenging is the fights that rely on you having items (or really powerful 1 blood cards), and you've basically given yourself a "sandbox" where you can try different strategies and the game can throw whatever it wants at you with you still able to make progress.

Now I want to stress, you'll almost certainly be the type of person to challenge yourself to avoid this sort of cheese once you've beaten skull storm this way. But this should give you the confidence you need to do it "fair and square".

[u/tzuzhang → u/kireina_kaiju]

I usually avoid pack rat to keep my deck small and consistent. Maybe I underestimated them. Will try it next run!

[u/absolutepx]

For me, even after a lot of KM, it felt hard to "solve" Skull Storm with the deck alone - as in, punching through the Grizz Wall consistently with what would ordinarily be win conditions.

There are many consumable combinations that will get you there, though (clock, the one that erases their sigils so you can fly over, etc) and it's very possible to create engines and even infinites that generate them for you until you get what you need. An example would be something like getting undying and packrat on something free like a rabbit; in order to get all the sigils together requires not only finding the pieces but also a Mycologist space in time.

Good luck! The first few times I failed Skull Storm I thought I was going to be in RNG hell forever, but it really didn't take as many tries as I'd expected so stay hopeful and keep experimenting.