The Silent
The Silent is making a return in Slay the Spire 2. The class is commonly built around slowly increasing Poison on foes or playing a ton of Shivs to whittle down enemies at no cost to yourself. While the class identity seems to remain entirely intact moving over from the first game., there have been a few changes including a key nerf and what seems to be an attempt at building a third core build pillar for the class.
What's Changing in Slay the Spire 2
We do know for sure that returning characters like the Silent “have totally different card pools” and are “natural evolutions rather than simple remakes.”¹ We also have at least one confirmed nerf in Blade Dance, which now has the Exhaust keyword so you can’t produce infinite Shivs anymore.
One big change is the new Sly keyword, which makes it so that whenever the card is discarded from your hand during your turn, it is played for free. The first revealed card, Flick-Flack, deals 7 damage to all enemies whenever it’s discarded.
New Silent Cards
Many cards have been revealed for the Silent, most returning cards from the first Slay the Spire game, alongside a slew of Colorless cards that complement the class’s playstyle.
View all Silent cards revealed
How Do These Cards Add to the Silent Builds We Know
Shiv build
For the common Shiv build, it’s a mixed bag at the moment. Losing repeatable Blade Dance hurts, but Fan of Knives is a genuine upgrade to the archetype’s biggest historical weakness. The build was always vulnerable to fights with multiple strong enemies as Shivs only hit one target at a time. It’s possible the build might be going away from spamming a single card repeatedly and moving towards a proper setup where Fan of Knives and Accuracy are your engine with Shivs having to come from multiple sources.
Poison build
Poison is the other build that a lot of Silent players gravitate toward but nothing shown so far really affects it. At the very least we do know that the build will be returning in a meaningful way. During a newsletter someone asked if the archetype would be back and the devs simply said, “we like poison.”²
Are There New Foreshadowed Silent Builds?
The Sly keyword, which again is all about discarding cards, is pretty clearly being set up as a new keyword to build around instead of just being a support tool. We know this primarily thanks to Master Planner which gives all of your Skill cards Sly, something you wouldn’t want unless that was the case. This empowers the archetype already without the devs having to make a ton of Skills with the keyword. As you might expect, the big question right now is whether the card pool in Slay the Spire 2 has enough triggers to make the whole thing consistent without it needing to line up perfectly.