Slay the Spire 2 Ascension Levels: All 10 Modifiers Explained

TL;DR

Ascension is the per-character difficulty ladder, and Early Access caps it at 10. Every level stacks on top of the ones below it, so a run at A7 carries all seven modifiers at once. Four rungs decide most climbs: A1 fills the map with Elites, A5 hands you a curse before the first fight, A6 roughly halves how many cards you can afford to remove, and A10 makes you beat two Act 3 bosses on one HP bar. Full release targets Ascension 20 to match the first game. Everything below is current for v0.107.1.

How Ascension unlocks

Clear any Act 3 boss with a character and Ascension becomes selectable for that character. If you have not gotten that far yet, our Slay the Spire 2 beginner guide covers the fundamentals that get you there. After that, each level unlocks the one above it. Finish a run at A3 with item:silent and A4 opens for Silent.

Progress does not transfer between characters, so item:ironclad sitting at A6 while item:defect sits at A0 is a normal save file. Each character re-earns the ladder from the bottom, which is how the game pushes you through five card pools instead of one.

The modifiers are cumulative and permanent. There is no way to take A6's Inflation without also carrying A1 through A5, and no way to turn a modifier off once the level is selected.

Every Ascension level

The rungs that actually stop runs

Ascension 1: Swarming Elites

Elite nodes are already the densest source of run-shaping power on the map. Adding 60% more of them turns the Elite fight from something you route around into something you walk into whether you planned for it or not.

Every Elite drops a guaranteed Uncommon relic, which is why A1 is not purely a tax. The question is whether your deck banks that relic without paying more HP than the relic is worth. Read your buffer, not the reward. Fight Elites early while you still have block and a full bar, and skip the floor-14 Elite that looks affordable right up until the second attack lands.

Character matters more here than at any other rung. item:ironclad's item:burning-blood returns 6 HP at the end of every combat, which quietly pays the Elite tax across a full run. item:necrobinder carries 66 HP with no equivalent sustain, so the same map costs her twice as much. Our character tier list sorts the five by how well they hold up once the modifiers stack.

Ascension 5: Ascender's Bane

The curse sits in your deck from floor 1 of every run. On its own it is one dead draw in ten, which is survivable. The knock-on effect is what changes your play.

Ascender's Bane pushes deck thinning up your priority list exactly one level before A6 makes thinning expensive. Take the cheap removals in Act 1 and early Act 2 while gold is still loose. Players who ignore removal until Act 2 at A5 walk into A6 with the same habit and never recover the gold.

Ascension 6: Inflation

Most climbs stall on this rung, where the first removal costs 100 gold and the second costs 150, so cutting two cards out of a deck runs 250. A3 has already taken a quarter of your gold income on top of that, which is how a modifier about shop prices ends up roughly halving the number of cards you cut over a full run.

The archetypes that feel it worst are the ones that win through density. Ironclad Strength decks want Whirlwind hitting off a 12-card list. Silent item:shiv decks need item:accuracy to show up every fight. Both plans assume you can cut four or five starters, and at A6 you can afford two or three. Decks that do not care about deck size take the modifier far better, which is why Necrobinder Souls and Defect orb queues hold up well at this level. Our Ironclad Strength build guide walks through which cuts come first when the budget is that tight.

When you do buy a removal, cut a Strike before a Defend in most decks. The A6 runs that die in Act 2 die to unblocked damage, not to a slightly diluted attack curve.

Ascension 10: Double Boss

Act 3 draws from Aeonglass, item:queen, and item:test-subject. At A10 you fight two of them with no rest site in between, on whatever HP and resources you carry out of the first one.

Any deck that wins by assembling one enormous turn loses here. Aeonglass is the fight that exposes it: damage climbs nonlinearly past turn 10, and its Wither pressure punishes block-and-wait plans, so a deck that needs 14 turns to close one boss has no route through two. What survives A10 is sustained damage per turn and a block engine that does not depend on drawing one specific card.

How drafting changes as you climb

Removal timing moves earlier

Below A6 you can thin the deck at leisure in Act 2. From A6 upward, the first merchant you see is usually the cheapest removal of the entire run, and the price only goes one direction. Budget for the removal before you budget for the shop card, and skip the 150-gold Uncommon that would be a fine pick at A0.

Front-loaded damage beats late payoffs

A8 and A9 change nothing about your cards. They change how long fights run and how much you take while they run. A combat that closed in three turns at A0 takes four or five at A9, and each extra turn is another attack pattern landing on you. Cards that deal real damage on turns 1 and 2 gain value against cards that pay off on turn 6, because turn 6 now arrives with 30 fewer HP behind it.

Scaling that works without a combo

A7 halves how often Rares and Upgraded cards appear, which means two-card plans fire in fewer runs. item:demon-form plus item:limit-break, or item:accuracy plus item:infinite-blades, stops being something you can draft toward with confidence. Commons and Uncommons that scale on their own carry high-Ascension runs.

The same logic applies to relics. item:ice-cream stops resetting your Energy at the end of your turn, which improves every deck ever drafted and is worth planning a boss reward around. item:paper-phrog is narrower, an Ironclad Elite drop that pushes Vulnerable from 50% to 75% extra damage, but it asks nothing of your deck beyond one source of Vulnerable. Generic power gets better precisely when the reward pool stops handing you build pieces. The full relic tier list ranks every one of them against this patch.

Potions become a resource, not insurance

A4 cuts a slot, so what you hold has to do work. Drinking a potion to avoid 12 damage in Act 1 is a better trade at high Ascension than saving it for a boss you may not reach. The HP you protect in Act 1 is the HP that lets you take the Elite path in Act 2.

What the top of the ladder actually asks for

By A8 the run stops rewarding clever picks and starts rewarding boring ones. Enemy HP is up, enemy damage is up, and fights you used to clear on autopilot now cost 8 to 15 HP each.

The healing arithmetic is what makes this bite. Rest sites restore 30% of max HP and one is guaranteed before each act boss, so item:necrobinder recovers about 15 HP per campfire off the 52 she carries from A2 upward. A2 has already cut Ancient healing to 80% of what is missing. Every fight you take at high Ascension is drawn against a recovery budget that no longer refills.

The habits that produce an A10 clear are unglamorous. Take the block card when you are unsure. Fight Elites while your buffer is fresh, remove Strikes before the merchant price climbs, and pick the Ancient relic that wins Act 1 over the one that reads better on paper. None of that is clever, and none of it needs to be.

A10 is the Early Access ceiling. Clear it on all five characters and you have run out of ladder until 1.0 raises it to 20.