How to Beat The Queen in Slay The Spire 2

Slay The Spire is known for its difficult bosses. Whether it’s monstrous foes that deal an ungodly amount of damage in a single brutal strike, or those who fill your deck with debilitating debuffs, your deckbuilding skills and tactical thinking are constantly being put to the test.

Slay The Spire 2 is, of course, no different in this regard. Some might say the final bosses that reside at the top of the spire, at the end of the third act, may be even more difficult than the ones prior.

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Time to put this triple-headed beast down!

The Queen is one of these tough boss encounters, and she’s ready to punish those whose deck isn’t up to snuff. Let’s take a look at some of her unique tricks and just how to take her down.

Encounter Mechanics

The first thing you’ll notice about the Queen fight is that she has a minion with her. In the base encounter, without any Ascension levels, the Queen has a total of 400 Health, and the minion has 199, for a total of 599.

The way minions work in Slay The Spire is that once the master dies, the minion goes down with it. Because of this, there’s very little reason to actually bother with the Queen’s minion.

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In addition, once the minion dies, the queen will start attacking you herself, dealing even more damage than the minion. As with most battles in Slay The Spire, the quicker you can be done with it, the better.

This minion, however, is the least of your troubles. The Queen has another mechanic which binds 3 cards together every time you draw a new hand. While a card is bound, you can only play 1 of the 3 cards per turn. For decks with no ability to draw more cards, this boss can end your run extremely quickly.

Killing the minion does not disrupt the binding mechanic. This is a permanent debuff on your character.

Boss Strategies

There are a few decks which really struggle against the Queen. Decks that rely heavily on assembling a few puzzle pieces before they can get the ball rolling suffer here. If you end up drawing 2 or 3 of your main key cards at the same time, you won’t be able to play all of them, meaning you’ll have to wait until you reshuffle your deck. By that time, it’s usually too late.

In addition, as I mentioned previously, if you don’t have a lot of draw in your deck, you’ll be stuck with a bunch of dead cards every time you draw a new hand. Drawing new cards gets around the binding mechanic, as only cards drawn at the beginning of the turn are bound.

So the best thing you can do against the Queen is to make sure you have a good amount of energy regeneration to prolong your turns, and a good draw engine to keep it going.

What’s more, you only need to focus on 1 health pool here, so builds that revolve around dealing a large amount of damage all at once, like Sovereign Blade, Reaper, and Demon Form stacked on top of Vulnerable, can take out the Queen very quickly.

Also, the Queen doesn’t reset her debuffs over the course of the fight, unlike bosses like Test Subject, so Accelerant-Poison and Doom builds function pretty well here. Just make sure you have enough defensive cards for the first few turns, while you get your build functioning, and you should be fine.