Slay the Spire 2 Ascension Guide: Every Level from A1 to A10 and How to Beat Them

Here’s what nobody warns you about before your first real climb in Slay the Spire 2: the level that breaks most runs isn’t A10, it’s A9. The ladder is only ten steps tall this time (the original had twenty), every modifier stacks on top of the previous one, and once Deadly Enemies kicks in, those Act 1 hallway fights you used to clear on autopilot start taking real bites out of your health bar. I’ve lost runs there that would have cruised through A7. So if the upper levels keep sending you back to the main menu, you’re in very good company.

In this Slay the Spire 2 Ascension guide, you’ll find every level from A1 to A10 with its exact effect, how unlocks work in solo and co-op, which character I’d climb with at each stretch and the mistakes that quietly end runs from A5 onward. Everything here matches the live Early Access build as of November 9, 2026. Mega Crit has a beta update scheduled for November 12, and if it touches the ladder, I’ll add an Update line right at the top of this guide.

How Ascension works in Slay the Spire 2

Ascension is the game’s optional difficulty ladder, and you toggle it on the character select screen before a run. Each level keeps every modifier from the levels below it, so A6 isn’t just Inflation, it’s Inflation plus extra elites, weaker healing, less gold, one fewer potion slot and a permanent curse. That stacking is the whole point. You’re not learning ten separate challenges, you’re learning to play one increasingly stingy version of the same game.

If you came over from the first game, the shorter ladder feels denser rather than easier. Effects that used to be spread across twenty levels have been folded into ten, which means each new level actually changes how you draft and path instead of nudging a number by a few percent. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite changes in any roguelike deckbuilder sequel, because every unlock feels like a new puzzle.

Unlocking every Ascension level one character at a time

You open Ascension for a character by beating any Act 3 boss with them. From there, clearing the Act 3 boss on your current level unlocks the next one, and that’s the only way up. There’s no shortcut, no global unlock and no grinding currency involved, just wins.

Progress is tracked separately for Ironclad, Silent, Defect, Regent and Necrobinder. You could sit at A10 on Regent and still be at A0 on Defect, and that’s totally normal. The good news is that any level you’ve unlocked stays selectable, so dropping back to A8 to practice a matchup before trying A9 again is a smart move, not a step backwards.

Multiplayer Ascension follows its own rules

Co-op has its own Ascension track (the flame icon turns blue so you can tell them apart), and your solo levels don’t carry over into multiplayer. You start that ladder from scratch even if you’re a seasoned A10 player alone.

Here’s the twist that a lot of guides skip: a multiplayer win unlocks the next level for every character at once, no matter who you played. The catch is that the party can only go as high as the lowest maximum in the group, so if one friend is still at A2, that’s where you’re all playing. My advice? Pair up with people at a similar level, or treat the low levels as a relaxed warm up while the newcomer catches up.

All 10 Ascension modifiers at a glance

Before getting into strategy, here’s the full list in one place. Keep in mind that everything is cumulative, so the right column is what gets added on top of everything above it.

Level	Modifier	What it adds
A1	Swarming Elites	Roughly 60% more Elites on the map
A2	Weary Traveler	Ancients heal only 80% of your missing HP
A3	Poverty	Enemies and Treasure Chests drop 25% less Gold
A4	Tight Belt	One fewer potion slot
A5	Ascender’s Bane	You start with an Unplayable, Ethereal, Eternal curse
A6	Inflation	Card removal starts at 100 Gold and rises by 50 each time
A7	Scarcity	Rare and upgraded cards show up half as often
A8	Tough Enemies	All enemies have more HP
A9	Deadly Enemies	All enemies deal more damage
A10	Double Boss	Two bosses at the end of Act 3

One heads up if you’re reading older guides: A6 used to be Gloom, which meant fewer rest sites. Since April 2026 it’s Inflation instead, so any route advice built around missing campfires on A6 is out of date.

Every Ascension level from A1 to A10 explained

I like to think of the ladder in chunks. A1 to A5 squeeze your resources, A6 and A7 squeeze your deck, and A8 to A10 squeeze your HP. Each chunk asks for a slightly different mindset, and the runs that fall apart are usually the ones still playing the previous chunk’s game.

That’s also why I don’t recommend skipping straight to the “real” levels with an unlock trick or a friend’s carry. The early modifiers teach habits (taking elites, spending potions, watching gold) that you’ll absolutely need when the damage numbers jump at A9.

A1 to A3 bring more elites, less healing and lighter pockets

Swarming Elites sounds terrifying, but it’s secretly a gift. More elites means more relics, and if your Act 1 deck has a couple of solid damage cards, A1 usually ends up feeling stronger than A0. The trick is to grab front loaded damage early so you can actually take those fights instead of routing around them.

Weary Traveler and Poverty are slower burns. Ancients now heal only 80% of your missing HP between acts, so you can no longer walk into an Ancient on fumes and expect a full reset. Poverty trims 25% off enemy and chest gold, which you’ll barely notice at first and then really miss once card removals get pricey a few levels later. It’s a bit like a tax you don’t see until April.

A4 and A5 take a potion slot and add a curse you can’t remove

Tight Belt is where a lot of players first feel the climb, and the community tends to agree. Losing a potion slot doesn’t sound like much, but it punishes hoarding harder than any other modifier. With fewer slots, every potion you sit on is a potion you’ll probably have to throw away when a better one drops.

Ascender’s Bane is Unplayable, Ethereal and Eternal, so you can’t remove or transform it. The upside hidden in that wording is Ethereal: if it’s in your hand at the end of your turn, it exhausts for the rest of that combat. In practice, it costs you one dead draw per fight, which hurts most in short hallway fights and barely matters in long boss battles. Big draw turns? Those make it disappear even faster.

A6 and A7 make every gold coin and card reward count

Inflation changes the Merchant math, and it’s worth doing the numbers once. Without it, your first three removals cost 75, 100 and 125 Gold, which adds up to 300. On A6 the same three removals cost 100, 150 and 200, a total of 450 Gold, and that’s with Poverty already cutting your income. So I stopped treating removals as an automatic buy and started asking whether a relic or a potion would do more for the run.

Scarcity halves how often rare and upgraded cards appear, both in combat rewards and in the Merchant’s stock. The practical fix is to value common and uncommon cards that already work unupgraded, and to spend campfire upgrades on the few cards that truly carry your deck. Waiting for the perfect rare to save you is how A7 runs drift into Act 2 without a plan.

A8 and A9 are the HP and damage wall

Tough Enemies gives every monster more HP, and on its own it’s manageable. Fights just last a turn or two longer. The problem is that A9 arrives right after it and makes enemies hit harder too, so those extra turns become extra damage, and that one two punch is what the community keeps calling the biggest spike on the ladder.

On A9 I rest at campfires a lot more than I’d like, and that’s exactly the trap. Every rest is an upgrade you didn’t take, and a deck with fewer upgrades takes even more damage in the next act. What finally worked for me was prioritizing block and damage mitigation in Act 1 far earlier than felt natural, so I could keep upgrading instead of patching holes.

A10 means surviving the Double Boss

At the end of Act 3 you fight two bosses instead of one. If your deck already beat A9, it can almost certainly beat each of these bosses individually. What kills A10 runs is arriving at the second fight with no potions and half your HP gone because you played the first boss like it was the finale.

So I treat boss one as a resource check. I’ll still use a potion if a turn goes badly, but I save my best potions and my biggest scaling turns for the second fight whenever the first one allows it. And before even reaching Act 3, I ask myself a simple question: does this deck scale well enough to handle a long fight twice in a row?

How to beat high Ascension in Slay the Spire 2

The players who climb consistently aren’t necessarily the best at combat math. They’re the ones who review their losses and change one habit at a time, and the run history screen is honestly the most underrated tool in the game for that. If you want more deep dives like this one, our game guides section keeps growing every week.

Character choice matters too, more than in A0. Some kits simply forgive mistakes better under A8 and A9, and picking the right one for your first attempt at a new level saves a lot of frustration. Every other guide we publish for the game is collected on our Slay the Spire 2 hub page.

Which character to pick for each stretch of the climb

For A1 to A5, play whoever you enjoy most, because these levels reward good fundamentals over specific kits. Ironclad is a comfy pick since Burning Blood heals 6 HP after every combat, which softens both Swarming Elites and Weary Traveler. Silent and Regent shine once you know their engines, and Defect is the one I’d save for later because it asks for the most planning.

From A8 up, Necrobinder is my go to, and plenty of players report their first A10 win with her. The reason is Osty: he absorbs all unblocked attack damage before it reaches you, and Bound Phylactery summons him at the start of every turn. When enemies hit harder, having a bony left hand eat the hits is a huge safety net (it doesn’t stop non attack damage, though, so don’t get careless).

Mistakes that kill runs from A5 onward

The number one mistake I made was holding potions “for the boss.” Spending a potion to save 15 HP in an elite fight is almost always worth it, especially with only two slots. A close second was skipping potions at the shop to save gold, and then dying to an Act 2 elite my deck wasn’t built for. Decimilipede, in particular, gets mentioned a lot as a run killer at this point of the climb.

The other big ones are subtler. Restarting every time Neow offers something mediocre robs you of practice in awkward runs, and taking cards that don’t fix a weakness or push a win condition just bloats the deck. If fights drag, look for scaling. If you’re bleeding HP, look for block. Simple, but easy to forget when a shiny rare shows up.

Personal review

What I love about this ladder is how readable it is. Every level changes one clear thing, and you can feel it in the very first act. The Inflation math, the Ethereal quirk on Ascender’s Bane and the way A8 and A9 team up are the kind of details that turn a frustrating wall into a solvable puzzle. If you’re the type who enjoys squeezing value out of every gold coin, you’ll be hooked. If you just want to see the story, A0 and co-op are perfectly fine places to stay.

Fans of the original’s A20 grind will feel right at home, and if you like this kind of build tension, the clan and Pyre Heart choices in our Monster Train 2 tier list scratch a very similar itch. Slay the Spire 2 has been in Early Access since March 5, 2026, for $24.99 on Steam, and you can play it on PC with Windows, macOS and Linux. Which level is your wall right now, and what would you add to this guide? Drop it in the comments, I read all of them.

Frequently asked questions

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