Wanted to show off an absolutely busted,
TWO UNIT deck I got to work on covenant 23 today. Penumbra variant was Monstrous / Gluttonous II. I lucked out and managed to get an Ancient Synergy to 1 cost early as well as a super duplication portal. The x+3 scroll in conjunction with shroud spike and fossilized fangs let Penumbra scale insanely fast, and the icicle artifact just made it easier to set up the aforementioned shroud spike megaboosts. Most of the spells aside from Ancient Synergy were consume cards designed to thin out the deck so I could play as many ancient synergies or spell weakness as possible while enabling Guard's incants. It might have been possible to run this without the guard of the unnamed but I didn't want to risk losing with what was already a pretty radically structured deck.
Some other interesting / broken combos I've had lately:
-Largestone + Legion of Wax + Intent on Death (basically auto win especially if you get holdover on intent on death). This is honestly relatively easy to set up as long as you get legion of wax midgame or so. Intent on death is a pretty solid utility card for any deck with tomb units / heavens aid and legion of wax is still functional / very good without largestone (sub for heartstone) if you have cards like wicklash.
-Split Anvil + Holdover/Doublestack Titanstooth -essentially managed to upgrade all other spells to cost 2 or less. this meant once I had played all my units I was able to play titanstooth every turn on the lower floors to clear jobbers and enable every other spell in my hand--the problem was it ended up being hard countered by the emberdrain sweepers summoned by seraph in the final fight. Still an interesting strategy that carried me through a majority of the run challenge-free.
I definitely feel you on the mind flood on umbra / melting remnant, too. I played a shit load of Slay the Spire on Ascension 20, and these two clans are where the most new mechanics see play. It feels a lot harder to grasp what's strong for me since there isn't experience for me to fall back on. Like, I don't really understand how to make most of Penumbra's build paths strong.
I won a really cool run with his Monstrous path that revolved around Furnace Tap, Void Binding, and Immortal Trade that let him solo kill everything, but it doesn't feel like something I can do every run. His Glutton tree doesn't feel like it makes him tanky enough to scale for late game enemies and his Architect tree doesn't feel like it scales at all outside of some very specific combo deck. All of his shit feels like it's done better by a minion in his own class which feels wrong for a champion card.
I'm not sure if this post was before the buff but I do think Gluttonous is at least really strong for splits just for the 2 lifesteal it gives--if anything I'd say Architect is now the weakest of the variants--though it does scale much better in higher covenants because of the capacity debuff, the base penumbra accompanied by it is not really worth summoning alongside your other units. Best to stick with a mix of gluttonous / monstrous most of the time in my experience, especially since both of the latter can scale well against any of the seraph variants with proper support. Gluttonous III or Monstrous III both have use-cases but definitely require more specific conditions to do the work than G/MII or GII/M.
Monstrous is great for the early game push since it can help you net some early challenges safely but struggles to scale properly for Fel/Daedalus (Monstrous III is insanely strong to make up for it), while Gluttonous with the lifesteal and support can solo plenty of bosses especially if you manage to grab shroudspike/ shroud mitosis / morselmaker/master / any other number of morsel split/autosummon cards in order to deal with the limited capacity--without proper support or lower floors backing it up it also risks falling flat.
Architect, on the other hand, is basically just kind of there and does decent damage from the backline while your better stronger units set up in front--a lot less impactful especially when on higher covenants i've struggled to build enough units to solidly fill two floors let alone the "four" floors created by higher tiers of architect.
I think where Umbra has really started to shine for me are the spells many of which are just boast incredible utility and value and work in weird and fun ways (e.g. furnace tap, other morsel-based boosters). Penumbra's definitely gone up in my estimation. If anything I'd say currently I think tethys is the weakest champ just because their low health is really hard to support properly against a lot of early game obstacles (spikes / even weak sweepers) and its early game scaling is also pretty wack (plus its upgrades feel more easily hardcountered by seraph than other champs). All the other champions have functions that allow them to work their magic in much more versatile or safe fashions. Tethys just requires so much support to survive and it makes it hard to get deck engines with her at the centre running properly.
