Part 4: Slay the Cultist

Haven't played Slay the Spire? Here's the background — the rules, and why the game is hard to learn. The first three combats in StS are drawn from a special pool of "easy encounters". Of those, the most straightforward is the Cultist: it starts with between 48 and 54 HP (meaning it takes 8 or 9 plays of "strike" on it to kill it). On its first turn, it performs a ritual, dealing no damage to the player. On every turn after, it attacks for an increasing amount of damage. The cultist is there to teach human players the concept of a damage race: that it's sometimes better to take a little amount of damage now to save a large amount of damage later. The cultist's first attack is for 6 damage, just over the 5 block from a "defend" card. A player holding two defend cards and three strike cards would need to decide whether it's better to deal 18 and take 6, deal 12 and take 1, or deal 6 and take 0. The ground truth would come from calculating the expected value of remaining HP after the f