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You did hit a sweetspot. I'm impressed at how relatively balanced it feels to have such fundamental StS things changed like limitless card voiding and and all cards having retain.

Happy to have confirmation for a download release once patreon content anti-piracy measures will no longer be needed. Looking forward to it.

But huh, really? I'm having a lot of success with Pearl so far, and I assume there's a lot of better unlockable goodies currently locked behind lvl 7-10 for patreon stuff.

 Card draw is already one of the strongest things you can build around in StS and its clones (and is outright necessary to make most builds work consistently, such as for ascension, in this type of game regardless) so getting what is essentially free mana for focusing on card draw and re-shuffling is very, very good, even if it is a little bit random. The randomness kind of stops mattering when your deck is slim and half of if is just milk bottles, so you're guaranteed to get several every turn.

Not to mention there's a relic that gives you benefits when a card gets replaced with another, which works with milk bottles. There's definitely some snowballing you can pull off there, and I haven't even talked about her infinite block builds which scale great with this game's equivalent of thorns.

I'd even dare say that I like Pearl's playstyle much more than Beryl, even though Beryl is really, really strong right now due to her mana retain, mana generation, quake builds trivializing everything in the game while also giving tons of block since you don't need to attack consistently... not to mention poison builds, which definitely feel inspired by the Silent from StS, though they take so long to setup that all my poison builds so far just end up turning into Gaea's wrath + Influx + Telluric Resonance eventually, since Beryl's mana generation allows for spamming this burst damage combo to end fights quickly and take out problem enemies first, and more consistently than drawing poison and block repeatedly for a while.

I like poison builds in StS, but they have the same issue there of needing too much setup to be worth it half the time, being outclassed by other better things that are much easier to snowball.

That said, while Beryl is extremely strong to me so far, there's one outlier I noticed... her starting deck. It's basically completely carried by her passive. Her unique card, Release, is... really bad early on, and gets outclassed even more during lategame. Since it doesn't count the first mana spent as an attack due to it being part of the card cost itself, if you run the numbers, there's basically no benefit to ever using it below 3 mana, and even then it's negligible.

It only REALLY starts outscaling regular strikes in the same amount at 4 or more mana.

Now, I know it's one card so you'd think the burst damage from one card draw could make up for it, but Beryl already has several cards like that which just function better for the same purpose of high-mana burst damage, and work much better with synergy cards like Influx and Telluric Resonance (Gaea's Wrath, or even Unleash immediately come to mind), so... you're only ever using it in earlygame. Where you will always have several strikes regardless, even though you ideally want to replace strikes with something else to trim the deck.

I don't think I've ever had a moment yet where Release did something that I wouldn't accomplish by playing strikes I had in my hand on the same turn, or just ending the turn to block and drawing the strikes immediately next turn if I don't have them somehow. I don't even know how I'd buff or rework it, but I feel it does need some sort of change. I don't even think nerfing the obviously overpowered Beryl builds would make Release shine more, it's just fundamentally not very useful even in a vacuum.

Pearl meanwhile basically has mana generation that scales with your draw/shuffle power rather than just being at the start of your turn, which is arguably better depending on your deck since Beryl's only scales with her level and by having/playing specific cards (which usually have vanish, or require several in the case of generating mana leaves rather than improving the base generation effect), not to mention Pearl's tons of great block + thorns cards, AND block retain between turns. Her unique starting deck card also remains useful throughout the entire run due to enemies that fill your hand with hexes later on. As you mentioned, under this system of retaining all cards all the time, you sometimes run into the issue of dead draws or having too many cards and not being able to play them all to refresh your hand properly next turn. Pearl fixes this for free just by virtue of her starting deck, and has direct upgrades to that card she can find mid-run as well. Very nice.

Feels like a bit of a mix between the Ironclad's infinite block + thorns builds, and the Buxom modded character's insane draw potential + snowballing milk effects, except without Buxom's downsides of getting too big stuffing your draw pile with bounce/immobility status cards.

...Speaking of, I feel like a Body Slam (Ironclad card) equivalent in this would fit Pearl very well thematically, and also slot into her block builds very well... I'd imagine it would hurt pretty bad to get smacked by booba weighing half your body mass.

Anyway, sorry I'm rambling, but yeah, just sharing my thoughts. Loving the game so far and can't wait for more. From what I can gather a QoL update is priority right now?

Would be nice if we had some soundeffect variety or maybe simple visuals for certain attacks. Maybe an extra music theme per stage. StS does these two things because the devs knew it eventually gets annoying to have no variety in attack sound effects between playing a tiny dagger card and a big damage slam card or something, and music needs some variety in a roguelike since you're guaranteed to be visiting the same locations at the start of every run.

I'll be following the development of this and seeing how it goes, can't wait for Pearl's full content! Sorry for the wall of text, and have a good day.