Ascension 6 Inflation: How the New Modifier Changes Your Run
Inflation replaced Gloom on Ascension 6 in v0.103.2. What it does to merchant pricing, shop relics, gold-generating relics, and how to actually plan your shop visits around it.
What Inflation actually does
Inflation replaces the old Gloom modifier on Ascension 6. Card removal at the merchant is now significantly more expensive, every shop relic is 25 gold cheaper than baseline, and gold-generating relics no longer appear in the shop pool.
The design intent is to push difficulty into spending decisions instead of map randomness. Gloom punished you with fewer rest sites; Inflation punishes you with sharper opportunity cost on every gold sink.
- Merchant card removal is significantly more expensive.
- All shop relics: −25 gold from base price.
- Gold-generating relics no longer spawn in shops.
- Gloom is gone — map randomness is no longer the A6 lever.
New shop discipline
On A6 you should plan exactly two productive shop visits per run: one in Act 1-2 to remove your weakest 1-2 starting cards before card cost spikes too far, and one in Act 2-3 to grab a key relic at the new discounted rate.
Greedy "remove 4 cards across three shops" runs are dead. The math no longer supports it because each successive remove costs more, and gold-gen relics that would fund that strategy are gone from the pool.
- Plan two shops per run, not three or four.
- Remove your two weakest base cards early — before prices spike.
- Use the −25 gold relic discount to grab one key piece, not three medium ones.
Card pickups under Inflation
Because removal is expensive, the cheapest removal is to skip the bad card in the first place. Be more aggressive about skipping mediocre rewards, and only buy in the shop when you genuinely cannot get the same card from a fight reward.
Lean decks gain even more relative value on A6 than they did on lower Ascensions. A 12-card deck that hits its game plan beats a 22-card deck where you only afforded one removal.