The Artist

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⚠ STEAM BRANCH NOTICE — READ FIRST

This mod requires the beta branch of Slay the Spire 2.

If you're on the default / main branch, the mod will appear to load but most features will silently do nothing. This is a Steam branch mismatch, not a bug in the mod.

How to switch:

1. In Steam, right-click Slay the Spire 2 → Properties.

2. Open the Betas tab.

3. Under Beta Participation, select "modded" from the dropdown.

4. Wait for Steam to re-download (small patch).

5. Launch the game in modded mode and the Artist will appear on the character select.

If features still don't work after switching, double-check that BaseLib is also installed under mods\BaseLib\ alongside mods\TheArtist\.

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Description

The Artist is a brand-new playable character for Slay the Spire 2, built from scratch around a single mechanic: the position of every card in your hand. Each card glows with a color tied to its slot, and each color carries TWO possible riders — a Boon that pays off when the card matches the slot, and a Bane that punishes when it doesn't. The whole deckbuilding loop becomes about reordering your hand so the right card lands in the right color — not about combos and scaling like the other characters.

Note

This is a Beta Release! There will be bugs! A lot of them! There will also be balance and scaling issues! Please post bug reports in the bug tab, and general feedback about gameplay in the posts tab.

Installation Instructions

1. Install BaseLib first if you don't have it (see Requirements below).
2. Download the TheArtist zip from the Files tab.
3. Extract it. You'll get a TheArtist folder containing TheArtist.dll, TheArtist.pck, and TheArtist.json.
4. Move that whole TheArtist folder into your STS2 mods directory: Steam\steamapps\common\Slay the Spire 2\mods\TheArtist\
5. Set STS2 to the Beta Branch.
6. Launch the game in modded mode. The Artist appears on the character select screen.

To uninstall, delete the TheArtist folder. Finish or abandon active Artist runs first — saves won't load without the mod.
Main Features

Ten Color Slots, Each With a Boon and a Bane

Every slot has THREE outcomes per card you play from it:

• BOON: the card matches the slot's good trigger. You get the upside.
• BANE: the card matches the slot's bad trigger. You eat the penalty.
• NEUTRAL: the card matches neither. The slot does nothing.

This means routing your hand isn't just "play attacks from Red." It's a three-way puzzle: each card has a slot where it pays off, slots where it costs you, and slots where it's safe.
The full table:

• Red. Boon if Attack: +2 damage (+5 upgraded). Bane if Skill that gives block: take 2 damage.
• Orange. Boon if Skill that gives block: +2 block per Painted card in your hand (+3 upgraded). Bane if Attack: gain 1 Weak.
• Yellow. Boon if Skill: draw 1 card (2 upgraded). Bane if the card has Exhaust: discard a random card.
• Green. Boon if Skill: heal 1 HP, or draw 1 card if you're at full HP (2 upgraded). Bane if Attack: gain 1 Vulnerable.
• Blue. Boon if Attack: that attack costs 1 less (2 upgraded), applied up-front before play. Bane if Power: lose 1 energy.
• Indigo. Boon if Skill: apply 1 Weak and 1 Vulnerable to ALL enemies (2/2 upgraded). Bane if Attack: add an Injury curse to your hand.
• Violet. Boon if Attack: +75% damage (+100% upgraded). Bane if Skill that gives block: gain 1 Frail.
• White. Boon if Power: gain 1 energy AND draw 1 card (2/2 upgraded). Bane if Attack: add a Decay curse to your hand.
• Black. Boon if Attack: this attack triggers a second time (a third on upgrade). Bane if Skill: add a Regret curse to your hand.
• Gold. Boon if the card is Painted Gold: cascade every other slot's Boon (twice upgraded). Bane if the card is the FIRST card you play this turn: cascade every other slot's Bane. Upgrading Gold suppresses the Bane.

Universal rules on top of the table:

• Painted cards and transient color overrides ALWAYS fire the Boon and never fire the Bane. Painting is the player's explicit commitment to that slot, so it pays out the upside only.
• Upgrading a slot suppresses its Bane entirely (the natural Boon trigger still applies).

Skills like Palette Swap, Palette Knife, Inspiration, Wash, Undercoat, and Impasto exist purely to manipulate hand position or override card colors. Your starter relic Painter's Palette gates which color tiers unlock as the run progresses.

Paint Your Cards

Theme cards (Ocean, Autumn, Evening, Monochrome) and Painter cards (Lady in Red, Mood Indigo, Paint It Black, and the rest of the rainbow) override a card's slot color — temporarily for a turn or permanently for the rest of combat. Paint a Strike Black and play it twice. Paint a Defend Green and heal off your blocks. Painted cards always fire that color's Boon, regardless of card type — turning the painter card itself into a precision tool for forcing a Boon you couldn't reach by position alone.

80+ Custom Cards

• Splatter attacks: Ink Blot, Foreshortening, Eye Gouge apply Blind, a 50% chance to miss next turn. Wet Paint is a Blind AoE that also Splashes a random color onto a random card in your hand.
• Multi-hit attacks: Light Touch deals 4 damage twice for free, fully compatible with Vigor and similar per-hit modifiers.
• Painter cards: one per color, paint a chosen card permanently while triggering their own Boon. Upgrading a painter drops Exhaust so you can reuse it across turns.
• Theme cards: repaint your whole hand for the turn into a chosen palette.
• Slot-conditional attacks: Flourish, Tenebrae, Heavy Strike, Etched, Prism, Wide Sweep get bonuses from specific slots.
• Color-counting skills: Layer, Synesthesia, Polychrome, Kaleidoscope scale on unique active colors in your hand.
• Paint synergy: Heavy Brush, Perspective, Atelier, Muse's Kiss reward decks stacked with painted cards.
• Status / cost tricks: Wash drops the cost of every Attack you play this turn (including ones drawn after Wash resolves). The discount shows as a visible status icon on the player and stacks if you play multiple Washes in one turn.
• Ancient gifts: First Brushstroke and Golden Hour, rare blue-flame elevators.

Relics, Potions, and Powers

Nine new relics: Painter's Palette (starter), Distilled Sunlight, Essence of Mother Earth, Dusk Mirror, Hand of Midas, Gold Dust, Quintessence, Squid Ink, and Yin Yang.
Seven new potions: Fixative Flask, Thinner, Ochre Draught, Complementary Tincture, Master's Palette, Varnish Vial, and the rare Distillation of Sight (3 Weak + 3 Vulnerable AoE plus unblockable attacks for the rest of the turn).
Custom powers with status icons: Inspiration, Pigment Forge, Polychrome, Ultraviolet (uses the engine's Vigor power for clean stacking), Synesthesia, Wet Canvas, Chef d'Œuvre, Golden Hour, Atelier, Muse's Kiss, Wash, and Splatter (Blind).

Quality of Life

• Hand-position colors glow on the cards themselves so you always know what each card will do.
• A palette legend on the side shows unlocked slots, their Boon AND Bane triggers, and their effects, with full hover tips.
• A small per-card indicator above each hand card shows whether the slot's Boon will fire, Bane will fire, or neither (the third "neutral" outcome) — so the routing puzzle is legible at a glance.
• Inspiration uses a drag-arrow UI — pick a card, drag the targeting arrow, drop it where you want.
• Reward pools tuned to reduce duplicates and over-frequent Power cards.
• Bespoke character art including a Spine-rigged combat sprite and character-select background.

Gameplay Note

You start with the Red color slot unlocked. At the start of your third combat in Act 1, you pick two additional tier-1 (Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue) color slots to unlock. At the start of your first combat in Act 2, you pick one tier-2 (Indigo, Violet) color slot to unlock, and at the start of your first combat in Act 3, you pick one tier-3 (White, Black) color slot to unlock. The Gold color slot can be unlocked by picking up a special relic!

Requirements

• Slay the Spire 2 BETA BRANCH (modded build, post-Apr 2026 sts2.dll API).
• BaseLib by Alchyr — required for all current STS2 character mods. Install it before The Artist: BaseLib on NexusMods. Drop its BaseLib folder into the STS2 mods directory the same way as The Artist.

Plays nicely alongside HermitMod and the rest of the BaseLib-based modded ecosystem. Bug reports and feedback welcome on the Posts tab.

Request for Help

If you've enjoyed this mod and have experience with translating, programming, or digital art, please let me know! I could definitely use some help and don't want to rely on AI assets when the mod gets out of beta!

How to Play - Brief Tutorial Video

YouTube: pFyFIaEE5Ao

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Nexus Mods Support Ending

Thank you to everyone who has supported this, and my other mods, over the course of 2026.  All future updates to this and my other mods will be exclusively through Steam workshop and my Discord, which can be found here: https://discord.gg/7kJMtFCarU.  Thank you everyone!
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New character mod: The Red Mage is out!

If you like The Artist's color-weaving, my newest character takes combo play even further: The Red Mage — a Final Fantasy-inspired jack of all trades.  Chain Sword, Black Magic, and White Magic cards in exact order to conjure Meteor, Holy and Manafication, or command your Moogle familiar's 11 trained combo moves.  ~60 cards, 12 relics, 8 potions, full art, sounds and spell effects.

Get it here: https://www.nexusmods.com/slaythespire2/mods/1372

Same BaseLib framework as this mod, so if The Artist runs for you, the Red Mage will too. Kupo!

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The Artist — Patch Notes for version 1.0.28: Game v0.108 Compatibility & Fix Batch

The game's v0.108 beta update reworked the modding surface for attacks and damage, and mods built against the old API — this one included — either fail to load or freeze combat the moment an attack card resolves. This update rebuilds The Artist against the new API and bundles the round of gameplay fixes that were already staged before the game update landed.
If you're on game v0.108 or newer, this update is required. Older versions of the mod will not work on the current beta build — and this version won't work on pre-v0.108 game builds, so update both together.

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v0.108 Compatibility

What changed under the hood, for the curious (and for other mod authors hitting the same wall):

• Attack commands now carry their card play.  AttackCommand.FromCard takes the originating  CardPlay alongside the card. Every attack in the mod — all 28 attack cards plus the slot riders' bonus hits and Bane self-damage — now passes it through properly.
• Damage-modifier hooks gained a parameter. Powers that scale or gate damage (Blind's miss roll, Golden Hour's double-damage lock) updated to the new  ModifyDamageMultiplicative signature, along with the in-hand preview calculator.
• Card-play hooks slimmed down. The engine's before/after card-played hooks dropped their combat-state argument. Three of the mod's patches — including the one that fires every slot rider — bound it by name and would have failed at load on the new build. Rebound to the new shapes.
• Damage interception retargeted. The unblockable-attacks patch (Distillation of Sight) now targets the new terminal damage overload.

No save-format changes come from any of this — it's all call-plumbing.

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Bug Fixes

Blind missed too often on some runs

Blind is supposed to be a coin flip — 50% chance the blinded enemy's attack misses. On some runs it clustered badly, missing far more often than it should. The per-turn roll was re-seeding a fresh RNG each turn from related seed values, and correlated seeds produce correlated first draws.
Fixed: the miss roll now seeds one long-lived RNG from the run seed and advances it sequentially each turn. Sequential output is properly distributed — a true 50% — and because both players in co-op share the run seed and advance in lockstep, the roll stays multiplayer-deterministic.

Painter cards lost to theme cards

Playing a painter card (Chiaroscuro, Lady in Red, Paint It Black, and the rest of the rainbow) after a theme card like Ocean or Autumn didn't take: the theme's turn-wide repaint kept winning, and the painter's permanent color silently failed to apply. Painters are the more explicit, more permanent commitment — they now correctly override an active theme.

Kaleidoscope fired Banes instead of Boons

Kaleidoscope reads "Trigger the ability of every active color slot" — and then punished you for it. The rider evaluation checked each color's Boon/Bane gate against Kaleidoscope's own card type (Attack), so skill-favoring colors fired their Bane instead: an Indigo hand slot meant Kaleidoscope handed you an Injury curse. The opposite of the card's promise.

Fixed: Kaleidoscope now forces each active color's Boon and suppresses all Banes — the same override semantics painted cards already use. With a Red/Green/Blue/Indigo hand it now gives bonus damage, the heal/draw, the cost discount, and the AoE Weak+Vulnerable, instead of a curse.

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Balance

• Palette Swap gains Retain. A position-manipulation tool you're holding for the right moment shouldn't evaporate at end of turn.
• Inspiration is now Innate. The drag-arrow reorder is the character's core verb — having it reliably in your opening hand makes the first-turn routing puzzle actually solvable.

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Housekeeping

• Workshop/Nexus description refreshed.
• Mod download size reduced roughly 75%.

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Compatibility

• Requires Slay the Spire 2 beta branch, game v0.108 or newer. This version of the mod will not load on older game builds.
• No save-breaking changes on the mod side. Existing runs continue working.
• BaseLib by Alchyr still required, as always.
• Singleplayer and co-op multiplayer both supported.

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The Artist — Version 1.0.27-Beta Update: Five Art Styles, Full Multiplayer Support, and the Erase Mechanic
Three days of heavy work across the whole mod. The headline features: you can now choose from five different card-art styles, co-op multiplayer is fully fixed, and there's a new Erase keyword with two cards built around it. Full breakdown below.

🎨 Five Card-Art Styles

Card art is now a setting. Go to Main Menu → Mods → The Artist → Card Art Style and pick whichever you like:

• AI Generated (default) — the original art.

• Hand-Drawn — my own hand-drawn doodles, rolling out card by card.

• Licensed — public-domain masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access collection (Hokusai's Great Wave, La Tour, Vermeer, Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, and more).

• Openverse — CC0/CC-BY art from a wide range of museums and libraries (Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty, Rijksmuseum, NYPL, Library of Congress…). Winslow Homer, Munch's Starry Night, Monet, Seurat, Constable.

• Openverse Community — openly-licensed photography and art from individual Flickr contributors. A grittier, street-level feel.

Every non-AI piece is credited to its artist in the card's hover tip — name, work, source, license. All art is genuinely free-to-use (CC0, public domain, or CC-BY); nothing non-commercial or no-derivatives. Each style uses per-card fallback, so you never see a blank — if a card lacks art in your chosen set, it drops to the next.
Prefer the AI art? It's the default and nothing changes for you. The other styles are entirely opt-in.

🤝 Multiplayer Co-op: Fully Fixed

Several co-op crashes have been squashed. The root cause was randomness being decided independently on each player's machine, desyncing the match. Everything random now runs through the game's synchronized RNG:

• Blind (from Ink Blot / Splatter) — blinded enemies attacking no longer crashes the session.

• Ocean, Autumn, Evening, Monochrome (Theme cards), Prismatic Burst, Wet Paint, Rule of Thirds, Squid Ink, Pigment Forge, and the Yellow slot Bane — all synchronized.

• Inspiration — now fully works in co-op via a networked two-pick move (pick a card, then pick the card to place it in front of). Singleplayer keeps the original drag-arrow.

Singleplayer is completely unaffected — your solo runs play exactly as before.

✨ New Mechanic: Erase

• Erase (keyword) — absorbs the next slot Bane that would trigger. Stacks; each stack eats one Bane.

• Erase (2-cost Common Skill, Exhaust) — Gain 3 Erase.

• Streak (2-cost Uncommon Power) — Whenever a Strike triggers a Boon, gain 1 Erase.

The in-hand slot indicator shows a neutral hyphen on any card whose Bane an Erase stack will absorb, so you can see your protected plays at a glance.

⚖️ Balance & Card Changes

• Chiaroscuro → 3-cost; upgrade removes Ethereal.

• A Whiter Shade of Pale & Paint It Black → keep Exhaust when upgraded; upgrade now reduces cost.

• Turpentine, Chef d'Œuvre, Atelier, Master's Stroke → moved to Uncommon.

• Atelier → painted-card threshold raised to 5 (4 upgraded).

• Gradient → upgrade bonus damage increased.

• Heavy Brush → base damage and per-painted scaling increased.

• Master's Stroke → no longer punished by the Black slot's Bane (it rewards being there).

• Polychrome → removed for now.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Compendium no longer shows 0 damage/block on many cards.

• Impasto and Palette Knife no longer paint locked slot colors.

• Lasting Candy relic correctly offers Powers again.

• The Artist's run-history icon is no longer enormous.

• Painted cards now glow their color in the deck view.

• Background-removal cleanup on several power/relic icons.

• Character-select screen now uses a clean static image.

Now on Steam Workshop

The Artist is also available on the Steam Workshop now — subscribe there for one-click install and auto-updates. NexusMods remains fully supported.

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Thanks for all the bug reports and feedback — the multiplayer fixes especially came straight from your reports. As always, follow for updates.

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Version 1.0.26-Beta --  Update: Museum Art Comes to the Spire

This update adds a full set of licensed, public-domain card art sourced from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection — 73 cards now have real artwork by real artists, every piece verified CC0 and credited in-game.

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What's New

Licensed Museum Art (73 cards)
Every piece comes from the Met's Open Access program, which releases high-resolution images of public-domain works under CC0. Each image was verified through the museum's own 

isPublicDomain flag — this is the Met asserting the license, not a scraper guessing.
The matching philosophy was Topic → Technique → Example:

• Topic — art depicting the card's subject. Ocean got Ogata Kōrin's "Rough Waves." Lady in Red got Fra Filippo Lippi's portrait of a woman in a red gown. Eye Gouge got Poussin's "Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun."
• Technique — art demonstrating the named method. Crosshatch got Dürer's "Knight, Death, and the Devil." Pointillism got Seurat's "Circus Sideshow." Chiaroscuro got Georges de La Tour's "The Penitent Magdalen." Ink Blot got a landscape by Alexander Cozens — the man who literally invented the ink-blot method. Tracing got a Whistler transfer lithograph, a drawing traced onto the printing stone.
• Example — factual exemplars. Magnum Opus got Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware." Chef d'Œuvre got a Vermeer.

Some personal favorites: Sharp Line is Hokusai's Great Wave. Signature is the Tughra of Sultan Süleiman the Magnificent — a sultan's calligraphic signature. Wet Canvas is Cot's "The Storm." Refraction is Chardin's "Soap Bubbles." And the Blue slot-unlock card is "William," the Met's famous blue faience hippopotamus.

In-Game Attribution

Every card displaying licensed art carries an "Art by:" hover tip naming the artist, the work, the museum, the license, and where to find the original. The artists are long gone, but credit is credit.

The Slot-Unlock Cards Got Art Too

All ten color-choice cards (the ones you pick from when Painter's Palette unlocks a new slot) now have color-matched museum pieces — Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" for Yellow, Bruegel's "The Harvesters" for Orange, Kōrin's irises for Indigo, a moonlit Wright of Derby nocturne for Black.

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Art Settings: Pick Your Gallery

The AI-generated art remains on by default. Nothing changes for you unless you want it to.
From Main Menu → Mods → The Artist, the Card Art Style dropdown offers three options:

Option
What you see

AI Generated (default)
The original AI art on every card

Hand Drawn
My hand-drawn doodles where they exist, licensed museum art where they don't, AI as the final fallback

Licensed
Museum artwork where it exists, doodles second, AI as the final fallback

Every option uses per-card fallback — a card missing art in your preferred set just shows the next tier down. No missing-art placeholders, ever. The setting saves automatically and takes effect on the next card redraw.

Why This Approach

The long-term plan is unchanged: hand-drawn art for every card. That's slow, though, and in the meantime the licensed tier means anyone who'd rather not look at AI art has a complete, beautiful, legally clean alternative today — and frankly, having Dürer, Hokusai, Vermeer, Goya, and Van Gogh in the deck is its own kind of delightful.
A handful of cards (six) have no licensed match yet — the Met's search and I fought eight rounds and they won those. They stay AI in Licensed mode until a doodle or a better find replaces them.

Compatibility

No save-breaking changes. Existing runs continue working.

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Version 1.0.25-Beta — Patch Notes: Hand-Drawn Art is Now the Default

What's New

The Artist now ships with two card art sets, and you can switch between them from inside the game.

Hand-Drawn Art (New Default)

I have always been clear on this: every card portrait in this mod up to now has been AI-generated. That was a placeholder choice, not a permanent one. The AI art needs to be — and should be — replaced with art made by a person, and that process has now begun.

The first batch of hand-drawn replacement portraits is in: Atelier, Autumn, Defend, Broad Guard, and Broad Stroke. More will land in every future update until the full card list is covered.

Because the hand-drawn set is incomplete, the mod uses a per-card fallback: any card that has a hand-drawn portrait shows it, and every card that doesn't yet have one falls back to the original AI portrait. You won't see a missing-art placeholder anywhere — just hand-drawn where it's ready and AI where it isn't, with the ratio tilting toward hand-drawn over time.

Prefer the AI Art? You Can Keep It.

If you've grown attached to the AI portraits, or just prefer that style, you can flip a single toggle and the mod will use AI art on every card, including cards that have a hand-drawn version.

How to Change the Art Style In-Game

1. From the Main Menu, click Mods.
2. Click The Artist in the mod list.
3. You'll see a checkbox labeled Use AI Art Only.
   • Unchecked (default): Hand-drawn portraits where they exist, AI fallback elsewhere.
   • Checked: AI portraits everywhere, ignoring hand-drawn replacements.

The setting saves automatically and persists between sessions.

You can change this at any point — main menu, between combats, even mid-fight. Cards already in your hand will pick up the new art on the next natural redraw (drawing a new card, opening your deck view, etc.).

Why This Change

A few reasons, in order of importance:

• Art made by a human is the right way to ship a character mod. The best characters in this game's mod scene have hand-drawn art. The Artist should too. I should have shipped it this way from the start and I regret that I did not do so.
• Many players strongly prefer to avoid AI-generated images in the games they play, for ethical, aesthetic, or both reasons. Defaulting to hand-drawn art respects that preference without forcing it on anyone.
• The AI art was always intended as a placeholder so the mod could ship and start being playtested while the real art was being made. We're now far enough along that the hand-drawn pipeline is live.

Compatibility

• No save-breaking changes. Existing runs continue working.
• The toggle defaults to the new behavior (hand-drawn first), but if you set it to Use AI Art Only and forget about it, you'll keep getting AI art across future updates regardless of how many hand-drawn portraits land — your preference sticks.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who's been playtesting and reporting bugs through the early builds. The mod is the way it is because people kept telling me what was broken, what felt good, and what didn't.

Hand-drawn replacements will roll out card-by-card over the next several updates. If you have specific cards you'd like prioritized, let me know in the comments.

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Coming Soon - Doodle Art

Unfortunately, I have not been able to garner much interest among the community in helping provide art for this character mod, so I have decided to take matters into my own hands.  In the coming weeks, I will release an option for players to use non-AI generated doodle card art drawn by me.  Here are some examples:









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Version 1.0.24-Beta — Patch Notes: Erase, Streak & Bug Batch

Two new cards, one new mechanic, and a fresh round of fixes for issues that turned up in the last few playtest runs.

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New Mechanic: Erase

Erase is a new buff-style power that absorbs the next slot Bane that would trigger on a played card. Thanks Lunar1214 for the idea! Each stack eats one Bane and then disappears. The in-hand color indicator now shows a neutral hyphen (
—) instead of the red ✗ on any card whose Bane will be absorbed by Erase — so you can see at a glance which of your plays Erase is currently covering.
New Cards

• Erase (2-cost Common Skill, upgrades to 1-cost) Gain 3 Erase. A straightforward way to bank Bane absorption for the turns when you need to fire a card from a hostile slot — or to neuter a positional Bane until you can reorder away from it.
• Streak (2-cost Uncommon Power, upgrades to 1-cost) Whenever a Strike triggers a Boon, gain 1 Erase. Rewards a pattern you're already running — Strikes from active slots — with passive Erase generation. Stacks: a second copy of Streak grants 2 Erase per qualifying Strike. Works with any Strike variant (the Artist's, vanilla, modded characters' Strikes).

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Bug Fixes

Compendium: cards displayed 0 damage and 0 block
A lot of cards (Heavy Brush, Pointillism, anything that reads owner-side state for its preview) were showing zero in the card library. The compendium context has no run owner, so the modifier-applied preview path was throwing and the fallback was clamping both base and preview to zero.
Fixed by falling back to the natural baseline when there's no owner, so the compendium now shows each card's printed damage/block instead of a flat zero.
Impasto painted locked colors
Impasto would happily paint a card with a slot color the player hadn't unlocked yet, leaving it in a "permanently painted but does nothing" state. Same shape as the earlier Palette Knife bug.
Fixed: Impasto now checks 
SlotUnlocks.IsUnlocked on the positional color before falling back, mirroring Palette Knife's behavior. If the target's color is locked, Impasto still applies the upgrade — just not the paint.
Lasting Candy stopped giving Power-only rewards
The vanilla relic Lasting Candy periodically converts a card reward into a Powers-only offer. The Artist's reward tuner — which has its own opinion about Powers (at most one per offer, with a coin flip to demote the first) — was running after Lasting Candy and converting the Powers back to non-Powers. Player saw Heavy Brush in slot 4 of a Lasting Candy reward instead of a Power.
Fixed: Painter's Palette now detects Lasting Candy in 
player.Relics and suppresses its power-demotion rule entirely while Lasting Candy is owned. Duplicate filtering still runs.
Master's Stroke punished its own intended interaction
Master's Stroke is a Skill that grants +1 energy when in the White or Black slot. Black's Bane (add a Regret curse to hand) fires on Skills — so playing Master's Stroke from Black gave +1 energy and a Regret curse. Net negative.
Fixed by adding a per-card 
SuppressBaneColors opt-out. Master's Stroke declares White and Black as exempt. The slot indicator respects the exemption too — Master's Stroke in Black shows a neutral hyphen, not a red ✗. (Other cards can use this mechanism in the future if a similar self-interaction comes up.)
Run-history character icon filled a quarter of the screen
The Artist's icon on the run history / ascension screen rendered absurdly large compared to other characters. Our 
CustomIcon override was a FullRect-anchored Control with KeepAspectCentered stretch — fine for the small in-run HUD slot, way too big for the run-history container which is much larger.
Fixed by dropping the 
CustomIcon override entirely. The engine now falls back to 
CustomIconTexturePath, the same path vanilla characters use, and the icon is sized consistently across the HUD, character select, and run history.

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Cosmetic

• Character-select background — swapped from the animated frame sequence to the static painted portrait. Same composition, no per-frame disk churn at the menu.
• Erase power icon — flood-fill background removal so the icon renders with proper transparency in the HUD power tray.

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Compatibility

No save-breaking changes. Existing runs continue working.
Built against the same BaseLib API as the last build.

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Version 1.0.23-Beta — Painter's Palette Overhaul, Plain-Language Slots, Card Balance Pass

A meaty patch focused on player onboarding and clarity. Big progression rework around the starter relic, every slot description rewritten in plain English, a balance pass on a dozen cards, and several quality-of-life fixes.
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PAINTER'S PALETTE — TIER PROGRESSION REWORK
The starter relic's slot-unlock schedule has been restructured. Old layout: Red auto-unlocks, then 2 picks of Orange/Yellow/Green/Blue on combat 3, then Indigo/Violet in Act 2, then White/Black in Act 3. New layout (one pick per Act + a 3rd-combat bump in Act 1, with cleaner tier groupings):

• Start of combat 1: pick Tier 1 — Red OR Orange. Whichever you pick, the OTHER color's painter (Lady in Red or Orange Crush) is auto-added to your deck. Either way you walk into combat 2 with both colors usable: one as a positional slot, one as a painter (painters bypass the slot-unlock gate).
• Start of Act 1 combat 3: pick Tier 2 — Yellow, Green, or Blue.
• Start of Act 2 combat 1: pick Tier 3 — Indigo or Violet.
• Start of Act 3 combat 1: pick Tier 4 — White or Black.

Hand draw scaling extended to match: 5 base, +1 per resolved tier picker, capping at 9 cards drawn per turn by Act 3.
The Red and Orange picker cards now show a hover tip with the painter card they'll add, so you can read what Lady in Red / Orange Crush do before committing to your slot pick.
Save compatibility: existing runs are migrated automatically. Old tier-shown flags map onto the new schema (legacy "tier1 batch shown" → both new tier1 and tier2; legacy "act2/act3 shown" → new tier3 / tier4).
==================
PLAIN-LANGUAGE SLOT DESCRIPTIONS
The Boon / Bane wording was confusing to new players. Every slot description across the choice cards, the left-edge legend, the in-hand hover tooltips, and the overlay text has been rewritten in plain "If you play X, . If you play Y, " form.
Example (Green): "If you play a Skill from this slot, heal 1 HP, or draw 1 card at full HP. If you play an Attack, gain 1 Vulnerable."
The Boon / Bane terms are gone from all player-facing text. They're still used internally as system vocabulary.
==================
CARD BALANCE PASS

• Chiaroscuro: 2-cost → 3-cost. Upgrade now drops Ethereal (was: drop cost). The upgrade trade is "you can hold it across turns" rather than "free to cast."
• A Whiter Shade of Pale and Paint It Black: keep Exhaust on upgrade. Upgrade drops cost 1 → 0 instead. Rare painters get the "free cast" upgrade rather than the "reusable" upgrade that Uncommon painters have.
• Turpentine: Rare → Uncommon.
• Chef d'Oeuvre: Rare → Uncommon.
• Atelier: Rare → Uncommon. Painted-card threshold 4 → 5 base, 4 upgraded.
• Gradient: per-trigger bonus on upgrade 2 → 3. Base unchanged at 2 per trigger.
• Heavy Brush: base damage 4 → 6, upgrade base 8. Per-Painted-card bonus 2 base, 3 upgraded.

==================
REMOVED
Polychrome (Power card) pulled from the mod for now. The cascade mechanic was hard to read and had become out-of-step with the recent tier remap. Source card class and its power are deleted; existing runs with Polychrome in the deck or applied will surface a "card/power not found" warning on load.
==================
BUG FIXES

• Tier-1 picker (Red or Orange) wasn't adding the corresponding painter to the deck. The painter card was being created at combat scope, so it got garbage-collected when combat ended. Switched the creation path to run scope (player.RunState) — the painter now persists across combats as intended.
• Cards didn't glow their newly-unlocked slot color until hovered. The slot-glow refresh fired inside the picker UI flow, while the picker's overlay cards were still occluding the player's actual hand. Added a deferred retint that runs after the picker tears down + a synchronous final retint at end of turn-start.
• Ultraviolet replayed via Glam / Spiral / EchoForm only stacked Vigor once instead of twice. Inspection of the engine's OnPlayWrapper IL confirmed the engine calls OnPlay exactly once per card play but sets play.PlayCount to the replay multiplier — vanilla attack cards consume PlayCount automatically via AttackCommand, but PowerCmd.Apply doesn't. Multiplied stack count by play.PlayCount on every Counter-stack self-Power card in the mod: Ultraviolet, Wash, Crescendo, Diminuendo, Chef d'Œuvre, Pigment Forge. Glam-enchanted Ultraviolet now correctly grants 20 Vigor.
• Sgraffito-suppressed cards visually still glowed their slot color in hand. Added a dim treatment to CardGlowPatch so suppressed cards lose their tint until the suppression consumes on play. Helps the player track which card has its rider disabled at a glance.
• Painted cards didn't show their painted color in the deck-view / card-library / reward-picker screens. Added a Postfix on NCard.UpdateVisuals so painted cards tint their painted color wherever they're displayed. Unpainted cards untouched (engine default rendering still shines through).

==================
ICON CLEANUP

• Pigment Forge power icon had a baked-in opaque near-white background that showed as a visible white square in-game. Same flood-fill background removal pass used on the slot splatters — the icon is now properly transparent. Card portrait left alone (intentional dark frame).

==================
INTERNAL

• New  Powers/WashPower.cs and related plumbing from earlier patches now interact correctly with replay enchantments.
• SlotUnlocks.LockedTier4() added; existing Tier1/Tier2/Tier3 methods rescoped to the new tier groupings.
• UnlocksPersistence schema extended with  tier1Shown/ tier2Shown/ tier3Shown/ tier4Shown. Legacy fields preserved and migrated at load time.
• PaintersPalette.AddCardToDeck<T> helper creates a run-scoped card and adds it to the player's permanent deck pile.
• EndTurnDragGuardPatch now also blocks End Turn presses during card-selection mode (covers Inspiration's drag-arrow UI in addition to standard card drags).

==================
KNOWN-OPEN

• Muse's Kiss not counting starter-painter (Orange Crush Starter / Lady in Red Starter) paints in one user report. Added defensive logging on both sides of the dispatch (NotifyPaint + MusesKiss.OnCardPainted) plus a NetId-based fallback for the player-equality check. If the issue still appears after this build, the log file will show exactly which check is failing — happy to dig deeper from there.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Version 1.0.22-Beta — Three Critical Bug Fixes

A small patch fixing three player-reported bugs from the last build, including one that could break combat outright.
================== 
BUG FIXES

• Sgraffito breaking the hand. After playing Sgraffito and drawing the two cards, some of the new cards in hand were unclickable — the engine couldn't find them. The hand-restore logic that runs after Sgraffito's picker was rebuilding the underlying hand pile from only the pre-pick snapshot, dropping any cards added during or after the picker. The card holders stayed visible in the container, but the pile data had lost them — resulting in orphan card slots that did nothing when clicked. The restore now appends any newly-drawn cards to the end of the restored hand, so they stay properly tracked. Same pattern Chiaroscuro already used.
• Atelier increasing its own threshold when stacked. Playing multiple Atelier copies made the painted-cards-in-hand threshold compound — 4 became 8, then 12 — turning the second and third copies into a strict downgrade. The power was set to a Counter stack type, so each apply added the threshold value (4) to itself rather than replacing it. Switched to Single stack type: re-applying Atelier now keeps the threshold pinned where it is, and an upgraded copy correctly replaces a base copy's 4 with the upgraded 3.
• Palette Knife spreading locked colors. If you Palette-Knife'd a card whose original slot was a color you hadn't unlocked yet (e.g. a Strike sitting in the Blue slot pre-PK before Blue was unlocked), PK would still spread that locked color to the neighbors — and the locked color would do nothing for the rest of the turn. PK now only spreads ACTIVE colors. Lookup order: painted (always valid), pre-PK position if unlocked, post-PK position if unlocked; otherwise the spread is a no-op. The "intuitive" case of "the card moved from a locked slot into an active one when PK left the hand" now correctly spreads the active post-PK color.

____________________________________________________________

Version 1.0.21-Beta — More Bug Fixes and a Visual Refresh

A patch focused on bug reports from the last build, plus a visual upgrade to the slot legend on the left edge of combat.
==================
VISUAL: PALETTE TRACKER ICONS
The ten colored squares on the left side of combat are now custom paint-splatter icons — one per slot color. Bumped the swatch size up 25% so the splats have room to read. The same mechanic stays: locked slots render dimmed, upgraded slots show a "+" overlay (rendered in white on the Black splat for contrast). The on-hover tooltip is unchanged.
==================
BUG FIXES

• Starter painters (Lady in Red Starter, Orange Crush Starter) showed no art. The card-art lookup path is derived from a snake-cased class name, so the new starter classes were looking for  lady_in_red_starter.png instead of the existing  lady_in_red.png. The starter classes now override their portrait paths to reuse the reward-version art.
• Starter painters' upgrades did nothing. The painter base class's OnUpgrade removes the Exhaust keyword, which is a no-op for the starter copies since they never had Exhaust. Starter painters now drop cost 1 → 0 on upgrade instead — an upgraded starter painter casts for free.
• End Turn button was still clickable during Inspiration's drag-arrow targeting. The previous guard only checked the standard hand-card drag state, which Inspiration's targeting UI doesn't trip. The guard now also reads  IsInCardSelection on the player's hand and swallows the End Turn press whenever a card-selection or targeting input is active. Covers Inspiration, picker cards, and any future selection-mode UI.
• BroadStroke wasn't triggering the Red Boon. The engine's Red rider fires a +2/+5 follow-up at  play.Target, but BroadStroke is targetless (AoE) so the rider bailed. The +2/+5 is now inlined into BroadStroke's own AoE damage when played from the Red slot, matching how Pointillism already handles this.
• Tenebrae's Black-slot bonus damage didn't land. The previous implementation fired two separate AttackCommands; if the first kill'd the target, the second silently lost its damage. Switched to a single AttackCommand with  WithHitCount(2), which routes both hits through the engine's per-hit pipeline. Side benefit: Vigor and Ultraviolet now apply to both Tenebrae hits.
• Orange Boon block off-by-one (preview showed 9, actual was 7). The rider fires after the card has already moved from hand to play pile, so the painted-cards-in-hand count missed the played card itself. The Orange Boon now adds +1 to compensate, so preview and actual block totals match.
• Slot 10 (rightmost slot with Gold unlocked, or the 10th-card slot in a large hand) was incorrectly acting as the Black slot when Gold wasn't unlocked. The position-to-color mapping was capping at Black; it now always maps index 9 to Gold. If Gold isn't unlocked, the rider just doesn't fire — slot 10 is inert instead of double-firing Black. Slot 9 (the actual Black slot) is unaffected.
• Vanishing Point with Vigor / Ultraviolet only applied the bonus on the first hit. The old for-loop fired N separate AttackCommands and the engine's "next attack" buffs only see the first. Switched to a single AttackCommand with  WithHitCount(N), so Vigor / Ultraviolet apply to every hit. Same pattern Light Touch and Tenebrae now use.
• Crescendo and Diminuendo didn't multiply their output when stacked. With two stacks of Crescendo and an ascending color sequence played, only one Refraction was being added to the hand. Both powers now spawn  Amount cards per trigger, so 2 stacks = 2 Refractions per sequence.

INTERNAL

• Palette legend swatches are now  TextureRect nodes loading PNGs from a new  TheArtist/images/ui/palette_splatters/ resource folder.
• Splatter PNGs went through a flood-fill background-removal pass on import, since the source images had white backgrounds that were getting baked into the PCK. The flood-fill only clears pixels connected to the corners, so the interior of the white splat (which IS white) stays intact.
• EndTurnDragGuardPatch now checks two non-public NPlayerHand properties via reflection —  HasDraggedHolder and  IsInCardSelection.
• New starter-painter classes ( LadyInRedStarter,  OrangeCrushStarter) override portrait paths and  OnUpgrade to differ from their reward-pool counterparts (which keep Exhaust and the cost-reduction upgrade).

Thanks for the keep-coming reports. The slot-system polish is a lot smoother for this round.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Version 1.0.20-Beta — Bug Fix Pass + Starter Deck Rebalance

A follow-up patch focused on bug fixes from the last round of reports, plus a starter deck swap and a few card rebalances. No new mechanics this time — just polish.
==================
BUG FIXES

• Blue Boon on painted non-Attack cards. The Blue rider's cost reduction was gated on Attack type, which meant a painter card's "this card receives the Blue Boon when played" promise didn't actually deliver for Skills or Powers painted Blue. The cost gate now bypasses the type check for any painted-Blue card, matching the universal "painting = always fires the Boon" rule that every other slot already used.
• Pointillism with Vigor / Ultraviolet. Pointillism fires its hits as separate AttackCommands at random targets, so engine "next attack" buffs like Vigor were consumed by only the first hit. Pointillism now pre-consumes any active Vigor up front and adds its Amount to each of its hits manually. Ten Vigor from Ultraviolet on a seven-hit Pointillism now lands on every hit.
• Sgraffito moving the picked card to the leftmost slot. The picker's cleanup re-parented the chosen card to the end of the hand container; Sgraffito wasn't restoring the original order afterward. Added the same snapshot-and-restore handler the other picker cards use, so the chosen card now stays in its original position.
• Signature granting energy before your turn. The energy gain fired during the enemy turn, then got wiped by the player's turn-start energy reset on the upcoming turn. Signature now banks pending energy and grants it via AfterPlayerTurnStart (after the reset). The energy actually persists into your turn now.
• Replayed cards not re-firing the slot rider. When a card was replayed via Black's Boon, only the original play fired the card's slot rider. A painted-Indigo card replayed via Black would only stack 1 Weak / 1 Vulnerable on all enemies instead of 2/2. Replays now run through ApplyOnPlayRider too, so painted cards correctly accumulate their Boon across all plays. Black-during-Black recursion is still gated by the existing depth counter.
• TotalDamage preview not accounting for Strike Dummy or Tri-Boomerang's Instinct. The preview pipeline only walked the dealer's Powers. Now it walks four hook surfaces: dealer Powers, dealer Relics (Strike Dummy lands here), target Powers, and the card's own Enchantment (Instinct lands here). Numbers in card descriptions now match what actually hits.
• End Turn button firing during card drag. The hand's rightmost slot (slot 9 / 10 with Gold unlocked) sits right under the End Turn button's hit area; dragging a card there at release would end the turn. New patch on NEndTurnButton.OnPress checks whether a card is currently being dragged and swallows the press if so. Normal end-turn presses are unaffected.
• Painter card upgrade not actually removing Exhaust. The previous fix returned a different keyword list from CanonicalKeywords based on upgrade state, but the engine only reads CanonicalKeywords once at card creation and caches the result. Switched to the standard RemoveKeyword pattern in OnUpgrade (same approach Wash, Etched, Offering, WetCanvas use), so upgraded painters now actually skip Exhaust on play.
• Palette Knife picking the wrong card's color. PK reads the hand layout in its OnPlay, but by that point PK itself has already left the hand and cards to its right have shifted one slot left. PK now uses a pre-play snapshot of the hand (captured by the Harmony Prefix that already handles other slot color captures) so the spread color matches the card the player was looking at when they decided to play PK.

==================
STARTER DECK SWAP
Flourish removed from the starter deck. Two new starter painters added: Lady in Red Starter and Orange Crush Starter. The starter copies are Basic rarity (so they don't show up in card rewards or shops) and don't have Exhaust — you can paint a Strike Red on turn 1, replay the painter on turn 2, paint a Defend Orange, and so on.
The Uncommon reward-pool versions (Lady in Red and Orange Crush, found through normal card rewards) still have Exhaust. Picking up a second copy mid-run is a real commitment, not a free reusable painter.
Flourish's base damage bumped 8 to 12 (+4 upgraded unchanged) so it stands on its own as a Common find now that it's not backed by the starter slot.
Starter deck is now 11 cards instead of the usual 10 — one more than standard, but the swap was net +1 (removed 1 Flourish, added 2 painters). Happy to trim one if the count matters more than the variety on draw 1.
==================
CARD REBALANCES

• Perspective: now counts only hand cards that will actually fire their Boon. Previously included painted cards in neutral slots (no Boon, no Bane) and painted cards in Bane-triggering positions; those didn't pay out on play but still contributed to Perspective's damage. The new count is tighter and matches what the player can realistically extract from their hand.
• Impasto: Rare to Uncommon, 2 mana to 1 mana. Paint-and-upgrade is more accessible now. The upgrade still drops cost to 0; the Exhaust + once-per-card-upgrade limit keeps it bounded at the lower cost.
• Palette Knife: card text simplified to "Choose a card in your hand. Paint the cards on each side of it the same color for this turn." Picker prompt changed from "Pick a card to paint" to "Select a card" (since PK doesn't paint the chosen card, only its neighbors).

==================
GOLD SLOT — TRIGGER REFINEMENT
The Gold slot's Boon trigger is now: any card whose resolved slot is Gold AND it is NOT the first card you played this turn. The first card from Gold still triggers the Bane (cascade all Banes), and an upgraded Gold slot suppresses that Bane. After your first non-Gold play, the Gold slot becomes a pure payoff slot: any subsequent card landing in Gold cascades every other slot's Boon.
Lead with anything else, then unload from slot 9.

==================
INTERNAL

• New EndTurnDragGuardPatch (Harmony Prefix on NEndTurnButton.OnPress; reads NPlayerHand.HasDraggedHolder via reflection since it's non-public).
• DamageCalculator extended to iterate dealer relics and the card's enchantment in both the additive and multiplicative passes. Power/Relic share an AbstractModel base, so one helper handles both source types.
• Pre-play hand snapshot captured for Palette Knife via the existing CaptureSlotPrePlayPatch (no new Harmony binding).
• LadyInRedStarter and OrangeCrushStarter classes — separate from the reward-pool versions; Basic rarity, no Exhaust in CanonicalKeywords.

Thanks for the bug reports — keep them coming.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Version 1.0.19-Beta — Boon/Bane Polish, Wash Icon & Slot Rebalance

A follow-up update to the Boon/Bane system that landed last patch. Lots of feedback came in around "the Banes feel too punishing at the HP level," "Light Touch ignores Vigor," "Muse's Kiss icon doesn't tick," and "Wash doesn't tell me when it's active" — this update addresses all of it. Plus a redesign of the Gold slot, Wet Paint, and Palette Knife, several cost / rarity moves, and the removal of Color Theory.
The prior version (the "all-cards" Wash + flat-damage Banes build) is still available on the older file slot for anyone who wants to stay on it.
==================
BUG FIXES

• Light Touch + Vigor: Light Touch's two hits used to fire as separate AttackCommands, which made engine "next attack" buffs (Vigor, Ultraviolet, etc.) only land on the first hit. Both hits now resolve as one AttackCommand with a hit count of 2, so per-hit bonuses apply to both swings the way players expect.
• Muse's Kiss icon overlay: the on-creature icon showed a static "1" / "2" that players read as a paint counter ticking up. The threshold tier IS stored in Amount internally, but the icon was rendering it as if it were progress. Switched the power's StackType to Single, which suppresses the overlay entirely. The threshold is read from the rules text now ("Every 3 times you Paint a card…") and the actual counter is hidden.
• Inspiration: same icon-overlay issue as Muse's Kiss, same fix (StackType set to Single).
• Slot upgrades persisting across runs: starting a new run was inheriting Blue / Green / etc. upgrades from the previous run's Painter's Palette unlocks. Fixed by adding a fresh-run reset in the relic's AfterObtained handler.
• Chiaroscuro disappearing cards: choosing two cards to paint sometimes left orphaned card "holders" parented to the hand container, causing the painted cards to vanish into a different visual slot or stack on top of each other. The picker pipeline now sweeps for orphan holders detected via parent mismatch and re-parents the painted cards to their original hand positions. The same hand-restore pattern now applies to all picker-based cards (Painter cards, Paint it Black, Undercoat, Impasto, and the new Palette Knife).
• Painted cards weren't always firing their Boon: a card painted by a theme card (Evening, Ocean, etc.) could whiff its Boon if the underlying slot wasn't unlocked yet. The Boon dispatcher now treats painted cards and transient color overrides as explicit player commitments — Boon always fires, Bane always suppressed.
• Ultraviolet stacking with multi-hit attacks: rewritten to apply the engine's Vigor power (10 stacks base, 16 upgraded) instead of a custom buff. As a side effect this fixes a stale-preview bug where hovering an enemy after playing Ultraviolet could consume the bonus before any attack fired.
• 400+ energy bug from Rule of Thirds + Evening: a static event subscription was leaking handlers across save/reload cycles, so each paint event ran the live handler PLUS every leaked stale handler. Replaced with a stateless dispatcher that walks the owner's active powers each paint — no subscription state to leak.
• Various target-alive guards added in the rider pipeline. A proportional damage rider queued against a dead target was wedging the combat-end check; the Red / Violet / Gold cascades now skip dead targets cleanly.

==================
WASH — NEW SCOPE + STATUS ICON

• Effect changed from "All cards cost 1 less this turn" to "All Attacks cost 1 less this turn."
• Now applies a visible status power on the player with a new icon (brush + water splash). The stack count on the icon shows your current total discount, so multiple Washes in a turn read clearly.
• The discount still applies across draws — any Attack drawn AFTER Wash plays also gets the cost reduction.
• Upgrading still drops Exhaust (reusable Wash).
• Moved to Rare. Same niche as STS1's Bullet Time, just narrower and cheaper.

==================
BANE REWORKS — LESS HP ATTRITION, MORE STATUS
Six slots had their Banes converted from flat HP / block recoil to single-instance status or curse penalties. The previous "take 2 damage per mis-routed card" pattern stacked too painfully across a turn of small mistakes.

• Orange Bane: take 2 damage → gain 1 Weak
• Green Bane: take 2 damage → gain 1 Vulnerable
• Violet Bane: roughly −50% block → gain 1 Frail
• Indigo Bane: gain 1 Weak next turn → add 1 Injury to your hand
• White Bane: lose 3 HP → add 1 Decay to your hand
• Black Bane: lose 3 HP → add 1 Regret to your hand

Indigo's Boon was also nerfed: 3 Weak + 3 Vulnerable to ALL → 1 Weak + 1 Vulnerable to ALL (2/2 upgraded). The base 3/3 effectively soft-locked encounters when applied every turn; 1/1 keeps the always-on debuff identity without the lockdown.
==================
GOLD SLOT — REDESIGNED AS A TRAP / RARE-PAYOFF SLOT
Two distinct triggers, no overlap:

• Boon if this is NOT the first card you've played this turn AND it resolves to the Gold slot: cascade every other slot's Boon (twice upgraded). Bane if it IS the first card you've played this turn AND it resolves to the Gold slot: cascade every other slot's Bane. Upgrading Gold suppresses the Bane — an upgraded Gold slot is always safe.

The old "painted any other color" Bane was unreachable under the slot resolution rules and has been retired. The new opener-trap is the live route: don't lead from slot 9 unless you've upgraded.
==================
CARD REBALANCES
Cost / rarity moves:

• Magnum Opus: 3-mana Rare with 25 damage → 2-mana Uncommon with 18 damage (+4 upgrade)
• Polychrome: 2-mana → 3-mana Rare (upgrade still −1 cost)
• Chiaroscuro: 1-mana → 2-mana, added Ethereal (use it the turn you draw it)
• Counterlight: 2-mana Uncommon → 1-mana Common, scaling bumped to 3 block per Attack-in-hand (4 upgraded)
• Layer: Common → Uncommon
• Turpentine: Common → Rare
• Pointillism: Rare → Uncommon
• Cover: base 4 block → 6 block (9 upgraded base)
• Quick Line: base 3 block → 5 block

Redesigns:

• Wet Paint: keeps the AoE Blind, now also Splashes — paints one random card in your hand a random color for this turn. Becomes a mini one-card Theme on top of the Blind floor.
• Palette Knife: scrapped the Strength buff, redesigned as a targeted color-spreader. Pick a card in hand and "spread" its color to its hand neighbors (±1 cards each side, ±2 upgraded). Plays as the precision partner to the Theme cards.

Painter card upgrades:

• All eight single-color painter cards and Paint It Black: upgrade now drops Exhaust instead of reducing cost. A repaintable painter is the bigger swing once you have the rest of the slot system online.

==================
REMOVED

• Color Theory (Spectra) was pulled from the card pool. The mix mechanic overlapped uncomfortably with the rest of the slot-color toolkit (Synesthesia for color counting, Polychrome for cascades, Crescendo/Diminuendo for sequences). Save-compat note: existing runs with Spectra in the deck will surface a "card not found" warning on load.\ ==================

INTERNAL / QUALITY-OF-LIFE

• Deleted dead UltravioletPower, PaletteKnifeTempStrengthPower, SpectraPower classes and the ColorTheoryDotPatch Harmony bindings.
• Various stale text overlays for legacy Color Theory / old Bane wordings cleaned up across the legend, hover tips, and choice-card descriptions.
• Tighter logging around rider dispatch — easier to diagnose if a Boon doesn't fire when expected.

Thanks for the continued feedback. Keep it coming 
________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Version 1.0.18-Beta — Boon & Bane System (May 14, 2026)

The biggest design pass since launch. The slot system is now Boon & Bane: every slot color has a positive effect AND a negative effect, both gated by specific card properties, so playing a card from a slot has three possible outcomes: get the Boon, get the Bane, or get nothing. Strategic routing of cards into slots is now the heart of the deck.
Staying on the Old System
If this rework doesn't sound like your thing, version 1.0.17b-Beta remains available on the Files tab. It runs the previous one-sided rider system with no Banes. Pick that version, mark it as your active version, and the mod will load the old behavior. The latest version is the only one I'll be actively patching going forward.
Why the Change
The old system gave every slot a one-sided rider — a bonus when you played a card from that slot, with no downside. That made the slot system a passive checklist: figure out which slot helps your card, line it up there, collect the bonus. Once your hand had a few unlocked slots and you knew the table, there were no real decisions left.
The Boon/Bane redesign forces a routing puzzle on every play:

• Each slot rewards one specific card type or property (the Boon trigger) and punishes a different one (the Bane trigger).
• Cards that match neither are neutral — the slot does nothing, so it becomes a safe parking spot.
• Painter cards, Theme cards, Painted relics, and color-override effects all let you commit a card to a color for only the Boon, removing the Bane risk as the reward for that commitment.
• Upgrading a slot drops the Bane entirely — the upgrade is what turns the slot into pure upside.

So every turn the question becomes: do I commit (paint or upgrade) to guarantee the Boon, or do I route positional plays to whichever slots their type matches?

The Gate Table

• Red — Boon (Attack): +2 damage. Bane (Skill that gives block): take 2 damage.Orange — Boon (Skill that gives block): +2 block per Painted card in hand. Bane (Attack): take 2 damage.Yellow — Boon (Skill): draw 1 card. Bane (card with Exhaust): discard 1 random card.Green — Boon (Skill): heal 1 HP, or draw 1 card at full HP. Bane (Attack): take 2 damage.Blue — Boon (Attack): cost 1 less. Bane (Power): lose 1 energy.Indigo — Boon (Skill): apply 3 Weak + 3 Vulnerable to ALL enemies. Bane (Attack): gain 1 Weak next turn.Violet — Boon (Attack): +75% damage. Bane (Skill that gives block): ~−50% block on this play.White — Boon (Power): +1 energy, draw 1 card. Bane (Attack): lose 3 HP.Black — Boon (Attack): this attack triggers twice. Bane (Skill): lose 3 HP.Gold — Boon (card Painted Gold): cascade every other slot's Boon. Bane (card Painted any other color): cascade every other slot's Bane.

Magnitudes scale on upgrade (e.g., Red Boon → +5 damage). The Bane always stays flat, and is dropped entirely once the slot is upgraded.
Suppression Rules
The Bane is the cost of an un-committed, positional play. Any explicit commitment to the color removes the Bane:

• Upgraded slots drop the Bane entirely. Investing the upgrade is the reward — the slot becomes pure upside on its trigger.
• Painted cards never trigger a Bane. Painter cards, Theme cards, the Master's Palette potion, the Squid Ink relic, all of them paint cards into a color and grant only the Boon (when the card matches the gate).
• Transient color overrides (Wet Canvas marking the first card Black) also skip the Bane — explicit commitment to a color, just turn-scoped.

So a Defend played from Red positionally triggers Red's Bane (Defend is a Skill that gives block — take 2 damage). The same Defend, after being Painted Red by Lady in Red, plays through Red's Boon path only (and since Defend isn't an Attack, that Boon gate doesn't match either — net result: neutral). To make the painted Defend actually use the slot, you'd paint it Orange instead (Skill-that-gives-block matches Orange's Boon → big block per Painted card in hand).
New Keywords: Boon & Bane

• Boon is now a registered keyword. Wherever the word "Boon" appears in card text, it auto-highlights with the keyword color and shows a tooltip explaining the rule.Bane same treatment.

Tooltips:

• Boon: "The positive half of each slot's effect. Each slot has a Boon trigger keyed on a specific card type or property — when a card matching the trigger is played from that slot, the Boon fires. Cards Painted by Painter / Theme cards trigger only the Boon when their gate matches; their Bane is suppressed."Bane: "The negative half of each slot's effect. Each slot has a Bane trigger keyed on a different card type or property. Bane fires only on positional plays from a NON-upgraded slot — upgraded slots drop their Bane entirely, and Painted cards never trigger a Bane."

Visual Indicator: Three States
The check/X glyph above each hand card now has three states, telegraphing exactly what will happen if you play that card from its current slot:

• green ✓ — Boon will fire. Card matches the slot's Boon trigger.
• red ✗ — Bane will fire. Card matches the slot's Bane trigger (only shown on positional plays in non-upgraded slots with unpainted cards).
• yellow em-dash — Neutral. Slot does nothing for this card.

The classifier consults the same gates the dispatcher uses, plus the Bane-suppression rules, so the in-hand glyph and the actual rider can never disagree.
Text Updates Across the Whole System
Every surface that referenced the old "rider" system has been rewritten in Boon/Bane terms:

• Hover tooltip on cards — every slot color's tooltip now lists the Boon and Bane with both triggers and effects.Left-side slot legend on the HUD — both base and upgraded blurbs.Painter's Palette unlock pickers (Act 1, Act 2, Act 3) — every slot-pick card describes the Boon and Bane. Upgraded variants now read "Bane is dropped."Painter cards (Lady in Red, Orange Crush, It Was All Yellow, Green Light, I'm Blue, Mood Indigo, Violet Hill, A Whiter Shade of Pale, Paint It Black) — wording is now "Choose a card in your hand. It becomes (the named color) for the rest of combat — it receives the (named) Boon when played."Theme cards (Ocean, Autumn, Evening, Monochrome) — "Each card receives only its painted color's Boon when played."Rule of Thirds — same Boon-only clause.Chiaroscuro / Impasto / Undercoat / Crosshatch — updated to mention "receives only its color's Boon when played."Pigment Forge spawned cards (Red Paint, Orange Paint, …, Gold Paint, 10 subclasses) — each now reads "It receives only the (color) Boon when played."Potions (Fixative Flask, Master's Palette, Varnish Vial) — added "receives only that color's Boon" clause.Relics (Squid Ink, Hand of Midas, Gold Dust) — rewritten in Boon/Bane terms.Powers (Wet Canvas, Color Theory / Spectra) — updated.Cards that reference riders in their text (Prismatic Burst, Color Theory) — now reference Boon.Ochre Draught potion — "Trigger your Yellow Boon 3 times."

Mechanical Changes To Watch
Some slots behave differently than before because their trigger type narrowed:

• White slot was previously "fires on any card type, energy unconditional plus Skill-only draw." It's now Power-only, with Boon = +1/+2 energy AND +1/+2 draw together (Skill no longer triggers the slot at all). White-from-Power is the biggest single-play swing in the system; White-from-anything-else is neutral, except Attacks which trigger the Bane (lose 3 HP). Tune your Power placements.Green slot was previously "fires on any, heal 1 or draw at full HP." Now Skill-only (Boon) with Attack-Bane (take 2 damage). Green is no longer a "free heal whenever you play here" — it's specifically the Skill-rewarding heal slot.Indigo slot was previously "AoE Weak+Vuln on any card type." Now Skill-only (Boon) with Attack-Bane (gain 1 Weak next turn). Save attacks for Red/Blue/Violet/Black; route Skills through Indigo for the AoE debuff.Black slot was previously "triggers twice on any card type." Now Attack-only (Boon) with Skill-Bane (lose 3 HP). Black is now the Attack-doubling slot specifically; playing a Skill from Black hurts.Gold slot now keys off Painted-Gold-specifically for the Boon and Painted-any-other-color for the Bane. Unpainted cards from Gold are neutral. This makes Gold a "commit-to-Gold" payoff slot rather than a free apex.

Implementation Notes

• New helpers WillFireBoon and WillFireBane are the single source of truth for the gate table — used by the rider dispatcher, the visual indicator, and (eventually) any future preview / hover code. No two places can disagree about what a slot will do.
• The Bane-suppression check lives at the top of the dispatcher: if (upgraded OR painted OR transient-override) fireBane = false; so all three commitment mechanisms route through the same gate.
• Bane damage uses standard attack-damage with self as target — block absorbs Bane damage, which keeps "armor up before a sketchy play" as a meaningful counter.
• Yellow Bane (discard 1 random) picks uniformly from the player's hand at the moment of trigger.
• Gold Bane cascade fires every other slot's Bane unconditionally — the same shape as the Boon cascade.

Known Follow-Ups

• Some legacy comments in code still reference "rider" — they're being cleaned up as I touch each file.
• The previous-design switch is retained inside an unreachable code block in SlotEffects.cs as a reference until playtest confirms the Boon/Bane coverage is correct. It'll be removed in a follow-up patch.

How To Play (Video)
I've put together a short walkthrough of the new Boon & Bane system in action — routing plays through different slots, watching the in-hand glyph change, committing via Painter cards to lock in the Boon. Linked at the top of the mod page. Recommend watching before your first run on the new system; it'll save a few "wait, why did that happen" moments.

YouTube: 4olDCGDCO5M