BEST MONSTER TRAIN 2 STRATEGIES

I came to Monster Train 2 the way a lot of people did. I put 600 hours into Slay the Spire, hit a wall where every run started feeling the same, and needed something with the same dopamine shape but different bones. Monster Train 2 is that game. It's also meaner than the original Monster Train in ways that took me a while to respect. The new clans are weirder, the covenant ramps hit harder, and the pyre economy has teeth now.

This is the guide I wish someone had handed me around my tenth run. I'm not going to walk you through what a champion is or explain what an ember is. If you've done two or three runs you already know the vocabulary. What I want to do is talk about the decisions that actually matter when you're trying to push past Covenant 15 and finally see the true ending.

The clan roster, ranked by how forgiving they are

The biggest mental shift coming from the first Monster Train is that the roster got reshuffled. Some old clans are gone, some got rebuilt from scratch, and there are new ones that don't play like anything in the first game. Here's how I rank them for newer players pushing higher covenants.

Banished

Banished is the clan I recommend to everyone who's new. They play like the cleanest version of a Slay the Spire archetype, which is to say they want to build up one unit and swing with it. The whole kit is about equipping relics and artifacts to a single warrior and watching numbers go up. You will lose some runs to getting your champion assassinated, but the feedback loop is so clean that you'll learn the game faster with them than with anyone else.

The key Banished card is anything with the Valorbond keyword. Stacking Valorbond on a champion early makes the mid game trivial, because every upgrade you grab snowballs. My standard opener is to take any card that gives permanent stats, skip spells that don't directly buff a unit, and aim to end act one with a champion that can one-shot a basic enemy on the top floor.

Underlegion

Underlegion is the new bug clan, and they're my personal favorite. They're a swarm deck. You fill every floor with small units, those units generate more units, and the board wins by math. The champion produces larvae on death, which means you kind of want your champion to die sometimes. That inversion of the normal protect your champion instinct is the whole identity of the clan.

The Underlegion trap is thinking you can play them like a traditional horde deck. You can't. Their small units are bad in combat. What you're doing is farming them for triggers. Cards that proc on summon, cards that proc on death, cards that buff per unit on a floor. If your first few picks don't include at least two triggers, your deck is a bucket of chaff. Skip the curse cards. Skip the single big finisher. Take the triggers.

Lazarus League

Lazarus League is the resurrection clan. Units come back when they die, with scaling stacks, and the whole deck rewards you for putting them in harm's way. They have the highest skill ceiling in the game and I am not good at them. When they click they're the most powerful clan in the roster because you get infinite value out of every unit. When they don't click you lose on turn four because your whole front line died and nothing came back.

The trick I eventually learned is that Lazarus wants relics more than cards. The clan artifacts that add stacks on respawn, or that let units resurrect on the pyre floor, are the entire build. If you can't grab two or three of those in the first act, switch strategies entirely and pivot into whatever your allied clan is offering.

Pyreborne

Pyreborne is the dragon clan. Big, expensive, slow. They want you to generate gold, hoard it, and then cash it in for absurd units that end the game. If you like the power fantasy of dropping a 80-attack dragon on the pyre floor and watching it one-shot the boss, this is your clan. If you hate runs where you scrape through act one with no board presence, this is not your clan.

Pyreborne needs a partner clan that covers early game. Banished works great because a buffed warrior bridges the gap to turn eight when your dragons come online. Underlegion also works because the swarm distracts while you save gold. Do not pair Pyreborne with another slow clan. You will die in act one and hate yourself.

Hellhorned

The one returning clan from the original Monster Train is Hellhorned, and they got a rework. Their imp and demon package is still about stacking attack buffs, but the new champion options push them toward different playstyles. I find them the least interesting because they feel too similar to what already existed, but they're reliable and the cards are forgiving.

Picking allied clans, the real decision

Every run you pick a primary and an allied clan. The allied clan decides whether your deck works or doesn't, more than almost any other choice. The game suggests pairings with that little synergy icon, but it's lying half the time. Here are the pairings I've actually found work.

Banished plus Lazarus League is the strongest combo I've played. Your Banished champion gets resurrected by Lazarus relics, so instead of losing the run when your buffed warrior gets sniped, they come back with stacks. It turns Banished's biggest weakness into a feature.

Underlegion plus Pyreborne is the sleeper pick. You fill the floors with bugs while you save gold for dragons. The bugs are cheap, they trigger each other, and they absorb damage while your dragon deck cooks. When the dragons arrive in act two, you have board and finishers at the same time.

Hellhorned plus Banished is the starter combo the game basically shoves at you, and it's fine. You'll win easier runs with it. You won't win hard covenants with it because it has no late-game ceiling.

Avoid Pyreborne plus Lazarus. It looks good on paper because both clans have expensive late game units and Lazarus resurrects them. In practice you spend all of act one with nothing on the board and die before the engine comes online.

Pyre health is a resource, not a number

The single biggest mistake I see in other players' runs is treating pyre health like a health bar. It isn't. It's currency.

Monster Train 2 gives you more ways to trade pyre health for power than the original did. Events, curses, altars, all of them offer you upgrades in exchange for letting your pyre take damage. Early runs I hoarded pyre health like it mattered. Late runs I spend it like water because I finally understood the math.

Here's the math. Your pyre starts around 60 health. A boss at covenant 20 will do something like 40 to 50 damage if you let them reach the pyre floor. So you have about 10 to 20 pyre health of buffer to spend across the whole run. If an event offers you a strong artifact for 10 pyre health, that's a fifty percent tax on your buffer for a permanent effect. Usually worth it. If an event offers you a single card for 8 pyre health, that's almost never worth it.

The harder covenants punish you if you don't spend pyre health. You're supposed to take damage to get stronger. Runs where I finish act one at full pyre are runs where I've underpowered my deck.

Covenant level strategy

Each covenant layer adds a modifier that fundamentally changes how you build. I'll hit the ones that trip people up.

Covenant 5 adds the extra enemy difficulty. It doesn't change strategy much, just punishes you harder for weak early game. Banished and Hellhorned scale easily here.

Covenant 10 reduces your pyre health. This is where you have to start playing more defensively. Skip pyre health trades on events unless they're extraordinary. Prioritize ember-cheap defensive cards in early picks.

Covenant 15 is the bump where most players stall. The enemies start getting abilities that punish bad board building. Shields that reflect, auras that buff other enemies, boss mechanics that force you to commit units to specific floors. If you're stuck here, your problem is probably deck focus. You're picking too many individual strong cards and not enough cards that work together. A focused 18-card deck beats a stuffed 28-card deck at this tier every time.

Covenant 20 is the real final boss of the game. At this level, everything scales. The run becomes a sprint to get your engine online before the enemies outpace you. There's no room for fat. Every card in your deck needs to either win the game or enable the card that wins the game. My highest win rate at covenant 20 is with a 15-card deck that does exactly one thing, hard. Bigger decks die.

Specific card combos that carry runs

These are the combos I've seen carry me through tough covenants. Cards change with patches, so apply the concept, not the literal names.

The infinite trigger loop. Any clan has some version of this. A card that triggers another card that triggers the first card. Underlegion has the cleanest version with summon triggers that summon more summoners. Once you assemble the loop your floors fill up every turn and nothing gets past.

The one-shot champion. Banished's core win condition. Stack permanent attack on your champion. Add an on-attack trigger that repeats. Now your champion is doing 200 damage per hit and hitting three times. Boss dies turn one.

The death chain. Lazarus plus any clan with on-death triggers. Units die, resurrect, die again, trigger again. If you can keep the chain going for two turns you generate infinite value.

The gold engine. Pyreborne. Stack gold generation artifacts. By act two you're printing 40 gold a turn and buying dragons directly from the shop. The dragons end the game.

Boss fight prep

Boss fights in Monster Train 2 are mostly about the setup turn before they arrive. You get one turn to arrange your floors knowing the boss is coming. Use it.

Most bosses have a tell about where they want to go. The act one boss at higher covenants will often target whichever floor has your champion, so put your champion on the bottom. The act two boss usually has a cleave that hits the top floor hard, so stack your expendable units there. The act three boss is a straight pyre rush, so your entire middle and top floors are buffer. Put everything you have between you and the boss and pray.

One specific trick: Monster Train 2 added bosses that punish you for having multiple units on the same floor. They do AOE damage that scales with unit count. If you're facing one of these, spread out. If you're not, concentrate. Checking the boss tooltip before the setup turn is the difference between a win and a reload.

Pyre choice matters more than you think

The game gives you different pyre hearts with different abilities, and I ignored this for way too many runs. The pyre you pick changes your win condition. A pyre that generates ember every turn wants a different deck than a pyre that damages enemies when you summon. Pick the pyre first, then build around it.

My favorite pyre is the one that gains stats when you take damage. It flips the pyre-as-resource logic and makes you actively want to take hits. You end act three with a pyre that one-shots the boss, which feels incredible.

When to give up on a run

This is the skill that took me longest to develop. Monster Train 2 runs are short enough that you should be willing to eat a loss at turn ten when the deck clearly isn't working. Signs your run is cooked: you finished act one at full pyre and you feel weak, you haven't added an artifact in 20 turns, your champion has zero upgrades, or your card picks feel random because nothing fits. Reset. Try a different clan combo.

The player who wins the most runs is the player who recognizes lost runs the fastest. I used to grind out 45 minute losses because I refused to quit. Now I bail at turn 12 if the pattern is wrong and start a new attempt.

If you're looking for more deckbuilders to rotate with Monster Train 2 once you've cleared the covenants, I wrote about the Steam games under ten bucks that swallowed hundreds of my hours and a lot of them scratch the same itch. Monster Train 2 is the current best-in-class roguelike deckbuilder for my money, and the clan system gives it replay value that Slay the Spire's single-character model doesn't quite match. I'm at covenant 22 and still finding new combos. That's the good stuff.