Discover everything you need to know about the best Defect builds in Slay the Spire 2, including the best cards and relics.

The Defect is a playable character in Slay the Spire 2 who fights using orbs and powerful combos. This character comes with a core mechanic involving Orbs that you channel into slots to trigger passive effects.

You can customize the Defect into very different styles depending on the cards and relics you choose for a run. Boosting Focus early makes orbs much more powerful during the run.

How The Defect Works Claw Mechanics

Best Claw Deck Build Best Common and Uncommon Cards

Orb Deck Build Best Common and Uncommon Cards

Best Core Cards For Orb Deck

The Defect is a character who uses elemental spheres and provides effects each turn or when evoked for powerful actions. He basically channels orbs to trigger passive effects or can be evoked for strong bursts. Defect can use Lightning Orbs, Frost Orbs, Dark Orbs, and Plasma Orbs to dominate enemies in combat. You start with 3 orb slots and can add more with cards or relics for additional flexibility.

Defect starts with 75 HP, 99 gold, and the Cracked Core relic to channel a Lightning orb at the beginning of each combat in Slay the Spire 2. Play a run with Necrobinder to unlock The Defect. Winning or losing a run doesn’t affect your progression towards unlocking this character. Defect is all about creating a board of orbs, managing Focus, and choosing when to Evoke them.

Claw is a unique mechanic of The Defect that offers a 0‑cost Attack card. It deals minimal damage to enemies and permanently increases the damage of all Claw cards for the rest of that combat. Claw can create its own 0‑cost aggressive archetype, allowing you to spam cheap attacks and boost claw damage.

Your strategy should be to add multiple Claw cards to your deck and play Claw repeatedly each turn for bonus damage. After that, use cards that help draw and replay Claws.

Scrape and All for One are the best cards that allow you to draw many cards and bring back all your 0‑cost cards from the discard pile. Hologram, Seek, and Rebound are the card tutors that allow you to get Claws or draw engines from your discard. Orbs don’t affect the Claw decks because they focus on cycling lots of cards.