Inscryption Killing Grizzlies in Kaycee Mod

By the time you unlock the Grizzly Bosses challenge, you should have a decent grip on the game mechanics. But Grizzlies present a very specific difficulty, in that you need to build the deck to get past them in the space of a single map.

Inscryption Grizzly Bosses Challange Kaycee Mod

When going for the Skull Storm achievement and playing with all challenges enabled, you will also lose certain strategies that work on lower difficulties. But there are still several strategies that still work, and you can play through the first map in such a way to maximise your chances of at least one strategy coming to fruition.

Use items to clear a single bear this turn, and attack directly in the same turn

There are several backpack items that will eliminate a single bear, allowing you to attack directly in that same turn.

Scissors

Kills 1 Grizzly, allowing you to attack directly in the same turn.

No other effects. This is as straight-forward as it gets.

Skinning Knife

Kills 1 Grizzly, allowing you to attack directly in the same turn. You then draw a pelt (which you don’t get to/have to keep after the battle).

Skinning Knives are basically a slightly better version of the Scissors. That free pelt can tank a hit from a Grizzly if required.

The real value of Skinning Knives is that they spawn reliably at the Trapper. On one hand, it costs 7 teeth and you need to take at least a Rabbit Pelt when you visit the Trapper. On the other hand, it’s a guaranteed spawn. It can be tricky to get 7 teeth together in time for the limited chances at the Trapper in the first map, but at least the Skinning Knife is a reliable way to clear bears in maps 2, 3.

Wiseclock

Rotates the board positions clockwise. In effect, this leaves the leftmost lane clear, and puts a Grizzly in your rightmost lane to do with as you please.

The trick is to leave the left-most position on your side of the board clear before using the item. Play a card in that position and you’ll give it to Leshy. Play a card in the second lane from the left, and it will be facing an empty lane after the rotation.

Your free Grizzly will be facing another Grizzly so don’t count on it for damage. However, you can use it for blood and bone. In a pinch, you could use it to tank a lane.

The Wiseclock isn’t available until you unlock it through the oil painting puzzles, and then it will be offered normally in Backpack events.

Use Hourglass to kill a single bear, and then attack directly next turn

With Scissors and similar items, you can remove 1 bear and attack directly with 5 power. With an Hourglass, you need 6 power equivalent to kill a bear, and then you’ll attack directly next turn.

That one extra point of damage can be difficult in the first map. An alternative is to play a Touch of Death card (Adder) and then play your 5 damage card next turn.

Use Magickal Bleach with Airborne cards to attack directly

Magickal Bleach is available once you complete the oil painting puzzles.

This will remove the Mighty Leap sigils from the front row of bears, thereby allowing you to use Airborne damage to bypass the bears. Because this effects all the bears in play, you could play multiple Airborne cards instead of having to build up a single 5+ damage card.

Magickal Bleach is great because it allows for a whole other strategy, but it’s not so great because you can’t reliably get it to spawn. You can, however, focus on drawing Birds when taking extra cards on the off-chance you are offered Magickal Bleach before the boss. Prioritizing Tribe Card events and picking Birds gives you the chance to draw the always useful Cuckoo, the always useful Magpie, and a wide variety of cards that do some form of Airborne damage.

You could also throw Airborne onto Mantis God, if you picked that deck. Trifurcation will clear regular battles quickly, and will work just as well against Bears when you use Magickal Bleach.

Use Trinket Bearer to Farm for Items

When playing with all challenges enabled, you will be restricted to 2 backpack items. This, in turn, means you have fewer chances at each Backpack event to pick a useful item. The most effective way to farm for items is to get a Pack Rat and then imbue its sigil onto something cheap to summon. If you’re playing the zero cost deck, any of those starting cards would be a good pick.

Trinket Bearer is a prime candidate for combining with Beehive and Warren. These are single blood cards that draw additional cards, the cards drawn inheriting the added sigils from the originating card. Bee Hive has the Bees Within sigil — draw a bee when hit. Warren has the Rabbit Hole sigil — draw a Rabbit when played. In short, imbuing Trinket Bearer onto these cards results in a single blood card that will give you multiple items.

There are other sigils that you can combine with Trinket Bearer to a similar effect; Cockroach (Unkillable), Field Mice (Fecundity), Beaver (Dam Builder). However, the associated cards are relatively expensive compared to the single blood cost of Beehive and Warren. It might not be practical to play these combinations in the first map unless you are lucky enough to get one of the effects on a totem.

Combine Touch of Death + Bi/Trifurcation to clear a bear

In lieu of items, Bifurcation + Touch of Death is an effective way of making a hole in the wall of Grizzlies in front of your attacker. Just make sure that you play your bifurcated card to the left of your attacker so that it gets to go first.

If you’re lucky, you may see Adder and one of Mantis or Pronghorn in your initial offerings from the Trader. Mantis is preferable — cheaper to summon and it doesn’t move around — but Pronghorn will work just fine.

The third option is to use the Mantis God deck. Trifurcation works just as well as Bifurcation. Then you only need to find an Adder.

High power cards for direct attacks

There’s very little to say here. If you are able to make a hole, you’ll need to deal damage.

Grizzly and Great White stand out at 4 power, requiring the minimum investment to reach the 5 damage required to win the round in a single turn. A single point from a Power Campfire, a Fledgling sigil, a Bi/Trifurcation card, or your starting pair of pliers will give you the extra damage that you need.

Grizzly also has the added benefit of being able to take a hit from another Grizzly. It’s not an elegant strategy, but a 6 power Grizzly can kill one opposing Grizzly, take the hit from the next opposing Grizzly in the lane, and then kill that too. The difficulty is that you need to block the other lanes for two turns before you can attack directly.

Wolf and Moose Buck have 3 power but will obviously take more to power up. If you are relying on power campfires, you may not get to 5 power before the first boss (depending on how your luck goes). Moose Buck can take a hit from a Grizzly but costs 3 blood and will also move around, which is undesirable. Wolf Cub will obviously turn into a Wolf but you cannot use a Fledgling sigil to reach 5 power.

Multiple hit sigils for efficient direct attacks and more

Dire Wolf:

Dire Wolf’s sigil is Double Strike. You strike forward twice. Pretty self-explanatory. But this ability is one of the most reliable ways to get through Grizzlies, assuming you can play it right.

Like with Mantis God and Trifurcation, Double Strike acts a multiplier. Any of the previously noted cards with at least 3 power will be able to deal enough damage to kill a Grizzly once imbued with Double Strike.

For maps 2 & 3, your goal should be to get your Double Strike card to 6 power. First hit kills a Grizzly, second hit does direct damage. This will allow you to breeze through Grizzlies with a single card. This is difficult to achieve before the first boss, but reasonable to achieve by the second.

Dire Wolf’s power is quite low; all of its value is in the sigil. Ideally you want to draw Dire Wolf and another card with at least 3 power and then sacrifice the Dire Wolf.

Dire Wolf Pup:

Compared to the fully-grown Dire Wolf, Dire Wolf Pup is still somewhat useful. Dire Wolf’s sigil can be transferred to something else already powerful; the Pup needs to be powered up specifically. As with its adult form, it only needs one more point of power to clear 6 damage, and you can worry about hitting 6 power later.

The chief advantage of Dire Wolf Pup is that you can guarantee it by picking the Bone deck.

Bifurcation + Trifurcation:

Delightfully, Bifurcation and Trifurcation stack for diagonal double-strikes. Combined, your card will attack left twice, right twice, and ahead once for a total of 5 hits. This will trivially clear most battles, but be aware that you will still need at least 3 power in order to deal the requisite 5 damage in a single lane.

This strategy is only really viable if you pick the Mantis God deck. Unfortunately, with all challenges enabled you’re going to have a difficult time getting your hands on a Mantis God otherwise.

Lammergeier as an alternate high power strategy

Lammergeier’s power is half your bones. Generate at least 10 bones and you’ll deal at least 5 damage.

In later maps, you can use Bone Altars and Black Goats to increase your starting bone count. But you won’t have the opportunity to do that in the first map. There’s several strategies that will generate the 10 bones but you may find it difficult to pull off in time for the bears.

The first strategy is chain-summoning Unkillables. Get two Cockroaches and two single-blood summons. Find two Mysterious Stones to sacrifice the Cockroaches at. Now you can endlessly sacrifice one Unkillable card to summon the other, generating a bone each time. You can generate 10 bones as easily as you can generate 100. A very effective strategy, but you need to draw 1 Lammergeier + 2 Cockroaches + 2 single-blood cards and visit 2 Mysterious Stones in the space of the first map.

The next best strategy is to combine Rat King with another sigil to multiply its effect. Rat King has the Bone King sigil, which gives you 4 bones instead of 1 when the card dies. There’s many sigils that will allow you to multiply your sigils: Fecundity, Unkillable, Bees Within, Rabbit Hole, Dam Builder, lots of things. Some are easier to play than others; Dam Builder and Bees Within, for example, will require Leshy to attack you. But if you can combine any of these with Bone King, you should be easily able to get to 10 bones.

Finally, you can try Dire Wolf Pup (with Bone Digger) and Racoon (with Scavenger) from the Bone deck can help you generate bones. These sigils will not generate bones as quickly as Bone King, and you may need to stall in the first round of the boss battle in order to generate enough bones for the second round. But the advantage is that you can reliably get these cards from the Bone deck.

It’s worth noting that Lammergeier also has the Airborne sigil. If you struggle to get to 10 bones, you can hedge your bets with Magickal Bleach and a few birds as a fallback strategy.

As with other high power cards, you can use Double Strike as a multiplier. But be warned that Lammergeier’s power is half bones rounded down, so you’ll need 6 bones to deal at least 5 damage with Double Strike.

Advice for the First Map

Picking your starting deck

• Zero cost deck: all three cards are useful and very flexible. If nothing else, the three base cards function as extra Squirrels.
• Mantis God deck: Trifurcation gets through regular battles easily and can be combined with Bifurcation or Touch of Death to great effect. Ring Worms can be sacrificed at campfires to kill the campers (luck pending).
• Bone Deck: Dire Wolf Pup is a potential bear killer. Dire Wolf Pup and Raccoon also have sigils that useful for generating bones for Lammergeier.

What to look for at the trading post

• Adder is good for removing bears with Touch Of Death.
• Mantis and Pronghorn are good for combining with Mantis God (for multiple hits) or with Adder (to clear bears diagonally).
• Dire Wolf’s Double Strike will double your forward attack.
• If you aren’t offered any of those cards, your next priority should be a raw damage card to improve later.
• In a pinch, you can try to take Airborne cards and look for Magickal Bleach later.
• Lammergeier is potentially a high power card, and Airborne to boot, but is a somewhat risky pick unless you are also have something to generate bones with.

Other Events

• Consider holding onto your items so that you can draw a Pack Rat at the first Backpack event. Put Trinket Bearer on something cheap so that you can more easily farm for useful items at each battle.
• The Trapper event guarantees a Skinning Knife for 7 teeth. But whether you can afford this depends on how well you do in early battles.

Killing Bears

• If you have Scissors, Skinning Knife, Wiseclock, or a card with Touch of Death that can attack diagonally to your main damage card, use that to get rid of a bear. Use your 5+ damage card to attack directly in the same turn.
• If you have an Hourglass and either a 6+ damage card or a Touch of Death card, you can clear a bear that way. Attack directly in the next turn.
• If you have Magickal Bleach, you may be able to deal 5+ damage with Airborne cards across multiple lanes.
• If you were able to build up a 6+ power card with Double Strike or Bifurcation + Trifurcation, that card can kill a bear and attack directly all on its own.