Slay the Spire 2 price: the first Steam cut, and a beta-only patch

Two things happened to Slay the Spire 2 this week, and only one of them is in the game you already have installed. On 12 November Mega Crit shipped what it called "the biggest (beta) patch yet" — a new character, two new modes — and it went to the beta branch only. Then Steam cut the price. Both land in the same week, which makes the Slay the Spire 2 price question more awkward than it looks: you are being offered a discount on a build that does not contain the thing people are talking about.

Here is what our own record says, read on 15 November 2026. Across the 26 daily readings we hold for Slay the Spire 2, from 26 September to today, the cheapest offer anywhere has only once gone below $18: $17.44 at CJS CD Keys on 13 November 2026. The live spread sits on the Slay the Spire 2 price page.

The deckbuilding core is unchanged from the first game. What the beta patch alters is the frame around it. (Official Steam screenshot)

What the Slay the Spire 2 price record actually shows

The useful number is not the low. It is how rigid the official price has been. On each of the five days between 26 September and 2 November when our tracker caught Steam itself as the cheapest place to buy, Steam read $24.99 — the same figure, every time, with no movement at all. For an Early Access game eight months into its run, that is a publisher holding the line.

Everything below that figure in our record came from one keyshop. Twenty-one of our 26 readings were set by CJS CD Keys, which spent October drifting around a median of $21.98 and then stepped down to the $17.40s from 7 November. So the pattern is clear enough: the official store did not budge for six weeks, and the grey market did the discounting. Steam's own listing has now moved for the first time since our record opened, and the store page says the promotion ends on 26 November.

That matters for timing, because it tells you what a "sale" on this game is worth. There is no history of official discounts to extrapolate from — this is the first one we have logged. If you were waiting for a deeper cut later in the year, you are waiting on something that has never happened.

Mega Crit's own Early Access trailer, from the studio's channel — the clearest two minutes on what the sequel changed.

The patch you have read about is not on the main branch

This is the part worth getting right before you spend anything. Patch v0.113.0 adds The Fool, the first new character of Early Access — in Mega Crit's words "a silly musician who wields a bow" — plus two modes. Blitz strips the game down: the map is gone, gold stops mattering, and the Merchant's stock changes, with five Ascension levels shared across every character. Dread goes the other way, and it is gated behind reaching Ascension 10 on all characters including the new one; every ascension modifier is switched on, bosses buff the rest of their Act, and curses accumulate as you climb.

None of that is in the default build. The patch notes are explicit that it "is exclusive to the beta branch", and that the main branch has instead been brought up to v0.111.0. Getting the new content means right-clicking the game in your library and switching to public-beta under Properties. A hotfix, v0.113.1, followed on 14 November with icons for the Dread powers and a round of translation and text fixes.

So the honest framing of this week is: buy now and you get a stable build one version behind the headlines, with an opt-in switch to the version you read about. That is a fine trade if you know it is the trade. It is a bad surprise if you install the game expecting The Fool to be there.

Blitz removes this screen entirely, which is a larger change to the run structure than a new character is. (Official Steam screenshot)

What the reviews say, and what Steam says about them

Steam's own store page puts the all-time rating at Very Positive, 92% of 72,980 reviews, with the last 30 days at Mostly Positive, 79% of 4,132. It also carries Valve's notice that the product "has experienced one or more periods of off-topic review activity" — which is why any single aggregate figure you see quoted for this game should be treated with care. The recent score is a good deal softer than the lifetime one, and the gap is the thing to read, not either number on its own.

For context on where the sequel sits, the original Slay the Spire holds Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam from more than 219,000 reviews, and it is cheap in a way the sequel is not: across 35 readings since 26 September its cheapest offer has stayed inside a $5.87–$7.40 band, with a median of $6.57 and 20 of those 35 days under seven dollars. The low we logged was $5.87, at Driffle INC on 7 November 2026. If you have never played either, that is not a close financial call.

The November patch added five new events across the Underdocks and Acts 2 and 3, including a Museum of Torture. (Official Steam screenshot)

The keyshop route, and the Dispatch bundle

Our record is a reminder that for most of the autumn the cheapest Slay the Spire 2 listing was a key reseller rather than Steam. That route is legitimate but it is not free of friction — activation regions, refund rights and seller reputation all differ from buying on the store itself, and we have written at length on whether keyshops are safe and what to check first. With Steam's own listing discounted for the next fortnight, the gap between the two routes is narrower than it has been at any point in our record, which weakens the main argument for taking the grey-market one.

There is also a bundle. Steam's page offers Slay the Spire 2 x Dispatch, pairing it with AdHoc Studio's 2025 adventure game. Worth knowing before you treat that as a saving: Dispatch barely moves. Across 34 readings since 26 September its cheapest offer anywhere sat between $21.08 and $23.99, a span of under three dollars, with the low at GAMIVO on 18 October 2026. A bundle discount on a game whose price is that flat is worth exactly what the bundle takes off, and nothing more — there is no "it would have been cheaper later" to weigh against it.

GameSpot's upload of the Early Access date reveal — a mirror channel, not Mega Crit's own.

How this compares to the rest of Early Access

Games in Early Access price themselves in two broad ways: low and climbing, or full and static. Slay the Spire 2 is firmly the second, and our readings show the official figure never wavering across six weeks. That is the same posture we found when SULFUR left Early Access, where the question was what the 1.0 release does to a price that has already settled. It also sits awkwardly with the broader finding in our pre-order price data: the first month after a release is usually the worst time to pay, and the first real cut tends to arrive at a scheduled sale rather than off-cycle.

This cut is off-cycle, ahead of the late-November sale window we mapped in our survey of the Steam sales. Whether a bigger one follows at the end of the month is unknowable from one data point, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.

The bottom line

If you already own and like the first game, buy it now. The official price has not moved once in six weeks of our tracking, this is the first discount we have logged, and it has a stated end date — which is as close to a floor as an Early Access game with no discount history gets. Switch to the beta branch on your first launch, because the modes added this week are the most interesting thing in the build and they are not in the default one.

If you have never played a Slay the Spire game, buy the original instead. It is a finished, Overwhelmingly Positive game sitting under a third of what the sequel costs on the evidence of our last 35 readings, and the sequel will still be here, more complete and probably cheaper, whenever you finish it. Check both live figures on the game pages before you commit.

Relics still do the heavy lifting in a run, and the beta patch rebalanced several of them. (Official Steam screenshot)

One more piece of housekeeping for anyone arriving from the first game: we have a separate list of games like Slay the Spire for the gaps between patches, which is a better use of a fortnight than grinding Ascension for a mode you cannot reach yet.