Their aesthetic? Chains, whips; spiked. Their mood? Afflicted, condemned, ritualistic. Their angels? Dark. Their maiden? Iron.

Friendship ended with dwarven gearsmiths; my new favorite clan in Monster Train 2 is the tortured edgelords.

The final faction being added to Monster Train 2, The Punished, arrive November 10 as a paid DLC. Their theme is self-damage, with new keywords and spells that, primarily, reward power in exchange for hurting yourself. Your pain? Enemies’ bane.

Leaving a mark

Though existing MT2 clans like the Melting Remnant revolve around forms of sacrifice, The Punished are absolutely thirsty for it. They bring new keywords like Chained (enemy units take half the damage that your units take) that make damage an active solution to enemy waves. The self-flagellation angle likewise brings new purpose to some existing spells and equipment, and jives great with partner clans that provide protection from pain (Lazarus League) or more ways to inflict it (Pyreborne).

Damaging my own guys sounds like a risk-reward tactic that requires sophisticated play. In my first run as The Punished, I anticipated having to do brain-wracking calculus about how much damage to absorb. But instead, I’ve found the new clan to be one of the most powerful and, at least with one of their champions, easy to play.

A lot of that is down to the utility of their new gimmick, a big purple gem called the Monolith. Here’s a breakdown of what makes it special:

• Their clan mechanic, the Monolith, sacrifices cards from your hand. Sacrificing a card grants 1 Devotion, a bar that you fill across the run to level up your Monolith level.
• 1 Monolith level = 1 Zeal. Zeal is +1 attack, +1 max HP when you deploy a unit. There’s no cap on Monolith level, but in my best runs I was able to achieve 10 or 11.
• Curses can be sacrificed to the Monolith like any other card. So if you have 2 Curses of Entropy in your hand while facing the Titans, but you have 2 energy, you can just click the Monolith twice to vaporize them, avoiding their debuffs completely. Extremely helpful.
• One of the more fun strategies I stumbled on is playing curse roulette with this system, hoping that a Monolith click deletes the undesired card in your hand.
• Also, sacrificing a card to the Monolith triggers Offering (if discarded, play that card)

“Level up the Monolith by sacrificing cards to earn Devotion, which grants Zeal, which buffs attack and HP for all units” kind of sounds like a line from a ProZD deckbuilder parody video (I will take any opportunity to reference the legendary Dairy Cow combo), but it’s really not complicated. Click the purple crystal, make cards go away, permascale a little bit.

Though it can change the calculus for a few units, Zeal isn’t that game-breaking on its own: usually you’re just increasing the ceiling of a unit’s HP to set up cards like Zealot’s Halo, an equipment that gives +1 attack for every 1 HP you’re missing.

More potent is The Punished’s starter champion, Archus, an S-tier champ that amps damage based on lost HP, but has the versatility to debuff enemy damage as well. All of his build paths grant him Flight. His best variant deploys a “Darkshard” into the lane he flies into, a 0-attack artifact that does one of the following, on your choice:

• Blinding Darkshard: Give enemy units -3 (scaling to -7 on max level)
• Looming Darkshard: Apply Bloodshed (+1 to all friendly units on the floor when a friendly unit takes damage—scaling all the way to +3)
• Shattering Darkshard: Sacrifice the Darkshard to deal 40 damage (300 damage on max level)

Bloodshed is really, really powerful with the right unit pairings and a cheap spell or two that hurts yourself. What’s wild is that Archus can deploy a Darkshard in every lane, with a cooldown of 2 on his flight ability. I might anticipate a nerf on that. Scaling your whole floor from received hits (including self-targeted spells!) is a wonderful way to accelerate sweepers or backline bruisers. Archus good.

Chain pain

Zariel, the other champ, is more advanced. The first angel cast out of heaven, “Zariel has been imprisoned for so long that her original crime has been forgotten to time.” Sick. Although, you’d think that that would enable some kind of clemency?

Since her arms and wings are bound in chains, Zariel has no base attack. What she does have are three diverse paths that all play off sponging up as much damage as possible:

• Matriarch of Chains: Apply Chained 1 to enemies on turn start
• Pain Maiden: Ability – Paintouch: Deal 3 damage to an enemy unit per stack of Pain (starts with 10 Pain, gains Pain for every point of damage taken by friendly units)
• Devout: Siphon – Gain 1 Devotion. Incant – Deal 6 damage to the front enemy unit, increased by 6 per Monolith level

I asked Shiny Shoe CEO Mark Cooke what combos the studio has found useful with Zariel. “A lot of Hellhorned cards like Branding Rite, Dark Deal, and Inferno work really well with Zariel’s Pain and Chain paths. Pox is a great spell for consistent friendly damage, because it applies Decay 10 to all units,” says Cooke. “Zariel’s Pain Maiden path especially synergizes well with The Condemned, because the unit has Tenacious, it won’t die to any friendly damage and it even amplifies the damage it takes and redirects it to an enemy, so it’s great for pinging and stacking Pain while still killing enemies.”

On my second run with Zariel, in the final rounds of a battle, I was dealing 1000 damage from her Paintouch ability, and I was doing it each turn because the ability has a cooldown of 1. On a couple other attempts, I couldn’t create damage outputting units to pair with her quickly enough, and my run collapsed.

This is one of the few weaknesses of The Punished—although several units have good base attack, instantaneous damage can be hard to acquire. Reaper of Suffering, The Punished’s only sweeper, starts with a generous 60 attack (as much as Demon Fiend, a 4-cost Hellhorned unit), but it also starts Suppressed (meaning she cannot attack), needing a cooldown of 4 to expire before she emerges from that state. Taking damage decreases that cooldown, and incredibly, she heals to full HP when she emerges from Supressed and gains flight when you cross that threshold.

This isn’t the only star unit on The Punished. Forsaken Berserker gains one multistrike for every two Monolith levels. Scarred Justicar, an uncommon, ended up being my damage solution on several runs. He simply gains +15 attack when hit by a friendly spell or ability, and considering one of the starter cards deals a gentle 2 damage, you can gain perhaps +30 or +45 attack in a round between spells and other effects. Slap a stack of multistrike and the new 3-cost equipment Sineater on him (Deal 8 damage to self, attack immediately, cooldown 2), and you have a high damage solution that just takes a little time to set up.

The superstar of the roster, though, might be Penitent Sentinel, an uncommon tank that becomes MT2’s most durable frontliner if you’re able to draft it early. This stoic statue unit cannot be healed, but it gains +1 HP on revenge, astoundingly rare health permascaling that is set-and-forget simple. I found myself taking the “enemies gain multistrike” trial just to welcome more attacks against Penitent Sentinel. In some runs I was ending with nearly 300 HP, linked to a Titanite upgrade that effectively doubled that. Wild.

Riding the pain train

After 12 wins with The Punished, I love that they have several viable units to pick from, and how much they synergize with a variety of clans. I kept finding new ways of winning with Zariel, and my strangest victory was with this configuration:

• The Punished (Zariel) + Underlegion secondary clan, facing Savagery
• No real tank unit, no sweep! 😬
• But I have Remnant Pact to grant Endless to Chainbearer, with a reasonable-ish 80 HP (Largestone/Smidgestone)
• Zariel does 96 damage to the front enemy on Incant
• Zariel applies Chained 1 to enemies on turn start + Dungeon Mooring artifact stacks an additional 1 Chained, so enemies on the first floor take 1X the damage that my units take. But I didn’t have any massive self-damage spells. In some cases though this was enough incoming damage on my units to kill the backline enemy sweeper units based on the damage I took from the enemy frontline units.
• In other words: You hurt me so much that you hurt your own guys enough to kill them, who otherwise would have killed me. Congrats, you played yourself?
• Manifold Mirror + Mushy Room to sap every floor, which somehow didn’t anti-synergy with Chained
• Use spells to damage my own Scarred Justicar, who I gave multistrike, to attain something like 150-260×2 damage
• Punished Spike with remove consume enchantment, played on Scarred Justicar (often granting 56 Zeal, which is +56 attack and +56 max HP)
• In a couple of situations I played the equipment Shackles of Spite (this unit does 2X damage if their HP is ≤50%) on Scarred Justicar to boost their attack to ~425×2, but I didn’t pull this off consistently
• Two 1-cost Rots for some extra damage on bosses
• 11 Monolith level, mostly from Zariel

I had no plan and was mostly freestyling through this, my upgrade selections weren’t particularly strong. I was surprised to beat Savagery, let alone the Titans.

After 500 hours in Monster Train 2, it’s refreshing to beat the game in an unexpected way. I truly thought this run was doomed because I had little traditional damage, no sweep, no tank, and no decapitating spells.

The Punished’s masochistic theme works. And Shiny Shoe’s treatment of these tortured angels is nice (their Carolina Panthers-blue skin helps them stand out, even among the pale blue Melting Remnant), though their stoic reverence doesn’t leave a lot of room for quirk.

I would’ve loved to have seen a silly torture sicko among the roster, but I’ll settle for Lasher, the first backline unit that hits any friendly units positioned in front of him for 1 damage (I don’t recommend relying on Damage Shield when he’s on the floor). Just think of it as giving your guys a helpful, spiked-chain pat on the back.

It’s appropriate for the final update to a game I like a lot to hurt a little. But Shiny Shoe CEO Mark Cooke did indicate that the studio may not be done with the franchise. “At this time The Punished is the last DLC planned for MT2,” Cooke told me. “However, we love the world of Monster Train, and hope to work on more Monster Train games in the future!”