Silent Shiv Build Guide — Turning 4-Damage Knives Into a Win Condition

A Shiv is a token Attack card: 0 energy, deal 4 damage. You never draft Shivs directly — other cards add them to your hand, and each one is a free attack that costs nothing but the card slot it occupies.

Because every Shiv is an Attack, it triggers everything that cares about attacks: Afterimage gains you a block per knife played, Envenom applies a poison per unblocked hit, and strength from any source multiplies across the whole pile. This is the quiet reason the deck scales: it is not that Shivs are big, it is that there are so many of them.

Shivs exhaust when played, which sounds like a downside and is actually the engine's exhaust valve — it keeps your deck cycling instead of clogging. It also powers Knife Trap, a rare that replays every Shiv sitting in your exhaust pile directly onto an unlucky enemy.

Blade Dance (Common, 1 energy) adds 3 Shivs to your hand and is the workhorse of the deck. Two or three copies plus a couple of smaller generators is the baseline for a real Shiv deck.

Cloak and Dagger (Common, 1 energy) gains 6 block and adds a Shiv, which makes it the best early pick: it defends while it builds the engine, exactly what Act 1 asks for. Leading Strike (Common, 1 energy) deals 7 damage and adds a Shiv — a fine filler that attacks twice for one card.

Infinite Blades (Uncommon, 1-energy Power) adds a Shiv at the start of every turn for the rest of the fight. One copy is passive damage that pays for itself in two turns; it is the closest thing the deck has to scaling that does not need you to click anything.

Up My Sleeve (Uncommon, 2 energy) adds 3 Shivs and then permanently reduces its own cost — by the second or third play it costs 0. Hidden Daggers (Uncommon, 0 energy) turns two discards into two Shivs, which makes it perfect in discard-heavy hands: it converts otherwise dead cards into attacks.

Accuracy (Uncommon, 1-energy Power) makes every Shiv deal 4 additional damage. This single card is the difference between the joke version of the deck and the real one: with one Accuracy, each knife deals 8; with two, 12. Three knives a turn becomes 24 to 36 damage for zero energy.

Draft Accuracy early and upgrade it the first time a campfire has nothing better to do — the upgrade adds 3 more damage per knife, which across a 15-knife fight is enormous. Stacking a second and even a third Accuracy is usually correct once the generators are in place.

Phantom Blades (Uncommon, 1-energy Power) gives Shivs Retain and makes the first Shiv you play each turn deal 9 additional damage. It is a weaker multiplier than Accuracy but stacks with it, and the Retain means leftover knives stop being wasted at end of turn — leftover knives are exactly how the old versions of this deck lost fights by one turn.

Raw Shiv damage is single-target. Against three enemies, six knives into one body while two others hit you is a losing plan — this is the deck's most common death. The fix is Fan of Knives (Rare, 2-energy Power): your Shivs hit ALL enemies, and playing it adds 4 of them immediately. One Fan of Knives converts the whole deck into AOE.

Storm of Steel (Rare, 1 energy) discards your hand and adds a Shiv for every card discarded. In a deck full of draw, it is an engine turn: cycle five dead cards into five free attacks, and with Accuracies online that is 40-plus damage from one card.

For long fights, Grand Finale (Rare, 0 energy) deals 50 damage to ALL enemies but only plays when your draw pile is empty. Shiv decks empty their draw pile faster than any other Silent build, so Grand Finale stops being a novelty and becomes a recurring 50-damage button. Pair it with card draw and you will cast it two or three times in a boss fight.

Envenom (Rare, 2-energy Power) applies 1 poison every time an attack deals unblocked damage — with a dozen Shivs a turn, that is a dozen poison stacks a turn, layered on top of the knives. And if the AOE hole persists, Noxious Fumes (Uncommon Power) patches it passively with 2 poison to all enemies every turn.

The deck runs on volume, so draw is not optional. Acrobatics (Common, draw 3, discard 1) is the best pure draw. Backflip (Common, 5 block, draw 2) defends while it digs. Expertise (Uncommon) refills your hand to 6, which pairs beautifully with a hand you just emptied of knives. Calculated Gamble and Tools of the Trade keep the discard side of the deck productive.

Block comes from the generators themselves — Cloak and Dagger — plus the usual Silent toolkit: Footwork makes every block card better, Leg Sweep blocks 11 while applying Weak, and Piercing Wail strips 6 strength from every enemy, which is often better than blocking the hit outright.

Afterimage (Rare, 1-energy Power) deserves a special mention: 1 block whenever you play any card. A Shiv turn plays six to ten cards, so Afterimage quietly generates 6 to 10 block every offensive turn — defense that costs you no extra cards.

Act 1: take Cloak and Dagger and Blade Dance on sight, plus any plain good attack, and pick up your first Accuracy when the deck has two or three generators. Do not draft five generators before any multiplier — knives that deal 4 forever do not kill 200-HP bosses.

Upgrade priority: Accuracy first, Blade Dance second (a fourth knife), then whatever block card you play most. If you find Fan of Knives, the deck's ceiling jumps a tier and AOE stops being a draft concern.

Count density before committing: by mid Act 2 you want roughly 6-8 generators, 2-3 multipliers, 3-4 draw pieces, and block filling the rest. If the rewards are not cooperating — no Accuracy, no Phantom Blades by Act 2 — pivot. Poison with our poison plan or a discard deck both share cards with Shivs, so the pivot is cheap if you do it early.

And as always, the card reward priority checklist applies: every Shiv card should answer "does my deck still function without this?" before it takes a slot.