Maybe you should force deck archetypes.

Tldr: title; some cards/archetypes are just that good I guess.

A popular piece of advice for newer players that I would largely agree with is that trying to build a certain type of deck is not how you want to approach the game. What newer players tend to do is see a card like body slam and barricade and go “ah, I’m building a block deck this run.” Or maybe take a catalyst early with no other poison cards and think, “I’m creating a poison deck this run, I’m going to take every poison card I see.” This is flawed thinking, and a recommended way is to view every encounter in the Spire as a list of problems, that you can put cards in your deck to solve. Entrench + Barricade + Body Slam can be a good eventual solve for bosses, but you also need to add that Whirlwind to deal with a bunch of the hallway fights. You can be using Bouncing Flask and Catalyst for the slower fights, but you still should take Blade Dance for some frontload. And you should certainly avoid taking Catalyst when there are no other poison cards in your deck, similar to how taking an early Body Slam is not going to do very much for you.

The thing is, though, I would argue that on Ironclad, a player should take a floor 1 Dark Embrace or Corruption. The decks that are enabled by these cards are so powerful that you should speculate on them, even if they are a “curse” right now. Similarly, on Defect, chances are that you should click on Defragment when you see it. There are cards in the short term that would make your deck stronger relative to where you are in the run (on floor 1, Doom and Gloom and Ball Lightning are my picks for most immediate strength excluding rares) but Defragment is a defensible choice over any of them. Most defect runs are simply going to value any source of focus so much that you have to take it when you see it. Focus builds are very nearly the only thing to be doing on Defect, so you have to force it to work. Silent is a little bit tricky; neither Catalyst nor Accuracy are cards I want to be taking floor 1. However, there are certain speculative picks that may not be so obvious: Acrobatics and Calculated Gamble. Discard is a deck archetype for the Silent, though both of these cards very happily go into a goodstuff deck instead of building a pseudo-infinite. Adding these cards to the deck can have big payoffs but can also be harmful, yet I would think they fall closer to a good choice than a bad one. Of course there is also Watcher, who is so strong that forcing a deck type really doesn’t hurt you that much, and has the payoff of going infinite if you force the rushdown deck successfully. And of course basically every card that goes into the infinite should also help you in the short term as well, so with a decently lucky start you hardly “forced” anything.

Ultimately, the idea that you should put cards in to answer the problems the Spire throws at you is perhaps a little more flawed than it seems. When some cards are so good at solving everything later, taking them now to make sure you have them could be optimal. Not to mention, upon securing these cards, you can leverage them to be powering your deck up in the short term as much as possible and/or playing it safe for the time being, knowing that your long term prospects are still very good. Anyways, this is just a wrinkle in what I would still consider good beginner advice.