Pure luck or is skill needed?

Hello everyone!

First of all, I want to make something clear: this isn’t a rant, and I’m not trying to say that any of the games mentioned here are bad — quite the opposite. This post is more of a cry for help or maybe a way to change my perspective in some way.

I’m not new to roguelikes. I have 725 hours in TBOI and all unlocks with the normal characters, 340 hours in Dead Cells, and around 200 hours combined in both Hades games. But I’m fairly new to deckbuilding roguelikes — about 65 hours in Balatro and 50 hours in Slay the Spire 1.

I recently bought Slay the Spire 2 to play multiplayer with a friend, but I just can’t shake the feeling that deckbuilding roguelikes are purely luck-based. If the RNG gods are on your side, you get a godlike run. If not, you die within the first few acts. “Skill” only seems to get you so far… or is there some kind of skill I just haven’t figured out yet?

In Isaac, Dead Cells, and Hades, you can finish runs without ever getting a single good item — you can beat them purely with skill. As far as I understand, that’s not really possible in deckbuilding roguelikes.

I know they’re different subgenres of roguelikes, so it’s not entirely fair to compare them, but still…

I just can’t figure out how to play these games in a way that lets me consistently succeed or enjoy them more. I want to like them, but I keep getting stuck on the feeling that a run can be ruined by bad luck rather than my own mistakes — like bad positioning or a missed dodge in other games.

I’ve watched a few “how to get better at X” videos, but they didn’t really help me.

Does anyone else feel this way? Has anyone managed to push past this and eventually get hooked on these games?