A tough new play format and an anvil-slapping set of new units are coming in early February for 2025’s best card game.
Monster Train 2’s first paid DLC, Destiny of the Railforged, will add a new clan to the game, the Railforged, as well as an expansive new mode called Soul Savior. And outside of this paid update, one of the original Monster Train’s clans is also being added to Monster Train 2 for free. No price has yet been announced for the DLC.
The new mode, Soul Savior
Monster Train 2 takes place in heaven, but the new mode, Soul Savior, plays out in a spacey, ethereal realm called the Soulstream, where you fight to reclaim souls from a final boss called the Lifemother.
The mode isn’t a novelty side attraction, but a fresh way of playing Monster Train 2 that the studio wants to be equal in depth and complexity to the main game.
Cooke says that the studio wanted to creatively explore a new format of play, but not take the approach they took in Monster Train 1, where DLC altered the way that a standard run worked. Making a separate type of run allows the studio to introduce “a bunch of new mechanics so we can isolate those things and make that as cool as we possibly can without interfering with the way that the base game works,” he says.
Souls are indeed an imaginative new system: they’re unique, permanently unlocked boons that enhance cards or units, or that take the form of global buffs, similarly to artifacts.
As you play runs of Soul Savior, you’ll permanently unlock souls, a new form of meta progression. Each soul has a different criteria to unlock or upgrade, representing “tens of hours” to fully collect and upgrade them all, says Cooke. Initially you’ll bring in one soul when starting a new run, later unlocking the ability to bring in multiple.
Souls are generally more powerful than standard card upgrades. Cooke tells me about a soul type called Butterball that you can attach to a unit that allows that unit to be consumed like a morsel to absorb its stats. It’s sort of like transforming a unit into Primordium, Umbra’s edible champion.
“We think it offers a different kind of experience that’s a lot of fun.”
—Mark Cooke, Shiny Shoe CEO and founder
Other souls include Red Hot, which makes a spell explosive and gives it +30 magic power, then grants -2 to a random card in your hand if it slays an enemy. A soul called Heartbreaker should work well with damage shield or stacks of reanimate: it gives your unit fragile and reanimate 2, but applies fragile to the non-boss enemy that killed that unit. The soul Goldie works sort of like a money-generating Holystone: it grants a card holdover, and that card produces 10 gold per ember cost when played.
Another way that souls differ from standard card upgrades is their flexibility—souls can be moved between cards mid-run to make adjustments, presumably to help you counter specific fights. There are over 30 souls in total, and they can each be permanently upgraded three times.
Adding to the list of differences, Soul Savior is non-linear. Players attack the Lifemother’s Children one by one, in the order of their choosing, a format that the studio likens to Mega Man’s boss selection structure. Each child is preceded by a fight that will feature familiar bosses and enemies from the base game that have been corrupted by the Lifemother, “remixed,” Cooke says, with new mechanics.
Image 1 of 6
And when you defeat one of these four children, you’ll earn a benefit and a curse, both of which persist for the rest of the run. A benefit takes the form of an in-run upgrade to one of the location nodes, like an improved Trinket Shop that might now sell boss artifacts. Curses include new effects like Witherbloom, which damages one of your units each turn, as well as friendly units adjacent to that unit. Another curse, called Insecure, causes champions to enter the battle with three stacks of melee weakness.
Cooke tells me that Soul Savior, which is only available by purchasing the DLC, will be more difficult at a baseline than a standard run of Monster Train 2 because you accumulate power over time by unlocking and upgrading souls. “As someone who’s played a lot of Monster Train, it’s nice to get beat up a little bit,” Cooke says. “There’s a number of new enemy status effects and mechanics that really you’ve gotta pay attention to, otherwise you’re going to be in trouble.”
There aren’t Covenant difficulty levels in Soul Savior, however. Instead there are three selectable, unlockable tiers of difficulty. Soul Savior will also be slightly longer than a standard run.
It’s an ambitious reconfiguration of Monster Train 2’s ruleset, and I like the idea of a novel mode of play that has a different rhythm than the game’s standard runs. Cooke says Soul Savior was a creative challenge to produce and balance. “Not only do we have all this meta progression and different objectives, then you can also visit all of the battles in different order, so it required rearchitecting some aspects of how the game works to support balancing in a new way. It has been more challenging, I would say, than the base game in some ways because of that structural difference. But we think it offers a different kind of experience that’s a lot of fun.”
The new clan, Railforged
Along with Soul Savior, the DLC will introduce the first post-launch clan to Monster Train 2, the Railforged, a faction of “tinkerers, creators, and mechanics” led by the champions Heph and Herzal, who until now had only been seen in the background of Monster Train 2’s story. “We wanted to try and build a clan that was based around their themes, their lore, and what they bring to the overall Monster Train world,” says Cooke.
These characters created the trains and the train stewards, and their capabilities focus on that equipment and machinery. The Railforged have ways to boost the attack power of the pyre itself, and their unit lineup includes “improved Train Steward-type units” like the Knuckler Steward, “a boxing Train Steward who can deliver a mean punch,” says Cooke.
Another unit in their deck is the Sentry Turret, a big cannon that can’t move, but automatically fires on any enemy unit that moves nearby it, triggering based on effects like shift or advance.
Central to the Railforged is a unique mechanic called Forge, a new in-combat resource they can accumulate and spend to enhance the health and attack of units or pieces of equipment as they’re deployed.
“[Forge] can affect the order you play units in… sometimes you do want to hold a unit to try to capitalize more on Forge if you think you can build it up,” Cooke explains. Unless you count the handful of cards that expend dragon eggs or gold, Railforged is the first clan with an in-combat spendable resource.
Like other MT2 champions, Herzal and Heph have three upgrade paths. One of Heph’s allows her to equip multiple pieces of equipment at the same time, opening the door to the insane, expensive prospect of attaching two pieces of merged equipment to one unit. One of Herzal’s paths, Cooke tells me, gives him an ability called Pyrespeak, an activated ability that gives you a card that causes the pyre to attack the room he’s in.
Cooke sees the Railforged as a bit more of an offensively-oriented clan. Railforged will bring a new status effect, Burst, a kind of multistrike that decays over time, but can be built up. The Railforged have no sweeper units.
The Railforged should excel at augmenting the power of other clans. “With Forge, unit-oriented clans can be quite good. They’re good with Lazarus League because there’s a lot of equipment flying around with Graft. So you can boost all the Graft equipment if you so wish with Forge points. It definitely feels like a great utility clan in general.”
Adding to the list of new content: some rooms will now have abilities that can be manually activated. Returning to MT2 is the card Steel Pulleyclaw, now taking the form of a room that will allow you to grab and pull units from any room to the room that Steel Pulleyclaw is installed into. Yoink.
The Wurm’s turn
Arriving simultaneously with the DLC as an entirely free update to the base game will be the Wurmkin clan, Monster Train 1’s wormy, multi-legged, egg-hatching uglies.
Like the other MT1 clans, the Wurmkin will be getting a total design refresh, including room and equipment cards of their own, a new clan card, and modified balance. “We know that a lot of players have requested [the Wurmkin] and we wanted to say thank you to our player community by adding that in as well,” says Cooke.
Expect all of this to arrive sometime in early February. Shiny Shoe is granting me early access to Soul Savior and the Railforged soon, and I’ll have a story coming at the end of this month with my thoughts based on playing.
