Ironclad's card list looks like a wall of damage. It is three decks wearing one coat, and the keyword edges in the extraction count them out. Start from the kit — the character page covers it — then draft toward whichever line your rewards are actually feeding.
The strength/scaling line
Keyword links identify explicit mentions of Strength, not every card that benefits from it. Heavy Blade names its extra Strength scaling, while Sword Boomerang gains Strength damage on every hit without naming the power in its description. The damage calculation guide compares their upgrades, energy costs and results after Weak, Vulnerable and Block. Demon Form grants its own amount of Strength at the start of every turn, after the draw — a permanent engine; Limit Break doubles whatever you've stacked (and Exhausts itself); Heavy Blade converts one Strength into several damage. The line's weakness is tempo: while you stack, you aren't blocking, and the deck has few answers to that window.
The exhaust-for-value line
23 RED cards carry the EXHAUST edge — Burning Pact, Dark Embrace, Feel No Pain, Fiend Fire, Second Wind and their kin across the pool. This is the biggest single keyword cluster in the color, bigger than BLOCK's 18 edges, and it works because exhaust is priced as a cost but spent as fuel: Feel No Pain fires on any exhaust anywhere, paying out its amount as block — so every self-exhausting attack becomes block. Corruption makes Skills cost 0 and exhausts them on play; Exhume pulls a spent card back for a second payout. The deck doesn't mind losing cards. Losing cards is the point.
The block/engine line
18 RED cards carry the BLOCK edge. On its own that's defensive filler; with Barricade it's an economy. Barricade stops block from clearing at turn start — and suddenly Entrench doubles a number nobody takes away, Body Slam converts accumulated block into scaled damage, and Metallicize/Juggernaut drip value onto a pile that never resets. This is the slowest line and the hardest to kill.
What compounds
The three lines share skeleton cards, and the compounding happens at the seams: Rupture pays Strength for self-damage, feeding both the scaling line and Hemokinesis/Brutality-style HP costs; Feel No Pain + Corruption turns every free Skill into block; Barricade + Entrench + Body Slam needs no Strength at all. These links describe interactions; they do not divide the entire card pool into scaling and non-scaling cards. A Strength deck still needs ways to draw and pay for its attacks, and enough defense to build Strength before taking too much damage.
The shared skeleton pushes you here
Every run starts from Bash and heals off Burning Blood — a kit that rewards trading HP and punishes decks that can't close. The starter relic's heal lands after every combat, which quietly favors aggressive lines early; the three archetypes above are the shapes that survive act 2's weight ramp (see the character kits guide for how each climber's kit bends drafting). Named anchors all exist in the pool: Demon Form, Barricade, Feel No Pain.
StS2 additions and MP-only exclusions
Spire 2 grows the pool to 87 ironclad entities, 49 names not in the StS1 red pool — Cruelty (Vulnerable enemies take extra % damage), Unmovable (first block each turn doubled), Colossus (half damage from Vulnerable enemies), Hellraiser (drawn Strikes auto-fire at random enemies), Thrash among them. The old anchors carried over verbatim: Demon Form still reads "At the start of your turn, gain Strength" at base 2, Barricade's text is unchanged, Feel No Pain now prices at 3 block.
Multiplayer carves two cards out: Demonic Shield ("Give another player Block equal to your Block") and Tank ("Allies take half damage") are both flagged multiplayer-only — they exist in the pool but are constrained to co-op contexts, and they're the only two of the 87 so marked. Solo, ignore them; drafting around them is drafting around cards your mode won't offer.