Hello!!!! I'm a really big fan of this mod, there's some really creative and fun ideas in here and I love how it's all done utilizing the vanilla features in the game, so I wanted to try and create a concept for it myself! I don't expect this to be in a comparable level of quality but if you're interested, I present to you:

//Champion Keeper//

The central focus in this concept for champion keeper's design is to amplify the notion that he's supposed to be a form of greed, while I think regular keeper does a fine enough job, it never feels like being greedy is part of your gameplan, and I wanted champion keeper to change that.

This is probably a very rough idea, I might spend more time refining later, but I had some fun with the concept while playing with the ideas and thought I'd share. The intention here is to reward players for accumulating mass amounts of money and managing to keep
said money throughout the game, while providing opportunities for them to spend that money in trade for other situational benefits.
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Item Changes

- Removed Wooden Nickel and Store Key:

These are instead replaced by Blank Card and the Reverse Hang Man card. This will serve as the player's main way of collecting money, lowering your firerate in turn of having temporary quadshot and killed enemies dropping pennies;

-Greed's Gullet and Blood Oath:

These two items serve as Champion Keeper's main gimmick, hoarding your stash of coins rewards players with more max health from Greed's Gullet, and the more health they acquire the more damage Blood Oath will grant them at the start of the floor;

-Deep Pockets:

Allows you to carry even more pennies, furthering the potential HP's and Damage ups provided from the previous items; (if possible, disabling its ability to create extra coins on room clear would be very helpful, as i intended for the main source of collecting coins to be via the tarot card!)

-Golden Razor:

Is kept in Keeper's pocket active slot, serving as a last resort save and grace
incase the player needs extra damage for the current room, at the cost of lowering your max hp due to Greed's Gullet and potentially reducing damage gained from Blood Oath;

-Smelted Trinkets:

AAA Battery allows the player to use their Blank Card more often; (If the charges of blank card
are capable of being edited manually, bumping the reverse hanged man from 6 to 4 would be great, 6 is a little too high for players to continuously keep a streak of the effect active by playing well and quickly.)

Silver Dollar causes there to be more chances for players to spend their money, providing shops in chapter 4.
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Other Changes

Increase keeper's tear multipler, so using the reverse tarot card is less punishing on the player
and allows them to make more use of its effects.

However in turn, keeper's damage modifier should be reduced as to encourage the use of blood oath and to prevent him from dealing too much early game with the effects of the tarot card.

Also if possible, disabling item rooms would be very nice!
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That's all, I hope you enjoyed reading through that, if you do take this into consideration feel free to make any changes and/or provide feedback :3

@Morango This sounds like a very cool idea! I love the interaction between greed's gullet and blood oath that encourages hoarding your wealth heh. Only issue is that the primary way you get money would be through the blank card use, which you can just swap out with another item and get yourself in trouble with. Another thing is that if there's no treasure rooms, it would be a little boring gameplay wise only using coins for damage and never getting any cool synergy items, but idk how this would be fixed

Originally posted by Kattack:

@Morango This sounds like a very cool idea! I love the interaction between greed's gullet and blood oath that encourages hoarding your wealth heh. Only issue is that the primary way you get money would be through the blank card use, which you can just swap out with another item and get yourself in trouble with. Another thing is that if there's no treasure rooms, it would be a little boring gameplay wise only using coins for damage and never getting any cool synergy items, but idk how this would be fixed

Thank you!!

I originally wanted to have chaos in the mix, making it so visiting shops could provide the interesting synergies but i feared that other sources of items like boss drops, angel rooms and secret rooms would also be affected (+ it felt too similar to tainted keeper in vanilla isaac)

And you have a very good point with the blank card use! Maybe keeping deep pockets effect and/or adding rib of greed could balance it out so obtaining money is still viable without it?

I have 2 suggestions for Champ'd Tainted Lost, you don't have to use either of them but I think they'd be fun ideas.

The first one would remove your extra chance for holy cards (not sure how possible this is modding wise), and instead give you Spirit Shackles, a gulped Mom's Pearl, and Satanic Bible as an active item, making you have an even less reliable way to survive hits in exchange for being able to exploit the epic Lost + Satanic synergy.

The 2nd would remove your extra holy card chance as well as your spectral tears, while giving you a pocket D4 and Damocles, letting you effectively play as Rebirth Lost while giving you even more items to reroll with D4.

@JansTheGamerJansTheGamer Spirit shackles seems like it can make for a very interesting time. How about removed flight and holy card spawn, and spirit shackles. I don't like satanic bible though since that makes it too similar to champion bethany and isn't too interesting imo, but maybe some other upside could be cool if we can think of one.

tainted judas: stay with the dark arts, blindfolded, speed 2.00, if you can make the dark arts make you go speed 3.00 do it, molten trinkets: Cursed Skull, Daemon's Tail, Isaac's Head (for poops and fireplaces)/Add items: Aquarius, The Battery, Dead Dove OR Spirit of Night (sorry my english)

Tainted Lost
This can be difficult to program, but here goes:

-Removes the chance for holy cards to appear

-Lose extra damage (back to 1.00x/3.50 damage)

-You need to deal 3.5x current damage per minute to not die

-Make sure that items with qualities 4 have a 50% chance of being exchanged (if it is difficult to program, you can leave this one out)

Add items:

-Eucharist
-Dead cat
-Berserk

Smelted Trinkets:

-NO!
-Filigree feather
-Cracked Crown

Originally posted by ptera1235:

tainted judas: stay with the dark arts, blindfolded, speed 2.00, if you can make the dark arts make you go speed 3.00 do it, molten trinkets: Cursed Skull, Daemon's Tail, Isaac's Head (for poops and fireplaces)/Add items: Aquarius, The Battery, Dead Dove OR Spirit of Night (sorry my english)

So the only way of dealing damaqge is dark arts and aqaurius? Seems like a pain especially against flying enemies and bosses that cant get hit by aqauarius creep

yes that's it

Just getting into this mod, really loving it so far! Cool to see so much engagement too!

I was thinking about a possible Champion Forgotten. If it's possible I feel that the Forgotten really needs to be restricted in some way.
1; Cursed Eye, Black Candle, and (ideally) no ghost form. Cursed Eye just makes it a them a little stronger.
2; No red or soul hearts, only bone! To make up for the powerful club and no curses, they become nothing more than a fragile husk!
3; Maybe give them Hollow Husk to start out with for the HP (or even a golden one)
4; Finally I feel a base tears down would make sense to balance it out.

@bravehunterforce I don't really see the unique gameplay to it here, the individual parts don't really go together much at all. When making champions i try to see how every new item given interacts with eachother and with the base character for cool synergies, but this just seems like a teleportless cursed eye start and that's not really too interesting to me. Also the bone hearts only is a bit outside of the scope of what champions can do imo, sorryy

???+
-No Poop
-Reduced tear rate
-Start with Birthright, Binge Eater and Goat Head
-Angel rooms do not spawn, but ??? can still get key pieces without needing to use sacrifice rooms (maybe the Satan statues in devil rooms are replaced with bombable angel statues if you don't have both pieces?)
-Like in the Ultra Hard challenge, heart pickups do not spawn, but direct additions to ???'s health bar still work as normal.

Lazarus+
-Starts with Blank Card, Polydactyly, Anemic, Suicide King and PHD. Maybe Schoolbag too?
-Items that aren't tagged 'offensive' do not spawn.
-Treasure rooms do not spawn.
-Full Health and Health Up are guaranteed to be in the pill pool, like how it is for Magdalene.
-All cards and runes that spawn have a 10% chance of being turned into Soul of Lazarus instead (maybe?)

Originally posted by Kattack:

@Morango This sounds like a very cool idea! I love the interaction between greed's gullet and blood oath that encourages hoarding your wealth heh. Only issue is that the primary way you get money would be through the blank card use, which you can just swap out with another item and get yourself in trouble with. Another thing is that if there's no treasure rooms, it would be a little boring gameplay wise only using coins for damage and never getting any cool synergy items, but idk how this would be fixed

I messed around with some other combinations and combed through the wiki for unique interactions and so I returned to tweaking on this idea and I think i found a solution to these issues, so here's a revised version of my Champion Keeper concept!


-Greed's Gullet + Blood Oath + Deep Pockets

The holy trinity remains intact! I feel like this was the best part of the concept IMO so I'll keep
playing with it as the central focus and temptation of saving up your money.

-Keeper's Box replaces Golden Razor!

Instead of a shabby temporary damage up for spending your precious money, how about some actual purchases? Keeper's box will spawn various pickups and rarely some items for keeper to purchase from the shop pool, while that isn't too interesting in of itself that's where the next item comes in.

-Schoolbag + D20

So, a fun little interaction i discovered is that if you reroll pickups spawned from Keeper's Box,
they actually have a chance to transform into a purchaseable item from the current room's
item pool! I think this would fix the problem of Keeper being unable to receive interesting synergies with item rooms disabled, while still creating that sense of choice on whether spending money on this item is worth it over the blood oath + greed's gullet benefits! (Schoolbag doesn't need to be added if there's a way to just intrinsically have 2 active items :3)

-Trinkets: AAA Battery + Rib of Greed

AAA Battery allows for quicker usage of Keeper's Box + D20, this could also be replaced by 9 Volt for a more consistent charge decrease, or if (again) it's capable of being changed manually would help a lot!

Rib of Greed stays as I felt like with this new setup players need a lot more money to be able to take full advantage of the Keeper's Box + D20 synergy, also getting greed in a shop just sucks.

-Random Extras

Keeper's damage multiplier should still be lowered I think, as It'd encourage players to not completely ignore the potential benefits of blood oath.

Head of the Keeper might be a nice addition for the same reasons as rib of greed!

@Morango Now that sounds pretty cool... Maybe i could even give him dicebag's mini d20 somehow. Great potential