Slay The Spire 2 The Trial Guide: How To Survive Jury Duty
Getting picked as Decider in Act 3's courtroom event feels like a throwaway flavor moment right up until refusing the job turns out to be a genuine death sentence.
This event drops without warning in Act 3, usually right when survival's already feeling tenuous. A figure calling himself the Grand Arbiter names you Entrant 332 and puts you in the decision chair for a courtroom case, and the game gives an option to refuse the role outright. Testing that refusal option myself so nobody else has to: declining once gets a stern warning, and declining a second time ends the run instantly. No hidden path, no workaround, not even a Fairy in a Bottle saves the character from that specific death screen. It's a hard-coded punishment for curiosity, and losing an hour of progress to a text box is about as frustrating as this game gets. Just accept the job. Anyone still building toward a first Act 3 clear at all should focus there first anyway, and my beginner's guide is the better use of time before worrying about courtroom politics.
The Actual Decision on the Table
Once seated, the trial itself is straightforward. A corrupt noble stands accused, barely bothers defending himself, and a note slipped into your pocket offers a payout for ruling in his favor. From there it's a binary choice with no morally correct answer, only whichever option actually fits the current run's needs.
Ruling Guilty heals for 10 HP and nothing else. It's the boring option, and in Act 3 that's exactly the point. Enemies at this stage hit hard enough that a free heal is genuinely valuable, and if the run's sitting below half health with no campfire on the visible route, taking the safe payout and moving on is usually the correct read.
Ruling Innocent hands over 300 gold in exchange for a permanent Regret curse. That's a significant amount of gold for a single event to offer, easily enough to buy a strong relic, grab a needed potion, and pay for a card removal all in one Merchant visit if one's coming up on the map. The catch is real, though. Regret does damage equal to however many cards are currently held any time it's still sitting in hand at the end of a turn, which can bleed through a health bar fast on an unlucky draw during a fight.
When the Bribe Is Actually Worth Taking
The gold only matters if there's a Merchant node ahead to spend it at. Taking a permanent curse for cash that never gets spent is a straightforward net loss, so checking the map before committing to Innocent is worth doing first.
Beyond that, the curse itself is much less scary with the right support. Omamori negates it from ever entering the deck in the first place, which turns Innocent into 300 completely free gold. Blue Candle offers a cheaper fallback, letting the curse get exhausted for a single point of HP instead of sitting there as a liability. Characters with strong built-in exhaust mechanics have an easier time managing Regret manually turn to turn as well.
Worth factoring in overall deck clutter too. A deck already carrying dead weight or unplayable junk gets hit disproportionately hard by one more unplayable card added on top, since draw consistency degrades faster the more of the hand is filled with cards that can't be played. A clean, tight deck can shrug off Regret far more easily than a bloated one.
The lore behind this event, and how a corrupt court fits into the Spire's broader history, is still something the community's piecing together in bits, and my Epoch progression guide digs into some of those narrative fragments if that's of interest. For gauging whether the payout here is actually worth chasing relative to other rewards, my best relics guide is worth a look too. Either way, the real takeaway is simple: accept the role, read the map before taking the bribe, and never hold a curse for gold that has nowhere left to go.
