Tainted Cain is easy, actually - a guide

I realized this 1 floor before the regular mom fight. Half of my run was carried by the yellow tear drop item (fire rate up, range down) and a halo. Luckily, i was able to use the shit items that i had accepted early on to take synergistic items and make em not so bad.

Cleared delerium off of basically the 2 items above, tarot card upgraded cards, turning myself into Beelzebub, and the meat that gives damage and health.

I use EID anyway like how are you gonna expect me to remember every recipe

Pc players: Nah id mod

Solo puedo decir que esto es cine, te dejo mi like

This has always been a character I slightly dreaded having to play and one I had some difficulty with, now I'm on a run with over half of my items being q4. I thank you greatly for you knowledge sir.

Wow, underrated creator alert?!

i say doubt. its just rng hell

So basically the external item description is cheating with t. Cain.

Just unlocked Tainted Cain and now I'm rewatching this. It's really is helpful!

The best way to play t Cain is not taking any pickups until u kill boss

I honestly prefer playing for a cheap recipe and spamming it, but if the first floor is a lucky one (i get an incredible pickup) i usually shift to this strategy. C section could be anywhere...

Old TCain was much easier
You could just open the item craft sheet and only craft the best items

Most boring piece of shit of a character imo

this is such a cute explanation video i love it!!!! effort u put in deserves more subs

You madee me want to try t. Cain. Gonna give it a shot

Out of all the characters I struggled with TC was def up there i gave up figuring him out and I just spammed healthups and dmg and it worked out

after this guide i was able to get all the check marks in one run

You're a God! Nice Video.

To those who say “just use EID”, some people play on consoles so they can’t use mods.

This video helped me so much, I'm gonna subscribe. We need more tutorials for other characters like this, Thank you so much!

love this video, great vibes, subbed!

In my most insane tainted cain run I got equality (tricket) and found the recipe for cains other eye was 4 hearts, two keys and two bombs. By making portable slot machines I was able to get more coins and other pickups allowing me to one tap the lamb. Very fun run

Yay, now Tainted Cain completion marks will actually be fun! thx lol.

Loved this viedo, trying to beat my first dead god file without mods, i HATE tainted cain... maybe soon into "hated"...

Hello, I have a problem with my tainted cain that every time I start a new run the crafting resets, does this happen to anyone else? Does anyone know if it is normal or is there a solution to my problem?

This guide is funny because my optimal strategy for t cain is the exact opposite, pick up the high value pickups like golden bombs and soul hearts to ensure survival while picking the bombs, coins, etc in the hopes of rolling a good item with an easy recipe that i can spam. Also abusing the 8 coins recipe in the secret room to farm the secret room op items like rock bottom or r key

Best guide on alt cain so far but if will use a heart in craft you will get speciall item poll: skull heart-secret,black heart-satana, white-angel room

Red Isaac is so polite :3

Did you make the blood isaac by yourself? The sprite looks really nice

You deserve a lot of subs because thanks to you I got four checkmarks in one run and all I did was made spoon bender, brimstone, chocolate milk and monstro’s lung

gambling the guide. It's not bad but it's not a guide it's more of a playstle. I think optimally for unlocks you do want to find a good easily craftable recipe and diplopia duepsi

Worst character in the game.

Such a great and awesome video, and thanks for the guide too, great video better than movies

You really like haemolacria huh

Another tainted cain enthusiast.

Be my guest

just stumbled across this video.. incredible! very well done, extremely informative, and useful even as an isaac veteran. I can't wait to explore the rest of your videos!

Honestly i never understand how people think it's fine to play t cain with eid because it gives extremely crucial information that you otherwise wouldn't have, it's basically cheating

good video, hopefully it stands against the rhetoric of TCain hate, as i also think TCain isnt that bad and just requires some thinking and planning

some things i would add though is mentioning the importance of the Luck stat, since more luck = more room drops = more items. I personally like to take any lucky pennies for myself, as imo the extra chance of more pickups down the line is more worth it than one potentially good item. (thats also not mentioning luck is good to have for items with % chance to proc)

Also since a decent chunk of boss items give some amount of luck, their recipes are usually fairly easy, so, for example, remembering a recipe for Latch Key can end up cascading quite quickly into you having 6 of them and then getting lots of room drops to make yourself overpowered via sheer numbers.

Pointing out buying items / other pickups from a shop to "convert" your held money to higher value pickups is a good call, but ill also add that buying the 10 cent active items from the shop pays out in the same amount of pickups a 15 cent item does, usually giving you back more than what you put in, so personally i only really buy 10 cent items.

items / trinkets that can generate pickups are also super valuable (you pointed out everything jar in the video which is a really good item for this like you mentioned), but any item that can partially pay itself back when picked up or provide extra loot down the line is quite valuable. (sack of coins, bombs, etc, latch key (hi latch key) mystery sack, all of the penny trinkets, old bandage, deck of cards, you get the point)

cards can also be really valuable, so check what card it is before bagging it, as it could provide more value by not being bagged (heirophant/hierophant? are REALLY good, paying out in soul hearts/bone hearts respectively, the high priestess is usually 1 free boss kill early game so it save you bombs, the Sun is a full heal so you can gamble more on blood donation machines / sacrifice rooms, the lovers / justice / justice? / temperance / wheel of fortune spawn things that can be useful, the hanged man? gives lets you get money from kills temporarily)

also remember to not tunnel vision too hard on getting a really good item early when you dont have many items. sometimes you just need something decent to help you get past the earlier floors. bombs are really good for bosses as you mentioned but youre not gonna have that many of them / they might be better off used somewhere else.

apologies for the essay, i originally wanted to just write about luck but the more i thought about it the more i could mention. i dont necessarily agree with tcain being "quality over quantity" but hey its what works for me, and who am i to judge what strat others use if the other strats work too.

I hope i get to see more of these types of more "in depth" isaac videos since isaac just has so much to talk about, especially character strats.

Wrong you open the tcain recipe book website after full clearing each floor and spend like 3 hours to find a game winning item because they didn't think this character thru.

I love how the guide is just “put good items in the bag” and for some reason half of us (me included) are stupid enough to just realize that that’s probably a good strategy actually.

(Vi) T Cain has always been an easy character for me. It is kinda easy to get op items if you know what you are doing, and it is also super easy to rerroll anything undesirable

The pick ups from destroying a item are based on the item pool of the room, so no matter what the item is or what item pool it is from, it will always drop a white heart if it is picked up in angle room. Also, some secert room will turn hearts spawned in the room into a fixed type of heart. For example, id 1 of super secret room(angle room background, one white heart in middle） only spawn white heart, so you can either replace you current active item/ use card and pills or use gamble machine to spawn more white heart

Very bad guide, no explanation of the quality of pickups and their connection to pools, no explanation of the strongest craft of daddy's coin, and that 1 lucky penny is enough for quality 4

Meanwhile the good items that require said low quality items:

(But yeah this guide does help)

There's actually a way to cheese tainted cain. If you can craft Gnawed leaf and Serpent's Kiss, you can get infinite black heart, which in turn, equals infinite brimstones.

Yeah ima just use external item description

I don’t really agree with this, personally I think it’s better to leave the bad ones on the floor and prioritize making a good item, and then turn the bad ones into decent items like star ups, you just can’t put in only completely terrible pick ups and expect a good item

Or, and hear me out here. Spend 2 hours to get to Depths 1. Trust me its worth it

The lil red guy is cute :)

The Tainted cain boss rush/hush torture is real with all the micromanagement 😭