Flexible Pyg Guide: Builds, Strategy, and Economy 2025

The Flexible Pyg

Table of Contents

• Early Game Strategy
• Wrist Warrior Builds (S+ Tier)
• Silk (S tier)
• 28 Hour Fitness (S Tier)
• Jabalian Drum (S Tier)
• Square Pyg (A Tier)
• Burn Builds (A Tier)
• Freeze (B Tier)
• Pigglestorm (C tier)
• Bees (C Tier)

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The Flexible Pyg

A true entrepreneur never overlooks a potential business opportunity

~ quote by s00pahFr0g circa 2025 while sitting in the dark eating yogurt

Disclaimer: This guide is still a work in progress but I feel that it’s good enough to share now

Hello, my name is s00pahFr0g. I’ve been an enjoyer of card games, both paper and digital, since

I was quite young. I have played the Bazaar since closed beta and reached legend each season.

My peak legend rank so far is 93 this season and I have been steadily climbing using my flexible

style. I started to main Pyg during the open beta season and have almost exclusively played him

since then. I don’t claim to be the best Pyg player nor that my playstyle is the best but I have a

lot of experience and strive to keep improving. Pyg can be a difficult character to learn and my

hope is that this guide will help ease that transition for newer players and help everyone keep

up with Pyg’s current place in the meta.

I’ve never been a fan of forcing specific builds and have always preferred a flexible playstyle. I

get bored easily playing the same build so while I do follow meta trends I also like to try new

combinations and make bad items work(usually to the detriment of my rank). I have been

pushing my rank hard this season so I’ve been resisting the urge to force Laser Security System

to 10 wins. Currently I usually pick enchanted item as my starting option, though income is also

viable, and between my enchanted item and shops in the first day or two I pick a direction.

Sometimes I’ll have an early opening that strongly indicates a build that falls outside the

common meta and I will follow that path. Oftentimes that may lead to failure, but sometimes it

leads you to finding another build to add to your options that increases your flexibility.

Pyg used to be the definitive late-game character but the last few seasons Tempo has shifted his

power to be less extreme at the top end. He is still capable of hyper-scaling but it’s much less

consistent than in the early days of the Bazaar. The other characters in-turn have had their

late-game power increased so while Pyg may on average have better late-game potential the

other characters are capable of keeping up which contributes to the reduced consistency of his

late-game. This combination means that currently Pyg is more suited to a tempo playstyle and

has been given the tools to be strong throughout the game.

You’re welcome to contact me on discord or reddit u/s00pahFr0g. If you have any suggestions or

things that could be improved I would love to hear it. This is my first attempt at writing

something like this. I should be getting a new PC setup in a few weeks and I plan to start either

streaming or posting youtube content or possibly both.

Early Game Strategy

• Ganjo with Piggles Launcher is Pyg’s best opening build right now. You want to fill the rest of the board with small, fast items to trigger Piggles Launcher rapidly. Showcase and Weights are both decent too if you need to fill the space. It’s only good for days 1 and 2 for the most part. Once we have all board spaces Showcase or Lumboars is better.
• Weapon starts with a mix of shields scaling with Showcase are usually the next best option. Ganjo, Lumboars, and Weights can be used temporarily if you can’t find Showcase. Ideally you mostly run small fast weapons like fang, yo-yo, ring king gauntlets, etc. Robe is another generically good early item as part of the shield package. A lot of the new set items work well here too. If you want to scale weapons and shields just remember you need 3 items of each but items like Tusked Helm will count for both.
• Currently in season 4 Wrist Warrior is a top tier item when combined with either Display Case or Sponsored Apparel. The latter is both easier to use and often better. If you can find the skill Sharp Corners from Fortis, Ryokan, or the generic skill vendors then this combo is a core build and you just build around it. You should grab the pieces for this build when you see them. Sharp Corners starts at silver tier and Fortis is the skill vendor most likely to sell it. If start with a restorative Wrist Warrior and find textiles you have a day 1 infinite damage loop.
• Matchbox can work for the early game but you want to scale burn using salamander and cinders from curio and other events, burn scaling piggles, or burn damage premium piggles, and ideally a mix of healing and shields because you need to survive to scale the burn.
• If your opening day doesn’t give you any of the above then your next best option is usually a pacifist setup with something like Robe + Bushel and another fast item or two with Robe in the middle. This will win a lot of early boards but heavy poison will beat you.
• Shops that sell medium items are usually where you want to reroll early on as many of our best early boards rely on specific medium items

○ Showcase, Lumboars, Robe, Ganjo, Weights, and Silk

• Money Tree is Pyg’s best generic economy item and can be used as a backup plan if your run has gone poorly. Rewards Card and Business Card are also generically good economy items. You can cycle Money Tree and Rewards Card. If you find a silver money tree and already have your own instead of buying it to upgrade to gold it’s often better to sell your current one, if it’s worth more than 12 gold, and buy the new money tree. You can do the same with rewards card.
• Stacking HP is very important for Pyg’s early game as you need time to scale damage in combat and without investing in HP you are likely to die before you ramp enough damage to win. There are a lot of ways to do this.

○ Buy chocolates, ideally gold but don’t spend all your gold if you are missing key pieces

○ There are passive HP scaling items like Globe and Signet Ring

○ You can use active HP scaling items like Lemonade Stand and Pyg’s Gym

■ Pyg’s Gym doubles as an economy item and a backup plan. Lemonade Stand can also be enchanted with an offensive enchant and used as a win condition.

• Take temporary buffs like Relax or Jules’ Cafe on the second half of the day to help in PvP fights. Nearly guaranteeing a win for the day is almost always better than anything else you can do.
• Look for monsters that drop expedition tickets or save 20g to buy from the aerodrome event
• Pyg’s skill pool is not great overall but he does have the usual left and right handed, strength, and crit options for weapons. He only has 3 burn skills so they’re not usually worth looking for if you have matchbox. Overall this is one of the weakest areas for Pyg. He also has a few value skills and skills that trigger when you buy or sell certain things that can be very good for some builds.
• Keep an eye out for your key build-around items. Usually these are Wrist Warrior with Sponsored Apparel/Display Case, Jabalian Drum, 28 Hour Fitness, Crook, and Luxury Kiaus.
• If you’ve ended up with a weapons board it’s usually worth it to grab the first Atlatl you find and use curio, boomerang loot, the sharpening stone event, the artisan booth event, weapon skills, along with any other flat damage boosts to get Atlatl’s base damage to 180. This will make it so it has a 1 second CD. Atlatl is one of the best items to include in the majority of weapon focused builds throughout the run.

General Notes (Mid/Late Game)

• Always focus on getting an expedition ticket, choose monster fights that have a chance to drop it or try to save 20g to buy from the aerodrome event
• Continue looking for your key items if you have not yet found them. If it gets to be around day 6 and you’re still looking then things can get challenging, especially if your run has started with mostly losses. If you’ve been win-streaking you still have some time. In my experience this is the biggest downside of weapon starts. You really need to find Jabalian Drum, 28 Hour Fitness, or Crook to pivot into otherwise you can get stuck. This is when you may consider preparing to pivot to something like Money Tree if you have a large one in your stash that you held onto because you didn’t need to sell it and the same goes for Pyg’s Gym.
• Late-game pivots are a struggle for Pyg. Many of his items are designed with the intention that you will be scaling them for most of the game. The weapon boards like Drum, Fitness, and Crook can be pretty clean pivots but other than those 3 the only other Pyg build that doesn’t require long-term investment is freeze. If you’ve been HP stacking well then you have lemonade stand as an option.

General Notes (Economy)

• One of Pyg’s biggest strengths is making loads of money and many of his builds gain power through shopping.
• Don’t over-value the income stat, while it is nice to have you don’t want to default to just taking income every time it’s offered. The best time to take income as an option is as a level-up reward.
• Pyg has tons of small things you can do to optimize your gold. Any time you see an item that gains value and you have the space you can just buy it and hold onto it until you need the gold or the space.

○ Buy VIP Pass if you’re holding a money tree, or other any other property that has a CD, and toss it in for monster fights

○ Items that gain gold in fights like Crystal Bonzai and Coincure. You can just use them against monsters. Coincure is also a very playable item at gold+ and becomes very strong with an offensive enchant, if you’re brave enough to run it.

○ Grab Piggy Bank and increase its value for a day or two with rewards card and then sell it.

○ Buy silver+ Luxury Kiaus and cycle bronze and silver medium properties.

○ Occasionally I’ll buy Masterpiece and hold onto it until I need the gold or space and sell it. Usually it takes too long to gain value though.

Wrist Warrior Builds (S+ Tier)

Wrist Warrior Build With Sharp Corners

Wrist Warrior Build Without Sharp Corners

• The meta for Pyg right now heavily revolves around Wrist Warrior and in particular Wrist Warrior paired with Sponsored Apparel or Display Case.

Sponsored Apparel is a lot easier to use but either one is worth it. Often times you can just put this 2 item package into most of Pyg’s current builds and it’s likely better than what you replaced it with. I expect that Tempo will change how some of these pieces function as currently it is too easy to build and too powerful.

• The rest of the board is most often made up of many toy items, including Yo-Yo, Ship in a Bottle, Speedrunner, Piggles Protector, PenFt, and Nesting Doll.
• The goal with this build is to set up some kind of item loop to infinitely get shield triggers from Sponsored Apparel or Display Case making Wrist Warrior fire a constant stream of damage.
• You can use Speedrunner to infinitely trigger Badblocker and put that next to Yo-Yo to get many activations.
• It is possible to get a day 1 infinite if you start with Restorative Wrist Warrior and find a Textiles.
• Best Enchants:
• Wrist Warrior: Obsidian/Shielded → Restorative → Heavy/Turbo → Fiery/Toxic, Wrist Warrior has solid enchants excluding deadly, shiny, and radiant
• Best Skills:
• Sharp Corners! Extremely Good! Without this you have to find some other way to scale Wrist Warrior which makes the build much worse. You can use Weights or Showcase if necessary to scale. There are also skills like Augmented Weaponry that can add a significant amount of flat damage.
• Defensive Stance. Almost as good as Sharp Corners

Silk (S tier)

Silk + Spikey Shield & Claw

Silk + Spikey Shield (Usually with Fortress instead of Bunker)

Silk + Crusher Claw

• This is currently one of Pyg’s best, and possibly the absolute best, builds and it’s the easiest build to get into early. It’s also easy to identify when it’s too late as this build requires scaling.
• You need to have a silver Silk by day 4 otherwise it’s usually too late. If you’ve been sitting on a bronze Silk you can guarantee this with the level 4 upgrade.
• At a minimum you need to have Silk and either Spikey Shield or Crusher Claw but ideally you’ll have both.
• As a rule of thumb, up until around day 7 your Silk should have at least 100 shield for each day. So at least 500 shield by the end of day 5, 600 by the end of day 6, etc but once it’s gold and you’re getting into the late-game this should increase exponentially.

Use your own HP total as a reference, you want to have enough shield for your weapon/s to win the PvP fights with one activation.

• Fight Haunted Kimono day 1 for a ⅓ chance at it dropping Silk
• Fight the crab on day 2 for a chance at Crusher Claw. It can also be found at Curio, Pearl’s Digsite, and very rarely from the weapon option at the docks.
• Don’t bother upgrading either spikey shield or crusher claw past bronze, both gain nothing relevant from upgrades
• Hold your small items until you have Silk to silver and then you want to visit chocolates and gumballs, cycle items like: safe, pinhata, briefcase, and piggy bank, take free options like chocolates and spare change when the other options aren’t appealing.
• Make sure that Silk always has roughly 1 second CD before Spikey Shield, if they get out of sync it’s very bad for you and having a slight gap like this helps avoid that. You can also mess this up with skills like Rush from the Giant Mosquito monster. Anything that could randomly speed up spikey shield to go before Silk should be avoided. Crusher Claw does not need to be synced up with Silk at all and is usually the better item to pair with Silk as you can get it to go off in combat very fast.
• You want to keep 5 slots open in your stash so you always have space for chocolates. Use the rest of your stash space for economy items like money tree and cash register or vending machine as they will both earn you money and help grow silk. Pawn Shop is an alternative to money tree as well and can let you pivot into Fat Pyg late game occasionally.
• Textiles is a great item to run against Mak and Vanessa to negate poison.
• Ideal skills are CD reduction, crit, defense grid, HP skills, some shield skills like Emergency Shield and Backup Defenses, Housewarming Gifts, and Chocoholic. Most of the flat weapon damage and shield value skills are mostly a waste. Silk will stack much more on its own than what you get from a few flat shield skills and the damage for your weapons will do the same.
• Ideal enchantments for:
• Silk: Shielded → Obsidian/Poison → Burn → Restorative
• Spikey Shield: Obsidian → Poison → Burn
• Crusher Claw: Obsidian → Radiant → Poison → Burn

28 Hour Fitness (S Tier)

• 28 Hour Fitness is another top tier build. This used to be a challenging build to put together but the Season 4 items have made it much easier and added new powerful cards.
• There are several good items for this build that require each item on your board to have at least 11 value. You can reach this early on by running PenFT but you will eventually want to have their base value at 11 so you can replace PenFT with something else.
• If you started with a mixed showcase board using weapons and shields this is usually the easiest build to pivot into.
• 28 Hour Fitness requires that you USE a shield item and a weapon item to scale so you must have some items with an active cooldown of each type.
• Badblocker and Wrist Warrior are a potent combo. Position Badblocker left of Wrist Warrior. You can add Yo-Yo left of Badblocker to get a bunch of triggers.
• Display Case and Sponsored Apparel with Wrist Warrior are even better than Badblocker though Badblocker is often still good to run alongside Yo-Yo.
• The best version of this build runs a toy package with the core items being Yo-Yo – Ship in a Bottle – Piggles launcher and then you’ll want something fast next to Yo-Yo. You can also run this setup with Speedrunner and let Speedrunner charge Badblocker.
• Shielded Weapons and Obsidian Shield items are extra powerful here.
• Best Enchants:
• 28 Hour Fitness: Shielded/Obsidian → Heavy/Turbo, Restorative is ok but fiery and toxic are the worst
• Wrist Warrior: Obsidian/Shielded → Restorative → Heavy/Turbo → Fiery/Toxic, Wrist Warrior has solid enchants excluding deadly, shiny, and radiant
• Display Case/Sponsored Apparel: Obsidian → Turbo/Heavy → Restorative
• Yo-Yo: Shielded → Obsidian → Restorative → Turbo/Heavy → Toxic/Fiery
• Best Skills:
• Sharp Corners! Extremely Good! Most easily obtained from Fortis.
• Defensive Stance. Almost as good as Sharp Corners
• Any crit and weapon damage.

Jabalian Drum (S Tier)

• Drum is Pyg’s most straightforward build and one of his best. You just need to find the drum and fill your board mostly with small, fast weapons. Ideally your runs with drum should be over by day 12. It’s a very fast damage rush build but once it gets very late in a run the enemy HP gets quite high and the builds start faster and drum doesn’t really have any tricks to push through at that point.
• You want to start your combat as fast as possible so multistrike weapons with longer initial cooldowns are not ideal.
• Buy an early Atlatl and keep it in your stash. It’s one of the best ways to enable drum quickly late-game.
• Fang, Uzi, and Katana are some of the best weapons for fast starts and you can also use Holsters to speed it up..
• Late-game your ideal board will often include Atlatl – Yo-Yo – Snowmobile. This configuration creates a 1 second combat start with Atlatl and makes an extremely fast damage loop with Yo-Yo and Snowmobile.
• You can run drum with a toys package using model ship to give multistrike to yo-yo and other toys.
• Your ideal skills are pretty much just weapon damage skills and crit skills.
• Best Enchantments:
• Drum: Obsidian/Heavy → Shielded → Restorative
• Yo-Yo: Shielded → Obsidian → Restorative → Turbo/Heavy → Toxic/Fiery

Square Pyg (A Tier)

Sample Final Square Pyg Board

Infinite Atlatl Loop

• Square Pyg is a convenient pivot option for Showcase weapons boards. Usually this consists of Crook and Atlatl as the core items and then the remaining slots can be quite flexible. It’s not quite as good as Jabalian Drum or 28 Hour Fitness but it’s close enough that you should take Crook if it’s offered before you see the other two. The only caveat is that you should already have an Atlatl in your stash. You can play square Crook builds without Atlatl but in my experience they are usually much worse.
• Showcase boards will often be running Lumboars and possibly Flail or Jabalian Recurve Bow which are all good square items to run with Crook. Showcase works as well for the early and mid-game. So your average early Crook board will often be these 5 items:

Crook, Lumboars, Flail, Showcase, and Jabalian Recurve Bow.

• Dog, Regal Blade, and Cash Cannon are all just a bit shy of being good enough that you want them. I do use them occasionally if I see them on day 1 hour 1 or something like that and get them to silver day 2. Dog is usually the worst. Cash Cannon is the easiest because you can sit on a money tree for a while and wait until cash cannon is at least gold, but ideally diamond, and then sell tree.
• Once Atlatl gets close to 1 second CD from one activation of showcase and lumboars you can replace another item. Usually Jabalian Recurve Bow is the first to go. It’s a strong item for the first few days but struggles once mid-game has started.
• As you get into the late-game Atlatl hopefully has enough damage to be at 1 second CD. If it’s still a little short of that you can hold onto either showcase or lumboars until the damage is achieved. Your core items are just Crook and Atlatl from here and the build becomes very flexible. You can even cut Crook if you’ve accrued a lot of flat damage from skills, loot, and other upgrades.
• Late-game you usually want to keep pushing Atlatl’s damage up, start running Caltrops, and go one of the following directions:
• If you’ve stacked HP you can add in a Giant’s Belt and Lion’s Cane
• If you’ve found Pendulum or Rivet Gun you can use Atlatl to charge Atlas Stone, another slow but very powerful item, or find a 2 second item to loop Atlatl.
• Streaming Setup to max crit on Atlatl and your other best damage item.
• In some cases you may find a combination that only leaves space for 2-3 medium items. It’s ok to run Crook still if it’s giving you a relevant amount of damage.
• Best Enchants:
• Crook: Deadly, the rest are all bad
• Atlatl: Obsidian → Restorative → Shielded → Burn/Poison, note that this order may be different depending on specific skills which you may have so also check the skill section below. If you have either the poison or burn scaling Relics from the expedition then poison or burn on Atlatl matching the relic is also good.
• Caltrops: Obsidian → Shielded/Restorative → anything else, almost all caltrops enchants are good with deadly being the only one that will sometimes be useless
• Best skills:
• Any flat damage or crit
• Depending on Atlatl enchantment
• If Restorative Atlatl – Invigorating Blade, if Atlatl is your only healing item it loops with itself
• If Shielded Atlatl – Electrified Hull, gets you several charge triggers which can charge any of your items
• Foreboding Winds from Lord of the Wastes
• Lethargy, this skill and Atlatl alone can get you 10 wins

One of my favorite final boards

Burn Builds (A Tier)

• The season 4 Pyg expansion helps out Pyg’s burn archetypes significantly. Burn is a viable early game build all the way through to the late game.
• The premium orange piggles make for a strong scaling option for burn in the early but starts underperforming as the game goes on.
• The regular orange piggles are great for scaling burn on matchbox and riceballer. Both of these are viable builds for 10 wins. Matchbox is a little more circumstantial but can be extremely powerful with the right setup.
• Streaming Setup brings Luxury Kiuas out of its lacklustre place and makes it a strong build. I’ve found Kiuas to be strong on board early on if paired with in-combat value scalers like Premium Piggles and PenFT.
• Best Enchants:
• Matchbox: Obsidian → Fiery → Shielded/Restorative
• Kiuas: Obsidian → Fiery → Deadly → Shielded/Restorative
• Riceballer: Obsidian → Fiery → Shielded/Restorative → Heavy/Turbo
• Best Skills
• Unfortunately Pyg only natively has 3 burn skills. The leftmost and rightmost burn skills Immolating Spark and Final Flame as well as Hot Spot. The first two are good skills for Matchbox and Riceballer. They’re hard to find though because none of Pyg’s specific skill vendors have burn skills so you can only get them from the Bronze - Diamond vendors which have a very large pool.
• Crit skills are good, otherwise you mostly want cooldown/haste, utility, or survivability skills. Chocoholic and Housewarming Gifts and Property Mogul are nice with Luxury Kiuas. If you don’t have any obsidian enchants then Pacifist is good. HP stacking skills like Arms Dealer or Backroom Dealings are good too.

Freeze (B Tier)

• I am personally low on freeze currently. It often matches poorly into Mak if he’s on poison. The nerfs to Yetarian Club make it less of a free pivot as well. That said, this is still a viable build and one of the few Pyg builds that can be pivoted into late-game with some ease.
• Usually the core build includes Cold Room, Igloo, and Yetarian Club. The first two must at least be gold to be worth using. If you get an Obsidian, Fiery, or Toxic enchant on Igloo you can use it as your main win condition as long as you find a way to scale its shield. Aurora Dome is usually the best to do this but there are several skills that can also work for certain boards. The Shatter skill also enables some alternate damage options like Caltrops for example.

Pigglestorm (C tier)

Including skills as I feel it’s important to show the full context of this being a high-roll 10 win

• Out of 28 hour fitness, jabalian drum, and pigglestorm gaming house the gaming house definitely seems to be the worst. I’ve been trying to get runs with this for a while and I’ve had a couple good ones but it takes a lot of things going right.
• The gaming house is great at getting a lot of Yo-Yo triggers. There is no reason to use this if you don’t have yo-yo. You can get it looping pretty easily with a toy setup using Speedrunner.
• The scaling on Gaming House is the biggest issue so you can supplement this with skills.
• If you are playing for rank you would never run this over 28 Hour Fitness or Jabalian Drum but if you see it early before the other two it might be better in the short term with some limited 10 win potential if you get lucky on skills and enchantments.
• Best Enchantments:
• Pigglestorm Gaming House: Heavy/Turbo, due to lack of play experience I’m unsure where to rate the others. Toxic/Fiery seem interesting and I’d like to try them out if I get the chance. Between Obsidian/Shielded/Restorative my guess is that Obsidian is much better.
• Yo-Yo: For most builds yo-yo does better with non-damage enchants, but for this one I think it goes Obsidian → Shielded → Restorative → Turbo/Haste.
• Best Skills:
• This item does have a lot of strong supporting skills that might make up the difference between Gaming House and the better options.
• Reinforced Steel, Prime Real Estate, Commercial Zoning, Pop-Up Shop, Sharp Corners, Defensive Stance, Juggler(monster skill), and Endurance.

Bees (C Tier)

• Bees are very strong, but entirely impossible to force as you must find two bee hives naturally from vendors. Upgrading Bee Hive does not give you more Busy Bees. I have placed this build in C tier just because it is completely unreliable. If given the opportunity though it is worth building.
• If it's roughly days 2-4 and I find a silver Bee Hive before I've found my direction then I'll grab the hive and hold it for a couple days to give me the option. Despite doing this with some frequency I have only been able to put the build together once this season.
• Luxury Kiuas makes a good economy item for Bees since you need to buy properties to scale the Busy Bees and then you can sell them for value on Kiuas and then sell Kiuas to recoup some of the gold spent and in some cases even end up making more gold than you spent.
• If you can manage to find a 3rd hive to upgrade and have 5-6 bees on board then you're in an even better spot.
• Its usually a good idea to avoid using any cooldown reduction on the Busy Bees because fort is the best item to include with the build and gold fort won't give them multistrike if you've reduced their CD in any way.
• Your goal with bee builds is to scale the bees enough to one-shot any opponent you encounter. This makes crit and flat damage very important.
• Best Enchantments:
• Bees interact uniquely with Enchantments. Enchantments on the Bee Hive apply to all the Busy Bees. You can also put individual enchants on the Busy Bees so in theory with enough enchantments you can have the Bee Hive and each Busy Bee with it's own enchantment.
• For both Bee Hive and Busy Bees offensive enchantments are king: Obsidian → Toxic/Fiery → Shielded → Restorative
• Best Skills:
• You are trying to one-shot all your opponents so Crit is your first priority with Damage second and then survivability third.