RUN SCALING
Build for depth, not adaptive punishment.
Use your map position as the difficulty signal. Later encounters are meant to introduce tougher health totals, attacks, and status combinations even if your own deck is weak.
Keep upgrading the small damage engine your deck can draw reliably. Avoiding a Kitchen, Practice Dummy, or Geode upgrade will not hold enemy scaling back.
When a counter appears, answer that visible status instead of rebuilding around an imagined adaptive system: remove Spellshield before the expensive effect, respect Thorns, and stop shield casters before they leave.
Compare repeated runs at the same depth if a fight feels inconsistent. Different enemies, rewards, and draw order can change the pressure without proving the game inspected your build.
Treat the September 10 Early Access build as a new ruleset. Characters, paths, difficulty options, and encounter pools can change even though the current Demo answer is explicit.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
You can explain the spike by where the run has reached and by the statuses on the current enemies—not by the amount of damage printed on your upgraded card—and you continue improving the deck instead of suppressing its power.
VERSION BOUNDARY
Team Lazerbeam directly answers the adaptive-difficulty suspicion and the official June Demo update separately states that enemies grow stronger with depth. A build-scoped enemy record also shows fixed starting statuses for a named encounter. This answer is complete for the current Demo; Early Access difficulty modes and encounter rules still require a launch check.