Last Chaos Destiny

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Tainted Cain is a character added in The Binding of Isaac: Repentance. He is the alternate version of Cain. Tainted Cain is unlocked by reaching Home and using either the Red Key or the Cracked Key to access a special room in one of the walls while playing as Cain. Soul of Cain cannot be used due to its unlock method involving Tainted Cain. He has an identical appearance to Cain with the exception of a giant blood wound behind his left eye patch.

Tainted Cain starts with 2 heart containers, 1 key, and the Bag of Crafting in the consumable slot.

Tainted Cain can't obtain items through any means other than the Bag of Crafting, and attempting to take an item from a pedestal will reduce it into an assortment of pickups.

The pickups dropped are dependent on what type of room the item was touched in; Items touched in Secret Rooms will drop Bone Hearts, Curse Rooms will create Rotten Hearts, Planetariums will spawn Runes, and Devil Rooms/Angel Rooms will cause items to generate Black Hearts/ Eternal Hearts respectively. Crafting an active item when already holding one will also transform the old active item into random consumables instead of dropping it.

Notes[]

Unlockable Items[]

Strategy[]

As Tainted Cain has "No Destiny", he must create his own with the Bag of Crafting. While it is tempting to place pickups like coins and health into the Bag of Crafting as soon as they are encountered, this will likely only lead to the creation of lower quality items. Tainted Cain rewards players who use lower valued pickups in a way that helps them obtain higher valued ones in order to craft powerful items.

• It is strongly advised to unlock most, if not all pickups prior to playing Tainted Cain. High tier items become much harder or even impossible to craft without certain unlockable pickups, such as Bone Hearts.
• Many alternate ways of getting pedestal items, such as Shops or Devil Rooms, become irrelevant or outright detrimental when playing as Tainted Cain. Taking a Devil Deal only has the immediate benefit of dropping Black Hearts, which are general more beneficial to find through other means, such as Curse Rooms. As such, it is often more beneficial to skip the first Devil Room and instead potentially get free materials from a later Angel Room.
  • Shop items can still be purchased by swiping them up with the Bag of Crafting, making them a consistent source of more remarkable ingredients.
• Cards (and pills) may want to be checked for their effects before having them put in the Bag of Crafting, as a few may be more beneficial to use than part of a recipe.
• It may be effective to leave room rewards and pedestal item drops for a later time, then returning to craft items out of the more expensive materials once more are gathered.
• Items across pits and rocks that would otherwise require resources or would be unobtainable can usually be grabbed by the Bag of Crafting's swing range.

Item Interactions[]

Helpful Items[]

Managing to create items or finding trinkets that increase agency over pickups can greatly improve a run:

• Duality: Provides much more freedom to utilize black hearts and eternal hearts as you see fit, especially when combined with Goat Head or Eucharist.
• D Allows Tainted Cain to reroll massive amounts of pickups into more helpful ones or even into chests, which contain extra pickups.
• Mitre: Makes it much more likely to find valuable soul hearts, which can be used to craft equally valuable items.
• Moving Box: Permits more control over desired pickups. By putting a pedestal item in the box and placing it back down inside of a special room, you can guarantee the pickup(s) associated with that room. This eliminates the need to constantly be spending resources crafting new active items, but requires a 4-room recharge between uses.
• Options?: While trying to swipe both given pickups with the Bag of Crafting at the same time is impossible, Options? allows for a much greater variety of ingredients.
• Sacred Orb: Makes it so you can't craft low-quality items, effectively making the creation of more valuable items easier. However, it also changes the recipes, so this might be detrimental if you have already noted down some valuable recipes.
  • NO!: If combined with Mom's Box or its golden counterpart, prevents items with 0 quality from being crafted. Doesn't prevent the creation of active items.
• Portable Slot: Has a guaranteed crafting recipe of 8 pennies across all seeds. Can be used as a way to mill off coins in exchange for other pickups, creating a large amount of pickups in a single room for manipulation.
  • Schoolbag: allows for the player to carry an Active Item they intend to use, as well as an Active Item to be turned into materials in special rooms.

This applies to items and trinkets that expand the number of pickups generated throughout the run as well:

• Black Lipstick / Bible Tract: Increases the chance of getting Black or Eternal Hearts, granting easier access to stronger items.
• Butter!: Using your active item drops it on the ground as a pedestal which can then be converted into pickups. Works well with Portable Slot for farming pickups in special rooms.
• Safety Scissors: Allows for more bombs to be picked up, and can be used to generate infinite bombs if a Bomb Bum is encountered.
• Broken Modem / Contract From Below: Can give substantially more pickups from room clears if crafted early.
• Diplopia / Rune of Jera / Crooked Penny: (Can) Double all pickups in a single room.
  • Rune of Jera can be paired with Clear Rune for a more sustainable method of cloning pickups.
• D1: Can be used to duplicate rare and valuable pickups.
  • D1 Synergizes extremely well with battery items such as 9 Volt or Car Battery, the latter of which when paired with a Battery pickup can generate infinite Batteries.
• Scapular: Gives a soul heart whenever damage reduces Tainted Cain to half a heart of health. Can be used repeatedly by leaving and re-entering a room, allowing for infinite items if paired with Piggy Bank, Fanny Pack, or Old Bandage.
• Sworn Protector: Allows for repeated generation of Eternal Hearts through blocking enemy projectiles, which allow crafting high quality Angel Room items.
• Everything Jar: Produces a number of useful pickups for crafting, in particular Golden Bombs, Gold Hearts and Golden Keys which are harder to find. Furthermore, the gold bombs and keys allow Tainted Cain greater access to further resources without needing to expend normal bombs and keys.
• Glitter Bombs: Produces more pickups, especially if combined with Dr. Fetus, Epic Fetus, or Number Two.
• Sack Head: Increases the amount of pickups from almost all sources.
• Sacks (eg; Sack of Pennies, Mystery Sack, Rune Bag): Reliable sources of a particular pickup type.
• Clicker: Transforms Tainted Cain into another tainted character. This allows for easy completion marks as Tainted Lost, especially since Holy Mantle, Dead Cat, and Gnawed Leaf can be crafted before transforming. If Lazarus' Rags or Ankh is activated while Clicker is held, it can be used to transform into non-tainted characters as well.

The Diplopia synergies can be easy to pull off: instead of using Diplopia, Tainted Cain can simply craft an item repeatedly using the same combination of pickups.

There are some items not shown on the Diplopia page that can also be useful for Tainted Cain to craft repeatedly:

Unfavorable Items[]

• Bum Friend, Dark Bum, Key Bum, Bumbo: will require intense micromanagement so they don't take essential materials and foil plans. Coins, red hearts and keys may still prove to be useful even in harder recipes.
• Humbling Bundle and Bogo Bombs: May sound good for Tainted Cain in theory, but in practice will make it much harder to craft items precisely. Double pickups will yield 2 of the associated crafting ingredient, which can lead to frustrating situations if a recipe specifically calls for 1 of a particular pickup.
  • Equality! also somewhat suffers from this, although it may be dropped and its effects are easy to deliberately cancel.
• Magneto: Can prove troublesome as it will cause pickups to coalesce and be pulled towards towards Tainted Cain, making it quite difficult to craft items precisely without grabbing unnecessary resources or picking them up.
• Range up items and effects: Offset the hitbox of the Bag of Crafting's swing. Can make it easier to grab pickups from long distances, but may also make it more difficult to collect desired pickups without accidentally swiping up nearby ones.
  • Tiny Planet in particular will cause the Bag of Crafting's swing to occur a severe distance from Tainted Cain.
• The D6, Eternal D6, Spindown Dice, There's Options, More Options, Glitched Crown: Serves no purpose without Clicker due to Tainted Cain's ability.

Trivia[]

Gallery[]

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  Tainted Cain's transition screen portrait.

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  Tainted Cain's locked character icon, depicting a closet door with a large lock on it.