The Binding of Isaac is a popular roguelike game that is known for the staggeringly huge amount of items that players can pick up. Each item alters the player character, Isaac, in vastly different ways, and they are key to survival down in the depths of the basement and below.
Trinkets are rather like items, but they can be picked up and dropped whenever the player likes. If a trinket turns out to be detrimental, it’s no matter as it can be left behind. To offset this, trinkets are often not as powerful or useful as active or passive items, though some of them manage to be extremely attractive to pick up.
10 Curved Horn
Unlocked by beating the Dark Room with Judas, the Curved Horn is a very simple large buff to Isaac’s damage stat. What is especially great about the Curved Horn is a flat damage bonus instead of the scaled damage increases that most items grant Isaac, so this trinket is really fantastic no matter when you get it.
This trinket synergizes especially well with damage multiplying items such as Magic Mushroom as the multiplication affects even Curved Horn’s already impressive damage bonus. Players are always pleasantly surprised to see Curved Horn drop.
9 Paper Clip
While initially one of the more mundane trinkets a player can find, the Paper Clip usefulness really makes itself known when you don’t have it. The Paper Clip allows Isaac to unlock Golden Chests without using a key, and this is very nice to have at the beginning of the run where keys may be at a premium.
Golden Chests received quite a good buff in the recently released Repentance DLC, as they can now contain a whole host of very useful items such as Squeezy, Guppy’s Eye, and the Stapler.
8 Blessed Penny
The Blessed Penny is a great item to have for survival purposes. This trinket makes it so that whenever Isaac picks up a coin there is a chance that half a Soul Heart may spawn. Coins drop so often that this will eventually lead to Isaac loading up on Soul Hearts, especially if he encounters one of the secret rooms that are filled with coins or chests.
This trinket is especially useful for characters who cannot gain red heart containers, such as ??? and Tainted Bethany. It makes the Soul Hearts that these characters rely on so much to spawn with much more regularity.
7 Cracked Crown
Cracked Crown is one of the items in the game that was smacked with the Repentance nerf stick, but it is still a top-tier trinket and is worth picking up when seen. It makes the stat upgrades that Isaac has picked up even stronger by 20%. Before Repentance, this boost was 33%.
This trinket simply gets better as Isaac picks up more and more items that affect his stats. Unfortunately, the unlock requirements for this trinket are quite tough: the player must get a 5-win streak in the daily challenges, which can be very hard at times.
6 No!
While this trinket is a bit situational, it is very noticeable when not taken. No! is a trinket that players will want to take once they have an active item they are happy with, as it replaces all future active item pedestals with passive item pedestals.
No longer will players be cursed with lackluster active items such as Bob’s Brain or Glass Cannon. These items will be rerolled automatically by the game into passive items which are, on the whole, more useful.
5 Forgotten Lullaby
Forgotten Lullaby is another somewhat situational trinket that relies on the player having picked up certain items beforehand. This trinket increases the rate of fire of Isaac’s familiars. This can be extremely useful if the player has picked up many familiars such as Robo-Baby, Demon Baby, or Sister Maggy. It’s also fantastic for Lilith, who must use familiars to fight.
Unlocking Forgotten Lullaby is a bit of a secret. To see it on future runs players must fight The Siren, which is a boss that appears on the Mausoleum floors, and use a bomb on the large skull she leaves behind.
4 Perfection
Repentance added Perfection as a reward for players who have managed to learn the game really well. This trinket appears upon completing three entire floors in a row without taking a single hit of damage from an enemy, and it is worth that struggle. Perfection grants a whopping +10 luck to Isaac.
This huge boost to luck is great for so many builds, but especially those that rely on special tear effects which appear more when luck is high. For example, the item Tough Love which spawns high damage tooth projectiles instead of tears every now and then, will consistently only spawn teeth at just 9 luck.
3 Brain Worm
The worm trinkets are often not that good and players are somewhat conditioned to ignore them when they pop up. Whether they are just increases or decreases to shot speed or make Isaac’s tears do odd movements instead of shooting straight, they are largely not that useful in most cases.
Brain Worm however has a very neat feature whereby it forces tears to redirect themselves if they miss an enemy, turning a corner very quickly to hit them. This synergizes really well with fire rate increases, items that grant more tears, and players who just aren’t that great at aiming.
2 Cancer
This trinket has been a favorite of many players for a long time thanks to how powerful it has remained. Cancer grants Isaac a large increase to his rate of fire, and it can break the tears cap meaning that Isaac can fire a lot of tears in a very short amount of time if he has picked up some rate of fire increases.
Cancer also synergizes fantastically with items that trade Isaac’s rate of fire for large attack bonuses, such as Polyphemus and Proptosis.
1 Flat File
Flat File is rather like another trinket, Callus, but much, much better. It’s a fantastic trinket that makes all spikes forcibly retract so that they cannot cause damage to Isaac. This includes floor spikes, spiked rocks, and even the spiked doorways that lead to Curse Rooms. This makes Flat File a great item to pick up to trivialize those oh-so-frustrating puzzle rooms with retracting spikes.
It is important to note however that Flat File does not protect Isaac from the damaging creep attacks of enemies, so players with many hours who are used to the Callus doing that need to be wary of strolling about without a care.
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