in chess this has been the way for a very long time. Problems, theory books etc dominate. Often you'll be using the board, true, but even if you're playing a "game" the timing will be different.

Weird how obvious this is actually

I see players in Yrackmania, a game which has a built-in track editor, taking 30s to get to a difficult jump then taking one try, failing, then restarting and looping. Why? with AI and even before that, you should be able to at least recreate the jump in a test area and actually have "useful practice" on it.

When pianists have a tough part of a song, they don't "play the entire song to that point" to practice it!

They don't even just "start practicing right before the hard part"

No, they also design super deep foundational activities to build up their entire vision and mind to be able to play piano well

Therefore, to play games like slay the spire 2 well, it's very unlikely the ideal action is to "play the game more". Yes, the puzzles, theory don't fully exist yet, but still

Brief thoughts