I tried the ‘oops, all status effects’ Executor loadout in Elden Ring Nightreign that turns his starting katana into a god-killing uber-sword—shockingly, it’s pretty good

Most of my time playing Elden Ring Nightreign has involved scrambling to piece together a good build out of the garbage the game gives me—I don’t have good luck in roguelikes, you see. If I need a four in Balatro, I won’t get one. But last night, cackling with glee as my starting sword gave my foes nearly every possible disease, I had finally beaten the game of fate: The only winning move, it turns out, was not to play.

Elden Ring Nightreign’s entire gimmick is the fact that you’re rolling the dice on your loot. While your passives are key to your survival, getting a solid main weapon under your character’s belt is vital—turns out, the community’s found a build that circumvents this entire gameplay loop.

After watching YouTuber and streamer Youwy pull off a level one victory all on his lonesome, I knew I had to try this solo Executor build for myself—mind, you need to knock over two Nightlords to gain access to it, but once you’re there, the setup solves itself.

• The Night of Miasma relic from Fissure in the Fog (Caligo, Miasma of Night)
• The Night of the Wise relic from Sentient Pest (Gnoster, Wisdom of Night)
• That’s literally it.

Your third relic slot can be dedicated to anything that’s good on the Executor—I’m having some great fortune with the “Partial restoration upon Post-Damage Attacks” and “Stamina recovers with each successful attacks” modifiers, but really, anything works.

These two relics set up your Executor’s Blade—which already causes bleed—with both poison and frostbite buildup. The former comes from the Night of the Wise relic’s “starting armament inflicts poison” while the latter comes from Night of the Miasma’s Chilling Mist weaponskill, which adds Frostbite to your weapon for a time.

What’s more, both of these relics add attack power boosts while striking a frostbitten enemy or being in the vicinity of poison and scarlet rot. And you’re going to be proccing all your status effects often because, well, you’re an Executor. You have S scaling in Arcane.

But Harvey, you might say, won’t my starting weapon be out-scaled? The answer is “yes, sort of”—there are lots of legendary weapons that are, strictly speaking, better on the Executor. But here’s the thing: You might not get them. This build pretty much equips you with an A-tier weapon from the get-go, rather than the S-tier legendary armaments you could acquire. And when C’s get degrees, A’s are still pretty good.

This is helped by the fact you can upgrade your starting weapon with smithing stones, and they’re not even that hard to get. Simply jaunt into a mine at least once in a session for a smithing stone 2, pass by a merchant for a smithing stone 1, and you’re in business.

The real boon here, though, is tempo—a term I am mercilessly borrowing from card games, but is very relevant here. Tempo refers to, unsurprisingly, the pace at which a game is played. Essentially, in the overarching metagame, a good weapon found early is more powerful than a good weapon found late—because an early-bird BIS will see you gathering more runes, killing more enemies, and getting more dicerolls on potent passives.

As I experienced last night, chewing through a couple of Nightlords like they were taffy, this Executor loadout is akin to an “aggro” deck in something like Magic: The Gathering. You start out really strong—far and away more powerful than any of the early-game locations—and snowball by staying ahead of the curve.

Its modularity’s nothing to sniff at, too, based on what you get in your offhand—in one game, I got a tree sentinel shield with increased guard counters and a passive that had me explode in a holy aura when I landed one. In another, I simply stacked another very good Katana with even more bleed and frostbite in my offhand, then went to town.

I would be shocked if FromSoftware didn’t patch this sucker out, and there are certainly Nightlords that this ultra-katana won’t work on. But for now, I will be enjoying myself greatly—seeing three status effects tear my enemies asunder with the humblest of katanas.