you can use my username.
for the book of the true cell it's not horrible, I used it when I won, but enemies just have such high stats on top of some enemies being buffed when damaged maybe? wasn't really sure about that. But it just doesn't really do much since 6 damage isn't super consequential on top of it being potentially unreliable with the negative cell effect potentially killing the useful unit. Target changing items are potentially useful, but are completely overshadowed by how affective unit spawning is. I considered using the attack changing ones but decided not to since there wasn't enough synergy reason to. I ended up just putting the attack +1 stat orbs on all the units along with a key since I didn't know how long the run would be. I definitely value attack more than defense this patch due to the enemy buffing if it survives. I have completely forgot how poison worked honestly, would be nice if you have a description for that.
Something I might have forgotten to mention was the cell effects you get. I just ended up choosing the negative cell one since I didn't know how many rounds there were going to be, the movement one is potentially a lot worse since you want to be matching units for the later levels. Overall the debuff cell could probably use some work since I ended up just having 2 future matching units die which essentially negated the debuff cell. For the positive cell affect it's not really worth it since your sacrificing scaling for a temporary win which could potentially snowball into a loss, I didn't use it my winning attempt since it seemed to be somewhat of a trap if you want to get to late game. Short term gain long term loss essentially.
Item abuse: essentially by getting 2 of the item selling ability that gives plus 1 gold upon selling it you can kind of infinitely reroll in theory. unit+key costs 4. fish/pig+key is 3. you get 2 gold from selling items I believe so if you get fish/pig+key that's 1 extra gold you can use to reroll till you get the item you want.
Brawler and dog at first glance don't seem that good so I am less inclined to invest in them. Brawler giving more attack on kill requires that you kill while in late game your essentially just trading everything and the the first stage feels very important in setting up a proper build. Since I didn't build dog I am not sure how big the attack increase gets.
Also, for pickaxe it's not clear what works with it and what doesn't since I don't think it worked with hermit or the death abilites.
I did also have the game crash once when quitting initiation unfortunately I am not quite sure how to replicate it