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Backpack Battles Mage Guide

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On June 16, 2025

With its 1.0 release, Backpack Battles has exited early access with a ton of new content. Two of the most interesting additions are the Adventurer class and the Mage class. This article will focus on the Mage’s kit, specifically.

Below you’ll find an introduction to the class, some of its most interesting offerings, and a description of its many Subclasses!

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The Basics of the Mage

The Mage is a class with a heavy focus on magic, with a wide variety of class-specific items associated with them, including spells, spellbooks, and wands. It offers a variety of interesting synergy opportunities, with several of its class-specific items (unsurprisingly) using, generating, or helping to maintain your Mana (although not all successful Mage builds will need or even generate Mana).

A Mage has three Loadouts available for you to choose from, including:

Scholar Bag
- This option grants a total of 14 Bag Slots via a Scholar Bag and two Leather Bags. Inside, you get one Blueberry and one Magic For Dummies spellbook.
Puzzlebox
- This option grants a total of 10 Bag Slots via the uniquely shaped Puzzlebox and one Leather Bag. Inside, you get one Wand of Equilibrium and one Broom.
Sack of Surprises
- This is the option available to all classes, which causes a player to start with a random assortment of starter bags and items roughly equal in value to the more predictable options.

Some of the potential benefits and drawbacks of these starting options are discussed in more detail later.

Some Notable Items

Backpack Battles is a game full of notable items and synergies, such that it’d be impossible to identify them all in testing (let alone write about them). However, some standouts have been identified through testing and the community. Given the number of recipes and items in the game, it’s certain that powerful strategies will develop and evolve as the community plays around with what is at the time of writing, options only recently made available.

Firstly, both the Mage-specific starter bags have some interesting properties. The Scholar Bag not only generates 5 Mana on Start, but also has a 30% chance to duplicate the generation of Mana caused by items inside it, as well as a 50% chance to protect against the removal of any Mana. Meanwhile, the Puzzlebox causes items in it to initially trigger 20% slower. However, after 5 seconds, they instead start to trigger 50% faster (more than double the initial debuff). The Puzzlebox also grants access to a number of Puzzlebags via the shop, which have a chance to spawn when you buy a bag with the Puzzlebox in your inventory.

The Mage can also get a variety of Spells and Books, such as the Scripture of Light, a Book which heals and grants Regeneration every 3 seconds at the cost of one Mana. Note that the Scholar Bag start’s Magic For Dummies item increases the odds of finding Spells and Books for sale, but it doesn’t gate them; you can still find Spells and Books without that start and without ever getting the Magic For Dummies item.

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A bag of interest unique to the Mage, available through the Puzzlebox, is the Puzzlebag of Improvement, which causes items inside to have a 20% chance of buffs added to those items to duplicate. This can result in huge gains for items that get significant or frequent buffs, especially if you’re making sure to efficiently place items so that four items that will receive such buffs each occupy only one of the bag’s four slots. The Mage’s Puzzlebag of Ruin is also noteworthy, with a similar but flipped shape and size to the Puzzlebag of Improvement. This item gives items inside a 25% to duplicate any debuffs they inflict, potentially letting you start seriously hampering foes with effects like Poison and Blind.

A fun gimmick item available to Mages that lets you radically alter your gameplay, similar to Balatro’s Jokers, is the Chess Board. This one-slot item grants you access to chess pieces (immediately spending 2 of your Gold when purchased to give you a White Pawn and Black Pawn, with other pieces sometimes spawning for sale in the shop). While too complex to fully detail here, these pieces each have different effects when they get a capture or are themselves eliminated, with a new “turn” occurring every second by default. Make sure you keep the Chess Board in your inventory when using this gimmick, or the pieces won’t function.

Technically, almost no item is class-specific in the sense that you can buy the Rainbow Badge to gain access to all class items in your shop. In theory, there might also be a Mage-specific badge, as there is one for the original classes, but this wasn’t found in testing and the community doesn’t seem to have discussed such a badge at the time of writing. For simplicity, “class-specific” in this article just means an item is normally only obtainable by a specific class except through special means.

Subclasses

At Round 8, the Mage (and every other class) can purchase a Subclass. Subclasses grant powerful items at the cost of 10 Gold, which tend to define your build going forward. You can also choose to skip choosing a Subclass by Rerolling (although this seemed like it would rarely be a good idea, based on testing and the strength of the Subclass items). Of note, one subclass should usually be on sale for 5 Gold, rather than the standard 10.

The Mage gets six subclass options, including:

Magical Girl: Grants the Rainbow Potion item, a two-slot-wide subclass item that allows all staves to spawn in your shop. It can then grant numerous buffs if you place staves and books in the right positions around it. Crucially, this subclass is a Potion item, meaning it can be used in potion chains for some very powerful combinations. It is drunk when you reach 20 buffs, with the “Potion” part of the item’s effect granting 2 random, distinct potion effects.
Shiny Chariot: Grants the Shiny Mantle item, a six-slot Armor item that will try to consume increasing amounts of Mana periodically, granting invulnerability for 1 second plus 0.2 seconds for each 10 gold worth of Gemstones you have. The item also inflicts 3 Blind when you turn invulnerable.
Spectromancer: This class gives the two-slot tall Spirit Bells accessory. Used for Pet builds, it allows you to purchase and use infinite Spirit Companions. The item gives a 30% damage-reduction buff at the start of the battle, with the effect lasting significantly longer the more pets you can position into the item’s many Star spaces. Finally, the item also gives you 50% of your current buffs after 8 seconds have passed.
Waterbender: This subclass gives you the Water Elemental, a four-slot item that counts as both a Weapon and a Pet. This item can consume significant amounts of Mana to grant itself significant buffs like healing you on hit and +15 damage, with Star spaces that let you generate Mana by placing Nature items into those spaces and Diamond spaces that cause the item to attack faster if you place Ice items into those spaces. Positioning this item can be a bit awkward if trying to maximize your buffs, as its buff spaces are in a fairly long line, but it has some major potential for synergy.
Battle Mage: The Battle Mage subclass gives you the t-shaped, four-block Harold, the Hateful Hat. This item is both a Helmet and a Pet, with several different effects. The first is that every three seconds it gives you and your opponent 5 random buffs. The idea is that you can presumably then remove those buffs to your opponent through other means, as items in the hat’s six-star slots gain a 3% buff to Critical Hit Chance for each buff you remove from your opponent. Additionally, the hat has a 40% chance of giving you +1 Regeneration whenever you inflict a debuff on yourself. Finally, the hat deals Magic damage equal to 10% of your healing, plus another 5% for each Dark item in the Diamond slots below the hat.