The climatological atmospheric circulation is key to establishing the tropical ‘pattern effect’, whereby cloud feedbacks induced by sea surface temperature (SST) warming depend on the spatial structure of that warming. But how patterned warming-induced circulation changes affect cloud responses is less clear. Here we use idealized simulations with prescribed SST perturbations to understand the contributions to changes in tropical-mean cloud radiative effects (CRE) from different circulation regimes. We develop a novel framework based on moist static energy to understand the circulation response, targeting in particular the bulk circulation metric of ascent fraction. Warming concentrated in regions of ascent leads to a strong ‘upped-ante’ effect and spatial contraction of the ascending region. Our framework reveals substantial contributions to tropical-mean CRE changes not only from traditional ‘pattern effect’ regimes, but also from the intensification of convection in ascent regions as well as a smaller contribution from cloud changes in convective margins.