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the holy poopacy posted:Either have a deck that's reliable enough that you can spend a few discards trading face-down cards for face-up cards, a deck that's strong enough that you can discard to get a perfect hand that will more or less one shot the boss, or have a deck that adds enough base chips and multiplier that it doesn't particularly matter what you play (the banner joker that adds a bunch of chips for every unspent discard is a good start for this kind of build.) Or have a deck built around low number cards where you can sort by rank and play the 5 rightmost cards and probably score ok. It's not impossible to beat but it's an absolute wall in a way that no other boss type was, and it's extremely aggravating to play against. Unless you've been lucky with jokers up until that point, for most average players of this game that encounter is going to be an exercise in frustration as you hope for the best and spend discards while praying for the luck of the draw. There's a reason why these games default to letting you see what your cards are, y'know?
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Feb 18, 2024 17:53
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| # ? May 25, 2024 00:39 |
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One thing I've started doing is just devouring as many Celestial Packs as I can, slightly less emphasis on Arcana Packs, but I grab them too. I'm always playing on Anaglyph, so if I see a Mega Celestial/Buffoon/Arcana pack reward for skipping a blind, I always slam that reward, because getting to pick up four Planet cards in one go can represent such an insane boost in power. My favorite skip reward by far is "increase [this hand]'s level by 3." Adding 6 levels to a particular hand is INSANE. And it gives you something to immediately lean into. Try and get those mid-level hands like Flush, Straight and Full House leveled up as much as possible, try to make your deck as versatile as possible to make any of those hands if need be. The "first hand face down" boss basically tests how quickly your deck can scale by stealing a mix of a couple hands and discards from you right off the bat. If that's the choke point for your runs, your decks are likely operating on too much of a razor thin margin to be able to consistently take down Cerulean Bell anyway and there's likely something wrong with the way you're approaching deckbuilding.
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Feb 18, 2024 18:18
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Tried to cheese the spectral pack that changes all cards to one suit, alt f4'd/restarted a few times but it always drew diamonds so goodnews/badnews, doesnt seem save scummable.
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Feb 18, 2024 18:29
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MJeff posted:One thing I've started doing is just devouring as many Celestial Packs as I can, slightly less emphasis on Arcana Packs, but I grab them too. I'm always playing on Anaglyph, so if I see a Mega Celestial/Buffoon/Arcana pack reward for skipping a blind, I always slam that reward, because getting to pick up four Planet cards in one go can represent such an insane boost in power. My favorite skip reward by far is "increase [this hand]'s level by 3." Adding 6 levels to a particular hand is INSANE. And it gives you something to immediately lean into. The complaint isn't the boss that flips your starting hand face down (The House), it's the one that flips all cards that replaced played cards with facedown cards (The Fish.) You're not wrong, though, and that's one way to look at the problem: The House sticks you with 8-9 facedown cards right off the bat. By the time you get to 8-9 facedown cards with The Fish, you've already played 3 hands. In the demo I think the absolute maximum number of hands you can have to play is 6. If you ran into The Fish at e.g. 16k and can't burn it down in 3 hands plus a few handicapped hands played around the facedown cards, then how were you going to beat The Wall if it showed up instead? A deck that can't beat 16k in 3 hands + chip damage won't beat 32k in 4-6 hands. It is one of the harder boss blinds (it's almost always worse than The House, for example, at least in any way that matters--if you can beat the boss in under 3 hands then The House is technically worse for you but also it's absolutely not going to matter) but it's not uniquely difficult, there are quite a few bastard modifiers in the mix. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Feb 18, 2024 |
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Feb 18, 2024 18:36
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Oh, okay, yeah, The Fish is a giant rear end in a top hat, moreso than the House. Same basic principle applies, but I can understand that being a kill point for a lot of runs for sure. There's a lot more careful timing involved with the Fish, you have to know exactly when the optimal time to use your discards is.
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Feb 18, 2024 18:50
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The Wall is much less of a problem. You absolutely can have decks that synergise well enough to take out The Wall by judicious decision making but would still get annihilated by having everything face down, because it's making luck a huge factor. You can have decks that will score decent points every hand and huge points in a couple; if your ability to recognise and play the latter is hamstrung at the same time that the former is also depowered, you're in a world of trouble. Besides, so much of it becomes guesswork and hoping for the best; that just isn't what makes these games fun. Playing the hand you're dealt is one thing, but playing the hand you're dealt when you don't know what most of it is and you're risking nuking your main tactics is a whole other thing entirely.
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Feb 18, 2024 18:53
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Thirsty Dog posted:The Wall is much less of a problem. You absolutely can have decks that synergise well enough to take out The Wall by judicious decision making but would still get annihilated by having everything face down, because it's making luck a huge factor. You can have decks that will score decent points every hand and huge points in a couple; if your ability to recognise and play the latter is hamstrung at the same time that the former is also depowered, you're in a world of trouble. The Fish still leaves you with more than half of the cards you see face up, so if you can beat a score of X with all your cards face up you are very likely to be able to beat a score of X/2 against The Fish. It does punish high variance decks that rely on burning a lot of cards to fish for very rare specific hands, but also that's just probably not a very good deck and if you need more than one hand with that kind of deck then you would have been killed by The Mouth (the first hand you play is the only type of hand you can score), plus you're kind of hosed by the end boss anyhow. Again, yeah, it's probably one of the top 3 nastiest boss modifiers but it's not really that much of an outlier. For my money the worst boss blind design (not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of how much it hard counters build options) the one that cancels out all clubs (including wildcards.) It turns several tarot and spectral cards into possible traps if it hasn't already shown up in a previous ante, and zeroing out 1/4 of your deck is bothersome enough even if you're not specifically invested in clubs. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Feb 18, 2024 |
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Feb 18, 2024 19:14
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I just want to see lots of Spectral packs every single run. not even because of the power boost. they're just fun.
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Feb 18, 2024 19:26
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the holy poopacy posted:The Fish still leaves you with more than half of the cards you see face up, so if you can beat a score of X with all your cards face up you are very likely to be able to beat a score of X/2 against The Fish. That does kinda ignore the impact of losing the discards, the cards you've discarded, or the ability to set up for future turns. It's simply not just the same as "get x/2" in half as many hands.
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Feb 18, 2024 19:45
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Thirsty Dog posted:That does kinda ignore the impact of losing the discards, the cards you've discarded, or the ability to set up for future turns. It's simply not just the same as "get x/2" in half as many hands. On average, it is. The difference only becomes really pronounced at the extremes, which are usually not where you want to be anyhow. A deck that is very high consistency but lacks highroll potential will get a free win against The Fish and lose to The Wall. A deck that has high (but not extremely high) score potential but lacks consistency probably beats The Wall and probably loses to The Fish. A lot of middling decks are in trouble against either one and is going to dependent on luck of the draw either way. None of the above is in a very good position to win the run, although theoretically they have time to course correct if they can manage to clear the boss.
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Feb 18, 2024 19:59
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the holy poopacy posted:On average, it is. The difference only becomes really pronounced at the extremes, which are usually not where you want to be anyhow. A deck that is very high consistency but lacks highroll potential will get a free win against The Fish and lose to The Wall. A deck that has high (but not extremely high) score potential but lacks consistency probably beats The Wall and probably loses to The Fish. A lot of middling decks are in trouble against either one and is going to dependent on luck of the draw either way. None of the above is in a very good position to win the run, although theoretically they have time to course correct if they can manage to clear the boss. I feel like you're overestimating how easy it is to get a very high consistency deck by that point. The requirements for a deck that can reliably beat the fish are much, much higher than a deck that can pump out the points for the wall, because the wall allows you to squeeze the most out of your deck while the fish might just cause you to completely gently caress yourself by you discarding multiple components of big scoring turns. Like I said, the average player (like me!) is going to have an extremely tough and unfun time with this one in a way that doesn't happen with the far simpler Wall. Even if in reality a mediocre deck has only a 15% chance of beating the wall, at least you do everything you can to get there and the only randomness is the draw. The fish feels so unfair by comparison and if the same deck does beat it then it's extremely likely to be just a fluke. My opinion is that it simply comes out too early in a run.
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Feb 18, 2024 20:08
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I feel that, conversely, you're overestimating how difficult it is to add consistency to a deck. A lot of jokers pump up score regardless of what hand you play (especially since this includes any foil/holo joker) and I feel like newer players tend to undervalue these since they don't specifically fit their build "archetype", sometimes to the point that they even hurt their preferred hands which could have used the generic boost. In that regard, yes, The Fish is pretty mean to newer players since it punishes a common assumption about the game, but that's because it's specifically trying to tell you that you're operating on a flawed assumption.
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Feb 18, 2024 21:14
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Your avatars look like they're facing each other and having an argument, it's funny.
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Feb 18, 2024 21:26
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Paying2Lurk posted:Gonna buy this game on my Switch Lite so I can play it in bed. this is the way
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Feb 18, 2024 21:32
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hearing rumors the balatronnites are "storming" the capital demanding that balatro is released early
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Feb 18, 2024 21:38
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I am one of them
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Feb 18, 2024 22:04
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Weird issue, I run a separate user id on my PC for work and for whatever reason some games do not cloud sync proper. Any way to fix this for balarto that isn't manually copying the folder every time.
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Feb 18, 2024 22:21
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 This is the most ridiculous run I've ever done lol
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Feb 18, 2024 22:51
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DaveWoo posted:
How the. The planet card doesn't even show up until you play one! How did you do this?!
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Feb 18, 2024 22:55
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MJeff posted:How the.
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Feb 18, 2024 22:58
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It's possible to get +15 levels all at once if you keep accumulating double tags and then cash them all in on a "+3 to hand level" tag. Presumably this involves using Tarot cards to manipulate the deck first to the point where it's possible to get a Flush Five and then cashing in.
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Feb 18, 2024 23:01
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DACK FAYDEN posted:my best guess is play one, have some Double Tags floating and find an Orbital Tag buffing it Yup - got an "Increase Flush Five by 3 levels" skip blind bonus with 4 Double Tags. Also, I lucked out and got a Hobo Joker early on, and used all the Tarot cards I got to make this deck: 
DaveWoo fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Feb 18, 2024 |
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Feb 18, 2024 23:01
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the holy poopacy posted:I feel that, conversely, you're overestimating how difficult it is to add consistency to a deck. A lot of jokers pump up score regardless of what hand you play (especially since this includes any foil/holo joker) and I feel like newer players tend to undervalue these since they don't specifically fit their build "archetype", sometimes to the point that they even hurt their preferred hands which could have used the generic boost. Getting access to those jokers is not consistent, though. And those alone are simply not enough to beat the fish - you can't autopilot through it with blind hands, you still need to get lucky, and if you discard enough to get visibility then you're left with no way to manage those crucial final hands. I have no doubt you're a better player than me and that you find it much easier to deal with - the point I'm making is that it's still a huge difficulty spike that seemingly removes all your options and that is not going to be fun for a lot of people. It either needs tweaking or simply delaying long enough where it can be reasonably expected that a deck can handle it. And what makes it particularly strange is there there's seemingly no way to play around the flipped cards mechanic with jokers or special cards (correct me if I'm wrong!) which makes the whole thing weirdly one dimensional and punishing.
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Feb 18, 2024 23:06
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DaveWoo posted:Yup - got an "Increase Flush Five by 3 levels" skip blind bonus with 4 Double Tags. I'm so loving angry at you that you got to do this. Gosh, what is that like 6 Deaths?
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Feb 18, 2024 23:45
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 There's a lot going on here.
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Feb 19, 2024 00:08
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I've been thinking about it and this is why I'm glad Videogames like this exist, can you imagine the logistical nightmare of trying to reproduce Balatro in real life? You'd need about a dozen decks of cards, lots of scratch paper, a graphics calculator... And that's just the start of it.
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Feb 19, 2024 00:18
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Thirsty Dog posted:Getting access to those jokers is not consistent, though. And those alone are simply not enough to beat the fish - you can't autopilot through it with blind hands, you still need to get lucky, and if you discard enough to get visibility then you're left with no way to manage those crucial final hands. You say that they're not consistent but hand-independent boosts are the most common type of joker. If you think there's not consistent access to generic score boosts then that does sound to me like you're writing off a lot of jokers that could be helping you. You can't always autopilot through The Fish with blind hands (there are specific builds like full never-discard builds that absolutely can, but you're not consistently going to be able to do that) but having enough of a base that you can play one decent hard hand while you have full visibility and then chip it down with easy hands is not terribly demanding and probably a good idea for other reasons. It don't think it's a skill issue so much as it is a playstyle issue, or else The Fish would cause a disproportionate number of losses for me too. I don't have a 100% winrate against the demo but The Fish is not a prominent source of losses for me. Maybe someone who's better than me can contradict me and if I was even better I wouldn't be losing to anything else, I dunno. And again, even disregarding build possibilities, there are special cards that can play around the flipped cards mechanic. Card-modifying tarots always reveal the cards they're played on, and the suit-setting cards (including wildcard, to a lesser extent) let you force flushes using flipped cards regardless of what they were originally, so if you see The Fish coming or even just are worried about it you can keep a tarot in your back pocket for emergencies. Which is also good idea anyhow because they're useful against the end boss's gimmick as well.
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Feb 19, 2024 01:32
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i've always beaten the fish by checking to see if i can tell the rank or suit of a card by how it gets sorted, and then discarding every card that i can't. its rare for there to be a run that I can't get by that way, esp since I tend to have 5 jokers by the end of the second ante
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Feb 19, 2024 02:01
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One day to go. Get your affairs in order, it's almost time.
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Feb 19, 2024 09:36
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Elman posted:One day to go. Get your affairs in order, it's almost time. I have to go into the office tomorrow so the game better not come out until 5 PM. 
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Feb 19, 2024 13:39
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I am absolutely hooked on this game and need an iOS release ASAP. I used to love Sword and Poker and hate that it got removed from the app store. This is a bit like Sword and Poker with some Ascension deck building, but staying grounded in just poker. So far I've only been able to beat the demo a few times but using a Flush strategy every time. Focus on 2 suits, destroy/convert the other 2 suits into the two you are building around, get as many Jupiter cards as possible (and play the deck that starts with 2x The Fool). I got down to 3 clubs and 3 diamonds once, so after a discard or two, I would draw into flushes every single hand. I could have left my decks untouched and gone through the next ante or two if they were available in the game.
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Feb 19, 2024 14:10
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MJeff posted:I have to go into the office tomorrow so the game better not come out until 5 PM. Alas and alack, the official release time for tomorrow is 10 AM EST/7 AM PST/3 PM GMT on PC, and an hour later on consoles, unless you're playing on a Switch in the Asia region, in which case *shrug*.
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Feb 19, 2024 14:12
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Jossar posted:Alas and alack, the official release time for tomorrow is 10 AM EST/7 AM PST/3 PM GMT on PC, and an hour later on consoles, unless you're playing on a Switch in the Asia region, in which case *shrug*. Nobody post about how much fun they're having until I get home!!!!!!!
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Feb 19, 2024 14:17
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MJeff posted:I have to go into the office tomorrow so the game better not come out until 5 PM. Jossar posted:Alas and alack, the official release time for tomorrow is 10 AM EST/7 AM PST/3 PM GMT on PC, and an hour later on consoles, unless you're playing on a Switch in the Asia region, in which case *shrug*.
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Feb 19, 2024 14:23
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This will be my first day one purchase in 10+ years, and possibly my last I guess lol
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Feb 19, 2024 17:10
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https://twitter.com/LocalThunk/status/1759624336887914892 I dunno if this is just social media bubble at work but I feel like Balatro might be set for a really big launch. Everybody who touches it seems to absolutely love it.
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Feb 19, 2024 18:29
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Has anyone tried it on deck? I'm going in vacation in a few days and not sure if I should get it on switch or PC/deck. I've got a win streak going running nothin but two pair planet stacking. All three started decks give you so many ways to stack it up. I won against fish first hand blind. Seems a bit OP.
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Feb 19, 2024 18:29
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MJeff posted:https://twitter.com/LocalThunk/status/1759624336887914892 I've been trying to get friends to jump in. The two that have are all in. I tried it because of a thread here after not loving Spellrogue and I've hit 16 hours in the demo.
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Feb 19, 2024 18:30
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I feel like we could use a thread name update because calling this a poker game is really underselling it. I'm so glad I gave the demo a shot thanks to this thread. I mean yes it is poker but it's so much more man... It's GOTY 2024 The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Balatro: JUST PLAY IT
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Feb 19, 2024 18:42
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| # ? May 25, 2024 00:39 |
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faantastic posted:Has anyone tried it on deck? I'm going in vacation in a few days and not sure if I should get it on switch or PC/deck. I've played on Deck this whole time, works perfectly. Can't wait for tomorrow!
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Feb 19, 2024 18:42
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