Steam Description posted:

Balatro is a deck-building roguelite where you must play poker hands and earn chips to defeat enemy blinds. Enhance your deck of playing cards, buy Jokers to modify each hand you play, and discover new and wild synergies to win!

Kuros posted:

Short form: Early on you need very little in the way of mults/chips to hit thresholds so typically you want one or two economy jokers to build up your funds. From there you slowly change from economy jokers to score/utility jokers to make the blinds. The only reason to keep an economy joker in your pool late game is if it's polychrome, negative or it's actively helping your mult due to effects of other jokers.

As for building the deck itself, typically you build around the jokers you get, not build in anticipation of the jokers you might get. If the game is tossing flush jokers at you and you're building the deck for straights you may lose pretty quickly. All hands can win a run with the right build and foresight.

Long form: Here's a good vid from Haelian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eby9Eva03zU

Kuros posted:

One thing to put into the guides part, hands and jokers are tallied up from left to right in order in MOST cases. Conditional triggers from jokers will trigger first before triggering other effects in the joker pool from left to right.

Example:

Your jokers are in order: Campfire (+.5x mult per sold card starting at 1x mult), Scary Face (face cards get +30 chips) and Joker (+4 mult)

If you play a three of a kind of Kings and Campfire is at 1.5x, you will trigger the Scary Face first per king, then the Campfire and finally the Joker. The Campfire is mostly wasted due to it going first in front of the +4 mult from the Joker. So you end up with a 7.5 mult as you would get 3 from the hand, then 1.5x from Campfire then +4 from the Joker.

If you switch the Joker and Campfire you get: 3 from the hand + 4 from the Joker which is 7 then 1.5x which is 10.5 mult.

Adding the chips which would be 150 (30 for the hand + 30 for each king + 90 from the Scary Face) you would have 1125 chips in the first example, but 1575 in the second example.

Typical rule of thumb is: +Chips or +Mult goes on the left, anything that does xMult goes on the right. These rules apply to cards/jokers that have Foil, Hologram, Polychrome, Mult, Enhanced, Lucky, or Glass.

Arcanuse posted:

Let's start with a basic Glass card.
That's a 2x (2x) Multiplier, simple enough.
Now let's make it a Polychrome Glass card.
Now it's 2x/1.5x (3x). A little better.
And let's give it a Red Seal. Red Seals cause a played card to trigger an additional time, and both the above effects are applied on trigger.
So, this would give it 2x/2x/1.5x/1.5x (9x)!

But we're just getting started.
Say this cards a king and you have, yes, Triboulet.
Now it's 2x/2x/2x/2x/1.5/1.5. (36x) Juicy, powerful, liable to explode don't worry about that.

Now let's put a Blueprint left of it, for another 2x/2x.
2x/2x/2x/2x/2x/2x1.5/1.5. (144x)

And lets add... Oh, Sock and Buskin. Now, this ones special, giving another trigger to face cards. So that (144x) becomes...
2x/2x/2x/2x/2x/2x//2x/2x/2x//1.5/1.5/1.5 (1728x)

and what the hell, we're this deep in lets slap a Brainstorm on the right (still keeping Blueprint and Triboulet neighbors), duplicating Sock and Buskin.
2x/2x/2x/2x2x/2x/2x/2x/2x/2x/2x/2x/1.5/1.5/1.5/1.5 (20736x)

now that's a big multiplier! except no, it's just one card. You get up to five.
[1]: (20736x)
[2]: (429,981,696x)
[3]: (8,916,100,448,256x)
[4]: (184,884,258,895,036,416x)
[5]: (3,833,759,992,447,475,122,176x)

and let's not forget steel cards for an extra 1.5 each, or a joker to trigger those again or planets buffing base multiplier and chips-
Look, you get the point.
Even under actual, non-theoretical limits, triggers are important and if anyone would actually reaches nevermind clears Ante 16 without severe trigger abuse I'll be shocked.

the holy poopacy posted:

Broadly, in order to score well you need:

1. A way to add chips
2. A way to add multiplier
3. A way to multiply multiplier

Playing big hands and leveling them up is a decent source of chips, but a poor source of multiplier. The difference in multiplier between playing something like a level 4 flush and playing an unleveled high card is less than a single mediocre joker, the biggest thing you're getting from the flush is chips.

Jokers are a great source of multiplier. Lots of jokers add multiplier and a lot of them are not even particularly specialized (which is good, because if you're relying on base hand scoring then you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket unless it's a really really good basket and a lot of the basic "+chips/+multiplier for a specific hand" jokers are not really worth it unless they have something like permanent scaling or multiplicative multipliers.) There are also ways to add chips from your jokers, but these are not as common as you need to keep an eye out for them. If you have a lot of chips from jokers and a lot of multiplier from jokers then the actual hand you play doesn't matter much, but if you only have multiplier from jokers then you need to be scoring good 5-card hands to get any reasonable score at all. At this point a joker that helps you get those good hands more reliably starts to look pretty useful, but again, just hitting the big hand every hand probably isn't enough if you don't have some added multiplier.

Suppose for example that you have 5 jokers adding an average of +10 multiplier each (a fairly mediocre build.) If you play a single ace, you score 16 chips x 51 multiplier for a little over 800. If you score a level 4 flush with decent card values you might score something like 120 chips x 60 multiplier = 7200. So you better hope that you can use enough tarots/spectral cards that you can reliably score that flush.

On the other hand, if you have 3 jokers adding +10 multiplier each and 2 jokers adding +100 chips, then your single ace now scores almost 3600 and your flush scores 8800. The flush is still obviously better but the gap is much smaller and it's not as immediately fatal if you miss your flush.

(If you only have chips from jokers and no real multipliers, you're probably gonna die barring Shenanigans, because even leveled up hands have very low multiplier compared to what you get from jokers. If you had +250 chips from jokers with no source of multiplier, the same flush is now only scoring 3700, about as bad as a level 1 high card from the more balanced loadout. Also, since chips are less common on jokers you're probably not even going to get to +250.)

These aren't very high scores, but these are pretty low bonuses for jokers, equivalent to the modifiers on holo/foil cards. Which means that if you get all shiny cards you can have a set of jokers that gives one of the sets of chips/multiplier above in addition to the actual bonuses on the joker! So go for those shiny cards, the skip bonus that guarantees one in the next shop is very good unless you have a rock solid joker build and/or no money. (Which is another important point: try not to be broke. Holding onto cash between rounds earns you interest, unless you're playing with the Green Deck. Don't go below $10 unless there is something amazing for sale, like a shiny joker with a big value ability.) Similarly, the voucher that makes shiny jokers more common is extremely valuable.

Even then, that only goes far. A reasonably strong joker base chips/multiplier joker build with 2 foils and 2 holos might see something like, I dunno, +270 chips and +90 multiplier. At this point you're clearing 25k on a high card and 39k with a level 4 flush. That probably gets you over the finish line, but you still might get sunk by a particularly nasty boss blind. After a certain point you need to stop looking at things that add multiplier and start looking at things that multiply multiplier. The worst joker in that build might only be adding +20 multiplier, which is only about 25% of your score. If you swap it out for a joker with x1.5 multiplier, you're going to get a much bigger boost.

And that's equivalent to a polychrome joker that does absolutely nothing else for you, there are much better multipliers available. There are also never any diminishing returns on multiplicative bonuses: if you play a level 4 flush and have a single joker that gives +20 multiplier it just tripled your score, but a second +20 multiplier joker only increases it a further 40%. But no matter how many x2 jokers you have they will always double your score, which racks up very quickly. The only caveat is that you still need a reasonable base score for the x2 jokers to fire off, if you get too greedy fishing for polychromes and big multipliers then you will hit the wall pretty quickly--you still can't neglect the need for base chips/multiplier.

tl;dr:

1. Pick up some jokers that add chips
2. Pick up some jokers that add multiplier
3. Pick up some jokers that multiply multiplier

roomtwofifteen posted:

Extraordinary stuff.

Also a tip for new players, you can turn up the speed of cards in the settings, it's a nice feature once you're bored of seeing everything tick slowly.

Infinitum posted:

I did find out that holding R will restart your run which is a much quicker way of restarting a run rather than going through a menu

Alkanos posted:

I watched this the other day so I might be remembering it wrong, but the changes aren't to the scoring. His move only takes effect between scoring and calculating the additional money collected. So when it start scoring it "locks" the joker order for that purpose, but reads the new order when calculating funds. Unless I read that completely wrong while I was watching.

Wooper posted:

Had a ridiculous build playing flush five of a kind Kings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqxSRicCZ70

Arcanuse posted:

absolutely bonkers luck. run still going. dont think i owe any infernal powers for this, not entirely sure though

e: instant hubris karma as the very next small blind got me. still, gives a good idea of what its gonna take to crack the highest Ante's
e2: yknow what thats probably enough balatro for one night, got some good unlocks that'll really help future runs

Onmi posted:

I have broken the ??? barrier? I don't know what number that is!


EDIT



The run finally died on Ante 14, the seed is H1VSVW7D with the Erratic Deck. If you want to toy with optimizing it yourself. I certainly didn't do things the smartest things in the run.

studio mujahideen posted:

well its not getting better than this for me. blueprinted a triboulet. has the face cards trigger twice joker. and the one that makes everything retrigger on the final hand. got a negative baron too, but it barely mattered

TastyLemonDrops posted:

Not sure if I'm ever gonna get this lucky again:
[insert e run here]

Sparticle posted:

I was starting to get annoyed that I hadn't seen a legendary jokers yet until I was blessed with 2 legendaries from the same shop.



I ended up with 12 jokers thanks to the anaglyph deck. My deck was pretty much just steel and glass kings and got my highest score ever.



I swapped out one of my jokers for the one that retriggers everything on the last hand played. I also recently bought the voucher that drops the ante at the expense of -1hand. My dumbass immediately miscounted how many hands I had left and I played high card instead of 5 of a kind completely punting my run at ante 12.

.

I hope someone who has more than a timeshare of a single braincell can take this seed to it's true potential.

Dr. Mantis Toboggan posted:

I think I hit a new record for the thread.



Seed is in the screenshot if you want to try it out with the Ghost Deck, White Stakes.

Final Jokers were:


Yorick
Perkeo
Triboulet
Sock and Buskin
Negative Driver's License
Blueprint
Polychrome Brainstorm


Gameplay spoilers:

I ended up getting a Cryptid and an Eris (flush five planet) in my inventory, and with Blueprint+Brainstorm+Perkeo I was able to make 3 copies between the two every time I left the shop. Eventually I got a Polychrome King which I copied a bunch, then I made one of them glass and copied that one a bunch, then I got to add a Red Seal to one of them and copied that a few times, but the Ante 14 boss was The Plant and ruined all my Kings before I was able to ever play a 5x Glass Red Seal Polychrome King Hand.

For Joker ordering I think the optimal was the following:

Triboulet, Sock and Buskin, Blueprint, Brainstorm, Driver's License, Yorick

Flush Five was somewhere around level 15-20, so I around 550x50 or something like that. I'll say 500x50 for ease of math. Had I been able to play a full Flush Five of Polychrome, Glass, Red Sealed Kings, it would have been the following:

Base: 500x50
For each King:
+10 chips, x2 (Triboulet), x2 (Blueprint), x2 (Brainstorm), x1.5x (Polychrome), x2 (Glass)
(Total +10 chips, x24 mult)
repeat all of the above from Red Seal
(Total +20 chips, x576 mult)
repeat all of the above from Sock and Buskin
(Total +40 chips, x 331776 mult)

Do that all 5 times
(Total +200 chips, x4019988717840603673710821376 mult)

x3 mult from Driver's License, x1.5 mult from Polychrome Brainstorm, x5 mult from Yorick

(Total +200 chips, x90449746151413582658493480960 mult)
+500 chips and x50 mult from the base hand
=
700 chips x 4522487307570679132924674048000 mult
or
Score: 3.16574e+33 chips


I'm so sad I didn't get to play the best possible hand, but this was amazing fun either way.

MagicBoots posted:

Well that's going to be hard to beat, could have kept it going to but I played 4 queens on the loosing hand instead of 5


The jokers:

Elman posted:

YES

https://i.imgur.com/RMtkXGm.mp4

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

Interesting

The Postman posted:

i love using the anaglyph deck to load up on negative jokers

Chadzok posted:

Don't think I'll ever see these heights again.
The two copy Jokers and DNA to generate (3 new kings per match) a deck mostly of Red Seal, Holographic (not Polychrome ), Glass Kings. This is why most played is High Card - my winning hands were all Flush Five or Four of a Kinds.
During the matches the copyjokers switch to copying one each of Sock and Buskin and the X2 Mult for scored Kings and Queens Legendary, for complicated mathematical reasons that I kind of get but the excellent Balatro simulator helped me confirm (add Five of a Kind please, could only run the numbers with 4). A smattering of other jokers, one the X2 Mult to first played face card, that was an extra little boost but at those heights I was looking very specifically for retriggering or ways to get the last few non UltraKing cards out of my deck. Everything else was pretty irrelevant.

Ghost Deck, spectrals make breaking the game way easier.

Alkanos posted:

Yeah, but when it works well it works REALLY REALLY well


Though who knows, maybe a regular deck would have been just as good. Triboulet is pretty awesome.

Lemon posted:

Finally got my first E score!



This was when I realised I might have a good run on my hands.

I'd gotten to about Ante 6 or 7 with Campfire, but dropped it for either Hologram or Vampire, I forget which came first.

Previous to this point, I'd also had Cartomancer which created a Tarot card each blind, which fed Fortune Teller directly, and Vampire indirectly through the enhanced cards.

Marble Joker added a Stone card each blind, which directly fed Hologram, and again indirectly fed Vampire with the stone cards.

I also had vouchers that gave me more interest, cheaper cards in the store, and the ability to buy playing cards from the store, so I could just pour cards into Hologram.



The next couple of shops went nuts. Cavendish just did it's thing and I'd been playing pretty much just pairs up until that point, so I had a huge window with Obelisk. I had enough econ that I didn't need Marble joker to create enhanced cards for me, I could just buy packs to increase the flat mult on Fortune Teller then 5 mult multipliers after that should go crazy.

By the end I had around 75 mult x 3.5 x 3 x 15 x 17 x 17 and finished up in Ante 14.



As always, an element of luck with getting the jokers in the first place, but it definitely felt like a run that I was able to build from the knowledge of the game I'd built up, knowing when to pivot and such.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

The wild thing is that a Vampire + Blueprint setup is still only quadratic scaling (or quartic scaling on the Plasma Deck, I guess) and will rapidly fall behind the greater-than-exponential-growth of the blinds. One of the "in-hand" multiplication builds seems like the only real way to stack multiplications repeatedly and get a long way into Endless - I had one just now which got me to Ante 14 and probably could've got me further if I managed my deck better/I didn't get really unlucky on one of the blinds and fail to get a hand full of Kings for the first time in ages.

uPen posted:

Beat Ante 14 for the first time ever with Blueprint/Brainstorm/Hologram/Burned/DNA. Got high card leveled up to the 90s with a deck that contained 80+ Red tag/holo/Steel aces.

Deck was already producing e numbers at the end of ante 8, feels like I could have gone a lot further if I transitioned from upgrading high card to upgrading flush 5 with Burned around then. I have a lot of trouble swapping hands, feels wrong to give up dozens of levels on a hand in the hope your new hand will outscale it 6 rounds from now assuming you survive till then with your 'primary' hand no longer scaling up.

e: Thinking about it would flush 5 even be better than just holding 4 extra red tag/steel cards in hand? Game rules.

quiggy posted:

Tried to get the 100,000,000 point hand to unlock that joker, ended up going quite a bit beyond

pumpinglemma posted:

New best run on white stake/yellow deck: a deck consisting entirely of queens of hearts, half steel and half glass. Two triboulets doubling multiplier for every queen I play for x32 each, campfire with a stupid economy for x6-10, a polychrome family for x6, and a steel joker for x4.5. And it still died to the first blind of ante 14, getting 9.3e11 with an optimal hand out of 2.9e13 needed and ending at a mere 2e12. I think to take it further I would have needed mime and/or seltzer bottle and/or red seals... Still, at least I got the ROI and flushed achievements at the same time.

RBA Starblade posted:

Purple stake's not loving around huh

e: Guess which Joker's the one I duped to make a second polychrome Baron lol




Those babies, Mime and Brainstorm finally got me 1.7 billion in one hand for stuntman lol, then 4.6e14 lmao. I finally won Balatro

PoundSand posted:

Got my first E hand, haven't really been shooting for them but I was just climbing on blue deck for my next gold and stumbled across a midgame polychrome 2 and hack so I shot for it. Couple jokers could have taken it to the next level (ended up with 6 slots due to voucher). And I legit never saw a glass tarot for the rest of the game but can't complain.

Relyssa posted:

Finally hit scientific notation! Two poly triboulet + poly supernova + hanging chad + sock and buskin. Got to ante 12, died to the plant because I was never offered any sort of boss reroll by the time I realized this would go the distance. It got very silly very quickly.

Sockser posted:

In a situation like this, where most of your points are coming from cards left in your hand, yeah, you should just be playing high card. That would be two more queens in your hand, each of them multiplying your mult by 1.5 twice, vs whatever base mult you're getting from 3 of a Kind.
Also, you've got Perkeo, but nothing in your inventory. That's a massive mistake, Perkeo is incredibly powerful and you should always have at least one card sitting around even if it's just to sell them



I'm upset that I hosed this run up:


At the start of Ante 18, a spectral pack offered me an ectoplasm
"Oh, brilliant!" says I, not thinking about the consequences of -2 hand size


Alas.

Eschatos posted:

Ayy I did it. Spent too much time adding cards to my deck before I got the Baron, but not bad for my first time past ante 12 small blind. Went through like 20 hands digging for Mimic in the shop with no luck. Probably should have dropped the Burnt Joker earlier but I couldn't resist temptation to keep double leveling high card every hand.

godogg posted:

Finally unlocked Stuntman and got my first e-value hand, thanks to Shoot the Moon, Mime, Hologram, Obelisk, and Blueprint. Also Burnt Joker for the first 7 antes and Square Joker for the first 3. I made it to ante 13!

Gangringo posted:

Made it to scientific notation for the first time. 5e24, crashed out on the boss blind of ante 16. If I had managed to slip a red tag into my king duping engine it would have been something amazing.

GoutPatrol posted:

loving finally

Power of Pecota posted:

Lived the dream with a negative tag, along with Bull which was a legit part of the build I got to sneak in useless copies of Jolly Joker, Drunkard, Zany Joker, and Shoot the Moon

If only ios had the update they'd have all been free and I could have cashed in the last few without potentially shutting down Bull, oh well

Necronomicon posted:

I finally got into scientific notation scoring on a pretty wild run. I played Anaglyph with the intent of getting a ton of negative jokers via double tags, and got a Perkeo in like the first shop, and over time managed to get an entire deck full of polychrome steel kings, with Mime to double the steel and Blueprint + Brainstorm + Baron to stack a bajillion 1.5x bonuses off of everything in hand. Unfortunately I never found any red seals and I imagine they would have helped me get up into Ante 17 and beyond, but my best hand was 3.311e19 and by god I’m probably gonna take a little break from this game now that I’ve done that. I ended up with 24 jokers total but ironically not a single one of the negatives ended up being all that important to the strategy.

On a side note I really appreciate how the game can be rewarding both for trying to put together absolutely obscene high scoring runs but also for getting through white knuckle tense runs in high stakes.

LifeLynx posted:

The hunt is over, I got into high Es. Blueprint and Brainstorm on Baron, which had to be on the left for Brainstorm to work, which aside from a handful of non-red-seal kings was the only thing keeping me from going to whatever the end of Balatro is.

Panic! At The Tesco posted:

finally got my first e numbers. fun as hell watching all those red seal steel kings trigger multiple times as it speeds up.

WhiteHowler posted:

Just had my best run, somehow lucking into a red seal steel king deck without really hunting for it initially. I got a ridiculous economy via Gold Mask and the "all cards are face cards" joker, and from there was able to reroll my way into some higher antes.



I could have gone further but never saw a Brainstorm, and I had to sell my Showman to get past the boss blind.

Really fun run. I'm probably never beating my last four challenges.

No Wave posted:

I beat the final difficulty! And all it took was prismatic blueprint and every OP joker!



Out of these stuntman is the one that's really just clearly too strong imo.

the holy poopacy posted:

And that's gold down. Actually took me fewer tries than orange. Fun fact: if you retrigger the first face card you play then Photograph fires again for however many times you retrigger it. This is actually my first checkered deck game where leveling up flush was a big part of my win, I rarely bother pumping it up above 3 but since all of those Photograph multipliers happen so early in the scoring getting the base hand multiplier up was crucial. (I did have one orange chip game where I got Flush up into the high teens via the burned joker, but I couldn't find any x-multipliers and died on a lategame Wall.)

Onmi posted:

And that is the Blue deck completely conquered. Holy gently caress what an exhausting push. I do wish the NG+ stuff was still in where you'd get an extra joker slot for each added difficulty (think I said that before)

I think I'll try the Plasma deck... I also don't think I'll ever play off of White Stake again unless I have to, that was harrowing.

Detheros posted:

Finally beat a gold ante with the checkered deck using 2 polychrome stencil jokers (thank you joker you sell to copy a random one) and the joker that copies the leftmost one, just 3 4x multis and 2 1.5x multis nbd.

The run ended at 10 with the "disables a random joker each hand"

Game owns.

TastyLemonDrops posted:

For people having trouble beating gold stake, the answer is just a high card build:


I was groaning when I got an early Supernova for the ghost deck, but I went all in on it and got kinda lucky with Jokers I never would've really considered otherwise. It really is liberating just putting in any one card (except on Psychic) and getting a load of points. I also had a Delayed Gratification that I sold at the end for Ramen.

Doltos posted:

25 hours of attempts

25 hours



i loving did it with the checkered deck

Relyssa posted:

Get hosed, gold stake. Highlights include accidentally resetting the bus halfway through the run and The Eye very nearly ending my run because I could not for the life of me dig out a hand type I hadn't used already. I used a Fool to dupe Hanged Man specifically to deal with the bell, since I had cleared out most, but not all, of my face cards. Didn't need it but glad I had it as a failsafe.

Jossar posted:

Finally get to add my name to the Gold Stakes clear list!




The unsung hero of this run, that sadly did not make it to the end, was a mid-game DNA which popped up and just let me keep cloning Queens of Hearts over and over again. It's funny - I was expecting that I was going to have to pull out all the stops with seals, multipliers, and polychrome cards to get a Gold Stakes win. But all it really takes is a good (read: lucky) set of jokers, and on Violet Vessel too!

Barry Shitpeas posted:

Got my first gold win with double Polychrome Stuntman. Hand size 3

MJeff posted:

Smeared Joker to make all my black cards the same suit, which meant Arrowhead gave +50 chips on every black card.
Green Joker scaled up to +56 mult.
The Duo for X2 on any hands with a pair.
Constellation scaled up to 3.2X

Level 6 Pair, Level 5 Two Pair, Level 6 Flush were the main stars, obviously.

I did have to close the game once when a hand wasn't enough and then play the fight differently, but there was no loving way I was gonna let this run slip through my fingers on Ante 7 again.

I really don't know how you're supposed to beat Gold Stake without getting Green Joker or something very similar basically immediately. Now that I can say I've done it, I don't think I'm ever going above Black Stake ever again.

instantrunoffvote posted:

Finally managed to finish my first Gold Stake run with just some good, fundament Balatro. Chips, multiplier, and multiplier multiplier. This also ended up being my first real High Card run. I don't hear anyone talking about Card Sharp as being one of the better Jokers, but it's always performed very well for me in any deck that can play the same hand consistently.

Elman posted:

Gold stake abandoned deck beaten. This one was surprisingly annoying, the lack of face cards makes it harder to win the early rounds (which are always the worst part of higher stakes). It also means a lot of face-based jokers become useless, like Sock and Buskin, Shoot the Moon or Baron. Overall it's not as powerful as I though it'd be.

I'll probably do checkered next just to get the easy ones out of the way.

cerious posted:

Beat gold stakes without ever seeing a decent x-mult joker, or using any tarot cards, or using any planet cards, or even adding any special cards. Just got an early blueprint, ante 2 burnt joker, ante 5 brainstorm, and went all in on high card. Got it to level 60 and found a supernova in ante 8 to keep up the flat mult.

I'm really enjoying going for gold stakes runs instead of endless. I've found endless to be pretty boring and the engine building difficulty on gold really forces you to make good decisions. I think I nearly threw my run buying a telescope voucher and an interest voucher, and then promptly being too broke to even afford to keep interest or buy packs while looking for a x-mult joker.

Aggro posted:

Finally joined 1.4% of Steam players and beat gold stake after uhhhhh 45 hours of playing. I had multiple runs end in Ante 8, which is a special sort of agonizing. The strategy was Checkered Deck and refresh until the 1st ante has tags for “everything in the next shop is free” and “boss blind adds an extra $15” and then beat the boss blind in two hands.

With that start, you open ante 2 with $25, and if the cards in the shop are decent, you’ll have 1 or 2 jokers and maybe a Jupiter. I ended up with an unexpectedly baller combination — Oops All Sixes and Bloodstone (so it’s now a 2 in 3 chance to get a x2 multiplier on every Heart). I got a progressive multiplier with Constellation, a static multiplier in Ramen, and capped it off with Baseball Card. From there, it was just filling the deck with Hearts and Steel. I one-shotted the final boss and it felt real good.

Next step is filling out the collection but it’ll be nice to play some low stress games with other decks.

LifeLynx posted:

The joker that gets 0.5x mult and eats a joker makes higher stakes much easier. I nearly expect them to nerf it so it only gets a bonus if it actually destroys a joker. I just cleared Checkered gold with it in my first shop, just throwing out high cards for 750k chips.

babypolis posted:

finally managed to get a win on gold stake with the abandoned deck, which btw is a top tier deck. got lucky with a bunch of polychrome jokers at the start, giving me enough time to build up my engine with ride the bus and the running joker, topped up with cavendish and vampire at the end. what a miserable experience tho. not the actual playing of the game, that was good fun, but the ridiculous amount of non runs and restarts needed to get a decent run going. deffo not going near the higher difficulties for a while, hope local thunk gives them a proper look at some point

roomtwofifteen posted:

Did not expect this to be the combination that got me through gold stakes, but hey I'll take it!

The Postman posted:

Hell yeah. Finally finished a gold stake run and made it to ante 10 to boot. Now I need to actually do the rest of my unlocks

super nailgun posted:

Finally beat gold ante. Red deck. Not sure how many others if any I'll run up that far. It gets really unfun and RNG bound a few levels from the top difficulty. Glad I saw the challenge through at least once though.

Did it playing pairs. Jokers were Supernova, Bull, Burglar, Blackboard, and Baseball Card. Barely touched planets and tarot, was all about the jokers and then as soon as I had the Bull stacking up coins to feed it.

PostNouveau posted:

Finally knocked off gold stake. I was definitely being pigheaded and bashing my head against the wall over and over with the hearts/spades deck, but dammit, it's just so easy to not make decisions and play flushes all the time!

Popete posted:

Got my first gold stakes win with spectral deck! Ended up getting a bunch of eternals that synchronized well enough to get a high card deck powerful enough to just squeak out a win.

PhysicsFrenzy posted:

Got my first gold stakes win! Played on checkered deck.



Every single wheel of fortune I played succeeded and helped this happen.

DaveWoo posted:

Just beat Black Deck Gold Stake with this insane set of jokers:



Between the doubled Certificate and the doubled DNA, I was increasing my Hologram multiplier by a full 1x every single round. It was up to 16x by the time I beat the Ante 8 boss.

overeager overeater posted:

I'm free!



(Okay, the checkered deck is maybe cheating, but with everything Gold Stakes throws at you, I'm taking it.)

I got Madness early on and tried to pick up Eternal jokers, giving me a somewhat silly build:

• Photograph
  
• Droll Joker
  
• Hologram (to 2.25x)
  
• Blackboard (picked up the very last hand)
  
• Madness (to 12.5x)
  

With Flush at level 6, I could get ~200k point hands consistently, even without the Blackboard bonus. I also got lucky with the boss - after one hand I had the shuffling figured out, put the jokers back in the original order, and handily beat it. Unfortunately I didn't make it past ante 10, though

I think this might be the only deck I bother going past Black Stakes on, the Orange Stakes booster prices alone makes some strategies (and jokers) just not viable at all

Arzaac posted:

After grinding at it for way too long, I finally beat Gold Stake with Anaglyph. It was uh, a goofy run. Supernova, Stuntman, (negative) Campfire, Joker Stencil, and Perkeo. Honestly it felt like it wasn't gonna be a winning run for a while, but man Stuntman can keep you afloat for a really long time. Perkeo I mostly only used it with a Mercury because I was levelling pair, but it did probably get me another 8 levels. Right at the end I picked up a Familiar, which I duplicated twice and it did make my deck more consistent. If I were playing optimally I would've sold Perkeo right at the end, but I wanted that gold stake sticker.

Also I gotta say, I think I was severely underestimating campfire, that joker's insanely good. Having joker stencil with me really highlighted it because I always had a free joker slot; I could basically walk into a shop, buy two garbage jokers and sell them, and I suddenly have a 2x mult card for like 4 dollars.

On the other hand, man I kinda hate Anaglyph now. It can certainly high roll and get you a lot of money, or in the case of this run get me 12 extra levels on pair in ante 8, but a lot of the time you just sit there and die with a stack of double tags. Sometimes you just blow them on minor rewards. A lot of the times they just feel kinda inconsequential.

Panic! At The Tesco posted:

new changes definitely make gold stake easier and more fun. after banging my head against gold for days i beat it second try with the new buffs.

feel

WarEternal posted:

Did gold stake pretty easily on the beta version. I don't feel like the rental jokers are that punishing, basically because when you're doing well on a run you have enough money to make up 3 gold per turn anyway so either you're doing well and it doesn't matter or you're doing bad and it doesn't matter anyway. It feels like it mostly just narrows joker selection early on like eternal does.

Level Seven posted:

Got my first Gold Stake done before the Switch patch! Ride the Bus came early and got big, Supernova got to 57 in the end, Cartomancer and Riff-Raff kept feeding the Campfire until ante 8 where they were sold just to make sure I didn't die to the boss. 10/10 game, time to not deal with gold stake's bullshit till the patch lands.

apophenium posted:

Lmao I burned myself out trying gold stake over and over, took some time off, came back to it today and got it on my first try. Didn't get a photo but I was playing checkered deck and got green joker on the first shop. Rode that for a bit, scaling it and saving up money. Got blue joker to help me through a bit more. Then I got an eternal vagabond and the tarot mult scaling joker. Made enough money to reroll a bit and bam, holographic stunt man! That was feeling pretty good but I desperately needed a mult multiplier. And then... God bless you campfire, right on ante 8 small blind. With vagabond I was able to scale it up to x5 before the boss, which went down to a single high card.

I think I'm gonna steer clear of gold stake until the patch. But that felt pretty good. And very lucky.

Aipsh posted:

Gold stake done on my third try lets fuckin gooooo - it was also one of the easiest runs in general because of some ferociously lucky jokers very early on:




2 discards, a throwaway hand, and then four queens, the first with a mult and red seal. I was expecting to be banging my head against the wall for this for days


oh wow and my first ever e score directly after with a five of a kind queens

Leon Sumbitches posted:

So I finally beat the gold stakes with the checkered deck. I'm sick of flushes, but it seems like such low hanging fruit.

Any advice for the next deck/build type I should try? I still have about 11 jokers to unlock.

Nemo2342 posted:

Swashbuckler 43 mult on final hand, Constellation 3.3X mult

First (and only) Gold Stakes win on version 1.0.0.n and boy was this setup getting by on the skin of its teeth.

Stuntman showed up in the first shop, but I struggled to get +mult jokers and for a while mostly had only +chips until Swashbuckler showed up. I knew it was very very risky, but I then grabbed the Eternal Egg just to try and get ANY kind of scaling going.

I actually had Astronomer for a while, but of course didn't get nearly as many planet cards as I had hoped; the planet voucher didn't show up until super late. Near the end I swapped Astronomer for Acrobat because I was falling behind the curve and needed any kind of boost I could get.

I wanted to swap over to High Card, but I kept getting Flush planet cards so I ended up sticking with that all the way until the end.

Frankly I thought I was hosed when Cerulean Bell came up, and I did have to play some High Card, but I lucked out and got to finish off with a Flush which blew past the ~60k I had left to go.

Scholtz posted:

Well, that may have been the easiest Gold Stake ever.

It didn't have the legs to get past Ante 12 or so but man did it chew through 1-8.

Desdinova posted:

I switched to beta branch after at least 2 weeks restarting gold stakes on checkered deck, 2nd attempt on the beta got my first win. Forgot a screenshot and still got a bit to unlock but the patch is allround better than the last version imho.

Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:

finally got my gold stake win with this deck, maybe the rarest cheevo (in terms of %) I've ever gotten for a steam game. after 90 hours and nothing left to unlock but a few more jokers, i think i might retire and try to forget this shameful phase of my life where I turned into a crusty old video poker addict

Infinitum posted:

This game is going to consume me

TwoStepBoog posted:

The wheel of fortune is not happy with me--that's okay, I'll still keep buying that garbage.

Veryslightlymad posted:

This card's effects broke me.

It has Holographic, so I definitely want to play it, yet it has a purple seal, so I definitely want to discard it, but it has steel, so I definitely want to hold onto it and not play it or discard it but it has holographic so------

FutonForensic posted:

Pwnstar posted:

The get murdered by casino security deck

WarEternal posted:

Well that was a close one.

e: jesus, blueprint+burglar is absolutely busted.

Darke GBF posted:

Like it or not, this is what peak performance looks like, ladies.



First shop had the card that gives you three dollars and deletes the card if your first discard is only one card, and well, numbered cards can basically get hosed. By the end of that run, Erosion had +124 mult, and I had a 100% chance of playing the card my Idol joker pointed to that round. But that's only an X2 multiplier so deck topped out at ante 10 on red stake. Fun though.

Infinitum posted:

Quantum of Phallus posted:

Jossar posted:

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

Veryslightlymad posted:

Listen to me.
Never let anyone tell you what you can and cannot be.
Never let anyone tell you who you can and cannot be friends with.
It's all an illusion.

Onmi posted:

I continue to have extremely dumb Balatro runs.

Quantum of Phallus posted:

Check this poo poo out:

https://cohost.org/plumpan/post/4775485-me-having-grown-up

Waffle! posted:

This plays all the time in my head, might as well get funky with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJi6m7R8ADY

mystes posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tURydXfCVlQ

Elman posted:

I finally came up with a really strong deck for endless!





I got another duplicate right after this pic so that's 6 cards with steel and red stamp which also get retriggered by the negative Mime. At the same time all of my J's (many of them glass) get retriggered too which means a lot of base mult before the steel kicks in (and very high chip value from the +chips joker). If I can get more glass/steel and hand size and a good multiplier joker to replace my +chips joker, then we'll really be in business!

Anyway I just started endless let's see what's ne--

lunar detritus posted:

I made a balatro simulator, for those times when I have no idea how to order my cards and it's my only hand left.
https://buffoonery.online

It's still a work in progress so please let me know if it's too broken. I have mostly tested it with early saves so I'm really curious if it holds up for high level hands.

Scholtz posted:

This screenshot has a lot of funny aspects.

Kuros posted:

Jezza of OZPOS posted:

Got punched in the face so I bought this to feel better and uh

Sockser posted:

Blueprint? Brainstorm?
Who needs 'em?
Not me.




And then one ante later,

Jezza of OZPOS posted:

its so funny to me that ff7 rebirth came out, I threw 130 hours into it, wouldn't shut up about it, cried a couple of times, felt incredible catharsis and joy from playing it, and I'm still probably going to give my GOTY to the poker game that looks like it was designed to run on a VGA monitor with absolutely no story whatsoever

Kuros posted:

Veryslightlymad posted:

Did you know
Luchador has to be sold at the boss. Either that, or there are bosses it won't work on.

El Jeffe posted:

Was watching the X-Files and

https://i.imgur.com/ubyKr7d.mp4

DACK FAYDEN posted:

Aces can be low, I did a A2345 entirely out of curiosity. They still give ten chips, too.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

Aces can be low, I did a A2345 entirely out of curiosity. They still give ten chips, too.

Artelier posted:

who's your favourite joker and why is it yorick (i still haven't unlocked every one but this guy is a beast)

Countblanc posted:

could someone explain Stone cards to me, as if I was a particularly slow child? i've read the description like a dozen times and still don't fully get what they do and don't do.

Jossar posted:

They don't count towards poker hand status because they have no suit or number, so if you were trying to set up a flush and only had 4 clubs and a Stone Card, then you're screwed.

Jossar posted:

stone cards

Discord announcement posted:

Demo Pause & Playtest channel
Hello @everyone , I want to announce 2 big updates:

The demo will be paused at the end of the week (Friday or Saturday). It will be available again before Steam Next Fest in October - with a ton of new updates. I am pausing the demo because the release for Balatro is still many months away and focusing on playtesting and content is more important at this stage than getting it out there for everyone to play.

I understand this is frustrating because the release doesn't line up with when many of you want to start playing, but know that I have my game's best interest in mind and I am in it for the long haul.


With the upcoming release of 0.8.8 - a fairly major update - I am making a playtester-only channel for future announcements that pertain to the playtest.
If you are a playtester, please click on the button below to join the channel
If you are a demo player, you can join but you will be just be getting notifications about content updates for the playtest.

I appreciate all the support and the kind words, thank you all for your understanding and patience. Know that I am working around the clock to get this game ready for release ❤️🃏

quote:

Update 0.8.8

Changes:
-Added new Arcana Pack to replace tarot reading, with 3 different versions
Arcana Pack (default) gives 1 of 2 random tarot cards to be used immediately
Jumbo Arcana Pack gives 1 of 3 random tarot cards to be used immediately
Mega Arcana Pack gives 1 of 4 random tarot cards to be used immediately
The charm tag now gives a Mega Arcana Pack
Crystal ball now upgrades Arcana pack to Jumbo Arcana Pack
Omen Globe now upgrades Jumbo Arcana Pack to Mega Arcana Pack
-Added new Celestial Pack to replace planetarium, with 3 different versions
Celestial Pack (default) gives 1 of 2 random planet cards to be used immediately
Jumbo Celestial Pack gives 1 of 3 random planet cards to be used immediately
Mega Celestial Pack gives 1 of 4 random planet cards to be used immediately
The meteor tag now gives a Mega Celestial Pack
Telescope now upgrades Celestial pack to Jumbo Celestial Pack
Observatory now upgrades Jumbo Celestial Pack to Mega Celestial Pack
-All normal packs have 4 unique pack arts (4 for celestial and 4 for arcana)
-All Jumbo and mega packs each have 2 unique pack arts (2 for celestial and arcana jumbo, another 2 each for mega)
-Updated tutorial
-Added new separate area for consumeable cards only (tarots and planets), up to 2 cards
-reduced base Joker slots to 5 for base game
-Changed Steel cards - now they give +5 mult when held in hand. No longer gives any xmult (same as old Glass cards)
-Changed Glass Cards - now they give +10 mult with a 1 in 5 chance to be destroyed when played
-Changed Steel Joker - now gives extra +10 mult for steel cards held in hand
-Changed Glass Joker - now gains X0.5 for every glass card that is destroyed (starts at X1)
-Changed Joker Stencil - now gives X1 mult per empty joker slot (Stencil counts as empty)
-Changed Marble Joker - now gives 1 Stone card per round
-Changed Certificate - now swaps running tally of Chips and Mult when gold seal card is playe and scores
-Changed Throwback - now it gives X1 Mult + X0.25 Mult for every skipped blind
-Wee joker now gains 10 chips per 2 instead of 20 chips
-Hit the Road now gives 0.5X mult per discarded jack instead of 1X
-Satellite now give $3 per planet used instead of $4
-Updated all Joker rarities to be more representative of their quality
84% chance for common
12% chance for Uncommon
4% chance per rare
-Buffed level up bonus for most planet cards
-Nerfed many Tarot cards
Emperor spawns 2 instead of 3 cards
Hermit doubles money up to $20 from $25
Wheel of fortune now 1 in 6 instead of 1 in 4
Strength now improves 2 instead of 3 card ranks
Hanged man now destroys up to 2 instead of 3 cards
Death now only converts 1 card into a rightmost card instead of 2
The star, moon, sun and world cards all convert 2 instead of 3 cards to their respective suggestions
-Changed ability of the fool card - it now gives you a copy of the most recent planet or tarot card used in the current run, The Fool excluded
-Buffed various Tags
Increased odds of negative, foil, holo, polychrom by 1
Increased handy tag from 2 to 3 hands
Increased garbage tag from 2 to 3 discards
Gold seal tag and enhanced tag both now create $1 cards in shop
-Increased game difficulty (Ante scales chips more)
-Modified Glass Joker to be unlocked when you have 8 or more glass cards in your deck
-Modified Steel Joker to be unlocked by default
-Modified smeared joker to be unlocked when your deck has 3 wild cards instead of 8
-Added description text to show the playing card enhancement for debuffed cards
-Adjusted cost of tarot cards from 5 to 4
-Adjusted cost of planet cards from 3 to 4
Bugfixes:
-Cloud saving should work
-Fixed a bug where defeating a final boss was not discovering it in your collection
-Fixed a bug where vouchers were showing up in the shop multiple times with the Voucher Tag
-Fixed a bug where debuffed jacks being discarded were still giving Hit the Road bonus Xmult
-Fixed a bug where duplicated wee joker and duplicated half jokers were very long
-Fixed a bug where resetting profile was still causing many unlocks to occur
-Fixed a bug where resetting profile was not also resetting the deck selection memory
-Potentially fixed a bug where some shop cards were showing up twice even without ring master
-Fixed a bug where wee joker was sliding all the way to the right of the joker area with 28+ jokers
-Fixed a bug where boss can still be selected before reroll tag applies
-Fixed a bug where card was randomly floating in the middle of screen - debuffed gold seal

grate deceiver posted:

I've clocked 9 hours already and I hate it. I hate that it keeps teasing me with cool new jokers that I don't get to play. Just let me give you money already goddamnit

MJeff posted:

This game rocks. I've seen people say it could be a new Slay the Spire in terms of longevity and based on how often I find myself going "goddamn I wish I was playing Balatro right now", I'm kinda coming around to it.

One small gripe I have is that I feel like Royal Flush is really underpowered relative to how much effort you have to put in to get it. I feel like it almost takes less effort to produce a deck that can consistently play Flush Houses and that hands VOMITS out points relatively.

Showing me cool looking pictures of Jokers and not even telling me what they do so I can't even fantasize about possible builds is cancel culture, in my opinion.

Pigbuster posted:

Note that they don't loop around, though; QKA23 doesn't work.

Cavauro posted:

tell them to put the demo back up until there is a release date. this is important

Snooze Cruise posted:

oh that twitch thing is going on.

wonder how the key giveaway thing would work, could i time it to just jump in the twitch of whoever is in the lead in the last second and get lucky and grab a key? i dunno how twitch works.

MJeff posted:

Top score is currently 145 mil. I think this one might be over.