Joker? BALATRO know her!

Apologies for the tortured title.

So far I've beaten the 8th ante for 4 decks, and IIRC they've all been flush-oriented (which has been a pretty reliable strategy). I did find a Joker that creates a stone card every time you pick a blind and I realized how well those can work (e.g. synergizing with Jokers that give bonuses to deck size).

However, the black deck has been a pretty significant difficulty spike, and you have to get your engine going in the first couple antes if you're going to make a decent run. I'm starting to think that buying vouchers for it isn't a great use of money UNLESS it's the one that gives you a +1 to hands.

I'm gonna have to get those aren't I? You're going to make me

There's a compelling argument to make in favor of NOT getting the game, it's not too late for you.

Cosign

Real talk: flush decks boring. Pair and pair adjacent desks far more fun

I agree on both counts!

I finally beat ante 8 with the black deck -- basically followed the tips from this post. The joker set that I had was chip bonus for face cards, the joker that makes all cards a face card, chip bonus for pairs, Supernova, Fortune Teller (which I think was enhanced with an XMult), and an XMult for pairs, and I spammed pairs as much as possible. I also picked up a voucher that rerolls the boss blind (which I used on the extra big boss blind) and still just squeaked through it.

Black deck is a challenge that I just don't enjoy as much as some of the other decks. I keep cracking away at it just to finish up the basic difficulty level but it's kind of a drag to play by comparison.

Flush-focused runs make a lot of sense to get through the lower difficulties but you really need to pump up their hand level to make a dent with flush on ante 9+. I've had winning results for ante 1-8 from pairs or two pairs if I get the right jokers. Blueprint and Brainstorm jokers seem to be key for the highest scores.

black stake even worse than black deck imo

I beat the black stake a lot more quickly than I did the deck, but maybe that's because I've internalized the basic strategies better.

Also it'll be 2 weeks tomorrow since I bought it and I've put 61 hours into the game.

my condolences

big patch incoming

You can opt into the beta to get the patch early, which is what I did, and may have been what helped me beat the purple stake. Orange stake still kind of sucks right now, though.

I bought this a few days ago. Does winning get easier when you unlock more? Because it took me quite a while to win a single game (with the blue deck).

Current strategies I'm using are having a single-suit-heavy deck for flushes and getting the shiny jokers for free chips and mults.
Planet cards seem like they cost too much to be worth it until I am getting the maximum interest every blind.
I'm also not skipping blinds unless the the tag is really good, like a negative joker.

The higher level jokers and vouchers make a big difference but you'll still lose if the cards don't fall your way.

Doing a seeded run can be instructive... playing the same setup multiple times can make it obvious what you should have done in that scenario if you had perfect knowledge

100,000,000 chips in a single hand and finally reached ante 13 today, beating black stake in the process. Ended up with all multiplier jokers. A glass card broken, steel card in deck, campfire and blueprint.

The secret is multipliers and rare cards! Also, check the collection to see how to unlock specific jokers. There are unlocks you won't get unless you are intentional (i.e. discard a royal flush, play four 7 of clubs etc.) those unlocks are pretty essential if you want to go big

Also, check the collection to see how to unlock specific jokers.

I'd already known about that but this was a good reminder -- unlocking some of these specific jokers has reintroduced some fun into the game.

I'm so pissed, I had a deck with like 12 jacks in it last night and could have got the "discard 5 jacks in a hand" joker but forgot it was a thing! Definitely good to keep going back and reminding yourself

Where are your priorities?!

I fell into one of those dazed stupors playing this last night. Even when I called it quits at 2am, lying in bed all I could hear was "dun dun dun dun, dun, dun, dun dun, dun *synth line rises*."

Okay so I wanted to see how people get those silly ante 40 decks and found this. I was so close on a real run! But the blasted observatory wouldn't show up :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3G5NhnfI1Y

Plasma deck a little silly broken

wow, that's nothing like what my games look like. amazing that this game is only 60 MB.

The music in this sounds like a balearic cover of "Nutshell" by Alice In Chains

Anywhere, I got this on Switch in the recent sale. Only just started playing, but j can see why people are feeling it

i think my favorite card is Ceremonial Dagger -- the one that kills the joker to the right for an increased multiplier.
on the other hand, madness (the one that eats random jokers) might be the worst card? it's madness. madness.

i got smeared joker yesterday and that's a crazy card too.

working my way thru the challenges, beat half so far
just tried that madness joker and it was an absolute disaster lol

I beat the orange stake with the ghost deck.

madness pretty terrible sadly. Ceremonial dagger would be an okay card if it ate the joker on the left. I find it pretty garbage in its current state

smeared joker great (except that it makes you play flushes which are kinda boring ngl)

Madness is a great early-game joker imo. It gains .5x every round even if you have no other jokers to feed it with.

I got it first round and thought I was finally going to unlock the "win with under 4 jokers" joker, but it doesn't scale well enough for the late rounds at higher stakes.

I also play primarily plasma deck where it's not as big a buff

Why does it matter which direction the Dagger eats? If it's because of Swashbuckler, they changed its behavior in the patch so that it can be anywhere.

I just had a run with Egg + Swashbuckler, that was an easy win.

xp Because you typically want to put your multipliers on the right, and they're your most valuable jokers.

I had egg + bull + a bunch of money generating jokers with the plasma deck and it weas the easiest win i've had. Game played itself. Also how I finally got the $400 joker!

By multipliers I mean the Xtimes mults. Not the standard multis

It's okay if you always have a buffer joker before you hit the Xtimes on the right. But the best decks have Xtimes on Xtimes. A good run beating higher stakes for me is normally a stock multi followed by as many Xtimes as possible. maybe a big chip generator on the far left. By the time I'm past ante 4 on a winning high stakes run, Dagger has become more of a hinderance than a help in my experience

Oh, I didn't know that the order mattered for scoring. I think there was a tutorial screen about that and then I forgot about it. Luckily I was usually putting the red X cards on the right anyway.

Likewise it took me a while to realize "first played card" was the leftmost one and not the first one I clicked on.

thinking of making a clone of balatro but using cribbage rules. i get excited when i get hands like 8876.

The only placement tbat matters is having your xtimes on the right. You want to multiply the multi when it's at it's biggest number. Can also matter for poly/glass cards in the hand if your jokers are adding multi to cards played. I place my glass/poly's on the far right when playing out of habbit even when it doesn't matter.

One more voucher to unlock (stupid playing card one) and I'll have a 100% completed collection of everything. I really went overboard with this one

Wait, you can move the dagger to the left after the round has started! of course i'll eventually mess up and have it eat a legendary.

That's exactly what's happened to me every time I've had it with a decent XMult, which is 2-3 times now.

how often are folks skipping blinds? i've probably only done it once so far.. should i be taking advantage of this mechanic?

True abanana!

I only skip with the higher stakes where you get no cash from the small blind. Do love me a free shop in the early game or a negative joker tag when it comes up

yeh definitely worth checking the tag to see if it is worth it to skip - sometimes you get a lot of money or a free mega buffoon pack when you have no jokers

Yeah skipping really only becomes essential with harder stakes where you feel the money constraints the most (I've been playing the beta, which gives you the joker for free instead of making you pay for it). In the lower stakes, you can earn enough just playing blinds to buy what you need.

I am skipping more often now. There is a great joker called Throwback that gives you more red multiplier every time you skip a round.

I find a lot of the details on the various packs quite hard to read when playing handheld on the Switch. I switched off the CRT effect though, and that has helped a little. I recommend

balatro!!

quick q, longer explanation. the q: can ya'll recommend some good videos/channels for maybe...intermediate players?

longer explanation: it's easy to find beginner strategy and tips, and it's easy to find people who can make it to ante 16 and rack up quadrillions of points who will show you how to do the impossible. i'm somewhere in the middle i think. i've logged about 95 hours, 127/150 jokers unlocked, have defeated almost all of the decks. i still need to finish zodiac deck, i haven't gotten past green stake yet, and i've only done a couple of the challenges.

example of what i keep finding and don't want:

https://i.imgur.com/akyAgKo.png

it's not the clickbait headline, it's the 44 minute length of video, and knowing that the one secret i need is splintered into hundreds of little secrets that he's going to haphazardly mention throughout the video. i just can't do it. i've never clicked on it, i just can't do it.

is there a youtuber out there who is like "here's a really fun and helpful trick - i'll tell you all about it 2 minutes"

actually a texts guide recommendation is what i'm looking for i think lol

(ok, maybe i can just let this guy be my guru: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7cBL6MvZyw)

The videos aren't short, but I've learned a lot from this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn-z2hdH1Co

gotta make videos longer to get more ad breaks
it sucks

For folks who've beaten the gold stake: How quick are you to start a new run if you don't get certain Jokers in the first ante?

also in the options menu

I heard that Joker order is important.

So there are +Mult an XMult jokers, the former which adds the Mult value and the latter which multiplies the Mult value (I needed a long time to tell the difference). So, you want to add all of your +Mults together before you multiply them.

Card order matters sometimes too (glass cards, polychrome) but I don't usually sweat that too much.

Beat the X-ray challenge, which can be a bit of a pain. The key for me was buffing high cards and getting Odd Todd and spamming 9s when I could.

i finally redeemed 10 blank vouchers ヾ( ˃ᴗ˂ )◞ • *✰

ヾ( ˃ᴗ˂ )◞ • *✰

Discovered every voucher to finally get 100% of collection. I think I may be done now. These challenge runs look painful

I'm stuck on orange stake. I think I just need a lucky run.

I spent a few days banging my head against the wall trying to get gold stake, getting to the very last boss bind a few times before looking up a guide. Read this, and got it after a couple runs. Would recommend

https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/s/hpbWg6iTIs

Honestly the biggest change came from not skipping any blinds (even though there is an incentive to in the first blind). Greater chances of getting a good joker = greater chances of winning. That and changing to high-card builds instead of putting all my eggs in a 5-card basket (full house, flush, straight) that would often not hit and kill my run

Yeah, I've learned a couple basic things lately:
- Decks built around high cards, buffed well enough, are almost fool-proof, unless you have some unlucky boss blinds.
- Mults are important in the early antes, but so are economy cards, ESPECIALLY jokers that get you a consistent income. No money = no purchases, which is duh, but it was a lesson that took a while for me to embrace. Delayed Gratification is probably one of the better ones, particularly because it synergizes well Green Joker.
- Red seals are great, even for cards you keep in your hands. They'll proc for gold cards AND steel cards (the latter of which, combined with Add a Mime joker (retrigger held cards), is essential to getting to ante 12 and/or breaking 100 million chips in 1 hand).
- An alternative approach that I've seen is to start hitting Tarots earlyish, because you want to start weeding out the cards that don't help you ASAP. However, I haven't had much success here, as I don't usually have enough money to get jokers that are good enough to sustain me through even the middle antes.

I've also just finished my collection, though I see there are achievements for Completionist+ (beat gold stake with every deck) and Completionist++ (add a gold sticker i.e. beat gold stake with every joker). No idea if that's something I want to do, though honestly this game transcends want and drives me towards reptilian need.

Lol last sentence otm. As a general rule, I don’t touch booster packs of any sort until I’ve got to the $25 threshold where I’m getting that max interest coming in each time. Happily go down to $0 for a joker that’s going in the early run, but I can’t see a situation where it’s worth it any type of booster pack (unless you get a hermit card! But then again, best to just save your money and not risk it)

it is a general rule though i.e. probably break it every 2nd run for a context appropriate buy. Joker booster packs not counting to this idea either.

Reptilian for sure. Just got "tiny hands" achievement. Now there's just three left: "complete every challenge run", "win with every deck on gold stakes difficulty", "Earn a gold sticker on every joker". The first two seem within the world of possibility. Don't even know how one would go about the last; that's just an insane ask

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong as I can't even beat blue deck. Last night I managed to get a Joker combo that felt totally OP for the first 6 antes, then the Boss Blind totally destroyed me on Ante 7 - couldn't even get close.

There's still a lot of luck involved, even for us Joker-brained folks! Keep at it!

Something that I've noticed is that if you have a blue seal in your hand when you beat a blind, the planet card that gets created is for the hand that you just played.

Yeah I wonder if that got changed in the patch? I only recently noticed it as well, and had a memory of the blue seal creating a random planet

I thought it was random too

Changed Blue Seal - now creates the planet card of the final poker hand played during the round

https://www.ign.com/wikis/balatro/Balatro_1.0.1_Patch_Notes

Nice, thanks!

I do like the change! Makes the blue seal more powerful

Yeah, I thought blue seal was the weakest of the three before this patch. Good balance

Oh these patch notes are making me feel like an idiot. I thought I was having some insane luck getting a buffoon pack to start every run since the patch lol. duh

the upcoming blinds visible from the boss shop is helpful. Few times it annoyed me not being able to plan that in the previous version. Making joker tags free is also great; so annoying to take the tag and then not be able to afford it because you didn't think it'd obviously cost like $200000000000 dollars to get it.

I should have read this. I didn't realise magician could be used on two cards now (still been using it on one). The midas and madness changes have really nerfed those cards. to-do list change actually makes it potentially useful now.... I won't comment on all these changes but damn, there's a lot of good fixes here!

I was playing plasma on one of the intermediate stakes and got a decent chip deck going, with an eternal Astronomer to try to buff the smaller hands. Then I got an Invisible Joker, and when I sold that, it cloned the Astronomer, eternal sticker and all. Died pretty much immediately after that, sad lulz.

Still can't quite seem to break the Ante 7 barrier, even with some fortunate builds. The Ante just goes through the roof and I get obliterated. I'll keep trying!

you'll get a build when you suddenly start hitting 100k per hand, then you'll be away. Keep looking for those stacking multipliers!

You don't want to get too attached to your deck: some jokers are viable only through the middle antes, and you'll want to replace them eventually, usually in favor of ones that don't have a cap on them, and for the really big hands, as many XMults as you can find.

Madness is pretty good fun, keep feeding him those other joker cards and watch your multiplier build!

dog latin do you have a certain kind of hand you're leaning on in these runs?

also, small comfort but as you play the game you'll keep unlocking more jokers and vouchers and other stuff, many of which make the game a little easier

dog latin do you have a certain kind of hand you're leaning on in these runs?

― z_tbd, Thursday, May 9, 2024 3:45 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ummm... not especially.. doesn't it all depend on what cards and boons you get? or am i missing an essential mechanic? I think I shut the game down halfway through the tutorial when i first booted it up, so i only learned about half of it

Madness doesn't need to eat other jokers to build. It's possible to win early stakes with a madness joker and some high hand levels.

Just finished a plasma deck run on the purple stake:

https://imgur.com/a/g2kkMmK

Bull + Blueprint + Brainstorm + Mail-in Rebate early on carried me very quickly through basically all the antes since I could triple my chip stack at any time. My only other Joker was Supernova, which I used to Mult high cards.

i can't believe i'm still playing this game. i'm way behind most people who have put in the time i have (about 120 hours), but i just beat blue stake with Abandoned Deck, so i suppose i'm trying to at least take down purple, orange, and gold stakes before i throw in the towel.

i haven't really used the madness card too much, but it really starts to come in handy once the eternal cards come into play! in my last run i had 4 eternal cards + madness, so every blind it would just gain X0.5 without destroying any of my (pretty weak) other jokers

Got all the way to the boss blind on ante 8. But it was The Wall (the one with the extra big ante). I got surprisingly close to beating it but alas...

Trying to complete gold stake with every deck (in my case plasma) has entirely killed my desire to play anymore.

Finally beat the red deck! Wahoo!

I think in this case I concentrated all my celestials on pair but using the joker that scores all the cards you play.
I also had the joker that gives you a bigger hand and no discards, which is pretty underrated in fact.
Then I had it retrigger face cards while adding a bunch of boons through steel and glass cards.
Well, it worked. It also meant that playing was a doddle - I just had to have a pair in my hand and I could just play my strongest cards next to them without having to think too much

This game is most fun when not having to think much imo. High-card build with bonkers jokers the best way about it

i finally started playing this instead of just watching my roommate play it. could not get past ante 6 with any deck... until last night, when my combo of jokers was so good i got to ante 12 with the red deck

my hand of choice was straight, which i upgraded to a ridiculous extent thanks to the space joker

I find straights the hardest hands to get consistently. I only bother with them on the deck with no face cards.

straight is pretty dang good if you get Four Fingers and Shortcut

i dunno, i seem to get straights more than things like four of a kind

straights are more likely than 4 of a kind, the hierarchy of scoring is in order of the probability, so flushes are slightly more rare than straights, full houses more rare than flushes etc. etc.

in poker, but not in a game where you can edit the decks

yes v true

The spectral card which changes all the cards to the same rank is very helpful for 4 and 5 of a kind, and potentially flush five as well

ok this game is ruining my life but i finally beat gold stake (with abandoned deck). that's the first time i ran across a Wee Joker (add +8 chips every time a 2 is scored) early on, and i combined it with DNA to create many, many 2s, and the Ride the Bus joker is perfect for abandoned deck so the mults were crackin

Wee Joker was adding 650+ chips by the end of ante 8!

sorry. this game...it's not right

This rocks so dang hard pic.twitter.com/xckNR6yvG7

— localthunk (@LocalThunk) May 15, 2024

Yeah the game was literally breaking my sleep cycles -- I'd wake up super-early (4-6am) without being able to go back to sleep because I *had* to play. I'm kind of glad gold stake turned me off because now my sleep has gotten loads better.