[Balatro] So I'll tell you all the story about the Poker and the rougelike

MNC Dover

Ended that last deck at 7.5 million best hand in Ante 11 with 31 Flushes. The "Water" boss got me (start with no Discards), but I did get close. No doubt the next Ante would have been my last.

On the plus side, I encountered my first Legendary card. That's pretty cool.

The Zombie Penguin

I still haven't managed to play a 1 mill hand at all - not sure if I'm getting unlucky, or I just haven't had the right combo of things come along.

MNC Dover

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

I still haven't managed to play a 1 mill hand at all - not sure if I'm getting unlucky, or I just haven't had the right combo of things come along.

You'll get there.

Beasteh

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

The variance in this game is immense. Ridiculously immense. Good for a lark, but I'm up to 10+ different decks won with now (off hand - Red, blue, yellow, green, blue, magic, ghost, black, checked, abandoned) and I'm not seeing myself playing this as more than an idle I feel like doing something dumb type thing. It's especially bad sub round 3-4, which is about when it feels like you're usually online enough to simply bowl the rest of the game over.

The confluence of basically needing to win round 1 on the first hand (unless you get a good skip option, another point of variance), then the immense variance in quality of the shops offerings, ontop of the very random nature of poker itself is well, a lot.

So far the most reliable strategies seem to be going in on face cards, aces, or flushes (shoutout to hack, Fibonacci and similar) based on what early stuff you get, then sculpting your deck to match.

Straights seem to be nigh impossible to get going reliably - there's some cool support cards, but they're less reliable than flushes, and they don't play nice at all with the various tarot or spectral sculpting options, which can rapidly see you playing five flushes consistently - and it's much easier to abuse things like red seal <Whatever> when you're going in on a single card type

(Is there actually a better scoring hand than five flushes? I've seen flush houses, but nothing else).

I'm working through the later difficulties and my playstyle has changed from trying to make my start work to scumming for specific jokers/tags which give me the best winrate, in true binding of Isaac/slay the spire fashion

Boring but it gets results

cursedking

going for flushes and adjusting to whatever "turn cards into this suit" I come across has been pretty reliable for me. Some runs are doomed, especially when i'm trying for that specifically, but I also definitely win more than i lose and getting million chip hands towards the end becomes more of a certainty. The main thing is to find some jokers that will start multiplying mult and then find ways to retrigger. Like in my best ever run I had this setup

So the ballot joker retriggers the first scored card, which was always a face card because i had turned most of my deck into a specific suit's face cards, and my flush level was very high. As this is the first face card, it gets x2 mult. Then it gets x2 mult again because the blueprint joker is copying the polaroid joker. The black/white card makes all face cards retrigger, so the card retriggers its own score and also the x4 from the polaroid/blueprint. Then the card retriggers again because the napkin joker is copying the ballot joker.

You can see in this screenshot that I scored 29 million chips in 2 hands. I don't think I had extra hand vouchers or anything.

Gnizmo

cursedking wrote: »

going for flushes and adjusting to whatever "turn cards into this suit" I come across has been pretty reliable for me. Some runs are doomed, especially when i'm trying for that specifically, but I also definitely win more than i lose and getting million chip hands towards the end becomes more of a certainty. The main thing is to find some jokers that will start multiplying mult and then find ways to retrigger. Like in my best ever run I had this setup

So the ballot joker retriggers the first scored card, which was always a face card because i had turned most of my deck into a specific suit's face cards, and my flush level was very high. As this is the first face card, it gets x2 mult. Then it gets x2 mult again because the blueprint joker is copying the polaroid joker. The black/white card makes all face cards retrigger, so the card retriggers its own score and also the x4 from the polaroid/blueprint. Then the card retriggers again because the napkin joker is copying the ballot joker.

You can see in this screenshot that I scored 29 million chips in 2 hands. I don't think I had extra hand vouchers or anything.

I just want to add the odd note that it is possible to have the Blueprint and Napkin joker copying the same card. I don't know if that would have fucked your setup any because ones that complex are to intricate and delicate for me to eyeball out. Just putting it out there in case others don't know that a copy of a copy works.

The Zombie Penguin

Purple stake and 1 mil hand unlocked.

Beasteh wrote: »

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

The variance in this game is immense. Ridiculously immense. Good for a lark, but I'm up to 10+ different decks won with now (off hand - Red, blue, yellow, green, blue, magic, ghost, black, checked, abandoned) and I'm not seeing myself playing this as more than an idle I feel like doing something dumb type thing. It's especially bad sub round 3-4, which is about when it feels like you're usually online enough to simply bowl the rest of the game over.

The confluence of basically needing to win round 1 on the first hand (unless you get a good skip option, another point of variance), then the immense variance in quality of the shops offerings, ontop of the very random nature of poker itself is well, a lot.

So far the most reliable strategies seem to be going in on face cards, aces, or flushes (shoutout to hack, Fibonacci and similar) based on what early stuff you get, then sculpting your deck to match.

Straights seem to be nigh impossible to get going reliably - there's some cool support cards, but they're less reliable than flushes, and they don't play nice at all with the various tarot or spectral sculpting options, which can rapidly see you playing five flushes consistently - and it's much easier to abuse things like red seal <Whatever> when you're going in on a single card type

(Is there actually a better scoring hand than five flushes? I've seen flush houses, but nothing else).

I'm working through the later difficulties and my playstyle has changed from trying to make my start work to scumming for specific jokers/tags which give me the best winrate, in true binding of Isaac/slay the spire fashion

Boring but it gets results

Thing is in Slay the Spire, at least on A20, I don't tend to just wipe out in the same way. While I wipe out in act 1 a decent bit, that's a: I see act 1 the most, and b: poor in fight decisions death of a thousand cutsing me.

Balatro is so compressed that it really aggravates the randomness. It's actively nuts to me you can not see jokers for all of an ante because the store felt like showing you planet cards and tarot cards. Likewise with the skip bonuses, the sheer variety of those and the power they offer is all over the place.

cursedking

I had to do a blink at the score to make sure I was reading the commas correctly

5.9 BilLLiOn chip hand at the 8 Ante

edit: this has progressed to the point where my score is scientifically notated. 6.604e11

Aioua

jeez, it took 22 hours but i finally saw my first legendary

Satsumomo

The first two decks so far seem to be some of the hardest to get anything decent going early. I still haven't beat the blue card deck (I think? It's the + discards one) but have been pretty consistent with all of the rest.

Peewi

I'm at purple stake with the checkered deck and I can't seem to get a run going.

A lot of the time I've got fuck all by the second boss blind and die or start over.

I don't think I've been past ante 6.

Gnizmo

I have almost beaten the orange stakes, but keep getting betrayed by bad luck. I had one run that was going fantastically. No major hands, but a really great grind where I could consistently beat blinds in 3 hands that scaled up with everything. Got to ante 8 with one random joker being nullified every turn. I just needed the game to pick one of the 2 weaker jokers twice in 6 rounds. I missed out by a small 40k because it fucked my strongest joker twice, and only once the weakest parts of my combo. It might have been the jankiest set of jokers I have ever tried though, so that was fun.

Hiker, Blue Joker, Supernova, Throwback (2x strength), and Green Joker (polychrome) being the team to damn near get the job done. Green Joker being the anchor offering +38ish multi and a multiplier in one card. I was shocked at what a work horse Hiker was as well with a lot of cards worth 30 chips a piece.

The Zombie Penguin

If you're lucky enough to see scaling chip jokers early - Square, Hiker etc they do an insane amount of work.

Aioua

An early hiker can really pay off, yeah.
Especially if you can get any additional triggers going.
I had a run once with where i got the seltzer twice and by the end of it most of my cars were over +50 chips.

The Zombie Penguin

Peewi wrote: »

I'm at purple stake with the checkered deck and I can't seem to get a run going.

A lot of the time I've got fuck all by the second boss blind and die or start over.

I don't think I've been past ante 6.

Just crushed purple stake here.

Gambled on the eternals paying off since i was checkered deck, then managed to trade out Ramen and one other joker i dont evenrember to get The Tribe, Blackboard and The Family. at which point cash went to standard packs and tarot packs to figure out which card was going to be my four-of buddy. Which ended up being Black jack. Ended the run with 11 Black Jacks in my deck, 1 heart jack, andm ost of the Black Jacks were bonus cards, so smashing the final "Random joker is disabled per hand" was prettyy easy

Gnizmo

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

If you're lucky enough to see scaling chip jokers early - Square, Hiker etc they do an insane amount of work.

I have never had a ton of luck with them, but I might just be paying the price from skipping so much, Definitely something that just doesn't work out at higher difficulties.

Edit: I finally unlocked the last difficulty. Pfft yeah right. Oddly it is a lot less detrimental than previous tiers if you ask me. It is another annoying hurdle rather than fun new element though.

DarkPrimus

Abandoned Deck, Red Difficulty Win:

Ice Cream
+55 Chips, -5 Chips for every hand played

Holographic Arrowhead
+10 Mult; Played cards with Spade suit give +50 Chips when scored.

Bloodstone
1 in 3 chance for played cards with Heart suit to gives X2 Mult when scored.

Baseball Card
Uncommon Jokers each give X1.5 Mult (3 Uncommon Jokers in set for 3X1.5)

Throwback
X0.25 Mult for each Blind skipped this run (Currently X4.5 Mult)

Negative Scholar
+1 Joker Slot; Played Aces gives +20 chips and +4 Mult when scored

I got Ice Cream during the goddamn Ante 1, but my combo came together so quickly with a lucky double free Mega Buffon Pack that I just skipped to the boss pretty much every Ante.

I've been bouncing between the Abandoned and Checkered Decks trying to get a Green Stakes win, but no joy yet. I've completed a couple of Challenges, but I'm still a bit gun-shy about playing those now knowing that I can't unlock anything for my Collection while engaging with them.

The Zombie Penguin

Gnizmo wrote: »

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

If you're lucky enough to see scaling chip jokers early - Square, Hiker etc they do an insane amount of work.

I have never had a ton of luck with them, but I might just be paying the price from skipping so much, Definitely something that just doesn't work out at higher difficulties.

Edit: I finally unlocked the last difficulty. Pfft yeah right. Oddly it is a lot less detrimental than previous tiers if you ask me. It is another annoying hurdle rather than fun new element though.

Yeah, I feel like the stakes just really aggravate the game's flaws, rather than emphasize the game's strnegths. Like eternal jokers are cool. Loosing hands and discards should push the tactical element, but also act as economeny punishers in a game that already has a very tight economy. Antes rising should encourage more stratergy, but the tight economy and deeply limited shop actively fights this, and basically turns it into a slot machine.

Like this was my winning Orange stake deck just now -



All that's actually really going on is abusing flushes with multiplier cards, which are insanely strong because they're exponential - you just need some way to prime the pump so to speak (And like, Jupiter, etc exist, it's not too hard to create some chips/multiplier and set things off). And the reason most of my orange stake attempts lost was... they didn't see any good multiplier cards!

Peewi

Fun discovery: Madness upgrades even if it can't destroy a joker. So it goes well with eternal jokers. It goes really well with eternal copying jokers!.

cooljammer00

Is it better to be more diverse with my options, or focus on one thing? Like do I want to make one type of hand super high level, or make several different types of hands middle level?

Also I think my issue so far is that I need to get better at leaning into whatever strategy the game is nudging me towards based on whatever cards/Jokers I am offered, instead of going for something specific and then being SOL when it doesn't work.

Also they should put this game on phones.

cooljammer00

Also what's the deal with Hieroglyph? I was checking Reddit and I guess people were like "It's another round of relatively easy blinds to farm money/cards/etc" but also you lose a hand permanently.

MNC Dover

Why am I just now finding out that you can make a Straight with Aces acting as a 1? Like, I knew in some card games that Aces can act as a 1 or 11, but I never specifically saw it spelled out in this game. Now I know!

minor incident

I was actually a little disappointed the game doesn’t accept wraparound straights.

Seems like the perfect kind of goofy hand that should be valid in a game that accepts Five Flushes and shit.

milski

cooljammer00 wrote: »

Also what's the deal with Hieroglyph? I was checking Reddit and I guess people were like "It's another round of relatively easy blinds to farm money/cards/etc" but also you lose a hand permanently.

If you can buy Hieroglyph, your current setup can already clear the ante you go back to. Losing a hand is an econ penalty, but in a lot of cases it's a relatively small one unless you bought Hieroglyph on like, Ante 1 or Ante 2, and in exchange you get more time to find a good Joker or scale the stuff in your hand that scales.

I don't think that you always windmill slam pick it, especially if you already have reduced hand #s or low discards, but in most cases you're going to be able to improve your Jokers by way more than the 33/50% of chips you need to make up for the lost hand and three rounds of interest will make up for the 10 dollars tag + 1 fewer dollar per hand.

Also, the post-hieroglyph voucher sets you back another ante but only loses a discard, and while that's still valuable (especially with a lack of hands to play), that really gives you time to spin up to a winning pile of jokers.

Aioua

cooljammer00 wrote: »

Also what's the deal with Hieroglyph? I was checking Reddit and I guess people were like "It's another round of relatively easy blinds to farm money/cards/etc" but also you lose a hand permanently.

In beta it didn't have the drawbacks, so that was a deliverate balance choice. I guess I'd say for the other vouchers there's at least a question if whether its benefit is worth the $10 given your current run. Heiroglyph without the hand cost is basically always worth it. You're going to earn your $10 back and get three extra rounds of scaling

cooljammer00

Blank is a weird voucher too. It sounds like the only reason to get it is for a cheevo/unlock? I did the thing where you buy it and restart the game over and over

Corporal Carl

cooljammer00 wrote: »

Blank is a weird voucher too. It sounds like the only reason to get it is for a cheevo/unlock? I did the thing where you buy it and restart the game over and over

Blank unlocks something that is insanely useful if you've bought it 10 times in your total number of games.

Like Gros Michel (the banana), if it breaks, the better version (Cavendish) can appear.
When you buy Blank, you have a chance for one of the best vouchers in the game to appear.

So yes, always buy Blank (if you can't afford it and it doesn't cripple your economy.

discrider

My apparently 5th run appears to be travelling smoothly.
Got sort of infinite money with To the moon generating $20 interest each round, and $29 worth of jokers from the present joker (now sold) feeding temperance.
Should be slightly more thrifty to hit that $400 target, but constellation and 3D visor jokers demand to be fed.
Got a late pants joker that I'm trying to bring online, after which probably be selling card sharp (holographic, +10 mult) in pursuit of something that comes online in the first hand.

cooljammer00

Corporal Carl wrote: »

cooljammer00 wrote: »

Blank is a weird voucher too. It sounds like the only reason to get it is for a cheevo/unlock? I did the thing where you buy it and restart the game over and over

Blank unlocks something that is insanely useful if you've bought it 10 times in your total number of games.

Like Gros Michel (the banana), if it breaks, the better version (Cavendish) can appear.
When you buy Blank, you have a chance for one of the best vouchers in the game to appear.

So yes, always buy Blank (if you can't afford it and it doesn't cripple your economy.

Oh that's what I did, buy it/restart 10 times to unlock the special card. But I didn't realize buying it in the game had a function beyond that/was a condition for better cards to show up.

MNC Dover

How often do y'all skip blinds, especially early on? I almost never skip a blind and I wonder if I should be doing that more often.

minor incident

MNC Dover wrote: »

How often do y'all skip blinds, especially early on? I almost never skip a blind and I wonder if I should be doing that more often.

If I get the “get $15 when you beat the boss blind” one on the first ante, I always skip that one.

The Zombie Penguin

MNC Dover wrote: »

How often do y'all skip blinds, especially early on? I almost never skip a blind and I wonder if I should be doing that more often.

It really really depends. On higher difficulty (I'm up to gold stake), skipping a blind (especially small blind) is very appealing if it'll give me jokers, give me 15 after the boss blind, make the next store free

If the boss is cards this ante can't be used again, that helps motivate a skip. If I can combo something like poly/foil joker with free shop that's a lot of value.

cooljammer00

I never used to skip blinds, now I do it more often if I just want the tag. Didn't make sense to me at first why I would skip a round of the game.

Surfpossum

Made it to ante 12 with this nonsense:



It was so much work! Move the blueprint next to the one that adds a card so that the xmult for each card added gets two upgrades each blind, then move blueprint next to burned to level up high card twice, then move it back to the hologram for about x169 (just from those two) towards the end

Luckily actually playing the hands just involved making sure I wasn't accidentally ruining the high card

Gnizmo

Corporal Carl wrote: »

cooljammer00 wrote: »

Blank is a weird voucher too. It sounds like the only reason to get it is for a cheevo/unlock? I did the thing where you buy it and restart the game over and over

Blank unlocks something that is insanely useful if you've bought it 10 times in your total number of games.

Like Gros Michel (the banana), if it breaks, the better version (Cavendish) can appear.
When you buy Blank, you have a chance for one of the best vouchers in the game to appear.

So yes, always buy Blank (if you can't afford it and it doesn't cripple your economy.

In I don't want to count how many runs I have yet to see the second tier blank voucher. I am severely questioning why I buy blank vouchers at this point. This is absolutely a me frustration, but I wanted to vent for a moment.

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

MNC Dover wrote: »

How often do y'all skip blinds, especially early on? I almost never skip a blind and I wonder if I should be doing that more often.

It really really depends. On higher difficulty (I'm up to gold stake), skipping a blind (especially small blind) is very appealing if it'll give me jokers, give me 15 after the boss blind, make the next store free

If the boss is cards this ante can't be used again, that helps motivate a skip. If I can combo something like poly/foil joker with free shop that's a lot of value.

For me it will also depend on the combo I am using. For a lot of the higher difficulty stuff I found anything that slowly built more and more power to be the most reliable. So depending on where I was on that scale would directly inform when I would skip. I have had some runs where I got a lot of power with the abandoned deck using Supernova and the joker that does +1 per hand with no face cards.

The Zombie Penguin

The further the game goes, the more skipping is a mistake, just because of interest and cards like Square Joker or Castle existing.

minor incident

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

The further the game goes, the more skipping is a mistake, just because of interest and cards like Square Joker or Castle existing.

Yeah, after ante 5 I basically never skip. The one exception is if the boss blind has a roll that truly fucks my build and I see a “reroll the boss blind” tag

The Zombie Penguin

Gold Stake down. dumped a bunch of cards to afford blueprint, and ran just off Blueprint Space Joker for a while, which got me to level 18 flushes by the end of the game. Then i found Baseball Card, and well... It's a dumb card. Notably, unlike every other X multplier card, it triggers 1.5x *per* uncommon.

So it'd go 1.5x, 1.5x 1.5 bringing a flush mutli up to 128.5... and then blueprint would do it all again, so you'd get up to a x432.8 modifer ontop of a base of 290 chips. The rest was just finding various ways to push things over the top, which ended up being not hard. I wish this had a proper run history, because this run was at least *kinda* interseting in the decision making at points (Therew ere some tactical skips to preserve the very powerful turtle bean, for instance).

At this point though i'm absolotuey dialing the diffuclty back down and fucking around for lols,and we'll see how long that holds me. I'm very curious about balance patches for this

Jam Warrior

You keep talking about balance patches like they’re expected but I don’t think the game wants to be as much of a skill challenge based thing as you want it to be. Its big cited inspiration is a literal slot machine building game (Luck be a Landlord), not Slay the Spire, which the creator claims to have only played briefly to see how it handled button controls for card selection.

I certainly personally have no interest in it tightening up any kind of balance. Just add more crazy stuff for me to luck into and watch big numbers go brrrrrr.

The Zombie Penguin

Balance can be to enable more crazy stuff. Like if the game wants to be enabling more crazy stuff, that's the direction it wants to go, that's great! Please tweak things so that some of these are reasonble ways to go nuts, because stuff like the Lucky Joker is just a well, joke, being multiplie layers of rng to maybe scale. Balance doesnt neccesarily mean it bieng tightend up like slay the pire - it means making stuff feel like it's equally worth taking.

Equally, they can also make it so that Ante 1/2 aren't so crapshoots to survive - which gives more chances for the game to let you do the fun pop off stuff.