heh, i just had a fun one where i had two Castles (upgrades by +3 chips whenever you discard a suit (which changes every round)) thanks to an early ankh
got a smeared joker to make getting the right suit be even easier
by the end of ante 8 they were both over +400 chips, though it wasn't going to scale into the millions so i didn't try endless. Could get about 300k with a straight flush
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
One thing I think i noticed last night that I haven't yet verified is that the red seal will take effect not just when a card is played, but when a card is triggered period. So for instance a steel card will trigger twice. And by extension I think that means that foil/hologram/polychrome will also apply when steel triggers?
As far as I know, yes.
And if you have retrigger jokers like the one that retriggers face cards, or the Hack joker that retriggers 2s, 3s, 4s and 5s, well, be ready to see the game go bonkers.
One thing I think i noticed last night that I haven't yet verified is that the red seal will take effect not just when a card is played, but when a card is triggered period. So for instance a steel card will trigger twice. And by extension I think that means that foil/hologram/polychrome will also apply when steel triggers?
As far as I know, yes.
And if you have retrigger jokers like the one that retriggers face cards, or the Hack joker that retriggers 2s, 3s, 4s and 5s, well, be ready to see the game go bonkers.
The Hack + Fibbonacci = a fantastic combination.
Yes it does retrigger steel and all other things. It is essentially having a second copy of the card in play or in hand depending.
Also a note on how the multiplicative jokers act I have seen. They don't add together. Having 2 x3 jokers is not giving you a x6 to your multiplier. It is giving you a x9. I had the x5 legendary that I got to copy twice for a x125 to my multiplier score. Yes that run got stupid as well.
Finally beat the game's head in with the Black deck. That is an obnoxious fucking deck to win with, let me tell you now.
Riffraff i probably should have gotten rid of, but a free 50 chips is just really nice. As is having 17 aces, 6 kings (3 red seal steel)
Black deck feels by far the most prone to randomness - it took getting the right line up of skip bonuses and then shops that actually paid off to get it going anywhere. For a while it was a werid mishmash of Splash, Scary Face and the +to aces card.
So that's Yellow, Green, Black, Abandoned and Ghost deck wins so far.
Managed to beat Ante 11, unlocking my final voucher
I had the xMult for each glass card broken joker, the Cavendish, a Constellation with 40+ mult, a negative Queens give +13 mult, but most of all, the 2 cheaper rerolls vouchers and the Campfire joker.
I also had the more planets and more tarots in shop.
The campfire gives + x0.5 mult per card sold until the boss is beaten.
So it was buy and sell every planet and tarot in the shop, and then reroll.
When I got to Ante 11 the Seltzer joker (retrigger all cards for the next 10 played hands) appeared in the shop, which was insta-buy because almost all my cards enchanted.
So I beat the 14M boss
Highest hand was 14M so I'm still far away from unlocking the 100M joker.
But I am very happy!
I don't think I've seen the Cavendish. I've had Gros Michel several times. I assume one leads into the other somehow?
I don't remember what the unlock condition was, but it's
x3 mult. 1 in 1000 chance to be destroyed at the end of round.
It claims to be common, but I've only had it once.
I'm pretty sure that there's a secret requirement, you need to have had a a Gros Michel die first in your run before Cavendish can show up
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I decided to try to go for the $400 joker unlock.
I only spent enough money for jokers to get me through, so that I could reap interest rewards.
During Ante 1 I bought the Hieroglyph voucher, which took me back to Ante 0 (!), which had targets of 100, 150 and 200 to get, so I could easily complete them without jokers.
During Ante 2 I bought the Cave Painting voucher (which can only appear after you reach Ante 12 once), which took me back to Ante 1.
In the later Antes I got lucky and got the Flower and the Tree vouchers for maximum interest.
I also had the "To the moon" joker which gives $2 per $5 in hand, and I targeted it with a "Copy Leftmost" Joker so I felt confident I would reach the $400, because I had been extremely lucky.
This resulted in shenanigans like this :
I did not expect this :
So yeah, I got to $400 in Ante 6! And then the game gifted me the Cowboy Boots joker, which gives +3 Mult per $5 held in hand.
So I had a card that was worth +261 Mult
Around Ante 10 I had to start putting the boots in front, so goodbye to my +$40 per turn, or as I liked to say, my +24 Mult per turn
I died gloriously in Ante 11 against the 7M Small Blind; I had more than $950 in hand, so I had a card with +570 Mult.
Too bad I didn't have enough Mult multipliers.
So in a way I was extremely lucky to get this build running, but when it was set in motion, everything that passed was really bad.
It was fun!
The only joker I need to unlock is the $100M one, and that one is not easy
I had the game throw me the "Play only one hand" boss blind 3 times out of 5 runs, and in all 3 cases, it was either in the 1st or 2nd round where you will just not have the means to win with just one hand. Note that this is different than the "Play only one hand type" blind.
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).
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
I basically go all in on flushes almost every run because it seems to be the most reliable type of hand to hit even early on. There just seems to be plenty of tarot that add wildcards or convert suits that it’s always possible to narrow down to two suits pretty well within the first 3 antes.
Of course I’ve only actually won on two decks, so maybe my strategy isn’t all that great.
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
I basically go all in on flushes almost every run because it seems to be the most reliable type of hand to hit even early on. There just seems to be plenty of tarot that add wildcards or convert suits that it’s always possible to narrow down to two suits pretty well within the first 3 antes.
Of course I’ve only actually won on two decks, so maybe my strategy isn’t all that great.
I have settled for straights because it generally works out to be a bit more reliable, and the planet card is a bit stronger. I don't know if it is the most effective or not, but I win with it a lot.
0
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
The strongest strategy for consistency is high card.
I was actually toying with that idea one run but wasn’t sure if it scaled well enough through endgame, but maybe I should give it a shot.
I have definitely had some builds that could support this to a very high level. I think it requires enough specific cards that it isn't more reliable than building towards specific hands.
The thing is that regardless of what hands you build towards, you almost certainly need to get powerful jokers to make it work, and high card has the advantage of having a ton of powerful jokers to build towards it (+300 chips -2 hand size, +20 mult for small hands, etc.) while dodging basically every boss blind. The only jokers that don't really boost high card strats are either obvious run winning buildarounds you can pivot to or the hand/suit specific commons that are generally weak anyway.
Milski on
I ate an engineer
+1
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
I got flush to 1.6mm point hands and that seems to be where it falls apart.
Maybe I start running down the high card road for a bit to see if I can game this
The thing is that regardless of what hands you build towards, you almost certainly need to get powerful jokers to make it work, and high card has the advantage of having a ton of powerful jokers to build towards it (+300 chips -2 hand size, +20 mult for small hands, etc.) while dodging basically every boss blind. The only jokers that don't really boost high card strats are either obvious run winning buildarounds you can pivot to or the hand/suit specific commons that are generally weak anyway.
Eh. The Straight/Flush/etc multiplier cards can turn things around hard. So can the early ones that rewards straights and the like. This is before you get into how many chips you lose from even low scoring hands of cards. That says nothing of the cards that give, for example, a 1 in 3 chance of doubling your multiplier every time you score a Heart. (I broke 100,000,000 in a hand with that, a copy of it, and the double the chances joker)
Edit: Not to overly belabor the point, but there is a reason there is an unlock for beating a boss blind with a high card, and jokers unlock when you don't use specific other hands.
It does kind of bum me out that you can't, (at least in my experience,) rely on leveling up hand types to carry you through to the end of Ante 8. It makes sense that you have to build some kind of Joker combo, but you're basically fucked if you can't get that combo to be pulling fire animations midway through a run. Hoping you can eek past with a mid joker collection and planet card level ups just isn't gonna do it.
Hanging Chad
Retrigger first played card used in scoring
Marble Joker
Adds one Stone card to deck when Blind is selected
Hologrpahic Smeared JOker
+10 Mult; Hearts and Diamonds count as the same suit, Spades and Clubs count as the same suit
Acrobat
X3 Mult on final hand of round
Polychrome Throwback
X1.5 Mult; X0.25 Mult for each Blind skipped this round (Currently X3.75 Mult)
Negative Hologram
+1 Joker slot; Gains X0.25 Mult per playing card added to your deck (Currently X5 Mult)
Luchador
Sell this card to disable the current Boss Blind ability
Sold the Luchador to lower Blind from 300,000 to 100,000 then played a 2 of Spades for a Lvl 4. High Card with 4 Stone Cards, one of which was moved to the first slot to trigger the Hanging Chad. Ante 8 beat in one hand.
Immediately went on to win a run with the unlocked Checkered Deck, but in my haste to go make dinner I forgot to note down my winning Joker setup. I can tell you it went all-in on scoring Flushes, with a Supernova and a Holographic Blueprint parked next to it. I was getting like +40 Mult from the Supernova by Ante 8.
The thing is that regardless of what hands you build towards, you almost certainly need to get powerful jokers to make it work, and high card has the advantage of having a ton of powerful jokers to build towards it (+300 chips -2 hand size, +20 mult for small hands, etc.) while dodging basically every boss blind. The only jokers that don't really boost high card strats are either obvious run winning buildarounds you can pivot to or the hand/suit specific commons that are generally weak anyway.
Eh. The Straight/Flush/etc multiplier cards can turn things around hard. So can the early ones that rewards straights and the like. This is before you get into how many chips you lose from even low scoring hands of cards. That says nothing of the cards that give, for example, a 1 in 3 chance of doubling your multiplier every time you score a Heart. (I broke 100,000,000 in a hand with that, a copy of it, and the double the chances joker)
Edit: Not to overly belabor the point, but there is a reason there is an unlock for beating a boss blind with a high card, and jokers unlock when you don't use specific other hands.
If you get a rare card that has a strong multiplier for a hand then yeah, you can obviously pivot, but high card is still incredibly consistent because most jokers can work with it, and while scoring for a strong hand is non-trivial, it's still a +3 mult and like +80 chips at most, which is easily achieved when you can like, windmill slam stuntman or ripped Joker to clear the midgame.
High card has rewards for clearing it because it takes work... but the amount of work is very little and leaves you with no constraints on jokers or your hands/discards during play. It is a build that naturally gets to use all discards as a resource, never has a bad hand, and plays like it has a free copy of the no-boss-blinds joker.
E: Admittedly, a huge part of the high card build value is Stuntman, which requires you to have built at least one broken 100 mil deck previously, but Stuntman alone is enough to make high card an instantly valuable build pivot as soon as you see it.
The thing is that regardless of what hands you build towards, you almost certainly need to get powerful jokers to make it work, and high card has the advantage of having a ton of powerful jokers to build towards it (+300 chips -2 hand size, +20 mult for small hands, etc.) while dodging basically every boss blind. The only jokers that don't really boost high card strats are either obvious run winning buildarounds you can pivot to or the hand/suit specific commons that are generally weak anyway.
Eh. The Straight/Flush/etc multiplier cards can turn things around hard. So can the early ones that rewards straights and the like. This is before you get into how many chips you lose from even low scoring hands of cards. That says nothing of the cards that give, for example, a 1 in 3 chance of doubling your multiplier every time you score a Heart. (I broke 100,000,000 in a hand with that, a copy of it, and the double the chances joker)
Edit: Not to overly belabor the point, but there is a reason there is an unlock for beating a boss blind with a high card, and jokers unlock when you don't use specific other hands.
If you get a rare card that has a strong multiplier for a hand then yeah, you can obviously pivot, but high card is still incredibly consistent because most jokers can work with it, and while scoring for a strong hand is non-trivial, it's still a +3 mult and like +80 chips at most, which is easily achieved when you can like, windmill slam stuntman or ripped Joker to clear the midgame.
High card has rewards for clearing it because it takes work... but the amount of work is very little and leaves you with no constraints on jokers or your hands/discards during play. It is a build that naturally gets to use all discards as a resource, never has a bad hand, and plays like it has a free copy of the no-boss-blinds joker.
E: Admittedly, a huge part of the high card build value is Stuntman, which requires you to have built at least one broken 100 mil deck previously, but Stuntman alone is enough to make high card an instantly valuable build pivot as soon as you see it.
I basically never see it and rarely the 3 or fewer card one so that might be the difference. I would point out Stuntman is uncommon like the rest of the "pivot to this build" cards.
Finally got my first win in like 3 days, first yellow deck win too. Smeared Joker, Ancient God, Hologram, Card Sharp, tons of Hearts and Clubs meant extremely easy flushes and Smeared meant every card was proccing OLBAP Ancient, got a new high score as well
Oh, and found out about a site keeping track of Balatro mods and tools: https://github.com/jie65535/awesome-balatro
Lots of new Decks, Jokers, UI tweaks, and other stuff. I'm not gonna mess with Gameplay stuff yet but definitely want the Fold and Exit buttons mods and the keyboard shortcuts one
+1
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
I hadn't really tried the flush strategy outside the deck that has just two suites.
But fate called and started a run and got arrowhead ( chips for spade ) and wrathful joker ( mult for spade ) before first boss.
Along the way to 8th level and picked up supernova, ramen, and campfire. I have a deck of 41 cards and 28 of them are spades.
Going to try endless out, since this is the first time I feel my deck has legs.
I have found a reasonably good rhythm to get through round 8 on flushes, even without that 2 suit deck. The trick is to get and sit fools whenever possible and try to use them only when leveling up flush, until you get one of those cards that lets you change three to a specific suit, then you chase that forever with fools and whenever those cards drop.
This isn't even my best run on flushes by far, as there are still cards from other suits in here heh. It just shows how wild you can get things by the time ante 8 or 9 rolls around
edit: oh yeah, and lots of death cards dropped on this one, which was a great way to transition into flush five aces. It feels like flush five, if I can survive long enough to upgrade that hand type, is how flushes survive the later antes. The base points and multiplier for that hand is bananas, though not as good as where I end up taking flush before I run out of steam. Each upgrade is wild though.
When I play the no-face deck, which is great for going for straights, it tempts me by giving straight-related jokers, like the Street that allows you to skip 1 space in a straight sequence, or the Runner which increases chips. But in my several tries not a single straight planet dropped . I also saw every face-related joker pass by, usually in Negative or Polychrome form.
When I play the hearts/spades deck, Jupiters (Flush planets) seem to be strangely absent until after Ante 5.
It know it's all in my head
The amount of Face/Mult halved bosses on Ante 1 I have encountered is staggering, and most of the time an instakill.
I do hope that they patch the console version soon as The Arm (-1 level of played cards) has been quite fatal too.
And I do wish that after you've finished the boss blind, when you look at the blinds before going into the shop, it would show the next Ante.
Or when you've defeated the boss, it would show you the next ante before going to the shop, because the jump from 1M to 7M blind always catches me offguard
Also, a possibility to check what the Voucher is in Ante 1 before playing, because something like "Everything cheaper" or "+1 Hand" is very important, and worth going for instead of skipping the 2 first blinds.
Yeah, there's a bunch of ui shit like that that's incredibly annoying.
The balance in the game is honetly shockingly bad - you've got cards like Vagabond (and it's buddy, the Fortune Teller) who probably need to be kicked up a rarity each at least, and then you've got stuff like Bootstraps which is just lol. or Superposition, which is incredibly fucking narrow and i struggle to see why you'd bother to grab it ever.
Straights vs Flushes is also very unbalanced, there's really not a ton of support for straights that i've seen - there's some good ones like "skip a number" (Which doesnt tell you that you can actually skip multiple numbers - A,3,5,7,9 is a valid straight with shortcut). But flushes are more immediately rewarding, play way nicer with stuff like Hack, the various face card support, and have the highest scoring hands (Flush five being the best you can get, i believe). And this all plays way, way better iwht doing stuff like getting a really, really good card - Red Seal Steel Kings, for instance, then just cloning it everywhere with death/cryptid.
The way planets work is frustrating too - feels like the game should pick the highest applicable multiplier for a hand. Having the game show you an actual score preview would be really helpful for optimizing plays - even if it was just showing a range to account for.
I'm climbing up stakes now, and i've cleared the game with every deck i've unlocked - i'm only missing 2 decks now - Plasma and Painted. Don't ask me how I have Erratic already, because i'm not sure.
Dunno. The game's good for a lark, but it's pretty much what i was worried about - go big or go home. Maybe the higher stakes will make it feel more strategic, but given they're mostly "Increase the ante scaling, make cash and hands harder to get", that probably just squishes the space into further highroll or get out.
Be very interested to see where and how this lands with balance patches.
Ha, I just noticed in a video where someone was playing version 1.0.0j, that Bootstraps was +2 Mult per $5, while in the post I made earlier, I was playing on console where the version is 1.0.0c, it had +3 Mult per $5, which allowed me to get to that insane Mult combo making me break through to Ante 12
After getting my butt kicked on the hearts/spades deck on purple difficulty on Ante 8 by a Very Large Blind boss that required a ridiculous amount, I decided to try the Plasma deck again.
It's a deck that feels totally weird as it replaces coins and mult with their average, so as a result coins feel more important than mult.
I already beat it on white so I tried red difficulty.
I managed to beat it:
I did it with this weird deck:
What was my secret?
My first joker earned was the one that adds a stone card each blind.
And then I got the beauty that got happier with each stone card in the deck.
After a while, High Card was worth even around 150K+
Too bad I died when I had 77 cards, just 3 short for the trophy
This is what I like about this game: sometimes you get a combination of jokers you would never think of using, but in a certain deck they are suddenly the stars of the show.
Yeah, I recently got that combo plus the rare Joker that scales Xmult whenever cards are added to the deck (not on plasma). It was a very dumb deck (and did get me to x80 cards). I also had Telescope and a polychrome free planets/planet packs Joker so it was about level 27 high card by the end, which was unnecessary but fun
I got a Negative DNA, a steel Queen, the Joker that adds multiplier for each Queen in hand, and the Joker that makes in-hand card effects trigger twice. So when you have an entire hand of steel Queens all triggering twice, you get a ridiculous multiplier if you play just that single Queen for DNA. In fact, it was better to play just one Queen instead of, say, five Queens, because you want all those steel Queens in hand so they proc twice instead of being counted once.
WotanAnubis on
+6
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
With my new found knowledge, I won with a deck that net me a 1 million point hand.
Got a vampire early in, so I started to feed it, and then got the "copies the joker to the right" card and a polychrome joker for fibonacci. In the end, I had the vampire up to 8x multiplier so I had a cool 16x base.
Got up to ante 11 with that, mostly because I didn't have a reliable way to create chips. I often had my multi at 2500.
So just a Math heads up here
If you have Vampire at X8 and you have a Blueprint that's not X16 it's X64
With my new found knowledge, I won with a deck that net me a 1 million point hand.
Got a vampire early in, so I started to feed it, and then got the "copies the joker to the right" card and a polychrome joker for fibonacci. In the end, I had the vampire up to 8x multiplier so I had a cool 16x base.
Got up to ante 11 with that, mostly because I didn't have a reliable way to create chips. I often had my multi at 2500.
So just a Math heads up here
If you have Vampire at X8 and you have a Blueprint that's not X16 it's X64
This is part of why I want a score preview, because it'd make figuring out stuff like this a lot more intuitive.
I think my one main frustration with this game is that the higher difficulties feel more like a chore to be completed than a fun challenge. I have had plenty of runs stopped by being offered no jokers that would increase my multiplier, or chips. Sometimes that is on me for skipping blinds. More often it is just bad luck getting offered a random assortment of planet and arcana cards that absolutely cannot keep up without strong joker support.
This deck also was my first win with the Black deck. Ended up with the Rare Joker that gives a x1.5 multiplier to each card of the same suit alongside the Joker that gives x.25 per Steel card. I used the Joker that makes a copy of a single card hand to replicate a Steel 3 of Hearts with a doubling chip to give me insane output.
All I did each round was discard down until I had a Flush with the bonus suit and watched the fireworks fly. I was basically a Flush machine:
I could take it higher, but I think I'll just leave it be and start a new run.
Edit: Eh, maybe I'll see how far I can take it tomorrow. Maybe there's a hidden unlockable or something I could get.
MNC Dover on
Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051 Steam ID
Finally sinking my teeth into the proper game after messing with the demo for a long time
Had a great run going that collapsed catastrophically just as quick. So it goes. Got that boss blind that makes it so you can only play 1 type of hand, and I got greedy with two huge haymaker plays and never got a chance to make the third.
But I am very into this and the "one more run" of it all.
I think my one main frustration with this game is that the higher difficulties feel more like a chore to be completed than a fun challenge. I have had plenty of runs stopped by being offered no jokers that would increase my multiplier, or chips. Sometimes that is on me for skipping blinds. More often it is just bad luck getting offered a random assortment of planet and arcana cards that absolutely cannot keep up without strong joker support.
This is part of what I mean by the variance.
I honestly think the shop needs to be redesigned so it's something like 2 jokers, 1 planet, 1 tarot card by base - or maybe just a consumable slot, precisely so you don't get such huge swings.
I'm climbing up the stakes, and while it is pushing strategy a bit more, you're mostly just rolling dice and hoping you high roll.
Posts
got a smeared joker to make getting the right suit be even easier
by the end of ante 8 they were both over +400 chips, though it wasn't going to scale into the millions so i didn't try endless. Could get about 300k with a straight flush
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
And if you have retrigger jokers like the one that retriggers face cards, or the Hack joker that retriggers 2s, 3s, 4s and 5s, well, be ready to see the game go bonkers.
The Hack + Fibbonacci = a fantastic combination.
Yes it does retrigger steel and all other things. It is essentially having a second copy of the card in play or in hand depending.
Also a note on how the multiplicative jokers act I have seen. They don't add together. Having 2 x3 jokers is not giving you a x6 to your multiplier. It is giving you a x9. I had the x5 legendary that I got to copy twice for a x125 to my multiplier score. Yes that run got stupid as well.
Riffraff i probably should have gotten rid of, but a free 50 chips is just really nice. As is having 17 aces, 6 kings (3 red seal steel)
Black deck feels by far the most prone to randomness - it took getting the right line up of skip bonuses and then shops that actually paid off to get it going anywhere. For a while it was a werid mishmash of Splash, Scary Face and the +to aces card.
So that's Yellow, Green, Black, Abandoned and Ghost deck wins so far.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
I had the xMult for each glass card broken joker, the Cavendish, a Constellation with 40+ mult, a negative Queens give +13 mult, but most of all, the 2 cheaper rerolls vouchers and the Campfire joker.
I also had the more planets and more tarots in shop.
The campfire gives + x0.5 mult per card sold until the boss is beaten.
So it was buy and sell every planet and tarot in the shop, and then reroll.
When I got to Ante 11 the Seltzer joker (retrigger all cards for the next 10 played hands) appeared in the shop, which was insta-buy because almost all my cards enchanted.
So I beat the 14M boss
Highest hand was 14M so I'm still far away from unlocking the 100M joker.
But I am very happy!
I don't remember what the unlock condition was, but it's
x3 mult. 1 in 1000 chance to be destroyed at the end of round.
It claims to be common, but I've only had it once.
I'm pretty sure that there's a secret requirement, you need to have had a a Gros Michel die first in your run before Cavendish can show up
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I only spent enough money for jokers to get me through, so that I could reap interest rewards.
During Ante 1 I bought the Hieroglyph voucher, which took me back to Ante 0 (!), which had targets of 100, 150 and 200 to get, so I could easily complete them without jokers.
During Ante 2 I bought the Cave Painting voucher (which can only appear after you reach Ante 12 once), which took me back to Ante 1.
In the later Antes I got lucky and got the Flower and the Tree vouchers for maximum interest.
I also had the "To the moon" joker which gives $2 per $5 in hand, and I targeted it with a "Copy Leftmost" Joker so I felt confident I would reach the $400, because I had been extremely lucky.
This resulted in shenanigans like this :
I did not expect this :
So yeah, I got to $400 in Ante 6! And then the game gifted me the Cowboy Boots joker, which gives +3 Mult per $5 held in hand.
So I had a card that was worth +261 Mult
Around Ante 10 I had to start putting the boots in front, so goodbye to my +$40 per turn, or as I liked to say, my +24 Mult per turn
I died gloriously in Ante 11 against the 7M Small Blind; I had more than $950 in hand, so I had a card with +570 Mult.
Too bad I didn't have enough Mult multipliers.
So in a way I was extremely lucky to get this build running, but when it was set in motion, everything that passed was really bad.
It was fun!
The only joker I need to unlock is the $100M one, and that one is not easy
There absolutely is.
I had the game throw me the "Play only one hand" boss blind 3 times out of 5 runs, and in all 3 cases, it was either in the 1st or 2nd round where you will just not have the means to win with just one hand. Note that this is different than the "Play only one hand type" blind.
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).
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Of course I’ve only actually won on two decks, so maybe my strategy isn’t all that great.
I have settled for straights because it generally works out to be a bit more reliable, and the planet card is a bit stronger. I don't know if it is the most effective or not, but I win with it a lot.
I was actually toying with that idea one run but wasn’t sure if it scaled well enough through endgame, but maybe I should give it a shot.
I have definitely had some builds that could support this to a very high level. I think it requires enough specific cards that it isn't more reliable than building towards specific hands.
Maybe I start running down the high card road for a bit to see if I can game this
Eh. The Straight/Flush/etc multiplier cards can turn things around hard. So can the early ones that rewards straights and the like. This is before you get into how many chips you lose from even low scoring hands of cards. That says nothing of the cards that give, for example, a 1 in 3 chance of doubling your multiplier every time you score a Heart. (I broke 100,000,000 in a hand with that, a copy of it, and the double the chances joker)
Edit: Not to overly belabor the point, but there is a reason there is an unlock for beating a boss blind with a high card, and jokers unlock when you don't use specific other hands.
But fate called and started a run and got arrowhead ( chips for spade ) and wrathful joker ( mult for spade ) before first boss.
Along the way to 8th level and picked up supernova, ramen, and campfire. I have a deck of 41 cards and 28 of them are spades.
Going to try endless out, since this is the first time I feel my deck has legs.
Retrigger first played card used in scoring
Marble Joker
Adds one Stone card to deck when Blind is selected
Hologrpahic Smeared JOker
+10 Mult; Hearts and Diamonds count as the same suit, Spades and Clubs count as the same suit
Acrobat
X3 Mult on final hand of round
Polychrome Throwback
X1.5 Mult; X0.25 Mult for each Blind skipped this round (Currently X3.75 Mult)
Negative Hologram
+1 Joker slot; Gains X0.25 Mult per playing card added to your deck (Currently X5 Mult)
Luchador
Sell this card to disable the current Boss Blind ability
Sold the Luchador to lower Blind from 300,000 to 100,000 then played a 2 of Spades for a Lvl 4. High Card with 4 Stone Cards, one of which was moved to the first slot to trigger the Hanging Chad. Ante 8 beat in one hand.
Immediately went on to win a run with the unlocked Checkered Deck, but in my haste to go make dinner I forgot to note down my winning Joker setup. I can tell you it went all-in on scoring Flushes, with a Supernova and a Holographic Blueprint parked next to it. I was getting like +40 Mult from the Supernova by Ante 8.
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If you get a rare card that has a strong multiplier for a hand then yeah, you can obviously pivot, but high card is still incredibly consistent because most jokers can work with it, and while scoring for a strong hand is non-trivial, it's still a +3 mult and like +80 chips at most, which is easily achieved when you can like, windmill slam stuntman or ripped Joker to clear the midgame.
High card has rewards for clearing it because it takes work... but the amount of work is very little and leaves you with no constraints on jokers or your hands/discards during play. It is a build that naturally gets to use all discards as a resource, never has a bad hand, and plays like it has a free copy of the no-boss-blinds joker.
E: Admittedly, a huge part of the high card build value is Stuntman, which requires you to have built at least one broken 100 mil deck previously, but Stuntman alone is enough to make high card an instantly valuable build pivot as soon as you see it.
I basically never see it and rarely the 3 or fewer card one so that might be the difference. I would point out Stuntman is uncommon like the rest of the "pivot to this build" cards.
Lots of new Decks, Jokers, UI tweaks, and other stuff. I'm not gonna mess with Gameplay stuff yet but definitely want the Fold and Exit buttons mods and the keyboard shortcuts one
I have found a reasonably good rhythm to get through round 8 on flushes, even without that 2 suit deck. The trick is to get and sit fools whenever possible and try to use them only when leveling up flush, until you get one of those cards that lets you change three to a specific suit, then you chase that forever with fools and whenever those cards drop.
This isn't even my best run on flushes by far, as there are still cards from other suits in here heh. It just shows how wild you can get things by the time ante 8 or 9 rolls around
edit: oh yeah, and lots of death cards dropped on this one, which was a great way to transition into flush five aces. It feels like flush five, if I can survive long enough to upgrade that hand type, is how flushes survive the later antes. The base points and multiplier for that hand is bananas, though not as good as where I end up taking flush before I run out of steam. Each upgrade is wild though.
When I play the no-face deck, which is great for going for straights, it tempts me by giving straight-related jokers, like the Street that allows you to skip 1 space in a straight sequence, or the Runner which increases chips. But in my several tries not a single straight planet dropped
When I play the hearts/spades deck, Jupiters (Flush planets) seem to be strangely absent until after Ante 5.
It know it's all in my head
The amount of Face/Mult halved bosses on Ante 1 I have encountered is staggering, and most of the time an instakill.
I do hope that they patch the console version soon as The Arm (-1 level of played cards) has been quite fatal too.
And I do wish that after you've finished the boss blind, when you look at the blinds before going into the shop, it would show the next Ante.
Or when you've defeated the boss, it would show you the next ante before going to the shop, because the jump from 1M to 7M blind always catches me offguard
Also, a possibility to check what the Voucher is in Ante 1 before playing, because something like "Everything cheaper" or "+1 Hand" is very important, and worth going for instead of skipping the 2 first blinds.
The balance in the game is honetly shockingly bad - you've got cards like Vagabond (and it's buddy, the Fortune Teller) who probably need to be kicked up a rarity each at least, and then you've got stuff like Bootstraps which is just lol. or Superposition, which is incredibly fucking narrow and i struggle to see why you'd bother to grab it ever.
Straights vs Flushes is also very unbalanced, there's really not a ton of support for straights that i've seen - there's some good ones like "skip a number" (Which doesnt tell you that you can actually skip multiple numbers - A,3,5,7,9 is a valid straight with shortcut). But flushes are more immediately rewarding, play way nicer with stuff like Hack, the various face card support, and have the highest scoring hands (Flush five being the best you can get, i believe). And this all plays way, way better iwht doing stuff like getting a really, really good card - Red Seal Steel Kings, for instance, then just cloning it everywhere with death/cryptid.
The way planets work is frustrating too - feels like the game should pick the highest applicable multiplier for a hand. Having the game show you an actual score preview would be really helpful for optimizing plays - even if it was just showing a range to account for.
I'm climbing up stakes now, and i've cleared the game with every deck i've unlocked - i'm only missing 2 decks now - Plasma and Painted. Don't ask me how I have Erratic already, because i'm not sure.
Dunno. The game's good for a lark, but it's pretty much what i was worried about - go big or go home. Maybe the higher stakes will make it feel more strategic, but given they're mostly "Increase the ante scaling, make cash and hands harder to get", that probably just squishes the space into further highroll or get out.
Be very interested to see where and how this lands with balance patches.
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It's a deck that feels totally weird as it replaces coins and mult with their average, so as a result coins feel more important than mult.
I already beat it on white so I tried red difficulty.
I managed to beat it:
I did it with this weird deck:
What was my secret?
My first joker earned was the one that adds a stone card each blind.
And then I got the beauty that got happier with each stone card in the deck.
After a while, High Card was worth even around 150K+
Too bad I died when I had 77 cards, just 3 short for the trophy
This is what I like about this game: sometimes you get a combination of jokers you would never think of using, but in a certain deck they are suddenly the stars of the show.
I got a Negative DNA, a steel Queen, the Joker that adds multiplier for each Queen in hand, and the Joker that makes in-hand card effects trigger twice. So when you have an entire hand of steel Queens all triggering twice, you get a ridiculous multiplier if you play just that single Queen for DNA. In fact, it was better to play just one Queen instead of, say, five Queens, because you want all those steel Queens in hand so they proc twice instead of being counted once.
So just a Math heads up here
If you have Vampire at X8 and you have a Blueprint that's not X16 it's X64
This is part of why I want a score preview, because it'd make figuring out stuff like this a lot more intuitive.
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This deck also was my first win with the Black deck. Ended up with the Rare Joker that gives a x1.5 multiplier to each card of the same suit alongside the Joker that gives x.25 per Steel card. I used the Joker that makes a copy of a single card hand to replicate a Steel 3 of Hearts with a doubling chip to give me insane output.
All I did each round was discard down until I had a Flush with the bonus suit and watched the fireworks fly. I was basically a Flush machine:
I could take it higher, but I think I'll just leave it be and start a new run.
Edit: Eh, maybe I'll see how far I can take it tomorrow. Maybe there's a hidden unlockable or something I could get.
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Had a great run going that collapsed catastrophically just as quick. So it goes. Got that boss blind that makes it so you can only play 1 type of hand, and I got greedy with two huge haymaker plays and never got a chance to make the third.
But I am very into this and the "one more run" of it all.
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This is part of what I mean by the variance.
I honestly think the shop needs to be redesigned so it's something like 2 jokers, 1 planet, 1 tarot card by base - or maybe just a consumable slot, precisely so you don't get such huge swings.
I'm climbing up the stakes, and while it is pushing strategy a bit more, you're mostly just rolling dice and hoping you high roll.
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