Balatro: The Poker Deckbuilding Roguelike Puzzle Game

[lincolnic]

So, uh, things escalated today.

I think I'm starting to get it, gang. High card builds are where it's at. This run started very quickly with a loadout of Ride the Bus, Green Joker, and Square Joker -- all of which got replaced eventually, but until I found said replacements they were crucial to getting started. Playing the full four hands every round gets those Jokers going really quickly. (I'm also starting to get a better understanding of when to pivot, Joker-wise.)

Regarding Square Joker specifically: this is also fantastic to start with in a high card build, because as long as you play four cards it'll still trigger even if only one of them scores. This lets you cycle low value cards out of your hand without having to use your discards, while gaining 12-16 chips per round. When you only need any one card to score, every hand can be consistent. (You can also cycle face cards out of your hand this way to keep your Ride the Bus streak going, as long as your scoring card is an Ace.)

Spoiler: More specific details on how I got there

So I set out specifically to try to unlock the Joker you get for earning 100 million points in one hand (Stuntman). The general recommendation for high scores seems to be making a steel King (with a red seal, if possible) and duplicating it as many times as possible in your deck, and then finding Baron to crank up the mult. I saw a further tip saying to use the Zodiac deck to maximize your chances of seeing all the Tarot cards it takes to get to that point, which was definitely what pushed the deck over the top. There was definitely some good luck involved -- I was able to get a steel King early on, which let me focus pretty much all of of my Tarot picks on either duplicating it, turning more Kings into steel cards, or destroying low value number cards to ensure consistency. (I'd also occasionally take the Hermit for a free $20 if nothing better was present.) I also picked up Delayed Gratification for a few rounds since I was never discarding any hards to maximize the Square/Green/Bus combo, which (combined with the Seed Money voucher) pretty much set me up on money for the rest of the run. There was a Gros Michel sometime around ante 3 that went extinct pretty quickly, and a Ramen that stuck at x2 for a long time since I was never discarding anything. I can't remember exactly when, but at some point I swapped that out when Cavendish showed up, and Green Joker got replaced with Supernova (which already outpaced it in terms of mult and let me start aggressively discarding for Steel Kings). Square Joker got replaced fairly late with Bull, and since I had ~$200 at that point it outpaced Square Joker in both chips and growth. Bull got replaced with Driver's License, since a flat x3 on everything was worth a lot more than the extra chips at that point. I wasn't sure if I'd ever see Baron, but it finally turned up very late (I think it was ante 9), and then Mime showed up to trigger those all those steel cards again.

My eventual Joker loadout to hit the score was Supernova, Mime, Driver's License, Baron, and Cavendish, and I played a single Ace (with the bonus chips enhancement) with a full hand of 7 or 8 steel Kings in hand to trigger it. I think the deck had something like 16 steel Kings by the end, and maybe 46 cards total. I kinda wish I'd taken a screenshot of the actual deck/Joker layout instead of just the aftermath! I think if I'd ever had the chance to put a red seal on a King the deck probably could've broken into the billions.

This run was a really good learning experience and it's going to serve me really well going forwards! I still haven't managed to break $400 in a run yet so that'll probably be my next goal. For now I'm gonna just go back to regular runs for a while, try to get some more wins on the medium stakes with other decks. I've got a red stake win with every deck I have so far (except the Black Deck, which I haven't gone back to since the white stake; haven't tried the Painted Deck yet either) and one green stake win as well.

I've logged 50-ish hours and have 5 wins, so looks like you're doing better than me! But until today, I'd been pretty consistently bashing my head against getting a win with the Black Deck (I still don't).

I'm at ~50 hours now myself. I need to try the Black Deck again, but it seems like it's the toughest deck to win with for a lot of people, and that's kept me away. Maybe tomorrow I'll be brave and sit with it for a session.

 

[spines]

high card has some strong enablers but you need REALLY good ones fast to win with it on high stakes where your purchasing power becomes brutally weaker (for the last couple levels it feels like you have 1/3-1/2 as much money as you normally would) and the blinds raise much faster (the blind value for the default ante 8 is ante 6 on the last few stakes and nearly doubles for 7 before doubling again at 8). of course, nothing wins reliably at that point, so you have to commit to something and swing for it, but still.

my #1 most used joker is egg, but i feel certain that's skewed by the challenge. though i do pretty much always buy it and see how long i can hold onto it. (bus is 5th, similar thing. though i know i've had to commit to it a couple times trying to play ghost deck too.) supernova, abstract, and fortune teller are my actual most used scoring jokers, which seems about right. and i have card sharp in 6th right at 100, which is one of my favorites for pair/high card type play.

of course there's some amazing jokers that are basically impossible to get on the graph. like the one that gains xmult every time you skip a blind, hahaha. but in terms of stable "win the game" play i do agree that the build-up jokers that don't lock you into feeding them forever (square, fortune, runner, castle, obelisk, etc.) are some of the best

gold stake is so hard i lost a run where i had a castle worth like 200 chips. i forgot to reroll the boss (random joker disabled every round) but i still would've had only a 50/50 chance of getting a boss i could beat. at best. violet vessel is like 1.08 million and having to sell one of the jokers would've also obliterated my scoring potential

 

[Dark Medusa]

I don't tend to like High Card builds, but I was rolling a high card/pair/two pair build with Blackboard, Card Sharp, and Ride the Bus polychromed twice on Gold Stake with Ghost and I was going to win, but accidentally let my Knife eat one of the Ride the Busses I Ankh'd at the beginning to get two of 'em. Curses!

 

[Violentvixen]

Me: Oh! This boss blind is The Needle and I only get one hand. That means I should be careful to only play one hand. Yes. One hand.
(discards a few rounds)
Me: Ah, let me just play these crappy cards before I'm completely out of discards to make sure I build to that really good one hand!

(loses because I played my one hand like a moron)

Me at the game over screen: You dumb idiot.

This was on ante 11 too. Gah.

 

[lincolnic]

high card has some strong enablers but you need REALLY good ones fast to win with it on high stakes

Yeah, it's not a build you can just immediately start with since you need bigger hands to win the first two blinds. I usually find myself spending the first two antes seeing what the shop has, and only moving into high card if the support is there. But it gets incredibly powerful if you do. Not having to flail around to assemble a hand of 4 or 5 cards every turn makes things pretty smooth.

I won a red stake Black Deck run yesterday (with, you guessed it, a high card deck) and it honestly wasn't too bad? The extra Joker slot really goes a long way. For whatever reason I'm having way more trouble with the Nebula deck. I think it's because the "bonus" you get from it is way less helpful than you get from other decks. I feel like Planet cards just don't scale terribly well into the late game, whereas Tarot cards can always be useful.

 

[ShakeWell]

I'm at ~50 hours now myself. I need to try the Black Deck again, but it seems like it's the toughest deck to win with for a lot of people, and that's kept me away. Maybe tomorrow I'll be brave and sit with it for a session.

I finally got that damn Black Deck win.

I've been sick as hell all week, so Balatro has basically been the only thing I'm playing, but it's hard to concentrate enough to do well consistently. I'm coming out of it now, so hopefully I'll have some better runs.

 

[lincolnic]

I finally got that damn Black Deck win.

I've been sick as hell all week, so Balatro has basically been the only thing I'm playing, but it's hard to concentrate enough to do well consistently. I'm coming out of it now, so hopefully I'll have some better runs.

Sorry you're sick, but congrats on the win! What was the build that finally got you there?

I've had a run of pretty good luck these past couple of days. I've got red stake wins on every deck available to me except the Painted Deck now, including one of those mythical red seal steel King runs earlier today. I threw that one in ante 12 when I forgot to move my Blueprint Joker for a round and completely donked up my score, but it was fun while it lasted.

 

[spines]

finally finished the ghost climb this week (gold stake is horrid; it felt amazing to power through it with a setup of 4.5 score jokers i would normally expect to fall short a bit except the money i had backing it up helped me get more planets and cards for vampire to feed on than i would've ever had on late stakes otherwise). i thought i might be done with the game but i can't help but want to play with the other "fuck it, we ball" chaos deck. by which, of course, i mean anaglyph and the ability to suddenly cast an absurd amount of booster packs or instantly gain 200 gold halfway through the run. i don't know if i'll gold again since it's rather arduous once you reach the highest ante values and becomes super easy to lose on ante 2 because you couldn't buy a Good score joker or 8 because you got vessel or something, but i already had a run where i spent absurd amounts of time building campfires in the late stretch despite holding a 700 chip bull at the same time (rerolling and getting more money tarots helped keep it going for way too long)...and a run where i went madness first and had to save for a long time so i could have jokers for the end. i also got like 4 spectral packs in a row with the tags at one point and polychromed the madness so it basically felt like a ghost deck run, lol

of course now that i've hit black stake where you can actually get endless jokers i'll never get madness again on this. oh well

edit: i beat blue stake on a run where my high cards got so powerful i unlocked stuntman and finished ante 12 while filling my deck with so many cards i unlocked all 3 of the suit-based cards i didn't have yet. if you get 11 jokers then half of them don't matter and if you get good ones anyway...

i have 3 more unlocks (discard royal flush, 7 of clubs, discard 5 jacks) and 10 more jokers and two vouchers to buy for the collection screen completion. and one tag? i don't know what it is, lol

 

[ShakeWell]

Sorry you're sick, but congrats on the win! What was the build that finally got you there?

Ancient Joker and a Brainstorm paired together with a good flush build to just go HAM on multiplying mult.

i have 3 more unlocks (discard royal flush, 7 of clubs, discard 5 jacks) and 10 more jokers and two vouchers to buy for the collection screen completion. and one tag? i don't know what it is, lol

I had that nagging at me for a while, but none of them are actually rare. For me, it turned out I just NEVER took the "get a buck for each unused discard this run" one.

Also, I've got over 60 hours into this fucking thing and I still haven't pulled a single Legendary Joker.

 

[lincolnic]

Ancient Joker and a Brainstorm paired together with a good flush build to just go HAM on multiplying mult.

Hell yeah, I just had that same combo myself. (Actually I think I had Blueprint instead of Brainstorm, but still.)

and one tag? i don't know what it is, lol

I dunno if this is helpful for you, but the other day I realized that you can open the collection pages if you hit escape (or however you open the menu on consoles) in the middle of a run. Helped me figure out the last tag I was missing.

I've got green stake wins on every deck through Yellow now, including a very silly run yesterday where I had Pareidolia (all cards are face cards), Midas Mask (all face cards turn gold when played), and eventually Vampire (gains x.2 mult for each enhanced card played and removes the enhancement) to repeatedly turn all those gold cards into multiplicative mult. I sold Pareidolia for something more useful after about half my deck had been turned to gold, but Vampire got up to something like x15 by the end of the run.

 

[Violentvixen]

I dunno if this is helpful for you, but the other day I realized that you can open the collection pages if you hit escape (or however you open the menu on consoles) in the middle of a run. Helped me figure out the last tag I was missing.

Also says how to unlock (some) Jokers, which is nice.

I think I was missing the "shop has a rare Joker" tag for a while because it looks so similar to the "shop has an uncommon joker" one, or some other similar design.

 

[Mogri]

Relevant to at least some of your interests, I'm sure: Bingle Bingle is "Balatro but roulette."

 

[spines]

finished gold with anaglyph. i actually had a ton of fun with this till orange, but gold is so miserable to get started. you have to get really lucky hands and good shops just to make it to ante 3...really the hand size thing doesn't even make it strategically different after the early game. you just have to get way luckier, which is annoying

it's really funny to finish one and go back to playing red stake. like wow, i can fish for hard to make hands and play stupid jokers i would probably skip on purple or higher even if they were polychrome.

 

[lincolnic]

New high score!

This was a red seal/steel kings high card deck (Zodiac deck, green stake), my first time into ante 13 and first time breaking into the billions. The Jokers behind the game over screen are Blueprint (copying Baron), a negative Vampire which I think was up around x8.4, and a Cavendish. I was desperately fishing for Mime in the last couple of blinds, but never saw it. If I'd gotten that, I think I could've gone a good bit further.

This started out as a "play buffed face cards to feed Vampire" deck (I think my first Joker was Photograph), but I was able to put a red seal on a king very early and then turn it into steel, so I pivoted in that direction while using the non-kings to continue boosting the Vampire multiplier. By the end I had something like 14-15 steel kings, roughly half with red seals.

I've only got one more deck left to clear on the green stake (Painted deck), and then I'll move onto black.

 

[ShakeWell]

Nice, Linc! Also, I looked up "Cavendish" assuming it was a Legendary Joker since I haven't seen it and WHOA. Now I feel like there are more secret jokers I can get from things expiring, like the bean and the ice cream, which I always sell before they become useless.

70 hours in and still learning new things about this game.

 

[lincolnic]

Nice, Linc! Also, I looked up "Cavendish" assuming it was a Legendary Joker since I haven't seen it and WHOA. Now I feel like there are more secret jokers I can get from things expiring, like the bean and the ice cream, which I always sell before they become useless.

70 hours in and still learning new things about this game.

As far as I know Cavendish is the only joker that requires another joker to go extinct first, but there are a small handful of others that won't appear in the shop unless you've got certain card enhancements in your deck, like you need a stone card in your deck to have Stone Joker show up, or a lucky card to have Lucky Cat show up. It's easy to do those things without even being aware of the requirements, so you may have seen them without realizing.

 

[lincolnic]

Got my first black stake win without too much trouble, though something hilariously unlikely happened along the way: had a Cavendish go extinct at the end of a blind (1 in 1000 chance of this happening). The next shop had a Judgment card (get a random Joker), so I figured what the hell. I use the Judgment, and out pops...another Cavendish. You can't make it up!

Then, I took my brand new Anaglyph deck out for a spin, and things got a little out of hand in my very first run.

There's nothing wrong with the screenshot, the money tags literally scrolled off the bottom of the screen.

So, you already know what deck this was. I swear I'm not doing it on purpose, these steel kings just keep falling into my lap! After that round, I was blazing through blinds with over $300 built up, and then the ante 12 boss was "Playing a high card sets your money to $0". I figure "okay, this isn't the run where I break $400", and spent all my cash rerolling/buying tarot cards. Made it through the boss without any issue, and then get to the ante 13 boss: the Plant. All face cards are debuffed. Without any way to reroll the blind, this is unfortunately where the run ended. Crazy new high score, though!

 

[ShakeWell]

The Anaglyph Deck was available from the start in the Next Fest Demo and I honestly think that plus the smaller number of available jokers is what made it so easy to clear.

 

[lincolnic]

Cleared Anaglyph on green stake today. This run was not nearly as ridiculous, because I never really found anything worth using the double tags on (or if I did, I needed to play the blind instead to get into the shop). But it was notable for being the first run I've had in a while where I couldn't find a single piece of x-mult, so I guess that's something.

 

[spines]

i actually love winning without xmult. makes me feel really smart. even when i'm playing zodiac

 

[ShakeWell]

I put together a run tonight that... just was hand-agnostic? I got the Swashbuckler and an Egg in the first ante, then pulled a Bull and got the Seed Money and Money Tree Vouchers and was able to just build chips and mult in a way that whatever I got after any given hand was so much bigger than whatever I got for any hand that wasn't, like, four of a kind or better, it really didn't matter what I did.

I think if I'd managed to roll something with good XMult, I could've gotten the 1m or even 100m in a hand cheevos, but alas. But the run to Endless Mode was a cakewalk.

 

[spines]

i think you could more broadly look at a main concept of the game as there being different focuses of different jokers. hand specific jokers (for examples of ones i think are really strong, pants and square joker) are very different from the ones that interact with your cards (10-4, hack, sock and buskin, etc.). and there's stuff that doesn't really do either and instead interacts with other aspects of the game (skipping, discards, modifying your deck, and so on). and planets also exist, so it's pretty hard to get a full game going where your hands just kind of fire off no matter what's in them (even if it's a full set of debuffed cards, which is basically "nothing"). it's more likely that you have 1-2 leading hand types and some others combo with most of your jokers and still hit ok numbers.

 

[lincolnic]

I put together a run tonight that... just was hand-agnostic? I got the Swashbuckler and an Egg in the first ante, then pulled a Bull and got the Seed Money and Money Tree Vouchers and was able to just build chips and mult in a way that whatever I got after any given hand was so much bigger than whatever I got for any hand that wasn't, like, four of a kind or better, it really didn't matter what I did.

I think if I'd managed to roll something with good XMult, I could've gotten the 1m or even 100m in a hand cheevos, but alas. But the run to Endless Mode was a cakewalk.

I had a run like this today. If you can get good scaling Jokers like those early, you can kind of just tweak your deck to be whatever you want. I ended up playing pairs (can't remember why) but I was able to clear Cerulean Bell without having to sell anything (that's the boss that debuffs all your cards unless you sell a Joker). Which leads me to my next thought:

Switching my play strategy to be more Joker-focused and less hand-focused was a bit of a breakthrough for me. My runs got a lot more consistent once I started building around the first Joker or two that I pick up. A lot of the time I don't even bother with planet cards unless I don't have anything better to do with my money. Sometimes the extra mult from an upgraded hand can be helpful in the early antes if you don't find anything else, but for most hands it gets outclassed by Jokers pretty quickly. (I will say I buy a lot more planet cards if I'm in a deck that's built around an otherwise low value hand, like pair or high card. Though for high card I'd hope to get an early Burnt Joker to get a free upgrade every blind anyway.)

 

[Violentvixen]

1.0.1 patch is coming in a week or two with what sounds like a lot of changes, hopefully they all work out well. Certainly seems like it's being thought through so that's nice.

 

[lincolnic]

1.0.1 patch is coming in a week or two with what sounds like a lot of changes, hopefully they all work out well. Certainly seems like it's being thought through so that's nice.

Ha, I came here to post that same info. Very curious to see all these changes!

My last run today had not one but two legendary Jokers, including the final one I was missing (which turned out to be pretty sweet). The rest of the setup wasn't anything too special, and I had to sell one of the legendaries to beat the final boss blind since it debuffed my whole deck, but it was Perkeo so it didn't actually affect my score at all. I think if I'd been allowed to keep that legendary I could've gone a good bit farther into endless mode, but as it was I think the run ended on ante 11.

Now the only Jokers I have left to unlock are the ones that you have to specifically work towards (win in 12 rounds or less, play a hand with four 7 of Clubs, discard five jacks, have $400 or more), and I'm feeling like I'll probably have to go back to white stake for those. During actual runs I'm never really in a position to pull any of those off. I'm having fun working through the decks though, so I'm gonna keep doing that for now. I've got a black stake win on everything up through the Black Deck, though I probably won't get to the higher stakes before the balance update drops.

 

[ShakeWell]

That's crazy, I've got most of those Jokers unlocked, but I have been doing runs specifically to get them. Haven't discarded 5 Jacks yet, but got the rest.

Also, like... Game Informer is kinda good now? They have a good interview with Thunk.

 

[lincolnic]

Huh, that was a surprisingly good interview. Thanks for the link!

 

[ShakeWell]

So, after 80 hours of the full version, I finally decided I would look up what kinds of strategies and stuff other people are doing and while I actually didn't look up THAT much, I did kinda have an epiphany that I think I was on the verge of anyways.

Spoiler: Stuff about specific strats you might want to figure out on your own, if you're a weirdo like me?

So. Jokers that give extra mult (not multiply mult, just add like 10 mult or 20 mult or whatever) are wildly important and more valuable, particularly early game, than extra chips or levelling up hands or... anything, really? Like, yes, you can craft a run around cards that give extra chips, or figure something out if you get a Brainstorm or Blueprint super early, but common Jokers that are either holographic or just give extra mult for certain hands are really solid ways to start a run.

I won a run with High Card as my focus because I pulled a Holographic Green Joker and a Supernova pretty early on, so basically every hand was giving me +2 mult to every High Card hand I played, and given that, I had outpaced what a Royal Flush earns for mult by like the end of the 2nd round.

Also, the one thing I did learn from watching other people was a video a guy did ranking all the skip tags in which he basically said that some of those tags are super undervalued by a lot of players, but also that SKIPPING BLINDS TOO MUCH IS BAD. I had kind of been rating some of the pickups from skipping more highly than I should have, but having control over the Jokers you see/buy is better than random Planets or Tarots that you might or might not use.

Which led to my last big revelation: rerolling the shop for cheap or free is massively advantageous, and saving/earning enough money to reroll pretty frequenly has way more value than I initially placed on it. I spent a lot of time on this game thinking that playing the hand you're dealt (pun extremely intended) was kind of the best option, rather than doing what I perceived to be wasting money on rerolls and stuff, but... no, I think that's wrong now. Also, mucking runs early if you can tell they're not gonna work out is probably a good time-saver.

Anyways, this game rules, still, as I approach 100 hours in the full version.

 

[Falselogic]

If you want to play this on your android device (phone or retro handheld) there is a way to do that now!

 

[lincolnic]

oh no

Oh wait, you need a PC. I'm still safe (Mac user)...until the mobile port releases. Although, honestly, I've begun to run out of steam a little bit with Balatro. It's still great, but I think I just burned out a little. I can't think of another game that I put 100+ hours into so quickly besides Elden Ring. Weirdly enough, it was the Plasma Deck that did me in. I appreciate that it makes you approach the game differently, but I find it less fun.

The big balance update is available for opt-in public testing right now, too, and it looks like a ton has changed. I'm sure I'll get sucked in again once this goes live for everyone!

SKIPPING BLINDS TOO MUCH IS BAD

Yeah, I think skipping blinds in general is a trap. Most of the time it's way more important to see another shop with several chances to try and improve your deck/Jokers/hands, otherwise you're likely to get outpaced by the increasing score requirements. Being able to reroll and consistently get stronger is a very big part of winning more frequently.