Balatro: The Poker Deckbuilding Roguelike Puzzle Game

[spines]

many tags are buffed in the test patch (in particular, "next joker is [x]" is now "next joker is [x] and costs $0"), but in 1.0 i think it's safe to say that in general no one tag is, in itself, better than another shop (unless you wouldn't have money anyway, which is really common on highest stakes given the current way purple/gold works). on top of that, the vast majority of jokers you would try to take to the finish line of a run are going to reward you for playing more blinds (either because they ramp up like pants, bull, castle, etc. or give you more chances to manipulate your deck for effects like 10-4, vampire, etc.). there are, of course, a few scenarios that work the other way around, like if you have flashback and blueprint or something like that. or sometimes with food or a prepped loyalty card. point is, there's obviously a lot of value even to small blind, even once you start playing above white stake where you get a lot less money from it early on.

that said, it's really a contextually calculated risk most of the time. like, the uncommon tag, in 1.0, has a very real chance of landing you something that can set you on track to win you the game (a couple of very good uncommons are being swapped for seance and sixth sense on the test patch, so uncommon is going to become worse and i think rare will become probably the new strongest tag). though, yes, it could also be showman or mr bones.

but, say, it's ante 2 or 3, and i already have a joker or two that can carry me for a second but totally want to replace them later? maybe i see how much balatro wants me to win this time, you know. maybe 3 levels on my best hand come up and i think, "that's actually a pretty decent value" and i know exactly what it gets me, while i could potentially spend a lot in the shop for less. or i really might need the extra cards or reroll to make it past an especially threatening boss. really, it's one of my favorite mechanics in the game because it sort of gives you a second way to look at how your run is progressing and what you're trying to accomplish.

although honestly after watching speedrunners and really strong other players for a while, i also think low stakes are easy enough that you can get away with skipping a lot. it's just a suboptimal play on that scale. and you can get away with making a lot of them on white stake. hahaha

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also, the new top stakes changes basically add a potential cost to playing blinds (or make a lot of the strongest jokers weaker). so that's a little interesting

 

[SabreCat]

Y'all talking about this made it sound like such fun, I eventually grabbed it. I've apparently played six hours? It didn't seem like that long!

First win was courtesy of Fibonacci, Trading Card + Canio, and retrigger effects such as Hanging Chad and Seltzer, with lots of card enhancements on the sequence ranks. Mostly Two Pair for hand, though it didn't matter a ton what I did, everything folded in one hand once it got going, ha.

 

[Violentvixen]

Important thing I haven't seen highlighted much: the beta (finally) has a "reduced motion" option that gets rid of the moving backgrounds. While you could turn the movement down before it never quite seemed to work so this is great. I also felt like that moving background was making my battery drain a lot faster than needed so curious if that improves without 'em.

 

[ShakeWell]

I managed to pair a Midas Mask with a Paradolia and a Vampire and OH BOY did that go off. Then I added a Square Joker to get a bunch of extra chips, and a Red Card to add a bunch of base mult (I bought and skipped basically every booster in every shop after that.) By the end I was getting something like 150 chips and 100 Mult with a x8 from the Vampire. In hindsight, I shouldn't have sold the Midas Mask after basically my entire deck was gold, who knows how long I could have kept that going, but it got me well into Endless Mode, at least.

 

[lincolnic]

I managed to pair a Midas Mask with a Paradolia and a Vampire and OH BOY did that go off.

I've done this and it rules. Unfortunately it's going to rule a lot less in the new update since Vampire is getting nerfed into the ground (which feels unnecessary to me, since this is already a three Joker combo and Vampire by itself isn't that great). But having done it once, yeah, would recommend.

 

[ShakeWell]

I've done this and it rules. Unfortunately it's going to rule a lot less in the new update since Vampire is getting nerfed into the ground (which feels unnecessary to me, since this is already a three Joker combo and Vampire by itself isn't that great). But having done it once, yeah, would recommend.

On that front, it is wild to me in a way I've never seen with another game the way content creators are basically ONLY playing the new patch before it's actually pushed out. Especially since most of them are complaining about it. It's like, well then keep playing the default pre-patch version until the patch is out of beta? I mean...?

 

[Dark Medusa]

I think it's because the new patch is rather quite good, in my opinion! Finally beat Gold Stake haha.

 

[lincolnic]

It's also likely that they think it's what their viewers want to see. Out of curiosity, what are their complaints? I'm not playing the new patch myself because I feel like a few things will still need more tweaking, and I'd rather just play the finished version once it's released than have to adjust to multiple versions of the game a couple of weeks apart.

 

[spines]

vampire seems really hard to balance, since even outside of the combos i think it was extremely strong. it didn't really feel the best to keep using tarot cards to feed it, but there's only a few cards that turn money into xmult with no limit, and another one is campfire, which gets super tedious and increasingly unsustainable due to the resetting. that said, the other one is constellation, which also grows at .1 but you get to use the planets, so i do feel it's a bit overnerfed...it'll be less common when you have combo pieces and it's way more expensive to run normally

 

[lincolnic]

Nah, Campfire is extremely strong. I haven't made it to gold stake yet, but I'm basically never below the $25 interest limit by the time I usually see Campfire, so buying and selling one or two consumables in every shop after that point is pretty trivial. I think it also got nerfed in the new patch, though, so I'm not sure if it's as worthwhile now.

 

[ShakeWell]

I JUST realized four of a kind doesn't upgrade the Spare Trousers and I'm calling bullshit on that.

 

[spines]

Nah, Campfire is extremely strong. I haven't made it to gold stake yet, but I'm basically never below the $25 interest limit by the time I usually see Campfire, so buying and selling one or two consumables in every shop after that point is pretty trivial. I think it also got nerfed in the new patch, though, so I'm not sure if it's as worthwhile now.

yeah i mostly mean in postgame where the constant resetting and just losing the money you spent on it...mostly caused me to stop playing postgame after a couple campfire runs, lol. it's definitely one of the best scaling jokers otherwise just because you can get it late and still benefit basically as much as you need from it. though it still does have a few limitations, like on the old patch it became hard to broker jokers on late runs above black stake where you probably had big parts of your setup totally inflexible at a certain point.

though, by the same token, in the new patch with more jokers that you can't or might prefer not to keep forever (and some of them have $1 purchase cost)? might be pretty sweet

I JUST realized four of a kind doesn't upgrade the Spare Trousers and I'm calling bullshit on that.

to me the card art is a sufficient justification (the legs don't match)

 

[ShakeWell]

Dubious.

 

[lincolnic]

though it still does have a few limitations, like on the old patch it became hard to broker jokers on late runs above black stake where you probably had big parts of your setup totally inflexible at a certain point.

Oh, I'm almost never selling Jokers to trigger Campfire (for exactly the reason you said). I just buy and sell tarot or planet cards.

 

[SabreCat]

Hear hear
I've not worked up to high stakes yet, but I just got a clear with Campfire and Hallucination as a helpful lil synergy, it was fun!

 

[spines]

Oh, I'm almost never selling Jokers to trigger Campfire (for exactly the reason you said). I just buy and sell tarot or planet cards.

yeah, it's just usually either that or rerolling a lot more so it can get expensive either way if you need to hit more than like x4 or something. but the fact that there's not a "buy and sell" button is also the only reason i ever don't buy the soda, haha. mostly i'm a hater of campfire because i find it really repetitive to use, but it's still a strong go-to if i'm in a good spot to win the run off of it. would i rather lose than play like 5 antes of campfire?

...i'm not sure

 

[chady]

I haven't logged in to post here in a long time but I just had a weird moment of emergent gameplay in Balatro and I had to share it somewhere, so here I am.

I was playing "The Rich Get Richer" challenge and had a fantastic run and took it endless, and things had become kind of mindless, just playing flushes and scoring in the millions of points. I was still looking for ways to optimize further, but l I hit The Ox on my Boss Blind on Blind 11.

I played a flush, not thinking, and it set my money to zero. As soon as I played it I figured "Dang! Wasn't paying attention to the boss blind! Oh well, should be able to power through and then slowly build my money back." So I played a second flush, thinking I could just power through the blind. And then I noticed my score was still zero, and I laughed for a solid minute.

My mult was multiplying up to hundreds of thousands. BUT, the rule on "The Rich Get Richer" challenge is that your chip size is maxed out at your cash level. And since The Ox set my cash to zero ...

 

[ShakeWell]

I picked this back up and got an immediate victory on Black Stake. I think it's possible the patch went too far the other direction, with free Negative or Rare Jokers kind of breaking how the economy works and making skipping those blinds totally worth it. But yeah, still good.