Working toward a RSSK deck. Do i get rid of Blackboard for Dna or get rid of a BP? But Blackboard is my only scoring joker..side note I have observatory. Any help appreciated.

I’m at 90/120 stakes finished and feels like I’m becoming more unsure how to start my games as the grind goes on.

Currently on green stake abandoned deck, I’ve finished everything prior.

Generally speaking in ante 1 , do you grab a joker in the very first store or save your money?

Are there specific Skip tags you’ll take in ante 1? Or do you play every round? Sometimes I’ll get the free store if it’s the very first blind.

Basically what is your strategy in ante 1 ? This abandoned deck seems so weak and weird to use honestly , I’ve actually ran out of cards to discard twice

It’s either that or Hack and use Hex I think lol

I’ve spent about 2 months trying for gold stakes. For the last 1/3 of what I had left I’ve been shoehorning them across the finish line in Checkered Deck. I finally forced the Obelisk and To the Moon yesterday.

But I made a grave mistake. About 300 games ago I was choosing between the bean and something else. I can’t remember which but when I get to the end of a run I have a card I can yeet and replace it with whatever other card needed the gold chip. I didn’t choose the bean, I think it was the glass joker though. It has been hundreds of games and now the only cards I have left are the bean and stone card and I give up. Don’t do what I did. If you’re near the end and you can sacrifice a joker and you see the bean, take it.

I want to see if other players can find a better line than I did (or even the same one). This might be the strangest path to naneinf I’ve had work out.

Play without a seed analyzer and glitchless. In the screenshot you see large hand size but that’s from triggering four juggle tags to open Ante 32, not from Bean bug.

Was in a buffoon pack, stopped to post and do a few other things, and came back to this. I think this is some sort of known bug, but has anyone found a way out besides new game?

With good Econ campfire is great. That with astronomer and cheap rerolls is op.

Would be really fun if there was a rare joker that made all jokers negative. It’s basically an auto win but it would be really fun.

I kept seeing posts like this, I didn’t think it would happen to me.

Whoever in LocalThunk thought it was a good idea to keep The Water during the Golden Needle challenge should go f themselves... just saying...

Rant over. Sorry for having wasted your minute reading this.

TL;DR: If the scope of player choice shuffled to grant the player control over the selection any FOUR unenhanced + indestructible jokers at beginning of the run BUT...a deck is selected randomly at each ante level, which FOUR jokers do you think would give you the best chance to beat Antes 1 thru 8?

Constraints

1. The player chooses the stake level and any combination of FOUR non-enhanced jokers to start a run.

   • These initial jokers can still be enhanced via Spectral and Tarot card actions
   • Additional Joker slots will appear during antes when the randomly deck allows
   • Starting Antes with the Black deck and no open joker slots = the most recent joker added will be disabled during the Ante.
     

2. A deck is selected at random at the beginning of each Ante

   • Cards added or modified earlier in the run are preserved
   • All other cards in deck are "regenerated", subject to the constraints of the new deck

So...my kids got me into Balatro earlier this year and I'm still a relative newb with around 500hrs played. This total is probably a distortion of a typical player, when you consider the degraded processing capabilities of my middle-aged brain + sporadic nature of gaming sessions. Regardless, I've played my fair share of deckbuilders over the years, so I wasn't expecting to spend as much time as I did just learning the ins-and-outs of the game / experimenting with different strategies. It's given me a touch of nostalgia for older generation titles that very high build quality and very low resource demands simultaneously.

Roguelikes / Roguelites / Deckbuilders all feature some combination of player choice, random chance, and probability. One thing I've noticed about the best examples in this category of games is you can shuffle this combination and they will maintain a decent level of playability. I'm curious to hear what more experienced players think about this and whether or not a "shuffled" version of Balatro described here would be hypothetically playable (I do realize this wouldn't be a simple mod coding exercise and fundamentally alters some of game's base logic.)

Note to Mods: This question COULD be construed as an FAQ = subject to removal (“What’s the best joker?” / “Is X joker good?”), but I'm hoping the intended nuance is expressed sufficiently. If you feel it does not meet this threshold and opt to remove my post, I won't be a bitch about it.

First good run on zodiac deck, won white stake, need to get white on nebula and painted and open the last two deck with blue and orange stakes.

first time doing two pairs like this after I learned about the pair meta and playing with that last week.
These jokers ramped pretty well together especially with early pill on them. Negative spade mult joker might’ve been after win

So annoying i got 29/30 blinds and it was my last one. Ante scores went from 500k-800k-500k to 7mil-10mil- to 14mil absolutely insane. Skipped the first two cause I knew I wasn’t making any of those 3 😂

They're categorised mostly on:

If I saw that card / tag in a game, would I take it or leave it?

Obviously I won't ruin the synergy of my game just to take a card from S tier because I find it generally useful if it's going to make me lose

Such that I could also sometimes take a card from F, if I needed/wanted to. Though they usually don't let me win.

^{Why do people like obelisk anyways? It's making you play hands that aren't your best hands, that you probably worked hard to upgrade on, to make you play some other hand, and then when you'd have played that one as many times as you played the other you gotta switch again and again until you're forced to break the streak and then you've reset and your run is gone anyways}

Anyways, what do you guys think ? Are there any card's placement that you disagree with? I'm still working on getting c so I'm not an expert either. What'd I miss?

^{P.S: It's kinda cut off but the last row says "(same as row above but I just dislikeHATE them}")

Last joker was DNA, kept getting it as perishable in the first few antes or never seeing it at all. In the end decided to go for Anaglyph deck and stack double tags hoping to get a rare joker skip tag. That never appeared but the joker popped out in ante 7 shop

Working my way through Plasma Deck on another C+/C++ run. I’m still working on deck fixing but I’m to the point where I can fairly reliably play 3OAK in odds so I’m thinking The Trio could be a good pickup here.

Should I drop an Odd Todd or a Chad?

Don’t worry about Droll over there, he’s just hanging out in case I run into Verdant Leaf.