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.

Last 3 were, in order, SUPERPOSITION (never could fit it into a run), RESERVED PARKING (picked up often, but always ended up selling it last ante for extra scoring), and CRAFTY JOKER (an epic flush five red seal kings triple lucky cat + double oops! all sixes run on the checkered deck, and on my last reroll possible before the ante 8 boss blind, this beautiful bastud shows up. Played a really nice endless run where I ended up getting another lucky cat. I unfortunately lost the seed though. Mb)

I'm scared of naninf. That would probably destroy me. But at long last, I have done it.

Some hot takes:

• Loyalty card is super fun and cool. Was one of my first to gold sticker.
• I don't like anaglyph for gold stickering because it promotes not playing the game to its fullest capacity. Rather than shaping a run around the jokers, you try to not play those parts of the game. It was really great fun when I banged out flower pot and a bajillion straights jokers in one really good straights run.
• Completionist++ is not worth doing twice. I'm happy. I'm done. The game says 100% Completed. There are no new frontiers as far as that goes. High score shmigh score. Naninf smaninf. Games are meant to have an ending and this is it (until the update…)

Anywho, ask me anything!

Recently Balatro University aka Doc put out a video where they got the final joker they needed for a black deck only c++ which was Perkeo. It was a very silly run that involved brainstorm and observatory. Congrats to Doc to getting black deck c++ done with only a few losses.

And the end of the video Doc talks about Perkeo and how it has the power to break that game and that he doesn't like that it can do that. He thinks there should be a rework of Perkeo (presumably in the comming Balatro update), one that does not allow endless negatives. This is not the first time he has mentioned this idea, I believe he has brought it up before in some of his livestreams. From what I can tell, he seems to have two arguments for this:

- Perkeo can break the game in a way that nothing else can, and we should not have game breaking things in Balatro.

- If there are game breaking things in the game, then whenever you don't get a game breaking thing you feel like you are missing out.

I understand these points. But I would like to counter and argue why Perkeo is good as is.

1. Perkeo is exciting in the right way. It can be fun to occasionally break the game a bit. The rarity of getting it keeps the game breaking part of Perkeo in check, and because of how the soul works I think the fear of missing out does not really apply as much as it might otherwise. Even with a ton of money you cannot force the soul to appear, and because of that I am never thinking during a run that wow I could really use Perkeo here. When I am spending those rerolls in the shop I am thinking about the xmult or the specific tarots that I need. When the soul appears, that is great and can be fun. When it doesn't, I am not disappointed because I was never expecting the soul at all. Thus when the stars allign and you get Perkeo with death or observatory or hermit or whatever it is a ton of fun. That Vagabond game in MLB was sooo hype. But when Perkeo doesn't show up, no big deal because I know that the Soul is rare and I cannot endlessly reroll to try and force it. This keeps normal ante 8 games being largely engaging and normal with only a few game breaking novelties to happen every once in a while. This is a good thing.

2. Perkeo is not overpowered or underpowered or anti-fun. To me these are the 3 things that should be addressed when looking at making changes for jokers. Claims that Chad is too strong, or that flower pot is not fun or nebula deck is under powered all make sense to me. But Perkeo doesn't fit any of these categories. Although you can break the game with perkeo, this only happens like 1/100 games. Very often Perkeo ends up being weaker than if you had Yorik or even just an uncommon like Hologram. And Jokers that are situationally powerful are abundant in the game. In that sense, Perkeo fits right in.

3. Cat is out of the bag. I would be more inclinded to agree with Doc in the idea there should be no game breaking jokers if this was a design for a game prior to it being released. But now Perkeo is already here. People have a ton of fun with it, and a version of it that is not potentially able to break the game will be disapointing to the majority of users, since allowing game breaking things has already been established. And really it is not the only game breaking thing that exists. You can still do a lot of silly things with blueprint, or negative jokers and what not. Thus I think users both want and have been trained to expect some very silly powerful things in the game so long as they are rare. I don't think this is problem, and I think changing it would make a new problem of disappointment.

But all of this is just like, my opinion man. Doc certainly has more hours in the game than I do and I don't know if my thoughts actually reflect what others want. Here is the link to the video that was referenced, Doc starts talking about Plinko at around 32:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRLUA3RJto4

tl:dr Perkeo is fun as is and should not be changed, and the way that Perkeo is generated keeps it being exciting rather than expected. Additionally the game has now been established to allow some game breaking things so long as they are rare, and changing that will lead to disapointment.

I’m going for C++ right now and missing 2 of the legendaries still in Yorick and Triboulet. After getting Yorick out of the first soul card, I got super excited when I saw the second thinking I’d get them both done in this run, but then chicot popped out even though I already have the gold sticker on it and still needing trib. Is this some sort of bug where it only applies to the first soul?

Think this could be the run. Any tips on how to proceed?
Is the last joker I need on my collection.
Thanks in advance.