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Got gold stake on plasma deck the other day. My final joker lineup was blueprint, burglar, holographic D6 (which was useless but I took it early and it was eternal), foil square joker, and brainstorm. Before ante 7 I had wee joker instead of brainstorm, and my gameplan was to copy burglar with blueprint and use the extra hands to play as many four-card hands and scoring jokers as possible. Then in ante 7 I saw brainstorm and I did the math and figured out that even with wee joker at ~400 chips, it was still better to have three more hands and a copy of square joker. By the end I had 14 hands per round. Weird run. I also got gold stake on black deck last week, but there’s no cool story there, I just got some super OP combo that I can no longer remember but probably involved photograph and hanging chad. The big problem with high-stakes black deck from a gameplay perspective is not necessarily that it’s bad, but rather that it’s SO BAD that you can’t get around it in a creative or interesting way, so it’s basically the early OP combo waiting room. For plasma deck I never worry too much about getting my mult up, I just go ham on chips. Especially when it comes to joker selection. All my flat mult comes from planet cards and mult cards, and all my Xmult comes from glass and steel cards. Assuming 0 mult (which obviously is impossible but if you’ve done nothing to gain mult then by the endgame it might as well be 0) you need 1,366 chips to defeat the final boss blind (except violet vessel) in one shot. If you can reliably get 317 chips per hand every single hand then that will beat the final boss on your fourth and final hand. That’s very doable. Square joker, assuming no extra hands, can ideally gain +48 chips per ante, which means if you get it on ante 1 then theoretically it could be giving you a score of 400,000 by ante 7. Obviously that’s a very idealized scenario, but even if you can only get it up to half that number, you still have four joker slots and however many deck enhancements to make up the other half. The secret to plasma deck is to take advantage of the fact that basic +chips jokers will carry you through the early game to get your econ going. You grab one or two decent +chips jokers early and then spend the following antes ignoring jokers that improve your score to save money and buy money jokers. Obviously if you see a +chips joker that scales well into the lategame you take it no matter when it comes up, but otherwise focus on econ so later you can buy up every arcane, spectral, and standard pack possible to maximize your bonus, stone, foil, and red seal cards. If you’re lucky enough to get a good scaling +chips joker early on you can also focus on doing whatever you need to do to scale it up without worrying about how you’ll survive to the next ante. This may not be the most optimal way to play plasma deck, but it does work and it is extremely fun. I think burglar might secretly be the most busted joker in the game. It’s not good for getting those insane scientific notation scores that take you to ante 20, but for just winning runs it’s honestly nuts. The way it lets you boost scaling jokers almost twice as fast, the way it almost doubles your scoring potential if you’re able to achieve consistency in scoring, the way it synergies with copying jokers… I mean for god’s sake, on blue stake and above it kinda gives you an extra discard on top of everything else.
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Nov 23, 2024 23:45
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Unormal posted:In addition to all that its ALSO an economy joker that improves economy from the extra $ per hand remaining. Oh drat I completely forgot about that. the holy poopacy posted:There are a couple boss blinds that can gently caress over Burglar if you're not using it in a pair/high card type build. If you're running e.g. straights with the intent of playing cards to discard them and you get the "only play one hand type" or "all cards drawn after playing are face down" bosses you might be hosed. But in general yeah it's really good. True but on the other hand it completely neutralizes the “play only one hand” and “start with zero discards” bosses. It also effectively neutralizes the “all cards debuffed until 1 joker sold” finisher blind since once you start that blind burglar has already triggered for the last time that run.
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Nov 24, 2024 08:16
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What’s up with abstract being in everyone’s top ten? Have I been sleeping on it? My perception has been that it can get you to +15 really early, but you don’t really need that much that early, and by the time you do need the +15 you should probably have something better. So basically in my mind it’s in the same place as misprint and the cycle of jokers that give flat mult for the different hands. It gets you through ante 2. In the interest of not flooding this page with too many screenshots, here is an imgur album with my card stats. I’m currently in the process of beating all the gold stakes. https://imgur.com/a/laEkYme I love wheel of fortune. 1 in 4 is a pretty good bet for the potential reward. Getting polychrome on one of the jokers I was already going to take to the end is basically like getting an above-average joker with a negative edition, it’s insane for a tarot card. Getting foil is really nice because it’s so hard to find space for +chips jokers, most of the good ones are scaling so once you get into the late game you’re very unlikely to find one worth a joker slot. Holographic is meh, but still it’s 10 flat mult every hand forever, nothing to sneeze at. As far as planet cards go, If I’m not looking for anything in particular, or if I’m looking for something specific out of the planet pack and didn’t get it, I’ll boost the lowest hand I can. I like doing this for a few reasons. Number one, having a low hand with a couple upgrades put into it makes the early game a lot smoother. Number two, if I later decide to build the run around a specific low hand, I’ll already have gotten a head start on upgrading it. Number three, even if I do decide to go for a higher hand, it’s not much of a waste because higher hands benefit more from each planet card so missing the opportunity to upgrade one isn’t as bad as it is for a low card. Maybe my thinking is backwards on that, but I just don’t really find myself thinking “drat I wish I had some upgrades for this hand” for high hands anywhere near as much as I do for low hands. It’s the chips that are the problem.
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Nov 25, 2024 06:19
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Just beat ante 8 on the inflation challenge but it’s not showing as completed. What gives? https://imgur.com/a/JJBafMd
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Nov 25, 2024 11:06
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I guess I’m just not yet skilled/experienced enough to wrap my head around the practical difference between +8 mult and +15 mult. That’s a big difference, I’m sure there must be one. New joker idea: Uncommon, you can’t beat a blind if you have more than 0 hands left, +3 mult for each hand played with a higher score than required for the blind. OP?
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Nov 25, 2024 14:57
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I’m now good enough that I can reliably win with base-level black deck, but most of my high-stakes black deck runs die in ante 1 or 2, with the majority of those being in ante 1. The thing I really had to internalize was that unlike any other deck, with the black deck you can’t start skipping round 1 once it loses its reward money. Black deck CANNOT reach 450 chips reliably without jokers, especially when you go down a discard. You have to get a scoring joker in the first shop, and the scaling ones (that would be an amazing pickup on the first shop for any other deck) will not do. You need to fill up those joker slots with scoring pronto, at least three scoring jokers. You also need econ jokers early on, so you can afford the higher number of things black deck needs to be good. The only time I EVER skip buying anything in shop 1 is if the +1 hand voucher is in stock. If that’s there, I’ll take on the serious risk of losing in round 2 to grab that lifeline.
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Nov 26, 2024 08:41
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The Obelisk hate is odd to me because what it asks of you is pretty similar to other scaling jokers. If you get Square Joker, you wanna spend as many hands as possible feeding it four-card hands. If you get Ride the Bus, you wanna spend as many hands as possible playing no-scoring-face hands. If you get Obelisk, you wanna spend as many hands as possible playing something other than your winning hand, which usually means high card. In fact, all three of those jokers can be scaled up with the exact same play pattern. If you have all three, you spend all but one of your hands (or all but two if you want to be safe) playing four-card high card hands where the highest card is a non-face card, getting rid of as many face cards as possible in the process and keeping the best pair or three of a kind you can. Then you use your discards to craft the best hand possible and win because the boost from your square joker and ride the bus are keeping you ahead of the curve. Then around ante 5 or 6 you stop sending high cards and switch to immediately using all your discards to craft the best no-face-card four-card hand you can to start paying off Obelisk. In this case the exact same strategy (high card, four cards played, no faces scored) is building up Square, Bus, and Obelisk, the difference is that with Obelisk the payoff doesn’t come as soon as you invest into it. Instead you have to choose when to stop investing into it so the payoff starts happening. That’s not actually a hard choice though, you can just do it until the number of high cards you have banked is a bit higher than the number of blinds you have left to beat. So yeah, once you internalize that Obelisk basically says “0.25x mult later for every High Card you play now” it gets a lot better and easier to play. Ariong fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Nov 26, 2024 |
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Nov 26, 2024 17:56
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Relyssa posted:square joker can't reset, and while bus can it's a lot easier to avoid that happening I’ve never found it difficult to not play high card. If I’m specifically trying to avoid it then it’s pretty trivial. By the late game you should be able to reliably get the hand you’re looking for using all your discards.
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Nov 26, 2024 17:59
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Square Joker is a nice dude, but he's no Wee Joker. 😍 Wee Joker is awesome but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. To really make it work you really need to manipulate your deck. You need more 2s, fewer non-2 cards, red seals. Sometimes the packs just don’t give you that. I’ve had runs where Wee got up to almost 1000 chips, but I’ve also had runs where I sold it three rounds after I bought it because it was only up to 36 chips and I could no longer afford to wait for it. I appreciate Square Joker for its consistency.
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Nov 26, 2024 19:16
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It’s really, really hard to evaluate what Hiker is doing for you when you take it. Even when I know, logically, that it’s doing a lot for me, it’s hard to tell.
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Nov 27, 2024 02:16
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Flower Pot not working with Smeared Joker makes me sad, but I guess it is a lesson in carefully reading effects. What do you mean? They work together pretty well. It’s just that with Smeared Joker (and wild cards) you do need to have enough cards to fulfill suit requirements. This is true with all jokers that require multiple suits. Seeing Double, for example, won’t go off if your only scoring card is a single wild card, because for the purposes of Seeing Double that card can be the club or the non-club, but not both. Old Doggy Bastard posted:EDIT: If an eternal rental joker can't be paid, will it go defunct but reactivate later with funds? Rental jokers are always paid. If you have less than $3 it puts you into the negatives. There’s no penalty for being in the negatives other than not being able to buy anything (without credit card). Ariong fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Nov 27, 2024 |
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Nov 27, 2024 16:25
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You know what, I think I was a bit mistaken in my earlier explanation of how wild cards work. I’d like to issue a correction. Wild cards do count as all suits simultaneously. It’s just that in cases where a single effect requires a hand with multiple cards of different suits, the game only allows a single wild card to replace a single one of those cards. I tend to conceptualize this as them counting as only one suit at a time, but that would be slightly different.
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Nov 27, 2024 17:02
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King Vidiot posted:I still feel like Black Deck shouldn't be that hard, like it's just one less hand and the higher stakes already give you fewer discards. But somehow it's a motherfucker unless I'm missing some other bad effect that it has. By this point you probably realize how powerful multipliers are, right? Well, you can think of your hands/round as a sort of multiplier. The total score you can get on any given round is equal to your average score per hand multiplied by the number of hands you have. Obviously it’s more complicated than that what with scoring consistency and builds that win off a single hand, but generally speaking that’s the case. It is particularly true in the early game, when you don’t really have a build yet and so your strategy is just to spend every hand playing the best hand possible. Well, losing a hand is like a negative multiplier on your potential score. More specifically, it is a 0.75x multiplier on your average round score. Again, that’s a simplification, but that might help you conceptualize why it’s a struggle. Having one less hand is less of a big deal once you have a build established and can win rounds quickly, but getting to that point requires you to survive and to make money, and -1 hand hampers both of those. On that note, I’m trying to do golden needle right now. It sucks. Ariong fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Nov 27, 2024 |
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Nov 27, 2024 21:23
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To conquer the black deck you must completely reorient your idea of what constitutes a good start. Round 1 shop has square joker, hanging chad, or blueprint? drat, that’s a shame, those won’t get you through the early game, you’re probably sunk. Round 1 shop has jolly joker, mystic summit, or riff-raff? Hell yeah, we’re in business.
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Nov 28, 2024 17:11
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Can anyone recommend a good strategy for beating Jokerless? I have dozens of hours in this game, I’ve beaten black deck gold stake, I’ve beaten every other challenge multiple times, but Jokerless just seems hopelessly impossible. Every place I look online recommends a different strategy. The Balatro University video about it kinda sucks, he explains his reasoning for each individual decision in that specific run but gives very few general strategy tips, and he also gets super lucky on hermit/saturn cards early on.
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Nov 30, 2024 06:59
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Elman posted:Seems like blue seals would really help with consistency. But generally I think you do need to go all in on a strategy and get sorta lucky to have a good start for it, which means you'll have to restart a bunch. Flushes work pretty well. Unormal posted:Glass, preferably red seal glass. How do you buy the stuff you need to win without econ jokers? When should I be making my first purchase?
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Nov 30, 2024 07:28
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Elman posted:It depends, but as far as I can tell you need to both build a decent economy and have a lucky start so you can make it through the antes. My run is here but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be helpful, at the end of the day it really is about rerolling until you get the right start. Thanks, it was a but helpful seeing what you prioritized. Unfortunately at some point between your run and now the challenge was changed to eliminate all final boss blinds based on jokers, so no more amber acorn.  On the other hand, post-buff blue seals.
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Nov 30, 2024 08:58
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I beat Jokerless! It really is about getting the good vouchers early. I got Clearance Sale on ante 2 and Telescope on Ante 3. Before Telescope I got lucky with Saturn cards. Clearance Sale is pretty necessary, since you have to sculpt your deck so much AND get as many relevant planet cards as possible. Maintaining econ was not as hard as I thought, since you can get hermit cards more reliably. In the end I got Planetarium and Crystal Ball and racked up three Saturns in my inventory, which came out to x3.375 mult.
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Nov 30, 2024 22:56
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:I agree, but it feels like I don't get enough offers from the shop or cash or something. It's hard to get a Chip, +Multi, and XMulti cards offered to me by the time it ramps up. I’m not really sure how that’s possible, the ghost deck doesn’t hamper your economy in any way. In fact, it helps by making it so your first shop joker is a polychrome joker for the price of a normal joker. That plus a single +mult joker, even a crummy one that gives you +8 or something, will let you blow through the early blinds on your first hand. This means you don’t have to buy jokers and you have more hands left over at the end of the blind. If you like, you could record yourself playing a game and post it. That would help us diagnose your issue:
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Dec 1, 2024 22:21
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:I'll try to stick to the fundamentals and keep trying, one out of a handful of times I manage to get a decent/acceptable +Multi on the first shop or two. I mean it’s not perfectly optimal, but it’s still really really good. The blueprint copies the pants and then applies the x1.5 to its own flat mult bonus. So if your pants are up to +10 then you get (10 * 1.5) + 10 = 25 mult. After that every two pair you play works out to an additional 5 mult. The biggest issue at that point is winning too fast and thus missing out on scaling. Why did you predict that you would die with this extremely powerful early combo? And how did you die? Ariong fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Dec 2, 2024 |
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Dec 2, 2024 00:17
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:I fell into the issue of winning too fast and missing out on scaling. Current game, much more careful about not squandering stuff. Interesting build. The first thing that pops out at me from this screenshot is that your Mystic Summit is on the right, so the +15 mult it gives you will not be multiplied by the Seeing Double or your polychrome card. It should be on the left. Further, you have a hex card in your inventory and a bunch of meh jokers, so I’d be looking for the first opportunity to use the hex. More specifically, I would be looking for any mult card in the shop that can replace Mystic Summit. Then I would sell everything other than Seeing Double and Raised Fist, then use the hex card. Since Raised Fist is already polychrome, it would be guaranteed to hit Seeing Double, and since Raised Fist is eternal, it would not be destroyed. Then you buy whatever mult card to replace Summit. I would even consider doing it here, replacing Summit with Popcorn. What’s up with Splash? That’s an odd pick. Was it a “least bad thing in a buffoon pack” pick, or did you get it for a reason? Old Doggy Bastard posted:EDIT: Newer run has me set up in a good spot. But, if I'm right, the biggest issue I have at the moment is getting a chip joker? The first question I have looking at this screenshot is: how much have you been leveling up your hands? Photograph is a strong joker, but its effect comes into play during card scoring, so it won’t multiply the flat mult added by something like Half Joker. Say you play a three of a kind with a face card and you haven’t upgraded that hand at all. Base mult on a three of a kind is 3, so with two Photographs that becomes (3*22) = (3*4) = 12. So those two jokers are effectively giving you +4.5 mult each, which is obviously abysmal. Upgrading your main hand with planet cards really helps Photograph, although it doesn’t truly shine until you can get some retriggers going on that first face card. Upgrading your hand also helps with chips. There are few truly great +chips jokers. Most of them are like Odd Todd, fine early but you’ll want to ditch them for something better eventually. Jokers that give you +mult are enhanced by xMult jokers, +chips jokers don’t have that going for them. I would say that I end maybe 1/4 of my runs with a +chips joker taking up a slot. The rest I get by fine with the extra chips from planet cards. So yeah, overall this build is SCREAMING for a ton of level-ups applied to whatever hand you’re aiming for in your gameplan. I can’t give a truly definitive assessment of the build until I know what your hand level situation was like. The main thing that jumps out at me in this screenshot is the antisynergy between your jokers. You took every xMult joker you could without thinking of whether you could use them all to their full effectiveness. More specifically:
So if I were looking over your shoulder at the time you took this screenshot, these are the questions I would have asked you: What is your gameplan? That is to say, what is your play pattern, the series of decisions you make with your limited pool of discards and hands? When you go into a blind, how do you plan to win? Do you use your discards? If so, what for? What hand(s) are you hoping to play? And most importantly, how does each part of your current build enhance the effectiveness of that gameplan? Seriously, please let me know what your gameplan was with this build, because I’m willing to bet at least one of your jokers was running directly counter to it in a kind of abstract way that was not obvious in the moment. Ariong fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Dec 2, 2024 |
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Dec 2, 2024 13:07
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Thank you for the comprehensive feedback Ariong, that's all really helpful. Mystic Summit is a bit embarrassing, I'm so used to Raised Fist as a +Multi that I forgot the polychrome makes ideal placement different. Splash was indeed the lease bad thing in a pack (only one to not be an eternal rental) You don’t actually have to worry about Raised Fist being to the left of your polychrome jokers. Raised Fist doesn’t actually give you any mult itself, it doesn’t go off during the joker triggering phase. As you’ve probably surmised, when you play your hand, first your played cards are scored in order of left to right, then the cards in your hand (like steel cards) trigger from left to right, then your jokers trigger from left to right. Raised Fist is one of the few jokers that creates a held-in-hand effect, specifically for the lowest-ranked card in your hand. So unless it is polychrome or something, its position in your joker lineup doesn’t actually matter. Instead, maximizing its effectiveness means rearranging your hand to put your lowest-rank card to the left of any steel cards. If you’re having trouble tracking what order effects are going off in, it may be worthwhile to kick your game speed down a notch for a bit. Old Doggy Bastard posted:I believe that I was upgrading my hands, but it probably wasn't as much as needed because my money situation was abysmal. I did have a few +Multi upgrades on my Queens. Upgrading them looks like an even bigger priority than I already thought. The difference in score from hands with upgraded Queens and the hands with plain jane Queens was very noticeable. Glass remains essential. I’m noticing a recurring theme of you having trouble with your econ. In this specific screenshot, it’s odd to me that you have $4 at round 7, especially with such a powerful build. Now you can’t afford the paintbrush, which is something you desperately want if you’re doing a Stuntman build. I can’t imagine why you would have been unable to save your money earlier, given that you had a polychrome card very early. What were you doing in your early game? The early antes are not hard, you don’t need to spend much money to beat them. The ghost deck makes it especially easy to not buy things for a while once you get your first joker. My focus in the early game is typically on buying whatever jokers I need to win early antes quick and then holding onto my money until I hit $25. You can’t rely on getting a decent money joker, you should be able to build up your treasury without them. I almost never buy non-buffoon packs before I have a full set of jokers, as an example. It’s not worth losing out on the interest payments. As for this specific run… well, you have a choice to make. Stuntman and The Family are a pretty serious nonbo. Stuntman makes it very awkward to try to put together a five-card hand. Then, on top of that, you also have two copies of Sock and Buskin which want lots of face cards. With an unsculpted deck, a flush can only have three face cards, and getting all three in a flush with a hand size of five is going to be pretty much impossible. So keeping all four of these jokers will demand you fill your deck with lots and lots of face cards of one suit to reliably put together flushes, and since Sock and Buskin is only really good when your face cards do things when scored, you’ll need to enhance them. That’s going to require you to spend quite a bit of money, which for some reason you don’t have. So really you have two options here. Either ditch the Stuntman to focus on flushes, or ditch the Family and focus on lower-tier hands that you can reliably put together with a hand size of five. It’s really a matter of personal preference, I would probably go with the stuntman because it requires less deck sculpting. You’re in a really tough position economy-wise, because you’ve spent all your money putting together a build that could produce massive scores in the late game… as long as you have a deck full of enhanced face cards… which you can’t get because you spent all your money. That’s the big problem you have here. My advice? Sell the family, if you see a straightforward joker that gives you flat mult then buy it (at this point Jolly Joker would add 4,500 to your score in total), but otherwise hold onto your cash tighter than Scrooge at a strip club. You need to get up to $20-25 so you can start getting $4-5 in interest every round, and so you can use hermit cards at full value when you find them, and so you can buy money vouchers like Seed Money and Clearance Sale. Ante 5 wouldn’t be such a big pinch if you could afford a few rerolls when you get there. the holy poopacy posted:Commutative property, people! As far as the end result goes xMult is xChips; the only difference is that you have to worry about the timing on +Mult and xMult (hence the Photograph dilemma in this post), whereas you never do with chips. You’re right of course. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I had it completely backwards. +mult jokers are usually more valuable than +chips jokers because base mult is lower than base chips and therefore +mult effects raise your final score more than +chips effects. However as far as xMult effects are concerned, they are identical… which means that if the vast majority of your score is coming from xMult effects then it becomes more efficient to go for +chips effects. Huh, I never thought of it that way! Ariong fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Dec 2, 2024 |
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Dec 2, 2024 21:17
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Vizuyos posted:Lessons learned the hard way: if you use an Ankh to duplicate a Gros Michel, their extinction chance is shared. When one Gros Michel vanishes, the other one will too I’m… not sure that’s true? I think you may have just hit the 1/36.
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Dec 3, 2024 06:41
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No poo poo? I swear I once had one go extinct but not the other. I must be misremembering. Man, that’s hosed up. Also I just discovered (not independently, I read about it) a new super secret tech that is valuable but also really annoying. I’ll put it behind spoilers, in case you’re the type that can’t help but do something if you know it will boost your odds of winning. The Misprint has glitch text in its description. Intermittently it will flash red text. That red text tells you the suit and rank of the card on top of your deck, your next draw. This is particularly useful for the checkered deck, so when you get 4 cards of each suit in your opening hand you know what to discard. You don’t need to have the misprint in your inventory to do this, you can view it on page 2 of your collection at any time. There, now you’re cursed like I am.
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Dec 3, 2024 07:00
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GoutPatrol posted:Does the game guarantee you will hit the plant when you get a nice photograph/hanging Chad combo on gold stake no matter what Skill issue. You should just do what I always do: reroll it. (Because you lucked into being offered a Director’s Cut at a point in the run where you could afford to buy a voucher.)
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Dec 9, 2024 12:42
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Natural 20 posted:I'm at the one that gives -1 discard. At that stake, I’d venture to say that every run is winnable. (Except with black deck.) If you lose, it’s because you made a mistake. Probably lots of mistakes. A successful run is all about figuring out a game plan based on the jokers (and cards and vouchers) you get during the run and then making that gameplan more viable. If you only go for pairs every time, you’re just ensuring that every run where you get jokers that synergize with a non-pair strategy is doomed from the outset. In other words, you’re entirely reliant on lucky draws because you’re playing in a way that doesn’t challenge you at all and wins or loses entirely on the basis of which jokers the game happens to deal you. Instead, you should be looking at what you get and then decide what you’ll play. You’ll know you’re getting better when you start planning ahead based on what you get in a given run. At my current skill level, when I lose a run, not only do I know why I lost, I saw the loss coming multiple rounds in advance and failed to overcome it. Since you’re just starting out, I recommend focusing on unlocking new things for now. Check out your collection and see what the unlock requirements are for different jokers, challenge yourself to fulfill those requirements. For example, there’s one joker that you can unlock by completing a run without playing a pair. Why not give that a shot?
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Dec 9, 2024 17:54
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Hmm that’s odd, it makes me feel like the smartest person in the world. Perhaps the game simply reveals what is already there? How droll. oh god gently caress i just played a four card hand into the psychic again
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Dec 10, 2024 14:30
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Do you get the sticker for a joker if it is perished when you win the run?
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Dec 11, 2024 02:42
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Kuros posted:To the first question, no. Any of the food jokers have to survive the round and still be in the joker slots in order to get the sticker. So having a Popcorn/Turtle Bean/Cavendish expire after the scoring won't get you a sticker. When I said perished, I meant debuffed due to the effect of a perishable sticker. I figured maybe you could pick up a perishable Gros Michel and then, as long as it perishes before it goes extinct (which is the statistically most likely outcome) then it would be safe.
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Dec 11, 2024 04:14
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 Why do you reset until you get the ~12th best joker to get as you first pick?
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Dec 12, 2024 12:38
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Oh! Holographic, not Hologram. That makes more sense. In that case I would still recommend breaking the habit of resetting until you get a holographic tag. In higher stakes, the effectiveness of that tag is mitigated by the presence of stickers that can make the joker negligibly useful or even outright detrimental. I’ll go for it with some decks, but for most decks I’d personally rather play through the first round because more money and more shops means more chances for a good early joker without a bad sticker. Usually when I skip the first round it’s for an investment or coupon tag.
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Dec 12, 2024 13:23
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What an insane level of quality for the trailer for a free update with a bunch of card skins.RBA Starblade posted:Just stencil and astronomer left Astronomer could use a redesign in my opinion. Maybe it should be common. It made a lot more sense back when one of the stakes was increasing shop prices by $1 every ante. Now it doesn’t have a good role to play. While technically it can save you quite a lot of money in any given shop, a lot of that money will end up being saved on planet cards you would not have bought if they weren’t free. Even if you do have a build that benefits from using lots of planet cards, I think it’s better to have a joker that just gets you more money, which you can then use either on planet cards or on something else if needed. Plus, planet cards are already pretty cheap, so if you want to buy and use tons of them from the shop then most of your money would be going to rerolls anyway. The only time Astronomer wins out against Golden Joker IMO is when you get two celestial packs in the shop. It’s just not a very good econ joker, and econ jokers are already troublesome to take to the end. Come to think of it the best synergy for Astronomer would be Bonfire rather than anything planet specific.
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Dec 13, 2024 01:18
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Wait. Wait wait wait wait. Wait. Hey wait. Just… wait a sec. Wait. Shortcut lets you make more than one gap? So it’s not just A-K-Q-J-9? You can go A-Q-10-8-6? What???????
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Dec 13, 2024 04:12
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Bad Seafood posted:Polychrome (x1.5) is rarely worth it in my opinion, though sometimes it's the best you can do. I agree. Polychrome is of course the best possible Wheel of Fortune result, but as a skip tag? Eh. The more I take the polychrome tag on the first ante, the less impressed I am with it. The issue is that early in the game 1.5x mult is just not very good, and with the polychrome tag there’s a very good chance the resulting joker will do nothing for your score other than 1.5x mult, which on your first round of gameplay will functionally mean +1 or +2 mult on every hand. It gets better over time, but ultimately a joker that just gives you x1.5 mult and does nothing else for your score is not great and will end up getting cut. Then of course later in the game your build is more set in stone, you’re less likely to have joker slot flexibility, the pool of jokers you can make use of becomes lower, you’re missing out on more interest and potentially joker scaling, etc. I’ll still take it when I see it though, for the dream of getting that excellent scaling joker in polychrome on round 1. You have to make room for the dream. El Jeffe posted:Strength is underrated for building up a certain rank IMO. It's not as useful as Death or Cryptid obviously but it's something. Also always pick up a loose Fool to hold on to until after you've used a Death or Strength. Honestly, for the purposes of filling your deck with a single rank Strength is often better than Death. Particularly starting out, you have four copies of the card below your desired rank and can easily convert two at once. That’s like two Death cards. Obviously Strength becomes worse than death as your deck becomes more sculpted. Additionally, the existence of Strength cards in the tarot pool means that you can take good cards one rank below your target from Standard packs, effectively doubling the chance of a standard pack giving you an outcome that fits your gameplan. Ariong fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Dec 14, 2024 |
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Dec 14, 2024 14:42
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Tsietisin posted:Finally managed it. Wow, gold stake in eight rounds is pretty impressive, that’s… wait, what??????
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Dec 15, 2024 03:07
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Alan Smithee posted:get a boss round that has face cards down Want a tip? The buttons at the bottom which you can click to auto-sort your hand by rank or by suit don’t care about cards being face-down. They can always see what a card is. So if you sort by suit and you see a face-down card in the middle of two diamond cards, you know it’s a diamond. Similarly, if you sort by rank and a face-down card goes between a 10 and an 8, you know it’s either an 8, a 9, or a 10.
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Dec 15, 2024 04:45
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Radia posted:arlong i really like your av title combo. ive seen it many years and always liked it. but i figured someone should tell you, it's been so long Thank you!!!! Yours is cool too. Alan Smithee posted:i felt so shmart picking the one next to diamonds Oh sorry, I misunderstood your post to mean that you were sorted by rank and you just took a gamble.
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Dec 15, 2024 05:55
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Jezza of OZPOS posted:imo flushes are only a trap in that they don't scale significantly quicker than low value hands like pairs, despite being harder to find. if you can make flushes easier to play they become a lot more viable. id never really recommend not playing flushes on chequered deck for example. you can but ultimately flushes are simply the path of least resistance because they are twice as easy to find. Yeah starting out straights and flushes are very similar, and over the course of the game they differ in that it is easier to sculpt your deck to consistently produce flushes, but straights scale better when leveled up. Personally, I almost never go for a straight build unless I get an early shortcut or I’m playing the abandoned deck. It’s hard. Initially the obvious gameplan is to maximize the number of A-10 cards in your deck and get rid of everything else, but something else inevitably comes up. Like oh, here’s a Wee Joker, should I pivot to 5-A straights? If I get an immolation, should I adjust my target straight based on what my deck composition looks like afterward? Comparatively the strategy for a flush build is not complicated by nearly as many possible developments. That also goes for jokers. Ariong fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Dec 15, 2024 |
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Dec 15, 2024 09:28
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I think you’re letting your preconceived notions about the genre blind you to reality somewhat. It is extremely obvious from what you have written that you have, in fact, gained a significant amount of understanding and mastery over the game. The concepts you’re discussing are not obvious, they’re something you have to discover about the game while playing it. It is self-evident that you have learned significant amounts of Balatro strategy.Natural 20 posted:Potentially weakening the value of x mult might do something interesting for difficulty and force out higher variation but I'm unsure. This isn’t really possible because, well, it’s math. The value of A * B * C goes up more when the lowest of the three values is incremented.
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Dec 16, 2024 17:20
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Alan Smithee posted:how the gently caress do you even deal with boss blind where every card after initial hand is dealt face down Depends on your gameplan. For a flush build, it’s useful to hold onto a high-ranking card and a low-ranking card (ideally an ace and a two) of the same suit so that, sorted by suit, you know that all the cards between them are also that suit. So for example if you play a hearts flush and you keep a king of clubs and a three of clubs in hand, you can then play garbage hands until there are at least three face-down cards in between the king and the three. Then you know you have another flush ready. Furthermore, when you sort cards in your hand by suit, they always go in the order S>H>C>D. So for this strategy, if you’re going for a spades flush, you only have to keep a low-ranking face-up spades card, because you know everything to the left of it is a spade. Ditto for diamonds, keep a high-ranking diamond and every card to the right of it will be a diamond. So for those two suits it’s pretty easy to make a flush with only one face-up card. It’s difficult to give comprehensive general advice on how to deal with The Fish because it depends so heavily on what hand you’re going for. The best advice I can give is to make heavy use of the card sorting buttons, swapping back and forth between rank sort and suit sort while your hand is partially face-down, to make deductions about the face-down cards.
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Dec 17, 2024 20:07
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