CypressPunk
@CypressPunk
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Aerginous
@Aerginous

A lot of people complain about the luck based properties of it, and a lot of people snub back because they easily get like 70% winrate on the easiest difficulties themselves. What they might both be missing is that it will probably take quite some unlocks to close that gap between Balatro being more luck based or not, to give you better chances of good jokers (there are a lot of them in the end, but probably not at the start?).

For example, the joker card you unlock by discarding a royal flush is incredibly good, it's worth it to play a few games with the sole focus to add that one.

Even then it is a game that mostly involves leaning into the first viable build you are offered, with maybe 1 pivot in the run unless you luck out on economy and can reroll as you like.

Other than that, it's mostly knowing a lot of rules of thumb. The reward gap between full houses or straights and simpler hands is pretty large. Flushes lie somewhere in the middle. The complex hands scale a lot better with planets, so 1 or 2 planet cards for those can carry you a lot early game if you discard for their hands specifically. Other than that, it's mostly about balancing investing into economy jokers with investing into mult and Xmult jokers.

Some people say 5 card hands are a trap, maybe that's true on the higher difficulties but I disagree. On the lower difficulties I usually immediately lean into a 5 card hand type, preferably two kinds of them unless I get an opportunity to trash the deck to lean into one or the other.

In the card deck, straights usually conflict with flushes. If you try and add cards of only just a certain suit, you probably have a hard time to balance the deck for good straight chances at the same time and vice versa. Also when playing, pairs or three of a kind etc. usually rob your chances of making a straight through that rank of card for the rest of that round.

It takes a lot of knowing specific mechanics to judge the value of cards and jokers well (like, metal or polychrome playing cards are not great unless you have +mult that triggers on the scoring of cards themselves). Builds that involve duplicating joker effects can involve reordering your jokers for every hand you play, or before every match.

I have unlocked like 95% of the game while rarely looking at the card counting table. I do feel higher difficulties become a lot more luck based (probably too much) if you do that, but you can get by fine rarely looking at the card count table on basic difficulties.


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