For the unfamiliar, this is Balatro, a brand-new video poker based roguelike about manipulating your deck of playing cards so you can do things that would ordinarily be illegal/impossible in standard poker, like play five of a kinds, and stacking up score bonuses and multipliers to make your score reach astronomical heights, in this case a single hand worth 615 billion chips/points (which stopped being good enough when I got far enough into endless mode that the target was 116 trillion).
In this particular case, the combination I used to pull this off was:
- Throwback: multiplicative score boost based on number of rounds skipped in the run
- Hologram: multiplicative score boost based on number of additional playing cards added to my deck in the run
- Baseball Card: gives every uncommon Joker (I had 3) another x1.5 score boost
- Constellation: multiplicative score boost based on number of planet cards played that run
- Perkeo: duplicates a random consumable in my possession after every shop and makes it Negative, so it doesn’t count against inventory space
- Blueprint: copies the effect of another Joker—I would use it on Perkeo between rounds and Constellation during rounds
- a massive base score and multiplier for five of a kinds, courtesy of using Blueprint + Perkeo to generate two extra Planet X cards every round (also letting me boost Constellation to x8 in the process)
- 5 Glass (applies x2 multiplier when played) 10s, four of which had Red Seals (causes card to be played twice), again courtesy of Blueprint + Perkeo to duplicate a Justice card a bunch of times to make a bunch of my cards Glass once playing Planet X cards stopped having an appreciable effect on my score (and of course a bunch of prior deck manipulation to get a ton of 10s and the Red Seals)
- 4 Steel cards (applies x1.5 multiplier while held), one of which had a Red Seal, also courtesy of using Blueprint + Perkeo to duplicate Chariot cards several times to make a bunch of cards Steel once I was able to consistently draw 5 Glass cards.
Also, I lied, I know exactly how I could theoretically top this, it’s just that the odds of finding an early Perkeo are low, what with it being a legendary Joker. If I could do that (and ideally find one of the means of copying it or its effect), I could start building a giant pile of duplicate planet cards, and then pray for the appearance of the Observatory voucher to make each of those held Planet cards apply a x1.5 multiplier, thereby achieving consistent exponential scaling after every round.