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.
Throw in a Blueprint and 2 Brainstorms to duplicate the effect of Perkeo 3 times over, and my score was increasing by a factor of 5.0625 every single round (or 2 orders of magnitude per ante), enough to outpace the ante scaling for quite a while and then to have a bit of a cushion once it did start gaining on me again, ending up with a final high score of 4.5 decillion, a number so large that (a) I had to check “list of large numbers” on Wikipedia to make sure I counted the zeros correctly for a decillion, and (b) it makes my previous high scores look like a rounding error. It’s cute that I thought “nearly a trillion” represented the peak of what I could achieve in this game.
It’s funny, Observatory alone was giving me so much mult that at one point I actually wound up ditching every single Joker that was directly giving me chips/mult in favor of economy Jokers so I could spam rerolls and fish for more Blueprints and Brainstorms (I had Showman, so duplicates could appear), which thankfully did pay out once with that second Brainstorm. Now that I’m thinking about it, if Mime works on held consumables (no idea if it does), that would’ve been even better, although I don’t think one ever showed up.