signal eleven

nope this one is sailing with a full deck of red seal steel kings. baron+mime, two brainstorms, a blueprint, and troubador; no useful negatives. antimatter voucher, both hand size vouchers, retcon, telescope, a few other things. (everything else being equal, the secret to success in this recipe is getting your mult multiplied by 1.5x 176 times per hand.)

chips are useless long term in the plasma deck. a couple hundred chips will set you sailing into endless mode, but you have to pivot to pure mult at some point. when you do, all your x-mult is twice as effective and you can go quite a bit farther. this one is reliably scoring something times ten to the 63.

scoring higher without playing high card is possible but very difficult. at this level everything is about getting more x-mult triggers, because exponents are always very quickly better than bigger individual multipliers. while played cards are typically fewer in number than cards remaining in hand, there are a few additional sources of x-mult like glass and polychrome (which never trigger on cards in hand) and stronger bonuses available (2.0x from glass, triboulet, and idol).

to make this work out for big money numbers you want to get to high antes with a large amount of polychrome, glass, and red seals in flush 5; triboulet in kings or queens is often the easiest since this lets you take sock & buskin for guaranteed retriggers, or you can use 2-5 with hack, get selzers and replace them, or anything else with dusk (but you only get one good hand). if you aren't going kings and queens the best multiplier is idol, which requires filling your entire deck with exactly one card.

that kind of gameplay lets you shrink your hand size without hurting your scoring significantly, because you can still play 5 cards; this means that if you have the opportunity you can cram more good jokers in with ectoplasm and probably a showman. balatro university ran this one a little while ago, you can see how ridiculously niche getting this far is and he still wasn't able to make polychrome + glass happen. best case a deck could make it through 1, maybe 2, maaaaybe 3 more antes like this but anything much after that is strictly perkeo cryptid high card memes ONLY in this build of the game.