Balatro tips and strategies
 

I love Balatro. It's CRACK. I've beat white stakes with several, and red stakes with a couple, and thoughts

Ante 1: Even with Green Deck, where you get paid for discards remaining, don't play any hand that A) Doesn't have at least 4 cards (and almost definitely flush/straight/Full House is the way to go). With 300, 450 and 600 in the first ante, you really want to blitz those in as few cards as possible to start the money train running

Early Antes: When you use a "convert 3 cards into a suit" tarot card, pay more attention to the suit than the number. Flush decks get a LOT better when it's 16/10/13/13 instead of 14/12/13/13, it also gives you targets to get rid of.

If you get one or two +multiplier jokers early, save money instead of filling things out more with things that don't fully synergize with your jokers/deck idea

If you run Green Deck especially, Delayed Gratification will be the equivalent of attaching a supercharger to your money engine.

early on, it's an auto skip if they offer a polychrome or a Holographic Joker, and it's just about always a good idea to skip if you get a negative joker.. Same with "All cards in the next shop are free to start". Don't forget you can sell cards you have no use for from that free shop, you just have to take them in your hand first (so, for example,. if you have Hanged Man, but no card targets, grab it, don't use it, and immediately sell it)

Fibonacci is a run winner.

And something you probably already know, but just in case... you can reorder your hand and your jokers to maximize your score (always do +Multipliers before x Multipliers, for example, same with things like Fibonacci before a card that multiplies the multiplier.

edit: I'm going to use this section for further thoughts:

On playing card hands, it's better to skip them instead of taking something that doesn't have a modifier, unless you're going for something like "I need 10 aces for this hand to work). They just take up room in your deck.

If you want to try everything without having to unlock it, create a second profile, switch to it, and click "Unlock everything" in the profile. You won't be able to get steam achievements while using that profile, but it will let you try out all the jokers, and all the deck types without having to unlock them.

Just got my first back to back wins, so I'm pleased with myself atm :)

Question (since this feels like it could turn into a general tips thread too):
Is there somewhere that explains some of the achievements/stats stuff? For example, what exactly IS a "joker sticker"? I have 1 now ... but I have no clue how I got it

edit to add: And yes to the "reorder deck (or jokers) to maximize benefit". I'm getting better about that but it still requires some practice to turn it into reflex

When you Play a hand that is less than 5 cards (ex: three-of-a-kind), you can throw in junk cards to get rid of them.

Right, it's like having extra discard opportunities basically.

cards that are supressed still count for hand ranking, they'll just not count for chips and any special abilities from jokers and tarot cards on them. (useful, if you say, you have the card that gives you x3 multiplier if you play a hand of the same type as you did previously that round.

Finobacci and a flush deck is awesome. Any tips on having a flush deck playing against a boss blind that negates that suit? That's always my worst fear.

There's someone out there with a video where he ends up with a score that needs E72 Exponential Notation to show up (just for comparison, a Million Million is only E12).

How? By ending a run with 28 cards, which all of them are the king of hearts. Some of which have planet seals (which feeds his multiplier through a card that gives +0.1 multiplier per planet card you play) , some of which has retrigger seals.

This, combined with the plasma deck (which averages out chips and multiplier before doing score caluclation, which can make a difference, compare 100 x 1 vs 50.5 x 50.5)

Balatro Science: Introduction to Infinity (1.0.0h) - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEsegOW8MCY&t=0s

Some of the boss blinds are so much harder than others. Like the one where you get zero discards, or only a single hand, versus the one where you have to play five cards to score.

OK. What is this?

It's a message board dedicated to an old football video game where old losers gather to get mad at each other, but that's not important right now.

The one that selects a card you must play has killed me so many times :banghead:

There is a 99.9% chance that you know this, but just in case: you can discard that selected card too.



I just had a run with the joker that pays on held face cards 50% of the time, and then I teamed that up with the joker that makes all cards considered face cards and I thought I was hot shit for like 5 seconds and immediately ran into the boss blind with all face cards drawn face down. :(

Man, I had a set up that considered all cards face cards, +4 face card multiplier, and some other X multipliers. Boss blind was all Face cards are de-buffed. So I sold the Joker that turned all cards into face cards, but it destroyed the whole synergy of my deck and I got stomped.

But for those who are just dipping into the game, be aware that discarding the forced card will result in a different card being forced in the hand.

Talking about synergies for wins, I hit a great one tonight and picked up a victory with it

Jokers for: All Clubs +4, All Spades +4, and Jokers/Spades (and Hearts/Diamonds) being interchangeable

So a 5 card flush of any black suit triggers 5x(4x+4x), so a 40 multiplier from the hand. Paired with "most played hand adds mult for each use" joker, and several holo/foil jokers acquired along the way, I think I was usually somewhere in the 200-250 multiplier range by the end stages.

Ooh, also

Splash joker "Every played card counts in scoring"

Yes, any bonus effects (chips, mults, whatever) DO count even if those cards are not part of the hand you're playing (i.e. one pair, you still get the effects of the other three cards too)

at some point, stop stacking +multipliers and go to xMultipliers (Polychrome, the one that boosts per blind skip, etcetera). you'll get your muitiplyers much higher

If anyone cares, here is a cool seed: JVGS56W9

look for dna, vampire, a blueprint, and astronaut and try to fill your hand with only one card rank.

OK. Downloaded and checking it out.

So when does a run "end?"

For example Slay the Spire has 3 levels, final level has a boss. Defeat the boss, game over.

When you finish ante (round) 8, the run is officially "Won" (for game stat purposes), but you can play endless mode if you have a deck with nice synergy to see how far you can go. The #'s keep escalating very quickly (the switchover from Ante 10 to Ante 11 is the "Casual Kill Screen", as it takes 7x the points from the Ante 10 boss to the Ante 11 Small Blind.

I actually saw FOFC alumni Pumpy Tudors playing it on twitch the other day

Got my 4th different deck win (one more to go to unlock Challenges) with a pretty sweet synergy that fed into my playstyle

+0.1xMult for each Tarot card played AND +0.1xMult for each Planet card played. By the end I has 4.0x Mult and around 3.0x Mult both firing.

First half of the run was fed by the +20mult if played hand has 3 cards, so I fed planets into 3 of a Kind.

Okay, fine, having Mister Bones _and_ Disable boss blind gave me a certain degree of agression in the final ante altough as it turned out I didn't even need them for the win

When playing a hand with fewer than 5 cards (e.g., three-of-a-kind), you have interactive plinko online version the option to discard additional cards, known as junk cards, to eliminate them from your hand.

Can someone explain interest?

For every $5 that you have saved up before the deal, you get $1 after the round, maxed out at gaining $5. Of course, pretty much every aspect of that is mod-able by jokers or vouchers.

Thanks

Just took my first run with a red deck. I was up to level 14 with two pair then used cards to try and get as many kings as I could.

This game is really fun.

Finally got challenges unlocked today.

Not the most scintillating stuff, I'll probably stick with trying to win with more decks instead of falling into the challenge thing any time soon.

-------
As an aside, I saw a note somewhere that said first week sales had topped 250k units. And in addition to NorthernLion (who has been playing for weeks), I've seen both Quill18 and Vormithrax doing LP videos this week.

northernlion did some really good videos and is chill

Some extremely basic strategerizing from me: after ante 4 or 5 it's time to ditch any jokers focused on making money/cards/anything else and focus all your jokers on scoring.

He's really how I came across the game a few weeks ago.

My son uses various gamer channels as background noise while he sleeps, NLion being one of those. That led him to Balatro, which in turn led me to it.

A very specific tip: if you get the joker that allows 4-card straights or flushes you can fill in 4-card straights with pairs of any of the cards within the straight, and all 5 cards will get scored.. E.g. 4-5-6-6-7

Ok, bought it. first 30m run was unexciting, but I'm taking it on faith that I will eventually get into this.

See you back here in a while.

I was the same and now my wife and I just had lunch and she said "you playing that game again?"

I also just learned a lesson. If you play a boss where you have to play 5 cards if you play less it doesn't say, screw you you can't do that, it discards them. Cost me the match when I tried to play 4 aces

I get so frustrated watching him play, holy shit. I know he's streaming and that's priority 1, but he misses so many obvious plays and then cries because he doesn't understand why he failed. Maybe he looks to his chat too much to get tips mid-game, but I quit watching him play Balatro altogether it was just too stressful.

That's a theme with a lot of streamers I think.

Quill18 drives me half batty with that sort of thing in general, FeedbackGaming is terrible about that with HOI stuff.

I need a mod that pre-calculates my score before I submit my hand. I'd burn some more discards trying to get gold cards or cards with seals that pay out when held, if I knew whether this hand was going to put me over the top.

hxxps://github.com/jie65535/awesome-balatro

Good article on this kind of thing (tips and tricks)

https://www.pcgamer.com/balatro-tips/

Just cleared the "Casual Kill Screen" 7.2 million for the first time!!!!

How? Most of it was the unholy trinity of Jokers. One that makes face cards gold, one that makes every card treated like a face card, and Vampire, which eats certain types of enhancements to make its multiplier go up. I probably could have gone a couple more hands of it, but they take up 3 jokers to do so, so I was worried I may not keep up).

But even with probably breaking up the infinite combo a bit too early, the Vampire was giving me a x12.6 MULTIPLIER.

Then, to top it off, I got the joker that gives a x3 modifier on the very last hand of the round. Lucky as heck, but I'll take it :)

edit: I actually made it through that whole ante, but it just makes me give more respect to those who post scores higher than there are number of atoms in the universe...

Just lost my first decent run because I played a four card seven high instead of discarding it. Oops.

Fun game but like most rogue likes not sure it will hold much interest long term. Still well worth the money and most innovative indie game I’ve played in a while.

Niiiice! I still haven't really been close.

So yeah I, uh, did a thing.

The first gaming video / Let's Play video I've ever done that sees the light of day.

2.5 hours of me doing way more talking about Balatro than actual playing Balatro. I mean waaaaay more talking than playing.

In hindsight I don't love it, as time passes I suspect I'll cringe at the sight and sound of this but I'm putting it out there anyway. If nothing else in hopes that it will inspire me to do better in a future release.

Balatro Play (hours 1-2) - YouTube

edit to add: 2nd video with better playing to 'splaining ratio
Balatro Play (hours 3-4) - YouTube

This game is great. I usually go for the flush deck and got the joker that allows a flush or straight with just 4 cards. My first flush play I had 4 spades and was tossing a club to clear my hand. The Hand was:
A-2-4-5 (Spades) and a 3 of clubs. It ended up giving me a straight flush since my hand was a straight (A-5) and four were clubs. Pretty cool feature with that Joker.

the nice thing is that let's say you had A-2-3-4 of a suit. ANY card you put in the fifth slot will make it a straight flush, since you have a straight AND a flush (with four fingers joker that is)

Also, the shortcut joker let's you skip a number in a straight. But I didn't realize until recently you can skip multiple iterations of 1. So you could have a 2-4-6-8-10 straight with that card, which makes it much more powerful than I originally interpreted.

And while on the subject of straights, I feel that hand size is critical for this. For me, it is worth giving up a discard or a played hand to increase it while playing a straight deck. I've beaten ante 8 a few times with straights, although I haven't been able to get past 10 with this strategy.

My best run, which got me to ante 12, was surprisingly a 2 pair deck. I don't remember my exact joker combo, but I know I had the trousers, the block (play exactly 4 cards), and the combo where every card is a face card along with the one that turns all face cards into gold. Add a vampire to suck away my mass gold, and this one added up quickly. I know I had another negative joker in there, but don't remember what my 6th one was.

ETA: And in case you didn't know, if you buy 10 of the blank vouchers, you unlock a voucher which gives you an extra joker slot. I don't know what happens if you keep buying them after it is unlocked though.

The blank voucher is a prerequisite for the voucher that gives the extra joker slot.

For whatever reason this game churns through my battery

I've had a few good runs with straight strategy too. Seems like there may be 1-2 more straight focused jokers relative to other hands...I like the one that gains +10 chips for every straight.

After literally a week of trying I finally just beat black stakes, with a straight deck and the above joker

Just played my 4th or 5th game and the first where I "felt it." Got a couple flush-themed jokers, and started to get real money, and sorta threw it around at all the things just to see what they did. Narrow loss in round 19, now I am looking forward to playing again, for the first time.

First win. Got lots of “face card” synergy and a deck of mostly spades. Easy wins down the stretch.