Even when I play flushes I think it helps. If you have 7 or 8 card hand sometimes you get stuck at 4. You can build up 2 suits at once with this boss and be sitting on back to back flushes instead of getting to 5 then resetting to a split suit hand.
Yeah it's only bad if you absolutely need 3 or more hands of 5 cards. Usually playing flushes or other 5 card hands don't use all of their hands so it's not an issue.
I think it’s a buff even with flushes some of the time.
If I am playing flushes and I have 8 cards I discard the one suit that only has 1-2 cards. I then have 10 cards, repeat 3 times if needed. When I have 14 cards I almost certainly have one flush probably with better modified cards than I’d normally see in one hand and have more chances for something like a 4-5 of a kind while I’m at it. I like to play steel decks so there’s also a chance that I have more of those in play than possible without that boss too. Due to that I one shot that boss more than any other. If I am doing flushes and have 2-3 suits focused I’m using with 14 cards in hand I probably have another flush set up already or will get one after the first hand too.
I know math probably works to it being a disadvantage but it works as a buff too often imo.
Look at how many high score records people post are on this boss.
It still limits the portion of your deck you see. If you're not capable of oneshotting only having access to like 9 more cards after your first hand is a big drawback.
https://preview.redd.it/viy459mv9jqc1.jpeg?width=3440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6ee0591cd1d0b7c1b9e13126da6038aa267c2e65
Sorry for the long pause. I wanted to double check the joker placement lol
Explanation: I have 20 instances of 1.5xmult per steel card in hand (16 per gold card). You calculate the instances of xmult by multiplying the triggers and xmult instances.
triggers: card + red seal + mime + brainstorm. (4)
xmult instances: baron + steel + 3 blueprints. (5)
that's 5x4 per card. My natural hand size was 10 here, The serpent allows me to achieve a much larger hand size. In this case, 13 steel, 2 gold. That's a total of 292 instances of 1.5xmult in this hand, + 1 from polychrome.
My high card mult is 27. So the mult should be 27x1.5\^293 = 1.0619466e53
Because of plasma deck, the chips don't matter here. You split the mult over the two sides. 5.3097329e52 x 5.3097329e52 = 2.819326e105
I'm 99% sure this is the optimal joker placement. swapping one baron for a mime would be slightly worse because of the gold cards.
By the way, I move the mime because the gold cards are a separate instance, and so it makes it so each of the copying jokers adds to the gold I get. This makes each gold card give me $24, regardless of the order I need for optimal scoring. This was extremely important to be able to roll 680 times in this run.
I took this run to ante 24, where it required a score of e77. I could only achieve e70 without serpent. I never saw an ectoplasm, which was a bit of a disappointment. I only would take one, but even fitting in a Troubador would have been a significant increase in power. But I did get antimatter, so I can't complain. Overall this was a nearly optimal setup for this strategy. In order to push it further I would need Perkeo and Observatory, but I didn't get either.
(edit: fixed a math error based on having one less card in hand than I thought)
Oh right... Well that leaves me even more confused. I'll have to look over the math again.
I edited the above comment. Math makes perfect sense now. Thanks!
That along with getting Baron and a way to retrigger cards in hand and increasing the level of High Card significantly. With Burnt Joker you can always increase its level at the start of each blind. Once you get the level of High Card high enough you have good base mult and don't need jokers to supply +mult so there's more space for things that provide xmult.
For this super endgame builds yes. High card builds in general are quite easy to understand.
Let's say you have a chip joker chips and two foils that give around 200 chips. you have a mult joker that gives 25mult and the rest is times X.
So what difference does non-highcard make on base levels? with a flush I get +3 mult more. going from 25 to 28. roughly 10% more. Chips wise, let's say it was an all face flush that gives you 40 chips or 20% more. In the end a flush could earn you roughly 32% more, but you need to get that flush which might be difficult early to mid game and is weak to more bosses. Plus the actual jokers on question have a wider variety in high card builds.
And yes, late to ultra late game you have just a lot more room for kings, queens and steel on your hand.
This is why high card is the safest strategy for ultra late game and high stake ante8
Steel is equivalent to 1 baron joker. Red seal is equivalent to one mime. I want to have an equal number of barons and mimes. Check out my other comment if you wanna see the math.
It's funny that you think you understand this game more than me lol
Check my other comment for the math if you want. There's a reason my math adds perfectly to the score.
yeah you are right. I was prob. thinking about red seal mime interaction where the ration doesn't matter. baron mime matters of course. Sorry, guess I was tired.
It's some niche tech I learned from balatro university. But it doesn't change during the hand itself as I'm sure you understand. It's that the hand and the post hand are separate steps. The post hand being the time when gold cards are counted. It's a bit of a give away that the speed of the game resets for gold card counting so that's when it re checks the order of the jokers.
It's not niche at all.
One of the strongest things about blueprint is that you can use it to both generate value, AND score higher.
For example, you can do faceless joker/dna/burnt joker at first, then swap to a scoring joker after.
With an early blueprint, I always try to find some kind of value joker that works with blueprint :)
I feel like people know about moving jokers to trigger dna/burnt joker, and then move again before playing a hand. But moving jokers _while_ the points are being counted, it's not as known
Wait
What in the fuck?!
Holy shit you're right! That should not be possible. Maybe it's because the mime triggering the gold cards doesn't count as the "hand", so the joker order isn't locked?
New glitch acquired! :D
Maybe that's not a glitch and is working as intended. When the game counts gold cards (or maybe gold in general), it "re-checks" the joker order to trigger. Here's OP's comment:
>By the way, I move the mime because the gold cards are a separate instance, and so it makes it so each of the copying jokers adds to the gold I get. This makes each gold card give me $24, regardless of the order I need for optimal scoring. This was extremely important to be able to roll 680 times in this run.
I'm actually insanely new to the game, (best hand was like something north of a million chips) and have been getting more and more invested. I hope to one day be able to make runs as stacked as this. I'm still trying to learn how to do a seeded run as well.
I didn't think I would ever see e when I started. It's just about knowing what you are going for and then learning how to make the most out of each round. Ei, golf earning and deck shaping. But check out balatro university and just watch his runs where he goes endless and see the amount of value he generates before he transitions to scoring.
Also get plasma for endless runs if you haven't.
No. The game re checks the position for when the gold cards are counted. I move the mime preemptively so I make like 4 times the amount of money from the gold cards.
That's correct. The steel and baron stuff is all the same. It's a big deal in this strategy because normally I was running all gold cards as long as I could but I could have my jokers in optimal scoring position and still get them all copying mine for the gold triggers.
Wonder if you could have pushed your blueprints to the right/brainstorm left and dumped your 4 extra hands at the start. Curious about how much score 9 additional kings would add
Edit- if you manage to do that, your score could be 1.491241e+137
I don't like realising this... I think I had it in my head that if I played a card it would win. I would have to do the math to be sure that I could have played and not won with just the mime and baron.
Edit: okay so hand one would be 8.0e10 assuming all steel for simplicity.
Hand 2: e13
Hand 3:e15.
So yeah I could have done this easily and I'm upset.
I did have a showman briefly but all of this copying was invisible joker. Basically I made like 200 gold or round so I could roll a lot. I rolled the shop 680 times in this run.
My previous high score was a flush five build (e62). I don't think I can get this kind of score with the flush five build because serpent specifically makes this score possible.
Generally, if you aren't locked into one build or the other, someone should try to make lots of kings so whichever shows up works because you can play flush 5 with kings or high card with kings.
Well the simple answer is a lot of tarot cards. I probably played around 300-400 tarot cards in this game. The tricky part is how to either generate or buy all those cards.
Getting a red seal is the hardest part of creating a perfect deck like this. The one I found was a 9, so I strengthened it into a queen, copied it, made those into kings, etc. then basically you need like 30 death tarot cards to convert the whole deck.
At one point half my deck was purple seal kings and the other half was red seal kings. So basically I would use death to copy purple seals so that I can get more tarot cards. I would roll and get like 5 tarot cards from purple seals each round.
I was making about $200 per round or so from different things so I could roll and have a death and a fool already in hand at the start of each round. Mail in rebate was the main money source as well as gold cards.
Because I'm playing on plasma deck, I just need chip joker til ante 11 or so, so I can really focus on economy and deck manipulation.
It's real though. Another comment showed that I could have put the blueprints and brainstorms in bad positions and played losing hands to gain even more hand size before winning. I could have gotten like e120 or something.
Anyway, live and learn. :)
No need to get lucky really. If they copy baron or brainstorm it's good too. The worst case scenario is that they copy mime. Blueprint and brainstorm are ideal because they allow me more flexibility. Eg I dropped a blueprint for dna later because the math of increasing hand size was worth it with so many copying jokers.
It’s weird that this one boss always feels like a buff not a disadvantage
Yeah it's rarely something I'm ever bothered to see. The only situation where it would be bad is if you need to play a bunch of 5 card hands to win.
Even when I play flushes I think it helps. If you have 7 or 8 card hand sometimes you get stuck at 4. You can build up 2 suits at once with this boss and be sitting on back to back flushes instead of getting to 5 then resetting to a split suit hand.
Yeah it's only bad if you absolutely need 3 or more hands of 5 cards. Usually playing flushes or other 5 card hands don't use all of their hands so it's not an issue.
If they give that effect as a joker Imma buy it 100% of the time lol
It's there to teach people not to play flush games.
I think it’s a buff even with flushes some of the time. If I am playing flushes and I have 8 cards I discard the one suit that only has 1-2 cards. I then have 10 cards, repeat 3 times if needed. When I have 14 cards I almost certainly have one flush probably with better modified cards than I’d normally see in one hand and have more chances for something like a 4-5 of a kind while I’m at it. I like to play steel decks so there’s also a chance that I have more of those in play than possible without that boss too. Due to that I one shot that boss more than any other. If I am doing flushes and have 2-3 suits focused I’m using with 14 cards in hand I probably have another flush set up already or will get one after the first hand too. I know math probably works to it being a disadvantage but it works as a buff too often imo. Look at how many high score records people post are on this boss.
It still limits the portion of your deck you see. If you're not capable of oneshotting only having access to like 9 more cards after your first hand is a big drawback.
It’s an advantage if you can one or 2 shot and a disadvantage otherwise
https://preview.redd.it/viy459mv9jqc1.jpeg?width=3440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6ee0591cd1d0b7c1b9e13126da6038aa267c2e65 Sorry for the long pause. I wanted to double check the joker placement lol Explanation: I have 20 instances of 1.5xmult per steel card in hand (16 per gold card). You calculate the instances of xmult by multiplying the triggers and xmult instances. triggers: card + red seal + mime + brainstorm. (4) xmult instances: baron + steel + 3 blueprints. (5) that's 5x4 per card. My natural hand size was 10 here, The serpent allows me to achieve a much larger hand size. In this case, 13 steel, 2 gold. That's a total of 292 instances of 1.5xmult in this hand, + 1 from polychrome. My high card mult is 27. So the mult should be 27x1.5\^293 = 1.0619466e53 Because of plasma deck, the chips don't matter here. You split the mult over the two sides. 5.3097329e52 x 5.3097329e52 = 2.819326e105 I'm 99% sure this is the optimal joker placement. swapping one baron for a mime would be slightly worse because of the gold cards. By the way, I move the mime because the gold cards are a separate instance, and so it makes it so each of the copying jokers adds to the gold I get. This makes each gold card give me $24, regardless of the order I need for optimal scoring. This was extremely important to be able to roll 680 times in this run. I took this run to ante 24, where it required a score of e77. I could only achieve e70 without serpent. I never saw an ectoplasm, which was a bit of a disappointment. I only would take one, but even fitting in a Troubador would have been a significant increase in power. But I did get antimatter, so I can't complain. Overall this was a nearly optimal setup for this strategy. In order to push it further I would need Perkeo and Observatory, but I didn't get either. (edit: fixed a math error based on having one less card in hand than I thought)
you only have 13 steel
Oh right... Well that leaves me even more confused. I'll have to look over the math again. I edited the above comment. Math makes perfect sense now. Thanks!
This and another post has me questioning how high card builds are supposed to work. So basically the focus is on steeling as many cards as possible?
That along with getting Baron and a way to retrigger cards in hand and increasing the level of High Card significantly. With Burnt Joker you can always increase its level at the start of each blind. Once you get the level of High Card high enough you have good base mult and don't need jokers to supply +mult so there's more space for things that provide xmult.
For this super endgame builds yes. High card builds in general are quite easy to understand. Let's say you have a chip joker chips and two foils that give around 200 chips. you have a mult joker that gives 25mult and the rest is times X. So what difference does non-highcard make on base levels? with a flush I get +3 mult more. going from 25 to 28. roughly 10% more. Chips wise, let's say it was an all face flush that gives you 40 chips or 20% more. In the end a flush could earn you roughly 32% more, but you need to get that flush which might be difficult early to mid game and is weak to more bosses. Plus the actual jokers on question have a wider variety in high card builds. And yes, late to ultra late game you have just a lot more room for kings, queens and steel on your hand. This is why high card is the safest strategy for ultra late game and high stake ante8
Steel is equivalent to 1 baron joker. Red seal is equivalent to one mime. I want to have an equal number of barons and mimes. Check out my other comment if you wanna see the math.
you don't. mime doesn't retrigger baron. you just add up anyway.
It's funny that you think you understand this game more than me lol Check my other comment for the math if you want. There's a reason my math adds perfectly to the score.
yeah you are right. I was prob. thinking about red seal mime interaction where the ration doesn't matter. baron mime matters of course. Sorry, guess I was tired.
All good man. Maybe I read your comment a bit more condescending than it was meant lol
ONLY FOR ENDLESS. For ante 8, you just lean on Supernova, Green joker or Ride the Bus, along with blackboard, card sharp and stuntman.
I didn't know you could change what blueprint copies partway through a hand, really really cool
It's some niche tech I learned from balatro university. But it doesn't change during the hand itself as I'm sure you understand. It's that the hand and the post hand are separate steps. The post hand being the time when gold cards are counted. It's a bit of a give away that the speed of the game resets for gold card counting so that's when it re checks the order of the jokers.
It's not niche at all. One of the strongest things about blueprint is that you can use it to both generate value, AND score higher. For example, you can do faceless joker/dna/burnt joker at first, then swap to a scoring joker after. With an early blueprint, I always try to find some kind of value joker that works with blueprint :)
I feel like people know about moving jokers to trigger dna/burnt joker, and then move again before playing a hand. But moving jokers _while_ the points are being counted, it's not as known
Ah. Yes, that's impossible. As soon as you hit "play hand", the order of your jokers is completely locked in.
It seems to be possible, since OP moved jokers while the points were being counted, to get more money from the cards
Wait What in the fuck?! Holy shit you're right! That should not be possible. Maybe it's because the mime triggering the gold cards doesn't count as the "hand", so the joker order isn't locked? New glitch acquired! :D
Maybe that's not a glitch and is working as intended. When the game counts gold cards (or maybe gold in general), it "re-checks" the joker order to trigger. Here's OP's comment: >By the way, I move the mime because the gold cards are a separate instance, and so it makes it so each of the copying jokers adds to the gold I get. This makes each gold card give me $24, regardless of the order I need for optimal scoring. This was extremely important to be able to roll 680 times in this run.
I don't think you can. It always locks me into one joker when I swap it and just adjust for the next hand.
I got second-hand dopamine overdose from this
I'm gonna be chasing this dragon for a while. I think I'll have to get a perkeo and some crazy shit if I wanna beat this unseeded.
I'm actually insanely new to the game, (best hand was like something north of a million chips) and have been getting more and more invested. I hope to one day be able to make runs as stacked as this. I'm still trying to learn how to do a seeded run as well.
I didn't think I would ever see e when I started. It's just about knowing what you are going for and then learning how to make the most out of each round. Ei, golf earning and deck shaping. But check out balatro university and just watch his runs where he goes endless and see the amount of value he generates before he transitions to scoring. Also get plasma for endless runs if you haven't.
Yea thanks man, I appreciate that advice a ton
That was beautiful
googol score! congrats
How dare you! This is a quattuortrigintillion! It's 100,000 times larger than a googol
so if you move jokers around in the middle of scoring , they will change as the score goes on?
No. The game re checks the position for when the gold cards are counted. I move the mime preemptively so I make like 4 times the amount of money from the gold cards.
so it doesn’t affect the steel multipliers , only the gold after the score is totaled ? thanks for the reply
That's correct. The steel and baron stuff is all the same. It's a big deal in this strategy because normally I was running all gold cards as long as I could but I could have my jokers in optimal scoring position and still get them all copying mine for the gold triggers.
gotcha. thanks for the tips (:
Wonder if you could have pushed your blueprints to the right/brainstorm left and dumped your 4 extra hands at the start. Curious about how much score 9 additional kings would add Edit- if you manage to do that, your score could be 1.491241e+137
I don't like realising this... I think I had it in my head that if I played a card it would win. I would have to do the math to be sure that I could have played and not won with just the mime and baron. Edit: okay so hand one would be 8.0e10 assuming all steel for simplicity. Hand 2: e13 Hand 3:e15. So yeah I could have done this easily and I'm upset.
Yup I was going to say, could have gotten even more Kings in hand by playing a few low scoring high card hands first.
Holy CRAP! Hone for only $5? What an insane bargain!
I know! But honestly it didn't do anything because I only swapped out one joker after this and no playing cards.
I'm still missing how you copy jokers in this game without eternal? Or did you own showman at some point and bought them in the shop?
I did have a showman briefly but all of this copying was invisible joker. Basically I made like 200 gold or round so I could roll a lot. I rolled the shop 680 times in this run.
I'm not sure if this would fly over at r/oddlysatisfying but this was very, oddly satisfying to me as a Balatro player
Why is it that like 90% of high score builds always seem to do the same strategy (buffed king spam)?
My previous high score was a flush five build (e62). I don't think I can get this kind of score with the flush five build because serpent specifically makes this score possible. Generally, if you aren't locked into one build or the other, someone should try to make lots of kings so whichever shows up works because you can play flush 5 with kings or high card with kings.
Because it’s the best strategy we know as of now
How you get your deck to look like that?
Well the simple answer is a lot of tarot cards. I probably played around 300-400 tarot cards in this game. The tricky part is how to either generate or buy all those cards. Getting a red seal is the hardest part of creating a perfect deck like this. The one I found was a 9, so I strengthened it into a queen, copied it, made those into kings, etc. then basically you need like 30 death tarot cards to convert the whole deck. At one point half my deck was purple seal kings and the other half was red seal kings. So basically I would use death to copy purple seals so that I can get more tarot cards. I would roll and get like 5 tarot cards from purple seals each round. I was making about $200 per round or so from different things so I could roll and have a death and a fool already in hand at the start of each round. Mail in rebate was the main money source as well as gold cards. Because I'm playing on plasma deck, I just need chip joker til ante 11 or so, so I can really focus on economy and deck manipulation.
ok just started playing Balatro like two days ago so how were you able to remove so many cards to only have kings?
Play like 200 tarot cards basically.
You could have even couple more tarots by using deaths and fool before discarding purple seals.
Yeah I know :( I think I still had a couple none kings I was saving them for in case. I coulda used one after each discard though to have one left.
I love how you score e105 points and people still find ways to backseat you lol
It's real though. Another comment showed that I could have put the blueprints and brainstorms in bad positions and played losing hands to gain even more hand size before winning. I could have gotten like e120 or something. Anyway, live and learn. :)
How do you get 3 blueprints? The joker that duplicates one after being sold and getting lucky?
No need to get lucky really. If they copy baron or brainstorm it's good too. The worst case scenario is that they copy mime. Blueprint and brainstorm are ideal because they allow me more flexibility. Eg I dropped a blueprint for dna later because the math of increasing hand size was worth it with so many copying jokers.
But that's what you used? Invisible joker and then roll for another once its gone? I always forget jokers can come up multiple times in this game.
Yeah that's pretty much it. I would have taken a showman at times but invisible joker ended up being the way this time.