Gold Stake is Absolutely Awful pt2

[warking]

(title is misleading)
Unfairly bad. Not tested, clearly.
Ranting and tempted to change my review that I posted after playing the base game (white stack, fair and balanced)

Just to be clear, This game is NOT poker. its a roguelike with the theme of poker.
I'm not here to convince you of that but if you dont think of this as a roguelike dont bother with this post

Since its a roguelike, there are certain diffuculty spikes thats either in the base game (with ante bosses, that are more or less difficulty depending on your build),
and there are challenges, which here are the form of stack color in a slay the spire style of ascension.
A core difficulty to balance ante bosse, is that you only have 2 turns provided you have no skip to actually adapt to the boss.
Most joker are meant for an archetype such as flush, pairs, or straight or money generation
once you invest in a certain archetype, such as colors, you dont have a lot of options to deviate in 2 turns into straight or pairs. its actually quite impossible even with having 100$+..
your best bet is to get tarot card as consumables to adapt to the hand you get. that is why I find them so overpowered and every joker that generates them.

Now about high stakes. what the hell is that? -1 hand? with -1 discard, and scaling and no money?
Challenges are meant to be challenging. If we use this definition alone yes, gold stack is indeed challenging.
is it possible to win this stack? Yes of course. of course
can you finish gold stack on all deck and complete it with ALL the jokers too? yeah! :D

Small issue, its not fun! it not thats its not fun it just sucks. 90 out of my 100 (i really lost count on restarts too) runs stops before ant 3
The scaling is too hard. but not hard enough to make it impossible. and thats a problem because that one guy that finished gold once will just flex on every post he can find and good for him.

There has to be a mathematical formul to simulate how many multiplyer and chips you need to make it to next ant...
I know that a glass card plus a color joker with a solid + 150 chips bonus is no longer enough for ant 3...
what do you get until you reach ant 3? maybe 3 jokers, some enchanted cards and perhaps level 5 planets. Thats not enough.

Some solutions since ranting doesnt solve the issue for devs arent present. A workshop mod. thanks to the dev creating the game but well take it from here

solution 1:
Changes the design of stacks. Thats not me but someone else came up with adding different type of jokers such as a joker than can only be put on the edge, damaged jokers that are more powerfull but could break (like a glass card) or even bloating jokers taht takes more than 1 slot...

solution 2:
get a number of tokens to ban &&& jokers to try to concentrate on a build on your next game

solution 3: give us actually starting gold (like 10 in high stack). like bruh why 4 gold? where them interrest><
This solution is great because it will help us not hold the R button after the first shop you know?

solution 4: fix the obviously comical high scaling.
Its too high since every additional hand you play you *loose gold potential that gives you more and more struggles... which is why most people dont even bother if they dont find money jokers to offset this

solution 5:
what do you think? I cant stop at 4 but im out of ideas.

Also I lied its not really a rant but also an post to discuss way to fix balancing in endgame without making it too simple.

From the fun division,

Warking

[bendirt01]

I do agree that the ante scaling stakes are stupid and should be changed, but the other ones seem like fine additions to make the game more challenging without going overboard. Honestly, overstock should just be baseline for all runs. Only getting to see two cards in the shop is pretty awful for trying to get a run off the ground (at least on the higher stakes).

[Jakkson K]

My issue is that most of the stake changes are boring number changes. While being easy to code, they are generally unfun.

I have been thinking a lot on Orange Stake and how it scales packs even when you don't buy them and I thought, "well, what if your first packs are cheaper to help offset early game but every pack you buy increases the cost of the type of pack for the run." Like if you buy a tarot pack is may only cost 2 dollars, but every future tarot pack will be more expensive.