We need better stakes like Black Stake.

[He Shoots, He]

After finally beating Gold Stake for the first time I realized why I didn't have as much fun with it as I wanted. Almost all of the difficulty stakes in Balatro (except for Black Stake) are designed to remove player agency and force players to snowball from the very first ante. Lets consider why most of the stakes are either mediocre or just not fun at all.

Red Stake (Small Blind gives no reward money): This one is honestly mediocre though considering how important the first few rounds are is to making a good run, its annoying to get almost nothing going into that first shop. It would make more sense to have all stakes give 1$ less since that allows the same amount of money to be absent at each blind without relying on a good skip on the small blind.

Green Stake (Required score scales faster for each Ante): This stake (along with Black Stake) is actually not that bad. Since the scaling doesn't start until ante 2 you have a small bit of time to get a decent joker to help you deal with the added difficulty.

Black Stake (Shop can have Eternal Jokers): This is by far the best implemented stake. A big part of that is how interactive the Eternal mechanic is and how it allows for more interesting decisions. Similar to Green Stake, its effect scales gradually over time having no impact when you buy the first Eternal joker but gradually making you consider every purchase decision when you realize you cant get rid of any of them. This also makes them immune to jokers like Madness and Sacrificial Knife as well as prioritizing them with Ankh (or refusing to destroy them if you have multiple Eternal Jokers).

Blue Stake (-1 Discard): This is just straight up bad for a number of reasons. Firstly, with how dependent you are on winning a round in as few hands as possible, this forces you to get luckier with the first few rounds since having no money early is a death sentence for any run. Second, it disallows riskier hands which means players are force to either scale lower scoring hands for a more reliable consistent score or get lucky enough to modify their deck heavily to make those higher scoring hands even remotely likely. Finally, it makes "debuffed / facedown card" bosses even worse since starting with a hand with mostly debuffed / facedown cards already forces you to waste a discard in most cases. All of this culminates in players having to rely more on lucky draws.

Purple Stake (Required score scales faster for each Ante): This one is the same as Green Stake, though admittedly I was a bit disappointed to reach this stake since I expected a new unique modifier. Ultimately its not that bad though I would love to see something different and unique while having all of the interactivity and interesting decisions of Black Stake.

Orange Stake (Booster Packs cost $1 more per Ante): This works similarly to Green Stake and Purple Stake though mostly affecting your reliance on money. If Red Stake didn't remove the reward money from the small blind this wouldn't be bad, though in combination with that it makes the first 2 antes even more of a dice roll. If anything the price increase should skip the first ante to allow players a fair start to their run.

Gold Stake (-1 hand size): This is awful for all of the same reasons as Blue Stake.

Given all of that, I think there's a few key variables to consider as to why Black Stake is so much more fun than all of the others. Having a unique mechanic that scales gradually over the course of a run, modifies rules to give players more interesting decisions, and interacts with other cards/jokers/consumables. Here's a few ideas I had for stakes:

IDEA #1: Spawn a negative Anchor joker after each boss blind: Anchor jokers would apply a X0.9 mult to your score. They can be moved in your hand and destroyed as well, though if you want to sell them you have to pay a few dollars instead. One anchor joker wouldn't affect you much though many of them could easily destroy your score. Since their sell value is negative, it would apply negative mult to your Sacrificial Knife joker, and using a card like Ankh would force you to weight the pros and cons of destroying your jokers to destroying the anchors.

IDEA #2: At the end of each round, a random card in your hand is debuffed permanently: This forces your to interact with your deck more and remove/replace cards that aren't useful anymore. This also means you can't rely as much on steel/gold cards since you'd be risking them getting debuffed every round. This also means that in the beginning it wont have as much of an impact until you start modifying your deck a lot with tarot/spectral cards.

What are your thoughts?