What's the trick it Abandoned Deck?

[Osamaru]

I feel like i've tried this thing 30+ times, but can't seem to get it to work properly.

[Winter Wolf]

Work towards smaller hands or straights. "face cards are bad" jokers, build up the deck with numerical cards to make 3-5 of a kind more likely. I am sure there is better advice but this is what I did at least on white stakes.

[malogoss]

Its main advantage is that it's consistent. It's much easier to discard in search of a card with a smaller starting deck.

Many jokers are a lot stronger because of the deck's content:
Odd Todd
Even Steven
Scholar
Fibonacci
Hack
Ride the Bus
Erosion (crazy joker to have!)
...and the list goes on

Some jokers are horrible:
A couple legendary ones
Sock and Buskin
...some others too, many that have an effect on face cards

What hand should you go for?
Any hand. If one deck is good at becoming anything, it's this one. Why? Because tarot cards, for example, affect a bigger % of your deck when used, compared to other decks.

If one deck makes straight flush build possible, it's this one. Not the best option, but fun to try. I got the "20 card deck" achievement doing just that. In the end I had a 19 card deck, all diamond. Every hand played was a straight flush, obviously.

Of course it's the best deck for straights too. Again, it's fun, totally winnable, but probably not the best option. Straights are by definition unreliable. Even the best deck possible can fail to a horrible draw order.

Best options? I personally like full house, 4 of a kind and 5 of a kind with this deck. Or the fancy versions of 5 of a kind and full house. But any hand works. Including high card and pair, which work for any deck anyway.

It's the only deck that makes me think twice before skipping the spectral card that transforms your hand to a single rank, at the cost of -1 hand size. Worth trying early game, not worth it later. But you could hit queens, which is often just bad. Else, it makes for a fun run usually.

If you managed to pull some wins with other decks, Abandoned Deck should not be a problem. It's a lot like many other decks, except it's very reliable and consistent. My first gold stake win came from this deck.

Good luck!

[Goblin]

Originally posted by malogoss:

Many jokers are a lot stronger because of the deck's content:
Erosion (crazy joker to have!)

Erosion is actually weaker in this deck, it doesn't consider your starting deck to be 12 stacks of +4. You have to go below 40 for it to add any mult, so you're really just losing out on 12 cards you could delete to gain mult.

[Heartbreaker]

Originally posted by Osamaru:

I feel like i've tried this thing 30+ times, but can't seem to get it to work properly.

The game is very, very stupid about a lot of things and one of those things is not telling us that an Ace is able to qualify as a 1 in a Straight or Straight Flush. Anyone who has never played poker is blissfully unaware of this fact and not knowing that makes the deck play worse.

[malogoss]

Originally posted by Goblin:

Originally posted by malogoss:

Many jokers are a lot stronger because of the deck's content:
Erosion (crazy joker to have!)

Erosion is actually weaker in this deck, it doesn't consider your starting deck to be 12 stacks of +4. You have to go below 40 for it to add any mult, so you're really just losing out on 12 cards you could delete to gain mult.

well s**t

[Karl]

Originally posted by Balatro GOTY fr fr:

Originally posted by Osamaru:

I feel like i've tried this thing 30+ times, but can't seem to get it to work properly.

The game is very, very stupid about a lot of things and one of those things is not telling us that an Ace is able to qualify as a 1 in a Straight or Straight Flush. Anyone who has never played poker is blissfully unaware of this fact and not knowing that makes the deck play worse.

unironically a skill issue on your part

[TimTim3000]

Yeah that's a strange comment. I think one of the first things you learn in poker is that an Ace can be high or low.

[viro94]

Originally posted by its ben:

shoot, I didn't realize aces could be 1. That would have really been really useful in some of my earlier runs where I could have built JQKA2 straights. Thanks for the info.

I don't know why those other people are giving you grief for this. I assume they are ghosts that we accidentally crossed paths with, having a different, ghostly conversation.

no, Ace can't bridge a straight like that. It is either above a king or a 1, not both. that's also the basis of the superposition joker

[Ratch]

Originally posted by its ben:

Originally posted by Balatro GOTY fr fr:

one of those things is not telling us that an Ace is able to qualify as a 1 in a Straight or Straight Flush.

shoot, I didn't realize aces could be 1. That would have been really useful in some of my earlier runs where I could have built JQKA2 straights. Thanks for the info. (edit: or maybe this isn't allowed? can aces be both high and low in the same hand? guess I have to go test it out)

I don't know why those other people are giving you grief for this. I assume they are ghosts that we accidentally crossed paths with and they are having a different, ghostly conversation.

Ace is 1 or 11. Straights don't wrap around. When you use an ace in a straight you are starting or ending at the ace. I guess it's assumed that by playing a Poker game you know the absolute basics of Poker but that not being in the tutorial is a fair complaint. A similar situation is double dribbling in basketball. A stupid mostly arbitrary rule that absolutely everyone except first time players know about.

[Bird Dirt]

Hack, Hitchhiker, Fibonacci, Ride the Bus

[SandTag]

Originally posted by Osamaru:

I feel like i've tried this thing 30+ times, but can't seem to get it to work properly.

Since abandoned starts with so few cards, you can very quickly build into high value cards with a huge amount of consistency compared to other decks, consider trying to use tarrots to form one of:

> Neptune (Straight Flush)
> Eris (Flush 5 of a kind)
> Ceres (Flush House)
> Saturn (Straight)

Px (5 of a kind) is also decent but its bonus per level is quite inferior to the flush variant and it does not take very much effort to make it so you are close to or actually guaranteed to draw one of the high value hands each round.

Straight is also unusually easy to make simply because the range of cards available is so small compared to a normal deck and the scaling on saturn can easily be enough to carry.

[DopaTrain]

Bus stop. 3 of a kind.