Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
That's a bit sad.
The thing is, habits you built at lower stakes are often detrimental to you at higher stakes. People like going for Flush or 5 of a kind or god knows what at lower stakes. At high stakes, what works best is high card and pairs. It's tricky because if you never tried it before, those builds are so alien to you that you won't get good results right away.
Maybe restart from white stake, try to get high card working. Relearn the game, in a way? Usually for the first 2-4 ante, high card won't be your most played hand but around ante 4, you can commit to it.
Practice really makes better. I'm rushing through stakes levels like a mad man compared to my first stake climb, which was all pain and suffering.
Also, some decks are friendlier than others. Decks like the black deck are not friendly at all. The -1 hand is really rough. A deck like Plasma is not bad, but it's an odd one, works differently than all others, and I would not recommend trying it at high stakes if you haven't unlocked Stuntman joker.
I haven't climbed with Nebula deck yet, but I'm sure that starting Telescope makes things a lot easier at high stakes. Getting the planet you want in every pack is a huge thing.
Anyway. If you ever want to give the game a go again, know that gold is not that bad. You just need practice with ways to play you maybe overlooked so far. Which is a trap I also fell into, but once you're out of it, I swear, the whole game changes.
I've considered this among other things. Obviously one of the tenets of RL is relearning so that you eventually get a wider grasp of the game's principles. The thing I keep coming back to in the higher stakes is how vilely random the game can be even you think you have figured out how/when to pivot.
But if you have patience and continue to enjoy the game despite this frustration, you'll eventually prevail over the odds!
You pivot if necessary every single blind/shop. You should not feel safe and secure. Have a flush build? No you have high card and steel now. Have high card and steel? No now you have Double Vampire + Throwback + Campfire.
I'm not a master of the game.
The more I practice, the less I feel "trampled" by the RNG. Don't get me wrong. It still happens, and I'll never win 90% of my games. But it's rarely a pure "yep, bad RNG, just restart I guess". There's often a lesson to learn, something that snowballed from a bad decision that I can avoid in the future.
Or I simply made a blunder that killed the run. It still happens.
I can say my first gold win was, in fact, a miracle. Play the game long enough, you'll end up with RNG paving the way to a win for you. That's basically what happened.
But now, it's more about getting a decent RNG through ante 1-2, not messing things up, and converting it into a win. Even past ante 2, RNG can still screw me. But it does not happen as much as it used to. I'm not luckier. I'm learning, that's all.
I'm curious what do you mean when you say "you think you have figured out how/when to pivot"? The only thing I can think of is when playing Plasma, at one point you have to move from chips to mult, if you go beyond ante 8. Else I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Luck is obviously a big part of roguelikes. But you can beat Binding of Isaac or Dead Cells or Hades with a mediocre run. It'll just be much harder. You'll have to be more precise with your movement, positioning, and timing.
Since Balatro lacks movement, positioning, and timing and only requires you to be able to identify poker hands, the luck plays much more of a part, as has been observed by others.
Trust me when I say I've tried many different strategies and I don't play the same now as I did when I started going for Gold Stake. I have played games on other decks and other difficulties and noticed myself playing differently. It's not that I'm stuck in my ways, it's that RNG does, in fact, have a bigger hand in whether one wins at Balatro at higher stakes. That's just observable fact.
The big thing is that you're getting choices taken away from you the higher the difficulty.
Small Blinds become all but worthless to play at low Antes. Therefore the optimal choice is now to skip them, and if you're going to skip them, you're going to need RNG to provide you with a good bonus. If it doesn't, you need to restart until it does.
You have fewer hands and discards. So you have less choice in what cards are available to you, and if you don't get a couple good hands at the start, it's not necessarily because you played poorly, it's because you got hosed by RNG. When it comes down to it, Balatro is basically Poker, and even the most skilled Poker players would not claim the game is 100% skill.
All that being said, I'm positive there are play styles that I haven't explored or Joker combos I haven't considered or strategies that I haven't employed. I'm sure that my skill is lacking to a degree.
In developing any skill, one is bound to hit walls. I have hit many in art. It takes perseverance to get over those walls.
But the big difference is when I hit a wall in art, I still have some fun drawing. I haven't been having fun with Balatro in a while, mainly because I find myself just hitting New Game over and over and over and over and over because I got a bad starting Joker and know I can't proceed anymore, or I got a bad Blind skip. And then I'll try a new strat and be doubling, tripling, quadrupling the score I need to win Blinds for a while and then suddenly I can't grow that strategy and the game isn't offering better Jokers and I stall out on the Ante 5 or 6 boss and it feels completely lousy and demoralizing.
For the last couple days of trying for Gold I was doing it mostly out of stubbornness, not because I was having fun, and I realized I could be having fun with other games, so yeah. I'll come back to Balatro one day but not anytime soon.
Let's just focus on that.
Skipping the small blind is RARELY the best option. By doing that, you're losing money made with remaining hands, you're losing money from interest, you're skipping a whole shop. Of course the game will feel RNG heavy for you, if you have less money to spend and visit less shops to buy things and see a lot less jokers during the course of a game because of it.
About Hands and Discards. You do NOT get less hands. You lose a discard and 1 hand size. At first, the -1 discard alone I thought was horrible. It is not. And the hand size also feels horrible. But it's not as bad as it seems. I'd argue that the purple and orange stakes downsides have much more impact than blue and gold, once you adapt your play to blue and gold.
Once you learn how to win with high card, discards don't matter, hand size doesn't matter. You no longer get screwed by the card drawing RNG, aka "man, so unlucky, I drew 8 cards, had 8 outs, didn't hit any, RNG sucks". That never happens and it changes everything.
How is skipping the small blind especially at the start a bad option? You literally get nothing from playing it unless you're playing Yellow Deck. Depending on your deck and your Jokers, sure you want to play Small Blinds later on sometimes.
And yes, the downsides of other Antes are worse but adding 1 fewer discard (which, again, limits your agency, making the game more about RNG) is a sort of straw that broke the camel's back situation.
I know how to win with high card. I've done high card builds. You still have to get the Jokers and Planets necessary to support the build. Also you're making it sound like the only viable option for Gold Stake is High Card. That sounds pretty lame.
Oneshotting the first round gives you $3.
$7 can buy you most jokers in the game. It also gives you $1 on the second round if you decide against buying a joker, or $1 if you do buy one and thus oneshot the second round instead of two-shotting it.
The "give $5" tag is thus just +$1 (and +1 skip scale) in reality, at the cost of 1 store and thus +33% RNG. God forbid you're one of those double skippers, banking entirely on beating the boss jokerless and then needing the shop to give you something good or you reset.
The +$15 after boss tag is entirely gambling on getting a good store after the first boss, slightly better but still leads to considerably more losses due to not getting any decent joker in the one/two stores you do see.
Free shop tag is probably the best one, but is still mostly banking on the two jokers being good - and (usually preferably) not eternal. But it's hard to argue with two free packs on top, so yeah you should probably always take this one on the first round. Is it worth resetting for 15 minutes to get it on the first small blind though? Nah. Just take it if you happen to find it.
Earlier in this thread I said I gave up. So I'd obviously rather do neither of those things. Because neither are engaging to me.
But if I had to, I'd much rather not play all 3 Blinds in the first Ante like you seem to be suggesting. By skipping the Small Blind I play one fewer Blind, see?
You also play all rounds less because you gave up, saving you many hours.
You can save us all even more time by also not posting in the forums with bad advice like "Small Blinds become all but worthless to play at low[sic: you meant high] Antes" and then refusing to acknowledge when people point out how you're wrong.
I wasn't "giving advice" buddy. And just coz you said something doesn't mean it's right, anymore than me. You're missing a lot of my point, which I made in my very first post, which I guess you didn't bother reading: Gold Stake feels like a grindfest to me. Anything that relieved that grind, like skipping the first Small Blind for a good bonus (which others have agreed with me on, but sure, you're objectively correct because you say so) was welcome.
Also, you scoff at saving 30 seconds, but alright, let me help you out: is 30 seconds very long? No. Now, is 30 seconds times 100 a lot of time? I'll leave you to figure that one out on your own. I believe in you, a little.
And boy, if somebody like you doesn't want me posting here, by gosh I'm gonna post even more just to spite you.
Many people who fail at gold stake agree with you - Malagos and others who are good at high stakes play agree with me. The numbers I gave are also a lot more objective than your unsubstantiated opinion.
You claim to save 30 seconds of playtime - by wasting many times more time resetting. Times 100, because you were evidently still not winning those reset-fueled runs either.
And I didn't say you shouldn't post - I said you shouldn't post bad advice. Although telling you not to post in a forum for a game you yourself claim to not enjoy would be good advice. Intentionally subjecting yourself to things you don't like is bad for your heart. You only spite yourself at that point.