Tips how to defeat the flint

[Blue Butterfly]

I ve lost so many actually good runs due to that stupid boss so please give me a way to defeat it cause that /4 fails me every time

[sab0t]

the Flint halves your hand's base score, so this affects you most if you rely on leveling up your hands more than anything. I think (though someone can correct me if i'm wrong), due to the nature of it halving the base score, higher tier hands (four of a kind, straight flush, etc) suffer more from this than lower tier hands.

there is no real secret trick to this one other than trying to make sure most of your score comes from other sources (your jokers, and card enhancements). ideally your jokers will all boost +chips, +mult, x mult, in some way, as that will lessen the impact of the halved base score. let's say all your jokers are boosting +mult and x mult and nothing in chips, that means the loss of half your chips is going to affect your score much more than if you had something boosting it.

bonus cards (Hierophant tarot) and mult cards (Empress tarot) are also extremely helpful with this boss, as they basically "give back" some (or all) of the lost base score. The Flint can appear as an early boss, saving / using Hierophant or Empress tarots is usually what I try to do if I see this coming up.

[malogoss]

The Flint punishes you for relying too heavily on planets and hands level. What was a nice level 7 hand suddenly becomes mediocre.

Better jokers and enhanced cards will help you beat The Flint. Don't be greedy, sell an economy joker if you have to, or sell that Hallucination that was nice until now.

[Blue Butterfly]

Originally posted by malogoss:

The Flint punishes you for relying too heavily on planets and hands level. What was a nice level 7 hand suddenly becomes mediocre.

Better jokers and enhanced cards will help you beat The Flint. Don't be greedy, sell an economy joker if you have to, or sell that Hallucination that was nice until now.

if only the game decided to balance them

You can have literally a godly muliplier or a godly chip
Most jokers unlocked give money or produce more jokers/cards so you are doomed either way

Originally posted by sab0t:

the Flint halves your hand's base score, so this affects you most if you rely on leveling up your hands more than anything. I think (though someone can correct me if i'm wrong), due to the nature of it halving the base score, higher tier hands (four of a kind, straight flush, etc) suffer more from this than lower tier hands.

there is no real secret trick to this one other than trying to make sure most of your score comes from other sources (your jokers, and card enhancements). ideally your jokers will all boost +chips, +mult, x mult, in some way, as that will lessen the impact of the halved base score. let's say all your jokers are boosting +mult and x mult and nothing in chips, that means the loss of half your chips is going to affect your score much more than if you had something boosting it.

bonus cards (Hierophant tarot) and mult cards (Empress tarot) are also extremely helpful with this boss, as they basically "give back" some (or all) of the lost base score. The Flint can appear as an early boss, saving / using Hierophant or Empress tarots is usually what I try to do if I see this coming up.

I buy those cards every runs and in those i dont encounter that boss which is very funny

[Paul Ryevere]

Originally posted by sab0t:

I think (though someone can correct me if i'm wrong), due to the nature of it halving the base score, higher tier hands (four of a kind, straight flush, etc) suffer more from this than lower tier hands.

TL:DR: I could also be wrong, but to me it seems about equal. The other factors which are present in a run have enough impact on which half of the spectrum have it worse such that general statements have too many exceptions to be valuable.


This isn't a correction. I can't decide if this is correct or not, and I'm too lazy to try and actual math my way to a definitive answer, so I'm gonna give my initial perspective on this, but now explicitly with the acknowledgement that I, too, could well be wrong.

It seems like it'd end up more as a wash as to what hands suffer from it more. As you pointed out, higher-tier hands do suffer more numerically.
However, all the hands suffer the same amount proportionally. If we were all playing hands where every card was debuffed, and we had no jokers, then undoubtedly the impact on the higher-tier hands would matter more. But that's not the case in actual gameplay. Unless you're very early on, or getting really, really lucky with planets, you're gonna have at least one joker to help out, and the specific cards you play matter.

Assuming we don't have any jokers at all, because the higher tier hands, with literally one exception (4OAK) all use 5 cards, the chip deficit is more easily made up in base card power. So in that regard, the lower-tier hands suffer more.

If you have some joker support, how bad things are for specific hands gets harder to puzzle out, and to make accurate general statements about, and really becomes a case-by-case sort of problem. That said, I do think there are some generalities worth noting, if we make some general assumptions, too.

Generally, if it's early in the run, lower-tier hands suffer more. Their multiplier often drops to one, and if you lack mult support from your 0-2 jokers, any chip bonuses you get are going to have a very difficult time brute-forcing their way through anything but ante one.

If it's anywhere between ante four and seven (can it appear in ante seven? I can't remember), higher-tier hands suffer more, but I'd wager only slightly. If you're heavily invested in planets, suddenly all those investments are only half as good, and as the antes progress, it gets harder to succeed with one or two "meant to score significant points" hands. The proportional loss from planet investment is the same for all hands, but higher-tier hands are more likely to be winning by being only played once, or twice, where low-tier hands, except in ridiculous builds, succeed through repetition, and that repetition grants them the counteractive benefit of getting your total joker support, and whatever additional card support you've set up each time. Unless low-tier hands are very, very heavily invested in planet support, they'll have an easier time overcoming that common loss than higher-tier hands.

I can keep going on and on about specific situations and what gets it worse in any given one, but since to me there isn't a clear, definitive answer, and I can think of plenty of situations where one, or the other, or even mid-tier hands specifically get dumped on hardest, I'm inclined to say it's too nuanced to say it's anything but effectively equal, when viewed from above.

But again, I could be wrong. Maybe I'm overlooking something obvious, maybe this, maybe that, this is just my perspective. Any additional insight you, or anyone has is welcome, because I can always be a better player, and multiple minds collaborating are better than one.