My 2 cents for the fixing Stakes idea.

[Jakkson K]

So, imo Black Stake is the last fun stake.
Red Stake is perfectly playable and makes a fun challenge. Green Stake, while boring, makes logical sense. Black Stake is very fun. Blue Stake sucks to play. Purple would be fine if Blue wasn't a thing. And Orange is such a slog. Gold is the worst.

So I propose a general solution from taking things from other roguelikes and trying to toss them in.
First, the whole system should come with an up-side. A lot of roguelikes use their advanced difficulties to make you stronger as well as making the game stronger, or giving you a bone after taking away your lifelines. So I propose letting the players choose 1 of 2 random common jokers at the start of each run. The number of jokers to choose from increase depending on the stake level.
Alternatively, you could start with a random poker hand increased by a level or two to push you towards a certain build and make the flush/full house early game meta less optimal.

Red Stake is perfect as is, no need to change it.

Green stake is fine, but I propose a more interesting idea, how about making rerolls start at a dollar or two more expensive. Not a big deal, and only slightly making spending down to interest worse.

Black Stake stays the same. (Or adds in more debuffs that can be given to jokers and cards.)

Blue Stake has your deck start off with 4 dud cards (3 with abandoned deck), these cards act as Stone Cards, but give 0 or 1 chip each instead of 50. This is a much more interesting way to accomplish the "get rid of discard" theme while being overall less punishing. Maybe have an interesting interaction where playing multiple duds counts for pairs etc. Maybe add in a joker this difficulty and beyond exclusive that gives you 2 dollars per dud played.

Purple Stake stays the same if Green stake got changed, otherwise give it the proposed changed to rerolls or something similar.

Orange Stake has an 'RNG diminisher' like making Negative Jokers no longer appear naturally in shops or packs, making it harder to pop-off and mega win, without hindering most deck's chances of a good old-fashion win.

Gold Stake should be a legendary change to the game for being the final challenge, so -1 hand size definitely doesn't fit. I was thinking giving Big Blinds certain boss blind abilities (they can still be skipped, but if you do win you get an extra dollar). Either that or give the ante 8 boss a random normal boss blind effect that changes each hand played ontop of the final boss blind ability.