Finally got 100% completion. Here's my thoughts.

[Fernanda]

Edit: Page 2 for update on my patch impressions.


Took me 290 hours.

Well, this was a trip. Played on main branch. I didn't watch videos, and I don't know much about the meta, I tried to play and learn as I went. I was okay at Poker but haven't played actual hold'em in a while.

The Challenges were very fun, but I wasn't going for Platinum until my bf was around and I decided to show him how bs some challenges were. I was 16/20 and had Blast Off and the last three left, so I went Golden Needle to show him how very hard the concept of playing with only one hand was and, to my surprise, I won.

After that I completed the Blast Off and Cruelty. Jokerless was another level. I kept hearing "I got lucky" when I asked people how they completed Jokerless but I didn't. It took me 12 hours from start to get a completion, during which I gradually understood how to play to form fours and fives of a kind and use some Spectrals I hadn't used before. I didn't luck out in the end, it was more of a grind of figuring out a strategy and not screwing it up.

Getting Completionist++ was just a grind like any other, I did it by running
Checkered Deck while fishing for high scores. I got annoyed at some of the conditional cards and had to do more than one run just for Lucky Cat at the very end.

For the Deck Gold Stakes, after doing the challenges they feel kinda easy. I managed to get a 12 win streak from Painted to Anaglyph for my last two gold stakes, it was very fun.

My thoughts after all this:

I don't like the reverse difficulty curve. Ante 1 and 2 are game-defining and most of my losses are, ironically, in Ante 1. Usually hubris in taking something needed for the late game, or just pure bad luck.

Highs, Pairs and Two Pairs are important in some challenges, and I heard they're meta in a discord server, but I find weird how in Ante 1 you have to play big hands to get through 300 and 450 points. I think this game could benefit from a combo system where follow-ups with the same hand would give more points, scaling higher towards lesser hands.

Completionist++ should not be a thing. Completionist+ makes sense, as it shows your mastery over the game since some decks are very different, but by the time you get Completionist+ you don't really need a lot of Jokers to win the game. Heck, you don't even need them to win a white stake as we all know. For higher stakes you can eco, convert cards and as long as you have a chip generator, a +mult and a xmult you can use the other slots in a black deck as you see fit. The best I can say about it is that to make it faster it forces you to make combos out of cards you never actually use and change your usual gameplay, but otherwise it's just brute force.

I feel like more Jokers should be useful. I think I can say that now that I've had to use all of them, and it's fine to have filler, but you can run straight into bad luck territory.

Finally, there's no greater frustration than finding a Legendary Joker and it turning out to be Canio. I'm sure there's a meta somewhere where he's OP or something, but for me it was just painful.

Favorite challenge was Medusa, I thought I was gonna hate it but ended up loving it.



Anyway that's my 2 cents. Great game. If there's anything I can answer, feel free to ask, I was particularly frustrated at every response to Jokerless being "I got lucky" so I don't mind answering stuff if I can remember what I did at the time.

[Jonathas]

Congratulations! What was your favorite deck?

[Fernanda]

Originally posted by Jonathas:

Congratulations! What was your favorite deck?

Erratic. It's extremely fun for me to see what kind of shenanigans you can pull off with it since it has the potential to give you great or wacky hands right off the start.

[kone]

I'm currently halfway through that Completionist++ grind, and yeah I agree with a lot of your points.

The reverse difficulty curve as you put it is something I'm not a big fan of either because Antes 1-3 are far too critical and tempting to reset.

With Completionist++ I guess it's a little fun? To make it work like how I'm currently running Anaglyph Deck to brute force a bunch of mediocre negative jokers to spawn but I shouldn't have to do that. I just wish there was a better way to show mastery of the game or even something more difficult to tackle.

Jokerless was torture.
I tried 4/5 of a Kind and Red Sealed Glass Cards and neither worked.
Telescope voucher, Flushes and regular Glass Cards worked for me, somehow.
Though strangely, I feel so much stronger at the game just from doing that challenge. It changed everything. I'm conflicted on how I feel about it.

[VAL]

Interesting. I found golden needle to be significantly worse than jokerless. Jokerless is not about luck, it’s simply applying all the same concepts without using jokers. Golden needle however… haunts me.

Anyway, hard agree on the comp++ comment. I myself am not even interested in running comp+ bc i have more desire to play other games but i see its value.

Phenomenal work overall. I’m sure you’ll have some great suggestions for the community.

[Underdrill]

I'm not sure if I'll do the completionist++ grind yet as that's quite insane haha, but I am at least looking to clear up completionist, and I'm missing 2 jokers and two enhanced vouchers at the moment. The jokers aren't legendary, they've been unlocked, but I just haven't encountered them yet, same with the vouchers after buying their respective standard versions. Any tips for finding those last four or am I completely at the mercy of RNG?

[Morthgarrow]

Originally posted by Underdrill:

I'm not sure if I'll do the completionist++ grind yet as that's quite insane haha, but I am at least looking to clear up completionist, and I'm missing 2 jokers and two enhanced vouchers at the moment. The jokers aren't legendary, they've been unlocked, but I just haven't encountered them yet, same with the vouchers after buying their respective standard versions. Any tips for finding those last four or am I completely at the mercy of RNG?

If you've unlocked the vouchers, then it's just a matter of time that you see them after buying their prerequisite/standard version in the shop.
For the jokers you're not seeing, they are probably the ones that do something based on certain enhanced cards in your deck like stones, lucky cards, or glass cards. Those jokers will only show up in the shop if you have at least one of the card types in your deck that they work with, so try to put at least one of those enhanced cards in your deck on your next runs and you should see it fairly soon!

[Eulenspiegel_Narrenkaiser]

Yeah, I can't see myself grinding for Completionist++. I am at 140 hours and I still haven't unlocked Yorick. Given how incredibly uncommon it has been to even GET a legendary joker, much less to get one and win on Gold Stake with it, and doing it with all five of them, feels like it just won't ever happen in the time that I still feel engaged enough to play the game.

[Underdrill]

Originally posted by Morthgarrow:

Originally posted by Underdrill:

I'm not sure if I'll do the completionist++ grind yet as that's quite insane haha, but I am at least looking to clear up completionist, and I'm missing 2 jokers and two enhanced vouchers at the moment. The jokers aren't legendary, they've been unlocked, but I just haven't encountered them yet, same with the vouchers after buying their respective standard versions. Any tips for finding those last four or am I completely at the mercy of RNG?

If you've unlocked the vouchers, then it's just a matter of time that you see them after buying their prerequisite/standard version in the shop.
For the jokers you're not seeing, they are probably the ones that do something based on certain enhanced cards in your deck like stones, lucky cards, or glass cards. Those jokers will only show up in the shop if you have at least one of the card types in your deck that they work with, so try to put at least one of those enhanced cards in your deck on your next runs and you should see it fairly soon!

The last one is Merry Andy, and one of the last vouchers is the enhanced hand size one. So both related to Hand Size it seems. Wish the game would give them to me but it's not been kind recently!

Edit - Merry Andy has been secured, just the last two enhanced vouchers now!

[Fernanda]

Originally posted by kitten exterminator:

I'm currently halfway through that Completionist++ grind, and yeah I agree with a lot of your points.

The reverse difficulty curve as you put it is something I'm not a big fan of either because Antes 1-3 are far too critical and tempting to reset.

With Completionist++ I guess it's a little fun? To make it work like how I'm currently running Anaglyph Deck to brute force a bunch of mediocre negative jokers to spawn but I shouldn't have to do that. I just wish there was a better way to show mastery of the game or even something more difficult to tackle.

Jokerless was torture.
I tried 4/5 of a Kind and Red Sealed Glass Cards and neither worked.
Telescope voucher, Flushes and regular Glass Cards worked for me, somehow.
Though strangely, I feel so much stronger at the game just from doing that challenge. It changed everything. I'm conflicted on how I feel about it.

Yeah, the first antes are just so much harder. It's weird.

You have a good point. I had fun doing some runs with 5 new jokers because they synced well and had to be creative about the deck building. Some runs had userless jokers, others had nice combos that changed the gameplay dynamic.

I also feel like finishing Jokerless made me stronger at the game, I win most gold stake runs now, while before I'm pretty sure a 12 win streak would have been impossible.

Originally posted by VAL:

Interesting. I found golden needle to be significantly worse than jokerless. Jokerless is not about luck, it’s simply applying all the same concepts without using jokers. Golden needle however… haunts me.

Anyway, hard agree on the comp++ comment. I myself am not even interested in running comp+ bc i have more desire to play other games but i see its value.

Phenomenal work overall. I’m sure you’ll have some great suggestions for the community.

I thought Needle was impossible (for me) until... it happened. I guess if everyone says they had luck with Jokerless, maybe I had luck with Needle. The entire thing started with showing my boyfriend how impossible it was and at some point we noticed we had a good chance of winning.

Thank you for the compliments.

[Fernanda]

Originally posted by Underdrill:

I'm not sure if I'll do the completionist++ grind yet as that's quite insane haha, but I am at least looking to clear up completionist, and I'm missing 2 jokers and two enhanced vouchers at the moment. The jokers aren't legendary, they've been unlocked, but I just haven't encountered them yet, same with the vouchers after buying their respective standard versions. Any tips for finding those last four or am I completely at the mercy of RNG?

As said before, some Jokers are conditional. The lucky cat only shows up if you have at least one lucky card on your deck, Cavendish only shows up once Gros Michel expires, and so on. It was a bit frustrating because I didn't know all the conditionals, so I had to google the remaining cards to see if I was missing something

[generic_user_0001]

what strat/build got u most wins

[Fernanda]

Originally posted by OkBuddy®:

what strat/build got u most wins

I heard the meta involves high cards and pairs, but I don't know how to build around them so I was just playing my own way. To answer:

I focused on Flushes and played Straights whenever they showed up. I'd see my hand and if I had 3 of a suit and 2 of others I discard all the others and play until that 3 becomes 5 cards for a Flush.

I always bought Standard Boosters because then if I got any card I could transition from Flushes and Straights into Four/Five of a kind early on.

So I saw what kind of jokers and booster contents I had and either played Flushes and Straights (with a focus on leveling Flushes and using Hanged Man to destroy everything else, usually Sun to convert into Hearts because of Bloodstone, and Death to make more Hearts), or Four/Five of a kind. If I had, say, two eights from Boosters I'd start discarding everything looking to make a Four or a Five, and if I had really good luck I'd move to Flush Five.

When playing Flushes, I go Aces to avoid the boss that flips face cards down. While it lacks the power of the face-based cards, it's more than enough to go 10/8 minimum on gold stakes just with straightforward Jokers.

My Stats for reference states Flushes:
https://i.imgur.com/e7tN8eb.png

[Xazuki]

Impressive that you achieved such a big Gold Stake win streak focusing on Flushes on main branch. I'd would've guessed the 7 hand size kills this before you even get started half the time.

Have you looked at the changes on experimental branch? The new joker stickers can be pretty interesting. It also addresses your concerns about Ante 1, specifically by adding a guarenteed Joker pack in the first shop as well as having 8 hand size.

[Fernanda]

Originally posted by Xazuki:

Impressive that you achieved such a big Gold Stake win streak focusing on Flushes on main branch. I'd would've guessed the 7 hand size kills this before you even get started half the time.

Have you looked at the changes on experimental branch? The new joker stickers can be pretty interesting. It also addresses your concerns about Ante 1, specifically by adding a guarenteed Joker pack in the first shop as well as having 8 hand size.

I tried the beta branch once but ended up returning to the main branch, but I didn't see at the time that joker pack guarantee. Thanks for letting me know.

I wanted to do the main branch because I heard some of the difficulty was gonna be nerfed and I wanted to do before it.

[FinalArrow]

Originally posted by Fernanda:

Completionist++ should not be a thing.

Thank you. My thoughts exactly.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2379780/discussions/0/4294818244837983518/?tscn=1713383967