Advice for Finding Vouchers?

[Cupcake]

I'm having a tough time finding the Illusion voucher. (upgrade of magic tricks) It's the only thing I haven't found in a run so my monkey brain says that I need to get it. I've finished about 4 runs on white stake trying to find it. My strategy is just to play anaglyph deck so that I can potentially find a voucher tag. (Somehow I never manage to see one at a good time) I reroll the seed until magic tricks is my first ante voucher and usually buy it after round 2. Sometimes I end up dying because of how awful the voucher is, but when I've finished the runs I usually get to around ante 10. Can't believe I haven't managed to get it after 4 runs and I'm really getting sick of playing like this. Any advice for how I can get this thing over with? Do I just have to get luckier?

[Ronald Brain]

Other than "keep trying", there isn't much you can do to tip the odd, sometimes the seed you land on simply won't give you Illustration unless you buy all 31 other Vouchers first.

[zirune]

The illusion voucher only unlocks when you buy 20 playing cards from the shop. So if you haven't met that unlock condition, you'll never see the voucher. Unless you've been using Hologram a bunch, there's a good chance you haven't bought 20 playing cards in the shop. Ones from playing cards packs don't count - they have to be in the shop due to the magic trick voucher.

Other than that, stop going out of your way to get the voucher. If you're planning to get all achievements or at least clear gold stake eventually, you're going to see it eventually. Finding all the vouchers Just buy magic trick whenever you see it, and you'll see illusion eventually.

[Cupcake]

Originally posted by zirune:

The illusion voucher only unlocks when you buy 20 playing cards from the shop. So if you haven't met that unlock condition, you'll never see the voucher. Unless you've been using Hologram a bunch, there's a good chance you haven't bought 20 playing cards in the shop. Ones from playing cards packs don't count - they have to be in the shop due to the magic trick voucher.

Other than that, stop going out of your way to get the voucher. If you're planning to get all achievements or at least clear gold stake eventually, you're going to see it eventually. Finding all the vouchers Just buy magic trick whenever you see it, and you'll see illusion eventually.

I'm definitely not planning to get all the achievements, some of them are crazy. 100% collection feels like a satisfying completion to me. I will probably try to clear gold stake too, I got orange done already pre-patch. I might finish the challenge runs too, but I haven't found most of them particularly interesting.

I appreciate the sentiment, but the thing is I won't see the voucher eventually by just playing normally because magic tricks is so bad. I would never normally buy it as it's actively worsening my run by diluting shops with useless stuff. It desperately needs a buff imo. I had to actively buy it one run and add a bunch of garbage to my deck just to unlock Illusion because I would always skip before. I think I found illusion in a challenge run and was excited, but then realized that challenge runs don't count for discovering stuff.

I know it's silly, but it's driving me mad having 99% completion and I can't get the last thing I need.

[Astroooooooo]

I think it's Hologram joker, that improves x25 for every card added to your deck?

Boy let me tell you about being happy to have the Magic Trick voucher and the absolute synergy it brings to Hologram joker. (and Stone Joker, and Certificate Joker - anything that adds a card to your deck is a + when you have Hologram)

But if you are hunting vouchers, you can always play the Anagram Deck and take the extra voucher reward

[Cupcake]

Originally posted by Astroooooooo:

I think it's Hologram joker, that improves x25 for every card added to your deck?

Boy let me tell you about being happy to have the Magic Trick voucher and the absolute synergy it brings to Hologram joker. (and Stone Joker, and Certificate Joker - anything that adds a card to your deck is a + when you have Hologram)

But if you are hunting vouchers, you can always play the Anagram Deck and take the extra voucher reward

Yea, it's a good synergy, maybe I am sleeping on hologram joker. Usually my mindset was that neither hologram nor magic trick is good, so I don't pick up either of them even though the combo together is good. I'm gonna try to start picking up hologram because of the other synergies you mentioned, which means that magic trick would probably be good after I have a hologram. I think I just didn't have them unlocked for a while so it didn't make sense to pick up holograms without additional synergy.

[Ratch]

Hologram is worth if you have Certificate or DNA or a lot of econ to be constantly buying packs. Since I stan DNA I run Hologram quite a bit.
Magic Trick is bad. You're either diluting your deck or diluting your store draw pool. Sometimes both.

There's no real strategy except what you're doing with Anaglyph tbh. I'm trying a similar strategy for getting Gold stickers on more than 5-6 Jokers per Gold win. Getting the followup voucher in a run is comically low chances. I buy Blank every chance I get, I can probably count on my hands the amount of times I've drawn Antimatter. I might have to include toes.

[Cupcake]

Originally posted by Ratch:

Hologram is worth if you have Certificate or DNA or a lot of econ to be constantly buying packs. Since I stan DNA I run Hologram quite a bit.
Magic Trick is bad. You're either diluting your deck or diluting your store draw pool. Sometimes both.

There's no real strategy except what you're doing with Anaglyph tbh. I'm trying a similar strategy for getting Gold stickers on more than 5-6 Jokers per Gold win. Getting the followup voucher in a run is comically low chances. I buy Blank every chance I get, I can probably count on my hands the amount of times I've drawn Antimatter. I might have to include toes.

I finally got it on the very next run! I somehow still never got a voucher tag past ante 1 seed rerolls even though there are only 24 tags. I saw close to 100 for five runs making it to around ante 10 and I never got a 1/24 chance. Just got it randomly as a given voucher, so I'll take it.

If my math maths, that's (23/24)^100 or ~1.4% chance I don't see the correct voucher ever in my attempts. Afaik the odds are the same for each tag. Maybe not? Guess I'm just unlucky?

[malogoss]

Originally posted by Cupcake:

If my math maths, that's (23/24)^100 or ~1.4% chance I don't see the correct voucher ever in my attempts. Afaik the odds are the same for each tag. Maybe not? Guess I'm just unlucky?

I won't do the math, but that isn't it.

It's more complicated than that because often, you won't even find the first voucher anyway. At other times, you'll find the first one, then complete duos of other vouchers, which makes it a lot more likely you'll find Illusion.

But in the end it took you 5 runs and I'll be honest, it feels like an average result. First 3 runs would be lucky. If it took you 12+ runs then yes, I'd say you were unlucky.

[Cupcake]

Originally posted by malogoss:

Originally posted by Cupcake:

If my math maths, that's (23/24)^100 or ~1.4% chance I don't see the correct voucher ever in my attempts. Afaik the odds are the same for each tag. Maybe not? Guess I'm just unlucky?

I won't do the math, but that isn't it.

It's more complicated than that because often, you won't even find the first voucher anyway. At other times, you'll find the first one, then complete duos of other vouchers, which makes it a lot more likely you'll find Illusion.

But in the end it took you 5 runs and I'll be honest, it feels like an average result. First 3 runs would be lucky. If it took you 12+ runs then yes, I'd say you were unlucky.

I'm not sure what you mean about not finding the first voucher? I always found magic tricks, I reset each run until I get the magic tricks in my first ante shop so that I could increase my chance of finding illusion as much as possible. The first four runs that I finished I already had magic tricks throughout the entire run, just never found illusion.

The 1% chance I mentioned wasn't for the chance I don't find the illusion voucher, it's just for the chance I don't see the voucher tag. (the things you can take for skipping a round) It would have been significantly more likely to find illusion if I had just gotten a voucher tag because I had been trying to save my anaglyph double tags for the entire run until I found it. I don't believe there's a limit to how many vouchers can be in the shop, so finding the voucher tag with a bunch of double tags would have given me way more chances to hit. Assuming all tags are equally likely to show up, the math is correct for the likelihood that I don't see one specific tag with 100 tags seen.

Now that I think about it though, I believe I did see the voucher tag once in like ante 11 but my run wasn't good enough to be able to actually finish any of the blinds and see another shop to actually buy the vouchers. So I did get to see it once, it was just too late.

Regardless, the game was just irritating me because I lost one or two runs on white stake just because magic tricks is so bad. I feel I'm good enough at the game to always win a white stake run now, but ruining your econ early and diluting shops makes it way more likely you just won't find any jokers to make it through the early game or just die a slow death because you constantly have to spend to stay alive.

I'm not a big fan of the discovering mechanics in Balatro because you have to actively make bad decisions in order to just discover all the stuff, especially the stuff that's clearly underpowered. My favorite part of the game is figuring out how to play optimally. I think just unlocking a card/voucher should be enough to put it in your collection. It's super weird that it will literally show you what card/voucher you unlock after you complete the unlock objective, but then right afterwards it's not in your collection and you can't see it again even though the game already showed you exactly what the card/voucher does? Even if the intention is that you can't yet read what the card does, once it shows up in a shop and you hover over it, it should definitely be unlocked because you already know exactly what it does. I don't want to have to buy it when it's actively bad for me just to add it to my collection. Feels like the system underwent a change at some point and it's got half of two systems, I can't imagine it was designed like that.