"Just spam high card and you will win"

[blazingdynamo21]

I like this game a lot and want to get a bit more consistent wins, the issue is the advice I get from videos and forums is "Just get X joker and spam high card" "get Y joker and spam high card" "Get Z joker and never discard AKA spam high card" This is a play pattern I just do not like and would rather play real poker hands but it feels nearly impossible to get past Purple stake while doing so. Is there any advice for me or is high level Balatro really just getting jokers that enable high card strategies and spamming that to win?

[malogoss]

The High card focus was, relative to many other ways to play, a lot better before May 1st. The most reliable hands were high card and pair, on high stake. Then the patch dropped and things changed a lot.

Now you can win with almost any hand consistently, even if you pretty much force it and even at gold stake. I say almost any hand, I would exclude straight flush and all 3 secret hands from the lot. Not saying you'll never win with those, just saying it will be a lot less consistent. Like if you wanted to force flush five when starting a game, for example. It's a bad plan that won't work too often.

With the new blue seals, plus the new orange and gold stakes, try anything.

Prior to the patch, I would have never recommended to play flushes on high stake. Post patch, you can win gold ending a run with level 50 Flush at ante 8. And if flush can get to level 50 then any hand can, considering Flush is a 5 card hand which is far from being the best with blue seals. But it still works.

Most of the videos you watched were probably made before May. In that case, they were right when they were made but they are now outdated. If they were made in May or later, I would not recommend those videos. High card can work, it still works pretty well in fact, but there's no need to focus on it every run you play.

[Chojoukif]

The way I see it, one way or another you need good jokers on the higher stakes (not anything crazy mind you, some multiplication Jokers, maybe some on trigger effects with multiplication, high base mult, that sort of thing), but in my experience there is no reason to spam high card. For my playstyle I usually either end up spamming full house and three of a kind which get upgraded to flush house and flush five late game, or I spam straights which become straight flushes, which may become royal flushes if I can finesse it. Both approaches are viable (straights are less consistent though), it just depends what kinda decisions you make when you add cards and change suits.

The thing about high card is that it has sucky base chips and base mult, it also doesn't benefit from enhancements/ red or gold seals as much since you only play 1 card, so basically the way I see it high card builds have to do 1 of 2 things, level up high card a bunch, with space joker or blue seals etc. or you have to have really high base mult and chips from your jokers, so in a sense it doesn't matter what hand you play and you still win. In both of these scenarios there is nothing about high card as a hand that specifically enables the strategy, you could do the same thing with any other hand that your deck can make consistently. I think the main advantages of high card is that you can hold more cards in hand and you can always make it, so its nice for farming purposes and consistency, but its not really necessary to win. Also, you can't just decide that you are going to make a high card build and the game will just give you what you need, not every run can be a high card run and you will lose winnable runs if you pidgeon hole yourself into 1 strategy, you're supposed to work with what you're given in the shops and manage the risk.

So really, what you need to do to win is make good decisions and get a little bit lucky.

[kone]

There's a lot more flexibility and reliability that comes with focusing only on your jokers compared to your poker hand. It's why High Card happens to be used the most.

It's also a hand that works the best for certain joker mechanics like chip and mult scaling where sometimes you don't want to kill a blind instantly like with higher scoring hands.
Still, there's a lot of fun to be had making Flushes, Full Houses and Straights work because there are decks and jokers that provide unique experiences and ways to score.

[Penguinator]

High Card can easily take advantage of Steel Cards, Blue Seals, and all Jokers with "held in hand" effects, but since their initial chip + mult potential sucks, the early game is hard unless you can quickly get the few Jokers that have high synergy with single card hands (which are a minority). Personally I never liked playing them, I prefer shaping my whole deck into (Glass) Aces and running Hanging Chad + Scholar (re-triggering a Glass Ace instantly explodes the score) but lately I've been clearing the challenges (17/20) and for some of them High Card is one of the only working strategies (notably the one where your hand size is limited to 5 cards).
In the end, "high level play" comes down to getting Jokers that have synergy with each other and your deck, what the shop offers is random so blindly aiming for High Card build every single time won't work out well (especially in the early game where High Card is at its weakest and there won't be much money for rerolls and Planet Boosters).