Stone cards?

[David]

So I played (and enjoyed!) this game for over 250 hrs and I still can't find a good use for stone cards. Can someone from this fine community please shine some light on this?

[sugarskull]

If you are playing a hand that is less than 5 cards, like two pair, you can add a stone card to score a 5th card.

[hey_SPAR]

If you are playing a hand that is less than 4 cards, like 3 of a kind, you can add 2 stone cards to score a 5th card.

[JellyPuff]

If you are playing a hand that is less than 3 cards, like pair, you can add 3 stone cards to score a 5th card.

[drwobbler]

If you are playing a hand that is less than 2 cards, like high card, you can add 4 stone cards to score a 5th card.

[w00t]

If you are playing a hand that has no cards in it, like empty, you can add 5 stone cards to score a 5th card.

[A bear]

They also count as removal for a lot of purposes so they work well for deck thinning. Works well with rebate and idol.

[BaconX]

If you are playing with yourself with your hand, you can not add a stone card to score a 5th card.

[malogoss]

Originally posted by BaconX:

If you are playing with yourself with your hand, (...)

Huh?

[BOT Hans Tobi]

Blackboard, playing high card build adds additional chips, Hanging chad is hugh when scoring a stone card (specially if its also enchanted). I once had plasma deck run where I had almost just stone cards. I played this Joker adding a stone card to your deck at the beginning of the blind and the one giving you extra ships for every stone card in your deck. Won on gold stake with this.

[CrabNicholson]

Originally posted by David:

So I played (and enjoyed!) this game for over 250 hrs and I still can't find a good use for stone cards. Can someone from this fine community please shine some light on this?

Stone cards are always scored when they are part of a hand, even if they don't contribute to it. Other than that, I don't see a point to them. They don't scale well into the late game.

[Wheelchair Murdura]

Originally posted by BOT Hans Tobi:

Blackboard

Correct me if I'm wrong but stone cards screw over blackboard, because you have cards in hand that are not either spade/clubs. So you'd have to play small hands and always be able to throw out all drawn stones. I'm not a huge fan of the combo.

[Trevor]

The only reason I ever use a stone card is to change a 6 7 8 or 9 card into stone. I only do it if there isn't anything better to do.

[Trevor]

Stone cards also work well when playing quads.

[Paul Ryevere]

They're good early in a run, and if you see them early in a run.

You can use them to (kind-of) replace or supplement planet cards if you're playing small hands, like high card or two pair. The mult increase from those hands on leveling up is pretty insignificant in most cases, and the chip increase is slow.
For $10-$12, you can get a low mult-bonus joker and two stone cards, which gives the same effective benefits as leveling the hand up five times, which costs $15-20.

Of course, this assumes you don't have a source of planet or tarot card generation.

Additionally, that benefit is immediate, while with Plutos or Mercuries, you have to actually find five of those cards one way or another.

The downside to this example, is reliability. The odds to turn up one of those two stone cards are iffy. If you chuck 5 cards every hand, and every discard, you end up seeing 25 cards at Gold stake on most decks.

This seems like a major downside, but it really isn't that bad in effect, because you aren't relying on them completely in early stakes.
A low-mult joker + a flush or a straight or a full house, or even a couple two-pairs can beat most rounds in antes 1 and 2 fairly reliably, and it's nothing to sneeze at in ante 3.

By the time you're in ante 4, you've probably had the opportunity to get more stone cards, or at least to get another couple jokers, and so the reliability of flexible hands becomes supplanted by the reliability of a greater default score bonus.
At this point, the multiplier bonuses you get from planet cards for small hands becomes less and less significant, and the only real reason to keep investing in them is the chip scaling, or you have just a BUNCH of steel cards.

Every stone card for high card and pair, again, is worth 5 planet cards in that regard.
So it's just the cheaper option. It doesn't scale to infinity like planet cards do, but it does go up to a max of +250 per hand if you're playing high card, and +150 for pairs.
160 chips is enough to win a run with. Might not be the most comfortable win, but it's doable.

And that's assuming you don't take planet cards at all. If things work out, you can skip them entirely, but it's easier to use 'em both. If you can get your hand type leveled up to like, eight or nine, AND you have 5-10 stone cards, you're looking good on reliable chips.

I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that stone cards are incredible, but they're a solid option in some circumstances. They have some reliability problems, both in draw frequency, and in having enough to play multiple hands using them, but those problems have solutions that aren't that hard to achieve.

[David]

Thanks for this sizeable explanation, it clears up a lot for me!