Can someone explain High Card Strategy on a more basic level?

[coronavitae]

I've read the guides, and there seems to be agreement that the High Card strategy is good for beating ante 8 on higher difficulties.

However, it seems to require a very specific set of jokers, and without them it seems impossible to survive the early rounds (or even with them since scaling over time is part of the strategy). So I find myself playing a 5-of-a-kind or Full-House deck to survive and buy the necessary jokers.

By the time I have the jokers for High Card (usually in about round 4-6), it seems easier to win with whatever strategy got me there rather than to pivot and rebuild a High Card strategy.

People are calling High Card "broken", can someone explain what play style is allowing people to get the necessary jokers quickly enough, or why the strategy has an advantage over other styles?

[Ronald Brain]

There are several advantage of going for fewer card hands on higher stakes:
-The -1 discard means you see 5 card less. Assembling five card hands will be very challenging without support from utility jokers
-You have 7 card held-in-hand when playing High Card. This gives massive boost to Steel/Gold cards to support your score and econ, plus any Blue Seal you happen to draw to gather Planet cards.

It's true that specific Joker combination is required to win with High Card. One strategy is to simply go with whatever setup you have in early ante to survive, focus on building your econ. Once you're set, be on the look out to pivot, but always keep in mind that you may not get the Jokers you need, so just keep up with your build to win the game first.

[JellyPuff]

It's broken because of re-trigger abilities on X-mult cards, giving you exponentially higher scores. Imagine having 20+ jokers, that all give "x1.5".

If you only play 1 card, you can have your hand filled with Steel Cards (preferably with Red-seals), while rocking Baron or Mime. Always try to use your Chariot-cards on Kings just on the off-chance, that you stumble across Baron. DNA is also great, especially if you get a Red Seal on a Steel-card. Perkeo is also great, if you have Pluto or Death-cards. Of course, you won't be playing high cards from the get go and trying to force builds often just ends in a loss.

Alternatively, you can build your Jokers and deck not for hand re-triggers, but around the cards you'll be scoring. Hanging Chad + Photograph wins you the game on it's own and both are commons and i honestly expect one or the other to get nerfed at some point (it's actually somewhat consistently forceable with enough money). Now imagine having Triboulet as well as Sock & Buskin and on top you'll be playing Glass-cards and/or Polychromes. And you can and should still try to get Steel Cards in your hands. At that point, you're already easely past Ante 11, even on higher stakes and i haven't even mentioned Blueprint/Brainstorm/Invisible Joker yet. That's where you'll be starting to put the game on max speed.

[coronavitae]

Thanks to both of you! Following your explanations I now get it and use this strategy a lot.

In addition to the long-game strategies you mentioned, I think I was under appreciating how powerful +mult and chips are early-game. I didn't need them to get past the first few antes at low stakes, so I discounted them too much.

Now I see that using something like bus-pass, after a few rounds I'm beating the blind with one high-card hand (if I have a chip-boost as well).