Is there any sort of penalty or stat count for restarting?

[Konebred]

So I have been making my way through the blue stakes. I have all the decks leveled to blue, besides plasma which I just got. I wont lie I have been finding myself restarting a lot. Like after the nth game where I just never got ♥♥♥♥ and it all petered out around ante 5 I just started saying F it and restarting if I dont get anything decent after ante 2. Then I am like well might as well just reroll the starting blind until I get 25 cash or a good foil joker. So is there any reason to not scum the starting ante?

[RazzberryMocha]

The only stat it would affect would be your win streak. The only skip I'd recommend taking in any general context is the $25 one in ante one specifically, any other skip tag at any other time is too weak to justify 99% of the time. Even then, the $25 boost isn't going to dramatically alter how strong you are after ante 1 so it isn't necessary to be "optimal." Additionally, you can make it through the earlier antes with just decent jokers and stick it out until you find some direction. All that matters is that you meet the score requirement.

[Goblin]

Your save file does actually track losses and wins for each deck (and each stake on every deck separately, in fact), and holding R counts as a loss. It's just not communicated anywhere in-game. No idea if it was a feature LocalThunk started working on then never finished implementing (like daily runs), or if win ratio was communicated in game during the beta and he decided to hide it but left it in the save file anyway.

[Konebred]

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

The only stat it would affect would be your win streak. The only skip I'd recommend taking in any general context is the $25 one in ante one specifically, any other skip tag at any other time is too weak to justify 99% of the time. Even then, the $25 boost isn't going to dramatically alter how strong you are after ante 1 so it isn't necessary to be "optimal." Additionally, you can make it through the earlier antes with just decent jokers and stick it out until you find some direction. All that matters is that you meet the score requirement.

Yeah but I actually want to play the game. Skip skip buy some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ skip skip buy more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ok, oh god thank you a decent joker playstyle and I still lose next ante isnt really fun. You are basically telling me to hang on until the RNG blesses me, and I am getting the RNG out of the way at the start and can enjoy actually playing the game.

[Goblin]

Originally posted by Konebred:

Skip skip skip skip

... I think I found why you're losing so much, and why you think RNG matters much at all.

[RazzberryMocha]

Originally posted by Konebred:

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

The only stat it would affect would be your win streak. The only skip I'd recommend taking in any general context is the $25 one in ante one specifically, any other skip tag at any other time is too weak to justify 99% of the time. Even then, the $25 boost isn't going to dramatically alter how strong you are after ante 1 so it isn't necessary to be "optimal." Additionally, you can make it through the earlier antes with just decent jokers and stick it out until you find some direction. All that matters is that you meet the score requirement.

Yeah but I actually want to play the game. Skip skip buy some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ skip skip buy more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ok, oh god thank you a decent joker playstyle and I still lose next ante isnt really fun. You are basically telling me to hang on until the RNG blesses me, and I am getting the RNG out of the way at the start and can enjoy actually playing the game.

A big part of the higher stakes is understanding what jokers are good and what jokers are good enough. Also, taking shop visits is more valuable than skipping outside of $25 on ante 1 and skipping frequently is objectively weak, no matter how interesting of a mechanic it is.

If you find restarting runs repeatedly until you get something good at the beginning more successful/fun I'm not going to stop you but I would advise against it as brute forcing wins becomes significantly more difficult once you get to purple stake and even more so later when each joker has a 40% chance of an edition. Better to learn how to adapt now when it's easier.

[CMDR Shven]

You can actually reliably limp your way through ante 4-5 with a mediocre and disjointed build. I often have runs that don't really come together until about that point and so if I gave up at ante 2 every time things didn't look promising I'd never have won half the games I've won. Stick with it longer. One joker or spectral pack can dramatically shift a run. You haven't lost until you lose.

[snakeskip]

Originally posted by Konebred:

So is there any reason to not scum the starting ante?

Learning how to beat the game I guess.

I have never restarted. There's no point. If I get to a point where a run is definitely lost, it's only a few clicks to play it through anyway.

Nothing is as satisfying as finding a way to victory from an seemingly impossible situation. If you keep restarting, you will totally miss those moments.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Konebred:

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

The only stat it would affect would be your win streak. The only skip I'd recommend taking in any general context is the $25 one in ante one specifically, any other skip tag at any other time is too weak to justify 99% of the time. Even then, the $25 boost isn't going to dramatically alter how strong you are after ante 1 so it isn't necessary to be "optimal." Additionally, you can make it through the earlier antes with just decent jokers and stick it out until you find some direction. All that matters is that you meet the score requirement.

Yeah but I actually want to play the game. Skip skip buy some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ skip skip buy more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ok, oh god thank you a decent joker playstyle and I still lose next ante isnt really fun. You are basically telling me to hang on until the RNG blesses me, and I am getting the RNG out of the way at the start and can enjoy actually playing the game.

You want to actually play the game, which you achieve by...skipping most blinds.

I'm sure that makes sense in your head, but...

You're not getting the RNG out of the way by skipping things. You're actually doing the exact opposite.

The thing about RNG is the more rolls you take, the more it evens out. Not in a gambler's fallacy way where good rolls are balanced by bad rolls, but in a statistical way where the more trials you have, the less likely it is you get a weird outlier result. Hitting three shops instead of one means finding about three times as much good stuff, but it cubes the chance of not finding any good stuff (which is a good thing, since chances are between 0 and 1).

You're also screwing yourself out of income earned from playing blinds which is frequently worth more than a skip reward on its own, chances to scale scaling jokers (once you have them, which you might do earlier if you didn't skip the first two shops) and activate play-based money jokers (same).

[HeraldOfOpera]

You'll notice that there's an achievement for winning a run with a lot of skipped blinds (or rather, for winning a run having played very few rounds). That implies, correctly, that skipping blinds is usually bad.

Anyway, the game only keeps track of current and highest win streak as far as I can tell. It couldn't punish you for this even if it wanted to, and it doesn't want to because the constant resetting is punishment enough.

[Moray Eel]

Getting throwback in the very first shop is fun though

[HeraldOfOpera]

Originally posted by Moray Eel:

Getting throwback in the very first shop is fun though

As is Anaglyph shenanigans, although it's even funnier when you save up all those double tags.

[MaskMcgee]

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

The only skip I'd recommend taking in any general context is the $25 one in ante one specifically, any other skip tag at any other time is too weak to justify 99% of the time.

Even negative joker? Better with a double tag. Also extra voucher with double tag too.

[HeraldOfOpera]

Originally posted by MaskMcgee:

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

The only skip I'd recommend taking in any general context is the $25 one in ante one specifically, any other skip tag at any other time is too weak to justify 99% of the time.

Even negative joker? Better with a double tag. Also extra voucher with double tag too.

Negative Tag can be good if you're going for Completionist++ and thus can benefit from having a lot of jokers at a time, or if you have Swashbuckler because negative jokers have more value than normal ones on top of not taking up a slot.

Vouchers are... eh. $10 is actually a fair bit, especially if you're skipping blinds.

[RazzberryMocha]

Originally posted by MaskMcgee:

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

The only skip I'd recommend taking in any general context is the $25 one in ante one specifically, any other skip tag at any other time is too weak to justify 99% of the time.

Even negative joker? Better with a double tag. Also extra voucher with double tag too.

Negative joker skip is one of the worst skips in the game. You are giving up a shop visit, money from both the blind payout and interest, and an opportunity to scale your jokers for a joker that 95% of the time will not contribute to your build in any meaningful way. When you factor in the stickers jokers can get from higher stakes such as rental and perishable then it becomes even worse.
The only good time to do a negative skip is
A. you're using anaglyph deck for the completionest++ achievement, but even then that quickly becomes a bad way to get gold stickers.
B. You are in an incredibly rare situation where you both can't afford to sell a joker in your lineup (because they are too important or eternal) and you are also reliant on card scoring effects to win. In this case I'd take a negative skip so I'd have a surefire way to beat the Verdant Leaf boss if it appears ante 8.
C. You are in an incredible position, are capable of beating every boss blind and the required score for ante 8, and literally nothing you do at that point will stop you from winning. If you want to have a little fun in this scenario, I'm not going to stop you.

[HeraldOfOpera]

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

C. You are in an incredible position, are capable of beating every boss blind and the required score for ante 8, and literally nothing you do at that point will stop you from winning. If you want to have a little fun in this scenario, I'm not going to stop you..

And in fact, the existence of Completionist++ means it's actually optimal in that situation. It's genuinely the only thing that might make your run even better.