White Stake, my absolute bane.

[Sasha]

So, I have played a bit of Balatro. I love it. I can't play it consistently for hours on end, but I love it. And more often than not, it really doesn't feel too bad when losing. However, I am starting to get a bit frustrated and discouraged by the fact that I have never made it out of white stake, and I have only once actually reached Ante 8. Most of the rest of the game is locked away because of that. I'd like to do challenges, or... whatever else it has to offer, but alas, I just can't make it, no matter how much I try.

Maybe I just don't get the game. Maybe I don't understand how it works. Or... idk. Is there some sort of definitive guide that I could maybe look up and learn? I want to keep playing because it's fun, but endlessly losing like that is starting to take a toll.

[Sasha]

And a little update, as of right now, I have also won one run on Steam! FINALLY!

Someone here said "once you understand scaling, you've got this." And I didn't understand scaling. Not at all. Well... I think now I just might.

First off, I had to try and get a Riff-Raff card in an early ante. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't, and when I did, I most likely ended up getting beaten in a further ante.

Well, long-story short, with the help of a Riff-Raff, I managed to put together this winning line-up, which also scored a whopping 471k on one blind, and won the Acorn with about 250k.

1. Chaos the Clown (negative) - free reroll is god tier, and an extra Joker slot, priceless.

2. Flash Card - One free reroll per shop, +2 mult. As of Ante 8's Boss Blind it sits at a lovely +60 mult.

3. Driver's License - My trump card for the phone win. I actually HIGHLY gambled with this as I had 1 enhanced card when I got it. So I made sure I quickly worked and got as many enhanced cards as possible using tarot juggling. Here I am with 35 enhanced cards.

4. Yorick (x6 mult) - It came out of a Spectral Pack card. That was also when I tossed my Riff-Raff. I made sure I used as many discards as possible, within useful limits.

5. Baseball Card - It's true, only Flash Card is uncommon, but x1.5 mult is x1.5 mult.

6. Blue Joker - +122 chips. On top of plenty of bonuses from my mostly enhanced cards, then multiplied like crazy... yeah.

I'm curious to see what you veterans think about this play but I'm pretty pleased with the results. Thank you once again for all your help and advice. Off to Red Stake now! But first, time to see how much further down the gauntlet can I go with this line-up.

[CMDR Shven]

Congrats. Looks like a pretty solid run for beating ante 8. You're right, Baseball card with only one uncommon joker isn't generally a good idea especially if it's your only source of X mult, because you're then effectively using two joker slots to accomplish what you could with one, but when you've got two other sources of X mult and a joker with +60 base mult, each additional X mult compounds and does a lot of work.

Also getting driver's license early with very few enhanced cards is generally a bad idea, because it's costing you money and then taking up a slot and doing absolutely nothing for a long time. That being said I have done the same thing myself on multiple occasions because dammit, sometimes it's just satisfying to fight to reach that threshold and get the payoff even if it's suboptimal.

[Sasha]

Origineel geplaatst door CMDR Shven:

Congrats. Looks like a pretty solid run for beating ante 8. You're right, Baseball card with only one uncommon joker isn't generally a good idea especially if it's your only source of X mult, because you're then effectively using two joker slots to accomplish what you could with one, but when you've got two other sources of X mult and a joker with +60 base mult, each additional X mult compounds and does a lot of work.

Yeah, I probably wouldn't have gotten it if I only had that for a mult card, but as I already had the previous two and steadily raising both the +mult and xmult cards I imagined it'd do good.

"Also getting driver's license early with very few enhanced cards is generally a bad idea, because it's costing you money and then taking up a slot and doing absolutely nothing for a long time. That being said I have done the same thing myself on multiple occasions because dammit, sometimes it's just satisfying to fight to reach that threshold and get the payoff even if it's suboptimal."

And yes, I know, like I said, wild gamble. I didn't wanna miss the opportunity because that's one of the best xmult cards that I know of, and its condition isn't really hard to achieve. Tarot helped and I had good economy to afford buying every tarot pack in sight, so within two or three shops I had enough cards for it to work. It felt satisfying.

[RazzberryMocha]

Origineel geplaatst door CMDR Shven:

Also getting driver's license early with very few enhanced cards is generally a bad idea, because it's costing you money and then taking up a slot and doing absolutely nothing for a long time. That being said I have done the same thing myself on multiple occasions because dammit, sometimes it's just satisfying to fight to reach that threshold and get the payoff even if it's suboptimal.

It depends. If I'm in a comfortable position and see an early drivers license while at 0/16 enhanced cards I'll usually take it and work towards that, as around 2 antes will be enough to get it online. If you're struggling to keep up with the blind scaling then absolutely skip out on it though.

[Sasha]

Well, Ante 11 got me, made about 4mil out of the 7.5mil threshold. Worth it.

[CMDR Shven]

If you're interested in trying to go as far as possible I'd recommend looking up some youtube videos of streamers playing high score runs. The game is balanced around Ante 1-8 and is not meant to be fair beyond that, as the scores begin increasing exponentially. The builds required to go into the teen and 20 Antes and beyond are somewhat limited and specific and thus often require risky and inconsistent decision making to pull off.

But even if you're not generally interested in messing around in endless mode you can still pick up a lot of good tips and deckbuilding ideas that will help in regular play from watching people play endless and if you know what the builds are and you naturally see the opportunity to make one in a regular run, you can absolutely obliterate ante 8. I've been messing around playing high score runs the past week or so after playing exclusively on gold stake for like 200 hours and I've regularly gotten hundreds of billions of points in a single hand by ante 6 even with only a partial endless build assembled.

[HeraldOfOpera]

Origineel geplaatst door Sasha:

Well, Ante 11 got me, made about 4mil out of the 7.5mil threshold. Worth it.

Yeah, it's worth mentioning that there's a single unlock related to exactly beating that ante at least once in your life. All the other unlocks are for Ante 8 or lower.

[ulzgoroth]

Origineel geplaatst door Sasha:

And a little update, as of right now, I have also won one run on Steam! FINALLY!

Someone here said "once you understand scaling, you've got this." And I didn't understand scaling. Not at all. Well... I think now I just might.

First off, I had to try and get a Riff-Raff card in an early ante. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't, and when I did, I most likely ended up getting beaten in a further ante.

Well, long-story short, with the help of a Riff-Raff, I managed to put together this winning line-up, which also scored a whopping 471k on one blind, and won the Acorn with about 250k.

1. Chaos the Clown (negative) - free reroll is god tier, and an extra Joker slot, priceless.

2. Flash Card - One free reroll per shop, +2 mult. As of Ante 8's Boss Blind it sits at a lovely +60 mult.

3. Driver's License - My trump card for the phone win. I actually HIGHLY gambled with this as I had 1 enhanced card when I got it. So I made sure I quickly worked and got as many enhanced cards as possible using tarot juggling. Here I am with 35 enhanced cards.

4. Yorick (x6 mult) - It came out of a Spectral Pack card. That was also when I tossed my Riff-Raff. I made sure I used as many discards as possible, within useful limits.

5. Baseball Card - It's true, only Flash Card is uncommon, but x1.5 mult is x1.5 mult.

6. Blue Joker - +122 chips. On top of plenty of bonuses from my mostly enhanced cards, then multiplied like crazy... yeah.

I'm curious to see what you veterans think about this play but I'm pretty pleased with the results. Thank you once again for all your help and advice. Off to Red Stake now! But first, time to see how much further down the gauntlet can I go with this line-up.

As an inveterate nitpicker, I'll say:
1) Can't go wrong with most negative jokers, obviously, and that one certainly will give value, especially with
2) I don't think I've ridden that one to a victory myself, but it should be great. +60 mult isn't the best +mult I've seen, but it's plenty and you can see how it makes other +mult irrelevant once you build it.
3) I'm a big fan of Driver's License among non-scaling xmult, and endorse picking it up even if you don't yet satisfy its activation in many cases.
4) Yorick is a little rough to scale, depending on deck and stake, but scaling xmult is a big yes and this sure isn't a bad one.
5) Baseball Card was not very good in your build. But it might have been your best option, and if it was then well played. I'd have hoped to pick up a better xmult or something polychrome, but you don't always get what you want.
6) Blue Joker might have been your worst, potentially. Chip adding is typically devalued quite a bit by card enhancement and hand upgrades by endgame, and Blue also has anti-synergy with Yorick since cards you discard are cards that aren't contributing to your chips. But unless you had the option to trade it for a better chip adder or another xmult, keeping it around wouldn't be a mistake.

That's a fairly well-developed setup by my view.

One thing you'll probably want to work on is not relying on early Riff-Raff, though. I mean, if the RNG giveth by all means take it. But you don't want to need any single card like that and IIRC it's driven both your wins so far.

[SledgePainter]

I'm in the same boat as you...I've played about 20 hours now and still with red deck white stake and can't beat ante 8. I've come so close a few times. The run I thought I'd win it I was one-shotting nearly all blinds until the final ante 8 The Wall, which quickly sank me due to the amount of points needed to win. I had buffed 3 of a kind, 2 pairs, and pairs planet cards but couldn't pull it off. This run I am in ante 6 and struggling hard even though I pulled a Polychrome DNA as my first card and been able to make an Ace copy every round but one. I also have To the Moon which gives X2 and Polychrome Photograph giving x1.5. But even though this is the first time I have more than 2 X-mult Jokers and polychromes, I am struggling on every blind. Using Tarot and a couple planetary upgrades for full house and 3 of a kind. This feels impossible.

[SledgePainter]

Ah! Happy to see you stuck with it and won. I mainly play on my phone and Switch. I've gotten a couple other people to play but they quit after 2 rounds. Meanwhile I keep watching people on youtube but most people are so far advanced I can't really get a grasp on things and they go so fast, cards all memorized already XD

[SledgePainter]

Welp, didn't manage it this time either, even with a retrigger; largest hand was 315k and defeated by Crimson Heart (disables one random Joker per round)

[ulzgoroth]

Origineel geplaatst door SledgePainter:

I'm in the same boat as you...I've played about 20 hours now and still with red deck white stake and can't beat ante 8. I've come so close a few times. The run I thought I'd win it I was one-shotting nearly all blinds until the final ante 8 The Wall, which quickly sank me due to the amount of points needed to win. I had buffed 3 of a kind, 2 pairs, and pairs planet cards but couldn't pull it off. This run I am in ante 6 and struggling hard even though I pulled a Polychrome DNA as my first card and been able to make an Ace copy every round but one. I also have To the Moon which gives X2 and Polychrome Photograph giving x1.5. But even though this is the first time I have more than 2 X-mult Jokers and polychromes, I am struggling on every blind. Using Tarot and a couple planetary upgrades for full house and 3 of a kind. This feels impossible.

Did you have no mult adder? Photograph doesn't really want mult adders, but the rest does. (And to make photograph really useful you really want to get a bunch of mult from the hand base plus enhanced/edition cards in hand before the first face card.)

DNA copying aces isn't really very good. What you want to copy are, say, an ace with a red seal and an enhancement. Or ideally a red seal and an edition. Or, well, if you're doing photograph things maybe a king instead.

Also, that's not actually that much xmult. A growth xmult can often exceed x6 in one card. But it should be enough to do fairly good for you.

EDIT: Photograph without a combo around it is kinda bad really. It's slightly weaker than just holding a steel card.

Origineel geplaatst door SledgePainter:

Welp, didn't manage it this time either, even with a retrigger; largest hand was 315k and defeated by Crimson Heart (disables one random Joker per round)

What stopped you from winning there? Your best hand was enough to one-shot the final boss by a wide margin. Was it something you couldn't reproduce?

[SledgePainter]

I really needed all of my jokers to function and even then my highest hand was helped by keeping 3 steels in hand and Red seal, but the final hands just were not procing and I needed to use my steels. Was down to just using Pairs after my initial 4 of a kind and it didn't cut it in the long run. I didn't really have a good basic chip card. I had a mult adder early on but sold it off mid-run...was one of those +3 mult for odd cards played type of joker.

[ulzgoroth]

Origineel geplaatst door SledgePainter:

I really needed all of my jokers to function and even then my highest hand was helped by keeping 3 steels in hand and Red seal, but the final hands just were not procing and I needed to use my steels. Was down to just using Pairs after my initial 4 of a kind and it didn't cut it in the long run. I didn't really have a good basic chip card. I had a mult adder early on but sold it off mid-run...was one of those +3 mult for odd cards played type of joker.

If you've upgraded your hands, a chip joker is useful but not critical.

A mult adder, on the other hand, is do-or-die for the builds you're most likely to achieve. Though I guess if you're going red seal steel maybe you're approaching one of the other builds. But not enough discard or not enough steel to be reliable?

[SledgePainter]

Not enough Steel. I think I got to 4 steel aces total, one with red seal. I had at least 17 aces overall in the deck using DNA every chance possible to just make another one and hope to be able to play 4 of a kinds and full houses. It just was never enough. I'll keep trying though. I refuse to pick any other deck I've unlocked until I can win with red on white stake. I can reliably get to ante 7 and 8 at least. I just feel like you need so much luck I just don't know how people win reliably at this. I'd be so happy just to win the game, let alone go on to ante 11+ lol. But I do need to learn the game more.