is pair build viable?

[SeñorJeff]

im new to the game and i can't get my first win. So far i've tried two pair and three of kind builds but haven't had good luck. Unless the way im playing the game is wrong

[JOHNNY]

played this just yesterday on mobile but i was almost beat the final boss with my 3 of a kind deck. i was 8000 short of score and fail.

[RazzberryMocha]

All hand types are very viable, though straights and high card/pair are often considered the best due to their great reward with little risk.

[AnonTwo]

Yes

Since it's only 1 more card than the high card, you can in most cases use the same kind of hand. These hands focus on planets and hand boosters (Space Joker, Burnt Joker, Telescope Voucher, Blue Seal) and then use a combination of either Hanging Chad+Photograph, or Steel Cards+Mime+Baron

Your goal is basically to buff the hand to just be better than stronger poker hands, then you can take advantage of more xmults since the poker hand comes before hand xmults.

Basically to help understand, the order of stats are

Hand (Base) -> Joker Hand Xmult (example Photograph) -> Hand Xmult (Example Steel) -> Joker Mult/XMult [Joker Order matters here] (Example Bus/Hologram)

In short: if you focus on buffing hand strength, it will apply more multipliers later on. Early game can be kindof iffy but once you're over the hill it's a lot nicer.

Poker Hand buffing also helps because it keeps your Chips up, which are in most cases not very preferable to get Joker cards for anyway if at all possible (except Plasma Deck)

[Xaelon]

Any hand type can theoretically work to win (ie beat ante 8) a white stake run. But....

Will you always get the Jokers needed to win playing Pairs on every single run? No.

Rather than choosing what hand type you want to play at the start of a run I would suggest seeing what kinds of Jokers you're given and then choosing a hand that works with them.

When you're choosing your Jokers try to get one that supplies chips, one that gives flat mult and one that gives X Mult if possible. You also need to be able to reliably trigger the jokers you've chosen too of course.

The best thing for you to do as a new player is to just keep doing runs. SO much of winning in Balatro is knowledge of how all the mechanics fit together. Eventually you'll be able to tell what jokers to take and when, as well as what hands they work best with.

[srn347]

Pair build plays a lot like high card build, but with the nice feature of the duo (2x mult joker requiring your hand to contain a pair) working for it. The planet scaling is a bit better too (15 chips per level instead of 10).

[ulzgoroth]

Pair is one of the better hands to depend on, if you must live with a build that depends on a specific hand.

IME usually you don't need to. There are very few good jokers that have such restrictions, and while hand-leveling is good you can pretty commonly get builds that don't need it to score sufficiently.

The only problem, really, is if your setup wants you to be scoring a larger number of cards and you don't have Splash.

[w0rM.9™]

I won on a high card build so yeah but it's not easy.

[SundownKid]

Some Jokers that enable a Pair deck:

Burnt Joker - this is one of the strongest because you can upgrade a pair nearly every round.
Half Joker - extremely good for early game
Stuntman - very high chips that counteract the lack of cards
Ice Cream/Blue Joker - good for early game if you can't find Stuntman
Burglar - pair decks often don't need to discard, so it's free real estate
Card Sharp - you will be repeating your hand a lot
Duo/Ramen - first is free 2x multiplier, and 2nd won't go down a lot

[HeraldOfOpera]

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

All hand types are very viable, though straights and high card/pair are often considered the best due to their great reward with little risk.

For why you're getting Jesters, straights actually do have significant risk. They're essentially impossible to increase the consistency of with tarot/spectral cards, and they're a five-card hand with all the drawbacks that implies. On the other hand, they have the same planet scaling as four of a kind precisely because of how they're inconsistent.

[RazzberryMocha]

Originally posted by HeraldOfOpera:

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

All hand types are very viable, though straights and high card/pair are often considered the best due to their great reward with little risk.

For why you're getting Jesters, straights actually do have significant risk. They're essentially impossible to increase the consistency of with tarot/spectral cards, and they're a five-card hand with all the drawbacks that implies. On the other hand, they have the same planet scaling as four of a kind precisely because of how they're inconsistent.

They still tend to possess a better risk/reward balance than other hand types, even if they do possess some decent risk. Just to make up some arbitrary numbers for an example, high card/pair are about 2 reward and 1 risk whereas straights are 4 reward and 2 risk if that makes sense. The reward far outweighs the risk in most scenarios.