Is every run technically beatable with any deck?

[Rusty]

Are there any seeds found that are unbeatable?

[malogoss]

A while ago, someone started a thread titled "post your unbeatable seed here", or something like that.

The idea was simple. Post a seed that can't be beaten on white stake, and please specify the deck that was used. Then others could try the seed.

Very few seeds were posted in total, a lot less than you'd expect from a thread that was popular and alive for a while. It looks like complaining about RNG is easy, but risking to have to admit you don't know how to play is a whole other story. The seeds that were posted were all beaten really fast (sometimes as soon as only 60 minute after the initial post, with screenshots to confirm), often by multiple people.

The thread lost traction, but no seed was left unbeaten.

Does that prove all seeds are beatable? No. But it points in one direction. Even the dev (unrelated to the thread mentioned above) said that he thinks all seeds are beatable on white stake.

At higher stakes, it's a whole other story. Strong players will win on gold stake often enough to build nice win streaks, or to do a full deck rotation and win 15 games in a row. I think some go for even more but I have no idea what the longest streak is. This just shows that winning, even at gold stake, is all about skills.

If anyone found an unbeatable white stake seed, I'd personally like to know. Not that it makes a huge difference if the reality is not 100% but 99.9999% instead. But if a unicorn exists, I want to see it, that's all.

[Rusty]

That's interesting, thank you for sharing. So far 100% of my runs have ended due to ignorance of the game's systems, poor decision making, and inexperience at poker.

On the topic of "why does it matter?" you put my thoughts into words better than I could.

[Goblin]

As had been discussed in that old thread, unbeatable seeds are extremely hard to find, if they even exist in the first place. It took the Slay the Spire community years to find a seed that's impossible, using a specific character, above a specific (high) difficulty level. And that involved some heuristics for "this particular fight is hard for them, and any of these things would let you beat it, so search seeds that won't have any of those things and are forced to get that encounter." Just found the full writeup about it again: https://oohbleh.github.io/losing-seed/

Balatro is a bit tougher in that regard, since perfect knowledge of draw order essentially guarantees that you'll be able to play particular hands. I certainly can't think of a heuristic to search for that would force an early loss, and late losses are pretty much guaranteed to be beatable with some other combination of things you saw or could have encountered along the way. Some of the harder bosses also can't show up before you reach a certain ante, too.

So even if there is a theoretical thing that would lose 100% of the time, for instance a run where all shop rolls in a row will only ever give jokers that give money and no score no matter what you do, they're unlikely to be within the given possibilities of the seed system. There's only 36^8 seeds after all, a "mere" 2.8 trillion different runs, while said seed would have to consistently roll two (or more in a buffoon pack) of 8/150 options. 10 singular rolls of those odds already blow past those 1 in 2.8 trillion chance of happening, but each second roll would also turn into 7/149 instead.

[KondaBuddy (Live)]

You can go back and beat a seed but unlockables are disabled lol

[Stuffdollum]

Originally posted by Rusty:

That's interesting, thank you for sharing. So far 100% of my runs have ended due to ignorance of the game's systems, poor decision making, and inexperience at poker.

On the topic of "why does it matter?" you put my thoughts into words better than I could.

DUDE seem like skill issue on you

[Rusty]

Originally posted by Stuffdollum:

Originally posted by Rusty:

That's interesting, thank you for sharing. So far 100% of my runs have ended due to ignorance of the game's systems, poor decision making, and inexperience at poker.

On the topic of "why does it matter?" you put my thoughts into words better than I could.

DUDE seem like skill issue on you :jimbo:

I... Wh- Y... Yeah..?

That's why I wrote it the way I did, highlighting the fact that my lack of in-depth knowledge is the reason why I lose. Not because the game is "cheating" or giving me an impossible scenario. I'm losing because I'm bad. I'm fully aware of my current inadequacies and I accept 100% responsibility for all of my losses. You'd know that if you read my post.

I'm simply curious to know if the game has ever provided an impossible scenario for the player, a question that was already much more succinctly answered by someone with either more knowledge than you, more of a willingness to open a dialogue with other players, or perhaps both.

In any case, strugglin' to see why you felt the need to post this, when my post can very, very easily illustrate the point you felt necessary to rudely draw attention to.

Are you just trying to pick fights online (on a friday night at that)?

[AlphaGodith]

i have seen a lot of people claim that no run is unbeatable, but i think they are leaving out the important factor of unlocks, which become irrelevant in seeded runs. the game is much harder if you don't have a lot of the good jokers and vouchers available, and it is physically impossible to win without a good, synergistic set of jokers, and which you get are dependent on rng.

so like, maybe there's no unbeatable SEED, but if you are playing unseeded, and haven't unlocked everything yet? i do believe you can have runs that you could not have won no matter what you did.

i also think that it shouldn't really count as a win if you have to know what is in the seed already and use your unfair future vision to plan ahead in order to win, and there's no way to prove whether the people who beat the 'unbeatable' seeds did that or not, since there's no way to track how many times a specific seed was used.

i've had many runs that failed simply because i didn't get lucky with good jokers early enough for them to build up into a strong team by the final blind. like i know the mechanics and what works together now, but that doesn't help if the game only gives me jokers that DON'T, and i'm not using seeded future knowledge to cheat and reroll things i would never have rerolled if i didn't know what it would give me for sure.

i think a lot of people like to SAY nothing's unbeatable for bragging rights or petty technicality, but are leaving out the important factors of unlocks and future vision.

[AlphaGodith]

Originally posted by Rusty:

Are you just trying to pick fights online (on a friday night at that)?

either they are trolling deliberately, have very VERY poor reading comprehension, or are just a socially inept jerk. in any of those cases, their words/opinion are worthless. just block and ignore, they WANT you to be bothered and are probably happy you gave them more words than they spent on you.

[Goblin]

Originally posted by AlphaGodith:

i have seen a lot of people claim that no run is unbeatable, but i think they are leaving out the important factor of unlocks, which become irrelevant in seeded runs. the game is much harder if you don't have a lot of the good jokers and vouchers available, and it is physically impossible to win without a good, synergistic set of jokers, and which you get are dependent on rng.

so like, maybe there's no unbeatable SEED, but if you are playing unseeded, and haven't unlocked everything yet? i do believe you can have runs that you could not have won no matter what you did.

i also think that it shouldn't really count as a win if you have to know what is in the seed already and use your unfair future vision to plan ahead in order to win, and there's no way to prove whether the people who beat the 'unbeatable' seeds did that or not, since there's no way to track how many times a specific seed was used.

i've had many runs that failed simply because i didn't get lucky with good jokers early enough for them to build up into a strong team by the final blind. like i know the mechanics and what works together now, but that doesn't help if the game only gives me jokers that DON'T, and i'm not using seeded future knowledge to cheat and reroll things i would never have rerolled if i didn't know what it would give me for sure.

i think a lot of people like to SAY nothing's unbeatable for bragging rights or petty technicality, but are leaving out the important factors of unlocks and future vision.

"If it's possible to beat, it's not unbeatable" is not a "petty technicality."

As for unlocks, no unlockable is needed to win any run, as far as anyone has been able to prove. Some of them are strong, but you don't need super strong things to win. They also aren't irrelevant in seeded runs, not sure where you got that idea from.
Plus no unlocks automatically means you're playing on white stake, and white stake is so incredibly lenient that it's hard to imagine anyone relatively skilled losing any run. In fact, the smaller set of available jokers makes it easier to strategise and thus less likely they'd lose randomly. And even if they did, then foresight still almost guaranteed makes it not unbeatable.

But you're free to come up with a sequence of available options in the shop that make a run completely unwinnable, and if the idea is good enough someone will gladly do the automated brute force searching for said sequence of events for you. But if you're only here to tell people that unbeatable just means difficult you're simply wrong.

[malogoss]

Originally posted by AlphaGodith:

(...)
i've had many runs that failed simply because i didn't get lucky with good jokers early enough for them to build up into a strong team by the final blind. like i know the mechanics and what works together now, but that doesn't help if the game only gives me jokers that DON'T, and i'm not using seeded future knowledge to cheat and reroll things i would never have rerolled if i didn't know what it would give me for sure.

i think a lot of people like to SAY nothing's unbeatable for bragging rights or petty technicality, but are leaving out the important factors of unlocks and future vision.

In the "post your seed" thread I mentioned above, the posted seeds were beaten as fast as humanly possible. Even if someone copied the given seed 5 minute after it was posted and started playing right away, there would have been no time to study the seed before the victory screenshot reply was posted.

If a seed is ever found, that can only be beaten by discarding in weird ways for 5 rounds, pile money, then reroll shops at ante 3 to get a crucial joker that makes a win possible, I'd say that it is, for me, an unbeatable seed. Winning that way has no value for me.

But I have never heard of unbeatable white stake seeds.

If you feel like you have found a killer seed, tried it a few times to conclude that it can't be beaten with "normal" play, please, post that seed here or anywhere. I never found that killer seed myself, it would be fun to look at what you or anyone else found.