Is Smeared Joker OP? Feels a bit like cheating. :P

[Carpet_pissr]

"Hearts and Diamonds count as the same suit, Spades and Clubs count as the same suit"

When I got this joker, I immediately started winning 80% more runs. Anyone else feels that it's a bit unbalancing?

I personally love this game, and how hard it is, and I guess I could just not buy it when it appears. Just feels a little OP compared to how balanced the rest of the games seems..

[malogoss]

It is not OP.

If you had 5 utility jokers like that, you'd be in a very bad spot.

[kone]

It's ok but falls off in higher difficulties.
It really only makes hitting Flushes or suit specific jokers more often but neither is super sustainable when you start playing the higher stakes with steeper score curves.

[Pod]

Just played Checkered Deck

[Penguinator]

The biggest problem with Flush builds is that they get hard-countered by suit-disabling Bosses and Smeared Joker makes them way more deadly; instead of each four bosses affecting 1/4 of a regular deck, every single one of them disables half of your deck. Since building a Flush deck usually means converting everything into a single suit for maximum synergy (with suit-specific Jokers), encountering a suit Boss Blind means a 50% chance of them disabling your whole build.
Flush builds are also kind of weak against The Ox (playing a Flush sets your money to $0), The Arm (Flush level keeps decreasing), The Eye and The Needle (only one Flush can be played), The Pillar (previously played cards are disabled), and The Serpent (playing 5 cards gives you only 3 cards back). In other words, Flush builds simply have very little flexibility.

This is why playing Flush builds past Ante 8 becomes harder and harder, especially without "Chicot" / "Director's Cut" / "Retcon" (disabling / rerolling Boss nerfs). On top of that, flush based Jokers aren't actually that strong; the regular Flush effects are simply weak compared to other stuff (like Aces or Face Card effects), many of suit-based Jokers change the effected suit randomly (notably "Ancient Joker") and there isn't a single Joker with a flush-triggered scaling +Mult / xMult effect. And like malogloss said, the fact that it takes away a Joker slot while being only an utility is also a huge minus; it only makes playing Flush easier instead of actually increasing your score (hence like Pod said, you could simply play Checkered Deck while having full slots).

[Goblin]

Originally posted by Penguinator:

Flush builds are also kind of weak against The Ox (playing a Flush sets your money to $0)
...
and The Serpent (playing 5 cards gives you only 3 cards back)

Ox doesn't target flush, it targets most played hand. So that's not countering flush builds, but any single hand targeting build.
Serpent doesn't really counter anything, you just discard/play single cards until you have all the cards you need to play as many hands as you want.

You're right about Flush's weakness when it comes to jokers though. It also has pretty bad planet scaling, with only 3 other planets being worse (high card, pair, and two pair). Even Three of a Kind has better scaling, it just starts with slightly worse stats.