The Fish has got to go/be nerfed

[gutter cat]

The Fish: Cards drawn face down after each hand played
Every boss blind can be accounted for fairly well when building, obviously sometimes you lose but thats gambling. Every boss blind except the fish, the fish is basically a damage check, and in the full game it might be better with possible high card or pair builds but right now if you can't instantly beat it, it kills runs.
I've done a lot to try and beat the fish, I've saved cards and sorted them by suit to try and figure out how much of one suit I have, I've used Vagabond to get tarot cards and hope that they can tell me/switch the suit of cards. There's counterplay to every boss blind currently, there's not much counterplay (at least in the demo) to not seeing your cards, and I don't think its gonna be a fun boss blind in the full release either.
Listen I can beat it every time if I went for a standard flush build every time but anytime I wanna experiment maybe take hit the road or obelisk I hit the fish and boom my run is gone

[Rouborn]

Why can't you just play a hand, then discard the face downs to redraw face ups?

[Albie There]

You just need to discard the hands

[gutter cat]

Originally posted by Rouborn:

Why can't you just play a hand, then discard the face downs to redraw face ups?

I swear to god I tried that before but I must not have, fair. I still think its the most damaging boss blind but now its moved into very unlucky to get rather than just a bad boss

[Ronald Brain]

Originally posted by gutter cat:

Originally posted by Rouborn:

Why can't you just play a hand, then discard the face downs to redraw face ups?

I swear to god I tried that before but I must not have, fair. I still think its the most damaging boss blind but now its moved into very unlucky to get rather than just a bad boss

You're always shown the boss blind 2 rounds in advance, so it's always a good idea to plan around that. Has Grabber / Painbrush voucher? Save $10 and grab it. Has a Boss Reroll tag? Take it and hope for the best. Has a suit convert tarot card or two? Take it with you to the blind and use them to peek at face down card. Has Drunkard for +1 Discard? Ditch a moneymaking joker or something and take it to increase your chance to draw good hands. Has a global multiplier joker? Ditch specific-hand buff joker in favor of it so you can play more cards for higher score. Has high card / pair planet buff? Take it so trash hand score more and hopefully bring you over.

[IsenMike]

Originally posted by gutter cat:

There's counterplay to every boss blind currently, there's not much counterplay (at least in the demo) to not seeing your cards, and I don't think its gonna be a fun boss blind in the full release either.

I've found a few different types of builds and strategies that work.

Don't neglect planet card upgrades for the lower-ranked hands that don't need as many cards to play, like One Pair or even High Card. The fewer cards you play in the hand, the fewer you get dealt face-down.

Swapping between sorting your hand by rank and by suit can give information to deduce a lot about the face-down cards, particularly given that both options are actually applying both types of sorting, just in a different order. Occasionally you can deduce both the rank and suit of a face-down card, just by seeing how it sorts and applying a bit of logic.

Play the small hands you can, instead of using the discard to try and draw to a big hand; save your discards for when you've actually got a high number of face-down cards that you can't deduce, to replace those with face-up cards.

[Cyrus106]

I have to agree with the sentiment, please re-think the fish boss, perhaps give us a way to earn more discards

[Albie There]

Originally posted by Cyrus106:

I have to agree with the sentiment, please re-think the fish boss, perhaps give us a way to earn more discards

You can discard cards without wasting discards by playing the ones you don't want. Let's say you can only play a pair, you can add 3 more cards to it, just the pair is gonna count for points, the extra 3 cards are gonna be discarded.

[IsenMike]

Originally posted by Robertt Crown:

Originally posted by Cyrus106:

I have to agree with the sentiment, please re-think the fish boss, perhaps give us a way to earn more discards

You can discard cards without wasting discards by playing the ones you don't want. Let's say you can only play a pair, you can add 3 more cards to it, just the pair is gonna count for points, the extra 3 cards are gonna be discarded.

In this context that's not helpful, since they'll be redrawn face down

[Ronald Brain]

Originally posted by Cyrus106:

I have to agree with the sentiment, please re-think the fish boss, perhaps give us a way to earn more discards

There's a Joker that +1 Discard, and the full game will have voucher that permanently +1 discard so you have a lot of ways to get more Discards to use against this boss.

[LostRanger]

I'd say House and Fish both, but Fish definitely at least.

[Global Warming]

You can selectively discard and play what you get by both rank and suit and approximate with what you have in hand what the other stuff that is face down is. If you're not using card sort and deck checks to determine what you could have you're missing out on an entire level of strategy.

[xenilla]

This is also the case with the one that discards two cards after you play a hand; if you happen to have two/three sets of hands that you can reliably play, and you pull one full set, and then part of the other set, or sets, then that "Discard 2" modifier has the possibility of completely destroying your ability to reach the score requirement.

And I'm sure this is not the only one; but it's not a bad thing. In fact, this is pretty much existent in every kind of roguelike that relies on not just skill, but luck as well. Luck manipulation is what makes the difference in games like these; I.e., in Slay the Spire, knowing the way the game works and playing around that is what allows people to go on 100+ win streaks in the highest difficulty levels, despite the game being notorious for its ability to destroy your run right out the gate with something absurd. There are plenty of videos out there of these streak-winners pulling a win out of a top-hat because they knew how to manipulate the luck of the game in their favour.

Balatro is very similar in that sense, which is why it's so rewardingly fun, imo. Not just plain-old power fantasy kind of fun, but a game that sometimes rewards you, even if you're just blustering through the game, and can reward you every time, if you know what you're doing and you do it well.

[Misery]

The Fish seems like it's meant to be a counter to full hands, particularly flushes, which are a bit too easy to get. What I'm learning is that focusing too much on those brings with it the risk of the Fish showing up and ending the run simply because of how hard it cancels those. I wonder if a lot of players who are frustrated with it are tending to focus on flushes too much?

Having a more well-rounded build helps a lot, and if you happen to have a build that is very focused on things like single pairs, the Fish isnt much of a threat. I had a run like that just now, focused on single pairs, and that boss was pretty trivial (granted, that type of build brings other potential problems, but... those problems arent the Fish).

[Cage2k4]

Originally posted by Misery:

The Fish seems like it's meant to be a counter to full hands, particularly flushes, which are a bit too easy to get. What I'm learning is that focusing too much on those brings with it the risk of the Fish showing up and ending the run simply because of how hard it cancels those. I wonder if a lot of players who are frustrated with it are tending to focus on flushes too much?

Having a more well-rounded build helps a lot, and if you happen to have a build that is very focused on things like single pairs, the Fish isnt much of a threat. I had a run like that just now, focused on single pairs, and that boss was pretty trivial (granted, that type of build brings other potential problems, but... those problems arent the Fish).

Honestly I find the fact that the fish counters flushes as a funny pun if anything hehe

But beside that, It counters spades/clubs harder than diamonds/hearts as diamonds and hearts usually appear on the outersides of the hand and can be deduced from other hearts/diamonds you have easier than clubs/spades which have more room for error

[gutter cat]

I would just like to add that my opinion of the fish has changed (said it earlier but want to reiterate) I wrote this when I s2g you couldn’t get face up cards by discarding (which would be terrible) but I was wrong. It’s definitely one of the harder normal boss blinds and unlucky when it shows up but hey it’s a poker rogue like sometimes you get unlucky.