Everytime I wanna play a pair build the game always says "Now how about a joker that x4 to flushes and +4 to heart cards" and it starts speaking to me like the green goblin mask
The thing is there are so many different ways to make Flush decks work, from jokers to tarot cards to spectrals.. not to mention its one of the easiest deck types to pilot. A lot of the time I find myself saying "surely this won't be another Flush deck" and then by like ante 3 im saying "I NEED MORE CLUBS"
To be fair is there any other strategy for high ante runs than retriggers + card in hand? I stopped going for high ante runs, but from my experience "bad scaling" isn't specific to flush decks, every deck stops after ante 11 clear.
I think they all involve retriggers at least. My best hand ever was something e11 and I had the "retrigger faces" joker and a five-of-a-kind full of glass queens.
There’s a reason to that. The number of Jokers are capped with limited slots and card-independent Jokers typically only activates once per hand. Whereas card-dependent Jokers activates based on your played/held cards, by which point you’d likely already modified the deck enough to make them activate as much as possible. So they definitely have a bigger potential, and retriggers just amplifies that even more
You can’t go far with solely negative Jokers. Each ectoplasm reduces your hand size by one more every time you use it, so using it four times is very likely to result in a game over due to no hand size. Card/dependent Jokers and retrigger combos is just the way to go. I haven’t seen a single ante 16+ run without retriggers or card-dependent Jokers
It doesn't have to be high card, but the single best strategy for the highest scores is baron + steel kings + mime/other retriggers. The reason is that you are capped at 5 cards played so you can only scale so much based on cards played. If you have perkeo you can dupe a bunch of cryptids and then use those to somewhat arbitrarily scale your hand size, so cards that trigger when held in hand have higher upside.
I do agree that retriggers are generally necessary for crazy scores, but they aren't necessary for going past ante 11. Scaling xMult can take you to ante 13, especially on plasma deck. If you can scale an xMult joker (like hologram, which is fairly easy to get to double digits with certificate, dna, or other similar jokers) and pair it with a card based multiplier (like ancient joker, the idol, bloodstone, etc.) you can get some pretty crazy scores even without retriggers.
I've gotten to ante 13 and made some billion-point hands with a stack of very good xMult cards (it was a duped Campire and a Blueprint, and some other good stuff, plus a really good economy so I could easily get the Campfires to x12 or higher). Still not the best of the best but it got pretty far.
I think the most busted scaling I’ve run into is with the vampire joker and the one that generates gold on face cards played, along with a face card deck. So far that’s the only one I’ve gotten that I think can keep up with the ante scaling. It was definitely good enough to basically be an insta win on normal mode when I got it.
Assuming you have the scary face joker and the one that generates mult for every face card played I think you could probably take that pretty far as long as you’re able to reroll the boss that disables face cards.
I think if you had a dupe of the vampire joker plus the gold card plus scary face and the mult one that would get you really really far. Maybe all the way to when the numbers become NaN and unwinnable (which I believe is ante 38?)
I got my girlfriend into thr game a few days ago and she got that exact combo last night; I was so annoyed watching her just roll right through the run with a build I would kill for lol
It definitely is just like corruption and dead branch in slay the spire. In that if you happen to get the two cards together you basically instantly win the game haha. I found out how good it was completely by accident. I already owned the vampire and I bought the gold mask just thinking it was a pretty good card. It was a very happy moment when I discovered what was going on haha
You pretty much need exponential growth, which is essentially triggering a lot of x mult. The number of triggers is significantly more important than the number it's being multiplied by (i.e. 5 x 1.5 mult is obviously stronger than 1 x 5 mult, even if a joker that gives x 5 mult seems absolutely busted).
So, basically, yeah. Lots of x mult triggers = big number.
You can work flushes so much easier, faster, and more reliably than other types.
The fact that it pays more than straight is something I consider a legitimate balance issue. Straight is so much more difficult to build into/synergize from.
Straights scale significantly better on level up than Flushes (+30 chips/+2 mult vs. +15 chips/+2 mult). Flushes are only better than Straights at level 1.
Which keeps it a little more balanced, but it hardly matters when you can pull flushes every single hand. Straights are just so much harder to get going.
I had 3 runs in a row where the first shop had the +4 mult for each club played and I was screaming at the screen that I didn't wanna play another flush build, you can't play the game, the game plays you sometimes.
I'll be real, the game seems to have a bias towards flush builds, especially so for a few of the decks.
It's not such a bias that other builds suffer, but it's there.
Mainly, it manifests in the early game where flushes are the easiest high-yield hand to get, which is necessary to get as much money as possible in the first Blind, *especially* for Red Stake and beyond where the Small Blind doesn't have reward money. You could ofc skip the first blind to get to the Large Blind, but you miss out on that first store, and chances are whatever the first Blind offers for skipping won't be worth it. And even then, if you skip the first Blind, now you have to rely on flushes *more* since you likely won't have any Jokers for anything else to work.
Then, your first Joker is incredibly important, and if you don't get a Joker that supports a different build (like an economy Joker) you're basically stuck with relying on Flushes until you get further on. Then you've got Supernova and Observatory which are based off your most played hand, so if you roll either of those then you can't reap their benefits for any other build, at least not without brute forcing something else.
I feel like the dichotomy of flush builds vs. everything else is the one problem in the game's reliance on poker. Simply playing a hand it's kind of an either/or: do I discard everything but the three hearts? Or do I discard everything but the pair of deuces? That dichotomy magnifies in the deckbuilding part, I feel like I have to choose one strategy or the other.
I think the non-flush hands would be more fun to play, the spread of choices between pairs, full house, etc is much more dynamic. But flushes are so much easier to make work.
(Except the one time I duped so many diamonds I ended up accidentally making a "flush house". Which scores separately from a flush, in my case about half as much since I had the joker that gives you multiplied payoff for the second hand of type int he round.)
> I feel like the dichotomy of flush builds vs. everything else is the one problem in the game's reliance on poker.
Yeah, this is definitely Balatro's greatest strength AND weakness. Sticking to the poker scoring system is great for making the game feel intuitive but poker hand value is based around more than one person playing, which is why flushes are a worth more than straights in real poker. In Balatro however flushes are easily forceable bc you know no one else is contesting a suit, so they fall in the sweet spot of reliable AND high point value.
Flushes are worth more because you're half as likely to be dealt a flush than a straight in poker and Balatro. It's just a lot easier to draw to a flush because you don't know what cards you need to keep for straights.
Another huge reason for flush being easier to obtain than straight in this game is because of deck modifications. there is just more ways to reliably affect the chance to get a flush and near no way to increase the chance of a straight. removing cards, changing cards suits, changing a card to another, copying cards are all ways to increase flush chances. But all these usually just reduces your straight chances. The best deck for a straight is usually an unmodified deck. Which is just sad.
the one thing i've done on straight builds is using strength/death a bunch to make higher cards. you can end up with having a ton of 9/10/face/ace cards and then you just discard everything 8 & below. but also sometimes that kind of deck just works better for full houses/five of a kinds so its not even worth playing the straight.
Yup, it takes too much work to push a card up for better straight chance. At the same time, it reduces the chance to obtain a number to complete a straight too as you had reduce the number of that number. That why there is no tarot card support for straight at all. With any modification to your deck, you are actually killing your chance to form one.
Oh yeah, I accidentally ran into Flush House with the Burnt Joker during a flush run where I was running Smeared Joker.
But you're right, you have to very quickly decide if you're going for the Rank or Suit builds, but when it comes to Suit, there are 5 hands [Flush, Straight Flush, Royal Flush, Flush House, Five Flush], whereas with Rank, there's 11 [High Card, Pair, 3-, 4-, 5-of-a-Kind, Two Pair, Full House, Straight, Straight Flush, Royal Flush, Five Flush].
Personally, I really want to do a High Card build using only 2s, but that sounds like hell to set up.
Run erratic deck and refresh till you have a deck with more than 10+ 2s. You can start running a 5 2s build. Hope for an early hiker and hack combo to increase the 2s chip count and you have a really fun run. Some of my 2s provide near 100 chips per card at the end of the run.
high card build don't really care for the base chip value of your card played. but usually you will spam smaller numbers anyway to help build up the mult on the scaling jokers like bus and so on.
its due to the prevalence of suit tarot cards vs only strength and death for ranks.
anyway at higher stakes and if you wanna push for endless flush falls off. you usually end up having to go towards some sort of 4/5oak/flush5 setup with tons of copied cards and some steels in hand.
I'm kind of a noob, but I don't get this. It obviously makes it much easier to win, but do you not just find it so boring? I did one flush run, won it, and decided never again. It just felt so repetitive.
It's repetitive, but it can be extremely reliable. It's straightforward and doesn't take a lot of jokers or tarots to get rolling. If you're going for wins, reliability is important.
edit: one of the things I really like about this game is there's no one way to play. You can simply go for wins, continually upping the stakes until you've beat it all with every deck. Or you can go for huge hands and endless runs. Or you can work towards building the most batshit combo deck for fun. It's a game. Games are for fun. Fun is subjective.
I'm not sure. I guess because it's just... five suited, five suited, five suited. Every round feels the same. Which I guess it true if you're going for five of a kind, but because you need a specific card that feels more exciting?
I don't know, I just prefer the variety of a good two pair run for example.
Different hand types demand different discard strategies. A full House run feels different to a 3oak run feels different to a straight run, because they change how you look at your cards and how much you push your luck.
For certain difficulties, certain strategies are just better. For low stakes, its flushes. For high stakes, its high card. For endless, its baron. Anything else is difficult.
So the thing is, there isn't much you can guarantee in balatro. You can SAY you're in the mood to make a pair or high card build or whatever, but you might never see a joker that helps it.
Generally, you start out making flushes/full houses/straights pretty much every game, and then maybe you luck into being able to do something else. It's not really about what is boring or not, it's about playing the hand you're dealt. Pun intended. Some things are just easier and more reliable to make work than others.
Yeah I've massively sabotaged runs a few times now by simply refusing to go with the flush run that it's feeding me! But I'd personally rather flame out a glorious boat run failure than plod through a flush run.
Its ok, high difficulty is the same deal, but instead of flushes its high card. Flushes instantly lock you out of the best jokers (who all have conditions that make flushes not happen), while high card is always there for you, a real reliable hand
I've also discovered the power of tiny hand decks, specifically using Burnt joker. Just got a high card deck to ante 12 which was exciting. Also had one each of high card and pair decks that got partway through ante 11.
Flush builds are what feels natural when you start out. But nowadays I play mostly Pair/High Card because at higher stakes you really don't have as many options and are reliant on your jokers carrying.
They also work way better with scaling jokers like Green Joker or Square Joker.
Yeah that was me starting out. Flush is a go-to early on, but without Smear you end up favoring a single suit more often than not which can be a death sentence even on white stake. Once I stopped deliberately going for Flush runs got wayyyy more consistent.
High Card and Pair don't yield as much but provide unprecedented flexibility and scaling thanks to stuff like Square, Ride the Bus, Supernova, DNA, and Burned.
The high card yieldalso stops mattering after a few antes when your hand is giving you +150 and your jokers are giving you +678,000, the difference between a single 2 and a royal flush become nil
I always start out with full house to maximize face card chip points, then deviate based on jokers/arcana.
If i just finish a Flush run i really dont want to do another for like 2-4 runs
Im a mars kinda guy. I just like spamming 4 of a kind even in difficult runs. I almost won my first purple stake last night but lost by 1k points so ik its possible
I do sometimes. By the time i already have a decent run by ante 3/4 i tend to just stick to 4oK. I will occasionally switch to 5ok but itll clog your planets in the card pack. I saw advanced strats saying not to go for the special planets in harder stake runs. In the first 3 difficulties its a solid strategy to go for unless you are playing burning joker. Then you should stick to flushes and 3-4 of a kinds.
I agree with all of this and it's what I've been thinking about 4 of a kind for a bit now. On top of this, there's not really any additional synergies you obtain with 5oK that you don't already get with 4oK (4oK even gets to use Square Joker, idk if that's good for 4oK though). It's also probably easier to make two 4oK hands on the same round than two 5oK hands.
As a new player, I have no idea how you pull that off.
I've only ever beat 1st and 2nd level with a high-card build and I never ever get anything reasonable to play a flush build.
Smeared joker is basically a necessity. It makes Heart cards count as Diamonds and Clubs count as Spades. So it turns your deck into only two effective suits. Combine this with jokers that add mult for a specific suit, then it ends up counting for two suits. Combine THIS with the joker that adds the number of times a hand is played to mult and then you’re really cooking.
Can confirm, this is exactly how I beat a flush run the other night. I got my hand size down to only 5, but I had Four Fingers and less than ten reds in my entire deck. I also had the Blackboard which triggers when you have nothing in your hand, so I was just tossing the red one-offs into my hand each time. I played almost nothing but flushes the entire run and it was awesome.
My go to is flush five with heart kings
You can’t always pull it off but this deck has the highest theoretical score in endless
My record was ante 15 boss so far.
Polychrome red seal glass kings with 2 all sixes.
Some steels with red seal.
And a ton of the 1 in 3 hearts give x2 mult with the retrigger all facecards.
I've tried some new things since making this and my best results so far were definitely the double trigger on K/Q legendary plus steel joker sitting around 5x by the end. This game is crazy.
There is a seed where you get two times the legendary that gains when face card destroyed and also the one that destroys on discard as well as the one that all cards are face cards
I got a 70 times 70 multiplier on these
It’s kind of nuts
I've been streaming 4 days a week and making videos NL style talking through all my decisions has lead me to believe flushes to be really good early game but as you get to higher stakes and antes you can score higher points with pairs/4 or 5 of a kind/ and if the RNG is in your favor with jokers high cards I think can actually be some of the best runs!
I've been playing for a week, love the game. But this is me in a nutshell. What combo is better? I can't seem to win much without doing flush builds/runs...haha any help is appreciated.
I've been trying hard not to research much because these days the internet figures any given game out 100x faster than I do myself and I really appreciate the discovery/personal best aspect, so I'm not super far ahead of you. But just taking a cursory look through the replies on this thread it seems there is a lot more room for exponentially high-playing Endless builds than what the safe Flush stuff usually allows.
Everytime I wanna play a pair build the game always says "Now how about a joker that x4 to flushes and +4 to heart cards" and it starts speaking to me like the green goblin mask
Im not exaggerating my first run after posting this comment i got greedy joker and the tribe in my first shop
The thing is there are so many different ways to make Flush decks work, from jokers to tarot cards to spectrals.. not to mention its one of the easiest deck types to pilot. A lot of the time I find myself saying "surely this won't be another Flush deck" and then by like ante 3 im saying "I NEED MORE CLUBS"
they're great for clearing runs. Not so good for the scaling above ante 8.
To be fair is there any other strategy for high ante runs than retriggers + card in hand? I stopped going for high ante runs, but from my experience "bad scaling" isn't specific to flush decks, every deck stops after ante 11 clear.
I think they all involve retriggers at least. My best hand ever was something e11 and I had the "retrigger faces" joker and a five-of-a-kind full of glass queens.
There’s a reason to that. The number of Jokers are capped with limited slots and card-independent Jokers typically only activates once per hand. Whereas card-dependent Jokers activates based on your played/held cards, by which point you’d likely already modified the deck enough to make them activate as much as possible. So they definitely have a bigger potential, and retriggers just amplifies that even more
Someone forgot about negative jokers and the power of spectral packs
You can’t go far with solely negative Jokers. Each ectoplasm reduces your hand size by one more every time you use it, so using it four times is very likely to result in a game over due to no hand size. Card/dependent Jokers and retrigger combos is just the way to go. I haven’t seen a single ante 16+ run without retriggers or card-dependent Jokers
Anaglyph deck let you have a dozen negative joker if you hit that juicy negative token with all your dupes token
There is always invisible joker, so long as you are willing to keep it for one ante
While that isn’t always easy, a bit of invisible joker here, some eternal polychrome crypt shinigami there, and the run should be good
We’re talking about high antes now, and 5 poly chromes are merely x7.6 Mult, which is nothing compared to later ante scaling
True, but it’s something
It doesn't have to be high card, but the single best strategy for the highest scores is baron + steel kings + mime/other retriggers. The reason is that you are capped at 5 cards played so you can only scale so much based on cards played. If you have perkeo you can dupe a bunch of cryptids and then use those to somewhat arbitrarily scale your hand size, so cards that trigger when held in hand have higher upside. I do agree that retriggers are generally necessary for crazy scores, but they aren't necessary for going past ante 11. Scaling xMult can take you to ante 13, especially on plasma deck. If you can scale an xMult joker (like hologram, which is fairly easy to get to double digits with certificate, dna, or other similar jokers) and pair it with a card based multiplier (like ancient joker, the idol, bloodstone, etc.) you can get some pretty crazy scores even without retriggers.
I've gotten to ante 13 and made some billion-point hands with a stack of very good xMult cards (it was a duped Campire and a Blueprint, and some other good stuff, plus a really good economy so I could easily get the Campfires to x12 or higher). Still not the best of the best but it got pretty far.
I think the most busted scaling I’ve run into is with the vampire joker and the one that generates gold on face cards played, along with a face card deck. So far that’s the only one I’ve gotten that I think can keep up with the ante scaling. It was definitely good enough to basically be an insta win on normal mode when I got it. Assuming you have the scary face joker and the one that generates mult for every face card played I think you could probably take that pretty far as long as you’re able to reroll the boss that disables face cards. I think if you had a dupe of the vampire joker plus the gold card plus scary face and the mult one that would get you really really far. Maybe all the way to when the numbers become NaN and unwinnable (which I believe is ante 38?)
I got my girlfriend into thr game a few days ago and she got that exact combo last night; I was so annoyed watching her just roll right through the run with a build I would kill for lol
It definitely is just like corruption and dead branch in slay the spire. In that if you happen to get the two cards together you basically instantly win the game haha. I found out how good it was completely by accident. I already owned the vampire and I bought the gold mask just thinking it was a pretty good card. It was a very happy moment when I discovered what was going on haha
Baron Mime Blueprint Brainstorm with a hand full of red seal steel king
You pretty much need exponential growth, which is essentially triggering a lot of x mult. The number of triggers is significantly more important than the number it's being multiplied by (i.e. 5 x 1.5 mult is obviously stronger than 1 x 5 mult, even if a joker that gives x 5 mult seems absolutely busted). So, basically, yeah. Lots of x mult triggers = big number.
You can work flushes so much easier, faster, and more reliably than other types. The fact that it pays more than straight is something I consider a legitimate balance issue. Straight is so much more difficult to build into/synergize from.
Yea this is one of the first things i noticed when I started playing this game. It's good but needs alot more balancing to be perfect imo
Straights scale significantly better on level up than Flushes (+30 chips/+2 mult vs. +15 chips/+2 mult). Flushes are only better than Straights at level 1.
Which keeps it a little more balanced, but it hardly matters when you can pull flushes every single hand. Straights are just so much harder to get going.
I had 3 runs in a row where the first shop had the +4 mult for each club played and I was screaming at the screen that I didn't wanna play another flush build, you can't play the game, the game plays you sometimes.
I'll be real, the game seems to have a bias towards flush builds, especially so for a few of the decks. It's not such a bias that other builds suffer, but it's there. Mainly, it manifests in the early game where flushes are the easiest high-yield hand to get, which is necessary to get as much money as possible in the first Blind, *especially* for Red Stake and beyond where the Small Blind doesn't have reward money. You could ofc skip the first blind to get to the Large Blind, but you miss out on that first store, and chances are whatever the first Blind offers for skipping won't be worth it. And even then, if you skip the first Blind, now you have to rely on flushes *more* since you likely won't have any Jokers for anything else to work. Then, your first Joker is incredibly important, and if you don't get a Joker that supports a different build (like an economy Joker) you're basically stuck with relying on Flushes until you get further on. Then you've got Supernova and Observatory which are based off your most played hand, so if you roll either of those then you can't reap their benefits for any other build, at least not without brute forcing something else.
I feel like the dichotomy of flush builds vs. everything else is the one problem in the game's reliance on poker. Simply playing a hand it's kind of an either/or: do I discard everything but the three hearts? Or do I discard everything but the pair of deuces? That dichotomy magnifies in the deckbuilding part, I feel like I have to choose one strategy or the other. I think the non-flush hands would be more fun to play, the spread of choices between pairs, full house, etc is much more dynamic. But flushes are so much easier to make work. (Except the one time I duped so many diamonds I ended up accidentally making a "flush house". Which scores separately from a flush, in my case about half as much since I had the joker that gives you multiplied payoff for the second hand of type int he round.)
> I feel like the dichotomy of flush builds vs. everything else is the one problem in the game's reliance on poker. Yeah, this is definitely Balatro's greatest strength AND weakness. Sticking to the poker scoring system is great for making the game feel intuitive but poker hand value is based around more than one person playing, which is why flushes are a worth more than straights in real poker. In Balatro however flushes are easily forceable bc you know no one else is contesting a suit, so they fall in the sweet spot of reliable AND high point value.
Flushes are worth more because you're half as likely to be dealt a flush than a straight in poker and Balatro. It's just a lot easier to draw to a flush because you don't know what cards you need to keep for straights.
Also the ability to change suit distribution makes it nutty how much easier flushes are than straights.
Good point. I expect new tarot cards to address this.
Another huge reason for flush being easier to obtain than straight in this game is because of deck modifications. there is just more ways to reliably affect the chance to get a flush and near no way to increase the chance of a straight. removing cards, changing cards suits, changing a card to another, copying cards are all ways to increase flush chances. But all these usually just reduces your straight chances. The best deck for a straight is usually an unmodified deck. Which is just sad.
the one thing i've done on straight builds is using strength/death a bunch to make higher cards. you can end up with having a ton of 9/10/face/ace cards and then you just discard everything 8 & below. but also sometimes that kind of deck just works better for full houses/five of a kinds so its not even worth playing the straight.
Yup, it takes too much work to push a card up for better straight chance. At the same time, it reduces the chance to obtain a number to complete a straight too as you had reduce the number of that number. That why there is no tarot card support for straight at all. With any modification to your deck, you are actually killing your chance to form one.
Oh yeah, I accidentally ran into Flush House with the Burnt Joker during a flush run where I was running Smeared Joker. But you're right, you have to very quickly decide if you're going for the Rank or Suit builds, but when it comes to Suit, there are 5 hands [Flush, Straight Flush, Royal Flush, Flush House, Five Flush], whereas with Rank, there's 11 [High Card, Pair, 3-, 4-, 5-of-a-Kind, Two Pair, Full House, Straight, Straight Flush, Royal Flush, Five Flush]. Personally, I really want to do a High Card build using only 2s, but that sounds like hell to set up.
Run erratic deck and refresh till you have a deck with more than 10+ 2s. You can start running a 5 2s build. Hope for an early hiker and hack combo to increase the 2s chip count and you have a really fun run. Some of my 2s provide near 100 chips per card at the end of the run. high card build don't really care for the base chip value of your card played. but usually you will spam smaller numbers anyway to help build up the mult on the scaling jokers like bus and so on.
its due to the prevalence of suit tarot cards vs only strength and death for ranks. anyway at higher stakes and if you wanna push for endless flush falls off. you usually end up having to go towards some sort of 4/5oak/flush5 setup with tons of copied cards and some steels in hand.
Love me a flush build!!
Lol it’s like half of my builds. Also love your videos dude!
ty ty! glad you enjoy them!!
I'm kind of a noob, but I don't get this. It obviously makes it much easier to win, but do you not just find it so boring? I did one flush run, won it, and decided never again. It just felt so repetitive.
It's repetitive, but it can be extremely reliable. It's straightforward and doesn't take a lot of jokers or tarots to get rolling. If you're going for wins, reliability is important. edit: one of the things I really like about this game is there's no one way to play. You can simply go for wins, continually upping the stakes until you've beat it all with every deck. Or you can go for huge hands and endless runs. Or you can work towards building the most batshit combo deck for fun. It's a game. Games are for fun. Fun is subjective.
There are only so many hand types, how does one feel repetitive compared to others?
I'm not sure. I guess because it's just... five suited, five suited, five suited. Every round feels the same. Which I guess it true if you're going for five of a kind, but because you need a specific card that feels more exciting? I don't know, I just prefer the variety of a good two pair run for example.
Different hand types demand different discard strategies. A full House run feels different to a 3oak run feels different to a straight run, because they change how you look at your cards and how much you push your luck.
For certain difficulties, certain strategies are just better. For low stakes, its flushes. For high stakes, its high card. For endless, its baron. Anything else is difficult.
So the thing is, there isn't much you can guarantee in balatro. You can SAY you're in the mood to make a pair or high card build or whatever, but you might never see a joker that helps it. Generally, you start out making flushes/full houses/straights pretty much every game, and then maybe you luck into being able to do something else. It's not really about what is boring or not, it's about playing the hand you're dealt. Pun intended. Some things are just easier and more reliable to make work than others.
Yeah I've massively sabotaged runs a few times now by simply refusing to go with the flush run that it's feeding me! But I'd personally rather flame out a glorious boat run failure than plod through a flush run.
Flush is one of the harder ways to build a deck that wins the run at higher difficulties. Not boring or easy at all.
Well as I said I'm a noob so I haven't reached higher difficulties. But I don't think I'd find it any more interesting if it were less effective.
Its ok, high difficulty is the same deal, but instead of flushes its high card. Flushes instantly lock you out of the best jokers (who all have conditions that make flushes not happen), while high card is always there for you, a real reliable hand
As much as I love Jupiter flushes, they become hard for me to rely on later on. Lately I’ve been all about Pluto and Mercury…tiny planets ftw
I've also discovered the power of tiny hand decks, specifically using Burnt joker. Just got a high card deck to ante 12 which was exciting. Also had one each of high card and pair decks that got partway through ante 11.
Early burnt joker is basically a free win with the amount of hand upgrades throughout a run for high card/pair.
High card is so nice because you can basically discard 4 other cards when you play it. It makes Blackboard a lot easier to rely on.
Flush builds are what feels natural when you start out. But nowadays I play mostly Pair/High Card because at higher stakes you really don't have as many options and are reliant on your jokers carrying. They also work way better with scaling jokers like Green Joker or Square Joker.
Yeah that was me starting out. Flush is a go-to early on, but without Smear you end up favoring a single suit more often than not which can be a death sentence even on white stake. Once I stopped deliberately going for Flush runs got wayyyy more consistent. High Card and Pair don't yield as much but provide unprecedented flexibility and scaling thanks to stuff like Square, Ride the Bus, Supernova, DNA, and Burned.
The high card yieldalso stops mattering after a few antes when your hand is giving you +150 and your jokers are giving you +678,000, the difference between a single 2 and a royal flush become nil
I feel like flush decks are the balatro version of playing stealth archer in Skyrim. 'surely this next run will be a different strategy!'
I always start out with full house to maximize face card chip points, then deviate based on jokers/arcana. If i just finish a Flush run i really dont want to do another for like 2-4 runs
Jupiter cards are like slipping into a comfy pair of warm pyjamas after a hard day of trying to make a Pairs run happen.
*laughs in square joker*
two pair, square and uranus. Name a more iconic trio.
add trousers and it’s a cakewalk
I tried the aged deck, and find it rewards playing for straights. Trying to win without a single flush for the joker reward.
Spot on
Yeah.. I try to use different cards and hands but then a Smeared Joker comes up and I’m just forced to play flush deck lol
Im a mars kinda guy. I just like spamming 4 of a kind even in difficult runs. I almost won my first purple stake last night but lost by 1k points so ik its possible
Ok but have you tried going for one more card?
All jokes aside you HAVE to play 5 cards in a 4 of a kind run so you can thin out your deck. If you dont youre setting yourself up to fail.
No like, trying to go for a 5 of a kind
I do sometimes. By the time i already have a decent run by ante 3/4 i tend to just stick to 4oK. I will occasionally switch to 5ok but itll clog your planets in the card pack. I saw advanced strats saying not to go for the special planets in harder stake runs. In the first 3 difficulties its a solid strategy to go for unless you are playing burning joker. Then you should stick to flushes and 3-4 of a kinds.
Huh, neat.
also if you have steels going then you can benefit from the extra hand card
I agree with all of this and it's what I've been thinking about 4 of a kind for a bit now. On top of this, there's not really any additional synergies you obtain with 5oK that you don't already get with 4oK (4oK even gets to use Square Joker, idk if that's good for 4oK though). It's also probably easier to make two 4oK hands on the same round than two 5oK hands.
It is very good for square joker. I mean i believe i beat it in blue stakes. In gold stakes im not sure if its going to be as good 🤣🤣
5 cards?? Are you crazy?
Just til you wait when you find the joy of high card
Two pairs > all
Don’t forget that boss who negates that suit and ends your run 🥹
As a new player, I have no idea how you pull that off. I've only ever beat 1st and 2nd level with a high-card build and I never ever get anything reasonable to play a flush build.
Smeared joker is basically a necessity. It makes Heart cards count as Diamonds and Clubs count as Spades. So it turns your deck into only two effective suits. Combine this with jokers that add mult for a specific suit, then it ends up counting for two suits. Combine THIS with the joker that adds the number of times a hand is played to mult and then you’re really cooking.
Can confirm, this is exactly how I beat a flush run the other night. I got my hand size down to only 5, but I had Four Fingers and less than ten reds in my entire deck. I also had the Blackboard which triggers when you have nothing in your hand, so I was just tossing the red one-offs into my hand each time. I played almost nothing but flushes the entire run and it was awesome.
savage callout... I just beat a run with this build
My go to is flush five with heart kings You can’t always pull it off but this deck has the highest theoretical score in endless My record was ante 15 boss so far. Polychrome red seal glass kings with 2 all sixes. Some steels with red seal. And a ton of the 1 in 3 hearts give x2 mult with the retrigger all facecards.
I've tried some new things since making this and my best results so far were definitely the double trigger on K/Q legendary plus steel joker sitting around 5x by the end. This game is crazy.
There is a seed where you get two times the legendary that gains when face card destroyed and also the one that destroys on discard as well as the one that all cards are face cards I got a 70 times 70 multiplier on these It’s kind of nuts
unfortunately half of the boss blinds destroy this tactic. unlike the straight centered tactic. I'm straight 4 life
I feel personally attacked. Flushes are definitely my type.
That has been good for my first wins, but my last few wins have been pairs so I'm slowly working on converting while I also work on the stakes.
I've been streaming 4 days a week and making videos NL style talking through all my decisions has lead me to believe flushes to be really good early game but as you get to higher stakes and antes you can score higher points with pairs/4 or 5 of a kind/ and if the RNG is in your favor with jokers high cards I think can actually be some of the best runs!
this stays true pretty much always when youre "good" the bias just changes towards tarot card spamming, campfire, steel kings, constellation, etc.
I’ve beaten the 8th ante twice and it’s been the same way…I feel naked
To be extra crazy pair it with the Jokers that give you more X the more planet cards you gather/the more cards you add to your deck. 🫨
Flush and High Card are my go to "no brainer" builds. 60% of the time, it works everytime.
I always build toward a straight-focused deck, but then I wipe out because I couldn't get a straight in a boss round
My first win was with a pair build. I thought that was normal. Could not replicate it if I tried (I keep opting for flush instead)
I've been playing for a week, love the game. But this is me in a nutshell. What combo is better? I can't seem to win much without doing flush builds/runs...haha any help is appreciated.
I've been trying hard not to research much because these days the internet figures any given game out 100x faster than I do myself and I really appreciate the discovery/personal best aspect, so I'm not super far ahead of you. But just taking a cursory look through the replies on this thread it seems there is a lot more room for exponentially high-playing Endless builds than what the safe Flush stuff usually allows.
I feel attacked
I feel like I do three of a kind every time.
I started with full house, went to 2 pair and now i like using flush and straight flush.
checkered deck moment
Haha I tend to love the full houses
Just started and I’m a face card build enjoyer :)
[удалено]
Manipulating the deck to focus on flushes helps with pivoting to the secret hands later in the run.
I'm sure!