Glad to hear it's only Plasma Deck you might be quitting. Good job on the next Gold!
Speaking of horrendous mistakes: I totally would have forgotten to check the Ancient's suit in your spot. Perhaps there might be a trick to find out though. Not sure if it works with jokers too, but for the Fool tarot card you can look up what it would be by checking the card in the collection. When you hover over it it shows you the same info it would show in game. This is useful if you wonder whether to take a tarot pack that could hold a Fool or not for example. Now if this works with jokers too then you could go to the Ancient Joker in the collection and see what it says. Need to test it next game.
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I had two fantastic games tonight. Both went to the final boss, but only one of them won. Both times it was Verdant Leaf which debuffs your cards until you sell a joker.
My general approach now is Gold sticker or bust. If I see a joker without a gold sticker then I take it unless doing so would put my run in grave danger.
For my first game I did Ghost Deck once more. Smiley face for +5 mult for played face cards was my first joker. No gold sticker? Easy grab and slap the polychrome from the starting Hex on it. Eternal made it iffy but whatever. I continued the same approach but all taken jokers were somewhat reasonable. I even got two negative skip tags which of course I took (gold or go home even if it's not the best choice for winning).
I settled on a Two Pair build but I had a problem. All of my jokers were eternal, I didn't have any xMult and I only had a single slot left. Luckily I found my xMult (totally forgot what it was) but then I ran into Verdant Leaf.
Since my Two Pair was only level 13 for 14 base mult the added hand effects +Mult from Smiley Face and Even Steven were crucial. My build got so good in the end that a two pair made from only face and/or even cards scored about 100k even without the xMult joker I had to sell.
It came down to the wire. I already had 2 tens and one of the red steel aces. If I had drawn another face or even pair I would have won (even without drawing the second super ace). I even whipped out my calculator app but both aces and tens or the trip tens only scored about 30k.
It was so close but it was still fun and exciting.
On the second run I focused on a source of chips, lots of flat mult and ultimately xMult. I love builds with nice hand effects and high hand levels but just focusing on this simpler strategy often makes for a more reliable run. That's exactly what happened here. Verdant Leaf was no match. Debuffed hands be damned.
Anaglyph this time, hoping for the elusive negative tag. It immediately worked and I got 4 negative tags. Build was already a potential winner before with 4 non gold jokers.
I settled on a pair build which works nicely with Blackboard. After discarding once or twice you can almost always play a pair and play the left over red cards along with it to get them off your hand.
From the negative tags Supernova added lots of flat mult, banana always nice but perishable and then the non gold sticker Juggler for +1 hand size on top. Nice haul.
Card Sharp was my only regular joker with a gold sticker when I came across non gold sticker Steel Joker. My build was so strong that I gladly took the downgrade from 3x to 2x (with the added steel from my Chariot) for even more gold stickers.
The next screenshot is just for kicks: on ante 8 I had an easy win and skipped the rare jokers tag for 3 free rare jokers. I was contemplating taking Blueprint but the Steel Joker is not always viable if I find it in the future whereas Blueprint will always be a no brainer. Therefore I didn't swap it.
One more finding from this run: Blackboard works the same even with debuffed cards. When I was sure the next hand would win I tried leaving a (debuffed) diamond card in hand and it didn't trigger. Without red cards in hand it worked as usual.
) - I just scraped past Verdant Leaf, but largely no thanks to Bloodstone.
