The Balatro Thread

[Touring Mars]

I beat Orange Stake on Black Deck tonight, leaving just 5 Gold Stake games for Completionist+...

It was a comfortable game with a horrible sting in the tail though...

I had The Family (4X for 4oaK) and Blueprint, plus loads of high +Mult jokers, and with 15 4s, I was hitting 4oaKs at will.

But... my usual favourite Ante 8 Boss Blind - Amber Acorn - is a ***** if you need Blueprint, which I did.

I had to play a 4oaK to find The Family, and I was able to identify 4 of my 5 other Jokers and shift them left, leaving two Jokers to the left of The Family - one of which was Blueprint and the other was Drunkard... it was a 50/50, and Blueprint needed to trigger for me to score enough to win on my final hand - and I got lucky 😊

Looking back at the replay after the game, I should have spotted Blueprint earlier, but I was too busy moving Jokers around before I forgot them. At least I played the game honestly and didn't resort to using the replay function to manipulate the Joker deck during the final round, so it was an honest win... if a tad lucky 😅

--

I currently have 38/150 Gold Stickers... so a looooong way to go for Completionist ++

 

[Touring Mars]

I beat Gold Stake on Nebula Deck tonight 🥇

I had two copies of Onyx Agate (∞) and so I was able to use Hex on a Flush joker - I leveled up Flushes to Level 24 (everything else was Lvl. 1!)) and collected Clubs - I got Throwback up to 3.5X and got The Duo and other Pairs Jokers near the end, so pivoted towards playing Flushes containing a Pair, which was pretty easy.

I got Crimson Heart as the Ante 8 Boss Blind, and played a dead hand to debuff a non-important Joker, then played a Club Flush with a Pair for an easy win

The very next Boss Blind was The Club, so I was certain I'd lose - but I managed to beat it with the help of Steel Cards and The Duo.

I reckon I got 4 new Gold stickers out of it too.

 

[RX-7_FD3S]

I get the feeling that you're pretty good at this Balatro thing. Deck looks beautiful. So much deck manipulation. Did you use Vagabond a lot or not anymore once you had Business Card? That must have been tons of Tarot Cards.

The greenish Clubs +3 mult joker is Gluttonous Joker.

Na I used Vagabond mostly on ante 1. After that it was just business card and very lucky tarot and lucky cards. I had a lots of death, fools and hangman.

 

[Wilsonson]

No update in a while but I took notes on and screenshots of the 4 more wins I had in the last few weeks.

Two new gold stickers for Yorick and Wily with 3 of a kind build. Early Ouija plus deck manipulation later gave me 15 4s and some aces for easy trips. Both of the discard vouchers gave me 6x Yorick. A super lucky Wheel of Fortune made it Polychrome.

Eternal Banner was probably bad especially once I had Yorick and needed the discards.

I was trying to figure out if swapping Throwback for another non Gold sticker joker could work but it would have become super risky.

The next win I got new Gold stickers on Blue Joker, Vampire and Bootstraps. Photo Chad is just so good. A couple base levels and you're good to go. Even pairs quickly get good enough.

Gold Joker count at 80 now. I seem to get the feeling that commons might be more difficult to get a sticker on than I would have thought. Many of them just do nothing in the endgame. You essentially need a good build out of four jokers to be able to carry one of the more useless commons to the end.

The next win came with a nice chunk of negatives from the Anaglyph double tags. It finally worked again.

A round one Supernova got me into a pairs strategy and it worked out. Ultimately Acrobat wasn't even needed. Should have switched for another non gold stickered joker.

More than 50 mult from Supernova, 30 from a Polychrome Red Card and level 23 pairs made for a ton of base mult already. I had Hiker for a long while before switching it for the Ice Cream. Therefore also quite a bit of chips.

A total of 5 new gold stickers. Nice.

Tons of losses in between including some where I had a winning build but didn't pay attention to the boss. Now finally another win, 3 new stickers this time. 8 Ball, Hallucination and Mr. Bones.

Pair builds are my new favorites. Just need to get them off the ground. On e I found a polychrome Supernova the run was a win. I knew that I was scoring high enough. Since I had a lot of steel my +mult jokers weren't super important. I still had all double tags. When I saw the rare joker tag I thought I could find a nice non gold rare in exchange for my +36 Fortune Teller but I didn't realize that the shop would only be after the boss blind.

An early Midas Mask and a perishable DNA in the middle gave me a nice deck of gold, blue steel and 3 nice red steel kings. Would have made for a nice Baron build.

 

[Wilsonson]

Another win shortly after this post. 4 Gold stickers for Cloud 9, Hit the Road, The Duo and Stone Joker.

An early Ouija have me Kings. I also got Juggler early for an extra discard which was important to find my Kings and later also Jack's once I had Hit the Road.

It got close in the middle but I managed to always one shot my 4 of a kind. Ultimately the Trio plus ever increasing 4 of a kind levels sealed the deal. Throwback was for peace of mind.

The final boss could have hurt me. But thanks to stocking Death I would always be able to play 4 Kings once I held 3 of them in hand. My well prepared red glass King finally had his moment to shine. Cool 15 mil score to finish it off. A very satisfying run.

Edit: another win. 4 new stickers. Flower Pot, Scholar, To the Moon and Rocket. Again it was 4 of a kind powered by Ouija. In the beginning I was close to death numerous times but at some point there was no looking back. Once again I realized that economy is king.

On ante 8 I still had all of my double tags when a Buffon pack tag came up. I took it and hoped for some non gold sticker 3x joker to replace Blueprint which was doubling The Trio.

The dreadful Flower Pot showed up. Since my Aces were very evenly distributed I took the gamble. Thankfully it payed off.

 

[RX-7_FD3S]

Huge win yesterday (well this morning), couldn't sleep so fired a black deck, heres the final jokers, noon were gold before. Cameo 5x, obelisk 3.8x, had a rocket for econ for most of the game but it was with a gold sticker. Switched it in ante 8 for the 3x jokers

 

[Wilsonson]

6 new golds is epic. I love it when I get obelisk at just the right time and my build being strong enough. It is usually tough to stop playing the main hand up to that point. Switching to it is super delicate but it's great when it works.

I gotta ask what hands did you play? What was your most used hand (and how often played) and what did you mostly play to finish the run. 3.8x Obelisk is only 14 hands so maybe you switch from pairs to high card?

 

[RX-7_FD3S]

When I got obelisk I was on 15 pair, 2 high card and a tree of a kind. Played mostly high card and skipped the last round. Last boss was all card disable until you sell a joker, never had to do it. I dont remember my planet levels.

 

[Wilsonson]

2 new gold stickers in Misprint and one of the weak page 1 commons +12 mult on straight Crazy Joker.

I had a very tough decision on the first shop into ante 5. I had Madness in the shop with eternal Misprint, eternal polychrome Brainstorm and some other scoring cards in hand. The boss was The Needle for only a single hand. I knew I couldn't beat it with my current build but 2x mult from two blinds of Madness scaling would also not be enough.

Thankfully I had the Hieroglyph voucher for going back in time in the shop. That did it and from then on Madness scaling plus Blue Joker for chips in the mid game allowed for one shotting my pair build till the end.

I saved enough to be able to reroll the last shop for a non gold sticker joker. It would survive because Madness only destroys on small and big blind, not on bosses.

I only used 2 double tags for improving pairs a lot. From then on nothing that was better than Madness scaling came up. No negatives this time.

A day after this win my PS5 broke. Thankfully it was only the power unit. Got a replacement part and was able to swap it myself. 55 euros instead about 200 for a repair shop. Happy it worked out.

Had to get my Balatro fix in started a game. Won straight away.

Early Spare Trousers which ended up +76 gave me a nice two pair run. 4 new gold stickers in Gluttonous, Clever, Cartomancer and Perkeo.

Pair Levels from Perkeo and some Deck fixing worked. I even dared getting a negative from Ectoplasm which takes away hand size. Kind of risky with Two Pair.

 

[Touring Mars]

I've had 2 wins in a row on my iPad...

Zodiac/Blue Stake - playing Flushes and later Flush Houses, I made good use of Mime and discovered it synergizes very well with Raised Fist and Reserved Parking; I had Brainstorm as well, and was copying Mime mostly. With Steel cards retriggering, I was getting beating most Rounds in one Hand; Had a funny moment in the game when I had a Blue Seal but no Flush, so I played High Card in the hope of getting a Flush, only for the High Card to score over the 460k needed to win, so I ended up with a Pluto card instead...

And today's chemo game: Erratic/Purple Stake - playing Full Houses and 4oaK. I had Acrobat, The Trio, Baseball and Spare Trousers - it was a relatively easy game as I had 11 Aces and 11 Jacks, plus a decent number of Steel cards again. I was nearly tripped up by collecting Spades (had Wrathful/polychrome), as instead of a Lvl 10 Full House, I got a Lvl 1 Flush House instead. Fortunately I was able to pivot to 4oaK (also high level) and take advantage of Acrobat to win comfortably without a Full House.