Balatro

My build was 4 of a kind. Why? You get +3 mult with each mars planet card used and +30 chips. Any lower hand (full house, flush, straight and so on) only gives +2 mult, so you need a lot more of the planet cards in order to achieve a score of 100 000 (and beat the boss blind of ante 8).

Ante 1+2

This build relies heavily on getting a mars planet card during ante 1. If you dont get one, reset the run. Beat ante 1 however you please (flush, full house or straight is pretty consistent).

With a single mars planet card, you get a base score of 90*10 = 900 which is enough to beat all the blinds in ante 2 with a single four of a kind. This DOES require SOME luck, but with a death or strength tarot, it should be pretty achieveable.

• Big blind needs 4’s or better.
• Boss needs 8’s or better, or just get a flush in addition to your 4 of a kind.
• An Empress, hierophant, or second mars planet card is enough to disregard the requirements above.

This allows you to save up money while you beat the two first antes. My favourite voucher early on is the x2planet cards in shop voucher, as these are more important early on to build up a nice base mult.

Tarot cards you are looking for are:

• Strength - improve consistency in getting the 4 of a kind
• Death - improve consistency in getting the 4 of a kind
• Empress - improve your mult if you see that your base mult is not enough to clear the blind
• The hanged man - If you see it in the shop, and you have cash: Buy it. Destroy the cards you have the least of in your deck, but try to avoid destroying the cards that are one below the cards you have the most of - we want to strength those.
• The hermit - Duh doi
• The devil - Buy it for 3 gold and use it on a random card before you score your ante winning hand. It costs 3 and gives 3. This is fairly low on the list of priority, but it's strictly a positive gain to your deck. Always spend all of your discards looking for gold cards if you know you have a game winning hand.
• Justice - Glass cards aren't too important early on, but super important later on.
• Chariot - gives a 1.5x to mult. Use it as a boost before playing your game winning hand. as a rule of thumb, 2 steel cards in hand = one glass card in played hand.

Buy the tarots in the shop and use them during the round. Don't get exited and spend them during an arcane pack. 4 of a kind is pretty inconsistent to get early on, but with a death in hand, you only need to get a 3 of a kind. Aces are technically the best, but it doesn't really matter what rank you go for (although i recommend going for 6's or better - see math below). Face cards can be a little sketchy because of the boss that debuffs face cards, but if you happen to have 7 kings in your deck, and 4 of everything else, i would say go for it.

Ante 3:

To beat ante 3, you need 3600 chips for the boss. In the beginning, your 4 of a kind level will vary depending on your luck. Look for specific tarot cards to clear the blinds depending on your level. Achieving 3600 score can be done with a single 4 of a kind at level:

• 5 (with 3’s or better)
• 4 (making one of them a mult card with empress)
• 3 (one of the cards are a glass card, and you need 5’s or better)

Ante 4:

The Boss blind requires a score of 10000.

Here are some ideas on how you can get a score of 10000 in a single 4 of a kind, depending on its level:

• 10 hand will clear this by itself
• 9 6's or better
• 8. two cards are mult cards and cards are is 6's or better
• 7 one card is a glass card

Ante 5+

Do the math on what you will score before leaving the shop. Save deaths in order to improve consistency. Strength should pretty much be useless because you should have already strengthed the cards below the one you have the most of in your deck. Try to focus on making more glass cards of a single rank, and making copies of them with death. Try to not play more glass cards than necessary, because if they break your deck becomes less consistent. The hanged man is great to thin your deck, but deaths are better imo.

Standard packs are nice, and try to get a card with a red seal on it. Make it a glass card and copy them with death. A single red seal glass card should hopefully be enough to clear most blinds. Red seal cards are not strictly necessary, but they help immensely. They are also great to transform into steel cards, and having one in hand is essentially the same as playing an additional (regular) glass card.

Ante 8:

4 of a kind level:

• 11 - 2 glass cards will score over 50k
• 11 - 3 glass cards will score over 100k
• 16 - 2 glass cards will score over 100k

Skipping:

I would often skip blinds if i had leveled up 4 of a kind to level 11 or 16, and KNEW a single 4 of a kind would beat any boss with a couple glass cards (even the ante 8 boss). This is because you have so many glass cards at this point that playing the ante would more often than not decrease the consistency of my deck. Just watch out for the tags that rerolls boss blinds. Play these blinds if the boss blind is easy. (This mistake is why i haven't cleared jokerless twice, huehuehue.

Tl:dr:

Get an early mars card and play 4 of a kind from ante 2 and onwards. Do the math before every round. To get a score of 100k, level up 4 of a kind with mars planet cards to level 11 (hand scored needs 3 glass cards) or level 16 (hand scored needs 2 glass cards).

Original Post by u/Swimming_Security_27

Just wanted to share my most insane win with people who may appreciate it.

So incredibly excited to see this community! I haven’t played Balatro yet because isn’t currently on a platform I have access to, but I found out about the game from a Youtuber I like who talks about heat indie games.

So excited to see this community grow and hope one day the game will come to iOS.

What fun idea do you have for Balatro ? It can be anything: a joker, a game mode, a challenge, a card...

My random thoughts:

• New secret hands: Flush Four, and Flush Pairs (A flush Two Pair). You can only play them with the Four Fingers joker.
• Otherwise, Flush as a modifier rather than its own hand. For example, playing a Straight Flush would give you the chips and mult of both a Flush and a Straight.
• Card themes, basically skins for cards (or even jokers). It could work like minecraft texture packs.
• A deck that uses tarot cards as playing cards. Each tarot card you use is added to your deck. They would count as their own suit, their number is their rank, and give mult instead of chips. Some are face cards, but it's related to the symbol rather than the rank (The Emperor...).

Jokers

Jokers are the most important for getting an engine going to crush the game. There are some jokers which are very strong in the first couple of antes but fall off later. It's important to invest only a minimum into the cards which are strong early so you can focus on building jokers which will carry you through the whole game.

You need a mix of three types of jokers:

• Chip Builder
• Flat Mult
• Multiplying Mult

With the right mix of these three, you don't need to buy a single planet card, your jokers ( under the right circumstances ) will be paying out 20-30k per hand even on a High card 2 without special conditions.

You can use Utility jokers to aid you, but you need these three types to win, so focus on these first. ( The exception being Smeared Joker, because that's just busted. )

If you have a deck that has 250 chips, 60 mult into 3x multiplied mult, then you score a minimum of 250 x 60 x 3 = 45k per hand, before any consideration of the hand you played or the value of the cards you played. That will easily win you the run against any boss.

Flat Mult

Flat multi are cards such as "Gros Michel" (+15 mult, 1 in 4 chance to disappear), Abstract Joker (+3 mult for each joker), etc. Some of these are only good for the first few antes, while others scale better into the later game. You can also get flat mult from holographic jokers which is generally a much more efficient place to get it from.

A card like misprint is fine to pick up in the first couple of antes, but should be sold for better as soon as it's reasonable.

A few flat mult cards also scale, these are absolutely worth building around if you come across them:

• Green Joker ( Incredibly powerful, especially with "Banner" )
• Red Card
• Erosion ( very difficult to make work, only suggest if you have a reliable way to destroy cards )
• Fortune Teller
• Spare Trousers ( Not actually great, feels like a worse version of Green Joker )
• Flash card
• Bootstraps ( Incredibly powerful )

Early on a card like "misprint" seems powerful because you one-shot everything with some luck but these cards scale much more reliably into the end-game. They should all have at least a flat 10-15 mult by the end unconditionally.

If you have a flat 15 mult, that's like having 5-10 levels on every one of your cards. In other words, one joker and some investment replaces investing into dozens of planet packets.

Chip Builders

Chip builders are any cards which give chips. Foil jokers help a lot giving a 50 chips, but there are some very powerful chip builder cards which give around 100 chips each, and are far more powerful than the conditional "30 chips if an odd number" type cards which should be avoided unless desperate:

• Banner ( Probably overpowered by a factor of 2, this gives 120 chips or 160 chips with the Wasteful voucher. )
• Ice cream ( Great early game, falls off quickly so needs to be replaced asap )
• Blue Joker ( As with banner, ridiculously good value. )

There are also some scaling chip builders, which are tricker to make work, but can be scaled to late game:

• Square Joker ( Difficult to make work unless you have a utility joker which lets you play short hands )
• Bull ( Extremely powerful, can easily scale to 250 flat alone )
• Castle ( Very fun to get going, surprisingly quick to scale if you're not reliant on non-discard strategies, but avoid if using banner. )
• Wee Joker ( Tricky to scale without screwing up and leaving yourself with no hands! )

Mult multipliers

These are cards which read "x2 Mult" or similar, and are very unpowered early while essential late. The naturally scale with the power of the rest of your deck, although there are still some which provided a fixed multiplier and some that further scale the multiplier.

It's worth having only one of these and investing in the scaling of it, although you can get away with two if you have extra joker slots. It's generally better to look to scale your chips and flat mult rather than have powerful multipliers which are multiplying a small sum.

NB: Do not get "photograph", the multiplier applies before your jokers have added their mult, it's worthless in a joker focussed build.

Some examples of powerful ones:

• Joker Stencil ( Not worth unless you're playing the deck with the extra joker slot )
• Blackboard ( Not recommended without utility, you will kill yourself trying to get the mult active )
• Cavendish ( The 1 in 1000 discard chance is a joke, this is basically a flat x3, it's a run winner )
• Acrobat ( Surprisingly useful, especially if you want to play extra hands to boost Green Joker )
• The Trio ( Make sure your deck can support playing 3 of a kind regularly )
• Constellation ( Amazing if you can support it, this can scale up to around 4x if you invest into planets )
• Hologram ( One of the best jokers in the game if you can get it early. )

Utility and Money makers

A last note about utility jokers. These are jokers which provide utility such as allowing freedom of suit or gapped straights. I've not had much success trying to get the straight based cards to work, but Smeared Joker is incredible. With a hand size increase such as from paint brush, you are guarenteed to be able to play a flush every hand without having to do any deck management whatsoever.

If you can afford a slot for a joker which makes money, and that can include doing things like generating consumable cards ( remember these can be sold too if you don't want them ) then it's worth doing so, as that money can be poured into scaling your scaling jokers, be it directly such as the bull, or being able to afford lots of packs or extra cards to boost others.

If you're happy with your joker selection based on these criteria, you're free to invest all your money into deck enhancements and deck-shaping if you need them for conditional jokers ( which I'd recommended avoiding if possible, but it isn't always possible. ).

Original Post By u/Zeeterm on Reddit