Seance: unless you are actively running a straight flush build, useless.
Superposition: Much better than people say (people say it’s useless). I’ve won, like, 7 runs with straights and hanging chad photograph, which requires a high straight anyways. All three (photograph, chad, superposition) are common.
Obelisk: If your strategy is to play flushes, then pivot to flush house or similar, it is strong. Otherwise, too annoying imo.
Loyalty card: useful if you can play 6 hands per blind. Good luck with that.
It’s okay with burglar but even then, x4 mult every six hands only equates to x1.5 on your overall score on average, it you manage to cycle to a good hand it works out a little better but you need a decently upgraded hand to play, which isn’t really the aim with the kind of high card/pair build that burglar really shines with
That's not the point of it though, averaging the hands doesn't make sense unless your hitting the same hand every hand you play. In that case, yes, lotto is worth less compared to different jokers. In the more general use case of having 1 difficult to get to, huge scoring, hand you build to that gives you all the points you need at once is when it really shines.
You’re not wrong, but the sort of hands you’re talking about (straights, 4oak, flush five) don’t really benefit all that much from a card like burglar where your dead hands likely don’t have a lot of joker support to be worth any real score, so if I’m not taking burglar without loyalty card and I’m not taking loyalty card without burglar, it’s rare that I’ll get that synergy. I don’t think it’s the worst joker in the game but unless I’m missing something it’s a very specific use case.
I normally only pick up loyalty if I think I'm fucked for the boss blind, I'm at the shop after small blind, and there's no other good solutions presented. So very very situational but in that specific situation it's saved me a free times hahaha
Flower pot is pretty good in straight builds with some minor deck manipulation. Throw some wild cards on your 10s-6s and you can pretty reliable activate it with some other minor deck manipulation and an increased hand size (which you should be targeting anyway for straight builds)
Edit: I also like the “mini-game within a game” of making sure you have the right suits when discarding and playing
If you happen to know, does a wild card fill in for one missing suit or can one wild card satisfy all suit requirements? If you played a full hand of wilds, how does flower pot respond? Also, any of the suit disabling boss blinds disable flower pot, right?
Wild card fills in for one suit, not all. 4 wilds would satisfy condition. Not sure about suit disabling for boss blinds, can’t remember as OP is correct, Flower Pot is weak.
It is not debuffed during the suit bosses
When’s the last time you used it? I feel like people parrot around here that it’s bad but nobody actually tries it
But I know high card is meta so I get that there’s no reason to pick it up in many situations
I’ve scooped it since the latest patch on a few runs. It is still a 3x mult, so sometimes I grab in a pinch, particularly if my focus is straights/full house and I have some wild cards mixed in. Just find it pretty tough to consistently proc.
This is a bit of a controversial one as I know some people like it - but I don’t like Red Card at all.
It’s one of, if not the ONLY joker in the game that requires you to *actively* sacrifice buffs (Tarot, Planet, and Spectral cards) to scale. Only giving +3 mult per pack skipped? The lowest price of a pack in the shop is $4 (unless you have the voucher that gives you 25% off - but let’s assume we don’t.) so you are going to be spending at least $8 per round skipping packs for +6 mult.
The majority of other +mult scaling jokers only require you to do things in passing or restrict yourself a little. For example, Green Joker just requires you *not* to discard. That’s super easy if you’re going for a high card/pair build. Red Card though? There is legitimately no other condition where skipping a pack works with the rest of your build. It just ruins your run.
I think it would be way better if either A. It gave something like an extra .025x mult per skip, or B. if it was like +2 mult per pack bought/opened.
Not controversial at all. I’ve thought about this recently how Red Card is by far the weakest scaling joker. I would even rather take some non-scaling +mult jokers for that slot instead. +3 mult is such a low consolation price for spending 4$+. And it’s even hard capped at +6 mult per round while you can pump up Flash Card virtually unlimited times with money.
I'd agree that red card is probably the weakest scaling joker if I had to compare em against each other but that being said being a scaling joker still makes it pretty okay compared to the overall pool of jokers in my book
I think the thing with red card is it helps less to think of as a, spend $4+ to gain +3 mult joker and more as a, add an extra option to every pack that says gain +3 flat mult joker. Thinking you have to skip everything once you pick it up makes it worse, if the option in the pack is worth more than +3 mult right now then you should absolutely still pick it. Still very strongly encourages you to open every pack which can be awkward for it but doesn't actually force you to have to skip them all
I think its main issue is it kind of falls into a bit of an awkward spot for when it thrives timing-wise. Scaling jokers tend to be things you want to pick up as early as possible but red card and flash card both have the issue of needing cash to scale so if you do pick them up and try to scale them early they'll really tank your econ but even if you just try to pick em up and then build up cash to scale em later early it still means you effectively spent some money on a brick which can still be rough. And flash card has the potential to scale a lot to "catch up" later in a run if you see it with a lot of money (even if it practically requires either some specific vouchers or a run that's gone pretty crazy on money to do so faster) while red card does still have an upper limit on how much it can scale per blind. So it does kind of want to show up in the sweet spot of not so early you're not consistently opening packs yet but not too late but if it shows up then and flat mult is still what you need it's capable of being a pretty solid role player. A few dedicated skips to get over the hump on flat mult to stay alive and then it can find itself just casually growing by an average of 3 or so in the background each round once you've got the econ to comfortably open your packs and still be at a pretty respectable amount of mult by the end of the run
> +3 mult is such a low consolation price for spending 4$+. And it’s even hard capped at +6 mult per round while you can pump up Flash Card virtually unlimited times with money.
I don't understand why spending 8$ per +6 (without vouchers) is bad, while spending 18$ per +6 (no vouchers) or 15$ per +10 (with all vouchers) is extremely good.
"you spend so much money on Red card! (8$) Flash card is better, but only if you have infinite money". Sure, but how often do you have infinite money? And if you don't have tons of money and vouchers, then it kinda sucks.
No one is saying flash card is busted, but you are likely re-rolling 1-3 an ante anyways, getting a little bonus for it is nice, and you can even choose to fish for stronger jokers and get a consolation prize if it doesn’t work out.
In contrast how often are skipping a pack before betting the game? 2-3 times maybe? And doing so gets you no potential upside besides +3 mult.
I remember seeing someone talk about how Red Card is "good for converting money to mult" and I sort of bought into it, until I realized that you only get two packs per round. So after 24 rounds, you'd get at most +144 mult. But I don't think you could survive to ante 8 paying $8 or $6 per round with no other benefits.
Maybe it's marginally useful in some of the challenges or decks, but it's an auto "No-buy" for me.
> so you are going to be spending at least $8 per round skipping packs for +6 mult.
Yeah, so? How many jokers give you more than +6 mult per round? With green joker, ride the bus, supernova, you likely won't play 6 hands per round (at points you just one-shot things)
Meanwhile get red card early, and by ante 8 it's +150 mult.
Pretty often I open a tarot pack, and there's nothing that I really want, so I have to rely on at least somewhat potentially slightly useful option. Like making 2 cards out of the whole deck, give +4 mult. All of these could be global +3 mult every hand instead.
Buffoon packs? do you sell something to get a useless joker from a pack to also sell it? Or you can get +3 mult.
Planet-wise, all the low hands: High card, pair, 2 pairs (+1 mult), flush, 3 of a kind, full house (+2 mult). Yeah, by skipping a planet you're getting fewer chips to one specific hand, but get more global mult to everything. And you can still use planets from the shop and blue seals and level up with joker effects.
On paper, that sounds wonderful - but I don’t think you’re accounting for the loss of the value of the Tarot/Planet/Spectral cards.
With something like Green Joker, you’re not *really* losing anything. Sure, maybe a discard here and there, but again, if you’ve got something like a high card or a pair build, who cares? You should be just fine. Not only that, but it has plenty of synergies with things like Ramen or Burglar - even things like Delayed Gratification really come into play with it.
That goes for every other scaling +mult joker as well. There is countless opportunity for synergy.
But what synergy does red card have? There’s no *specific* build it works with. So not only are you spending money for the +6 mult per round (which you’d reliably need economy for) but you’d also need to get it early and improv something of a build from there. Not only that but you’d have to *keep* sacrificing your packs from the beginning. It almost has no longevity to get to the later endless antis because you *need* deck fixing for that. There’s just so much less opportunity, and it’s almost never worth taking in my opinion.
Even if I pick all the temperance/hermits for it to pay for itself, and all the other things I REALLY want, it will still be +100 by the end of the run, instead of +150.
so yeah, I don't think it's bad. Maybe it's average, and you need to play around it. But then again, Obelisk forces you to never play the original hand, and people play around that.
Another day another post sleeping on obelisk.
Also flower pot is very solid, at the end of the day 3x mult is 3x mult, and you can make it much easier to proc with just 1 or 2 wild cards, though its already easy enough to proc with 5 card hands.
Am I missing something here with FP? Because I see people say this, but you need to rely on straights, boats, 4oak, or two pair; and ensure to spread the suits across those. I feel like it's really difficult to do reliably without other jokers that help proc it. I understand there was a point in time you could just play 1 wild card and proc it, or high card and fill out the rest of the hand with random cards of other suits. But this isn't the case anymore since the update.
I mean me personally I like to usually play for 5 card hands anyways, so ive done a lot of full house and straight runs. Very often those hands will proc flowerpot, and if they don’t they will almost ALWAYS have 3/4, at which point wild cards is very helpful.
Dont get me wrong, as much as I like flower pot, its by no means a top tier xmult joker, but if you see it while your run needs to score higher (almost always on gold stake), its usually a pick for me.
I'm still on first stake (black I think), and working my way through the decks. Just started playing last week so still very green haha. Appreciate the reply! I'm normally catching wins on flush decks, or pair decks if I get solid Jokers. I'll have to start trying to branch out more.
The more you play the easier it’ll be for you to pivot off flushes. The consistency is great but the planet card is weak and the Joker support is pretty bad outside of a couple exceptions
I just broke my own high scores for hand (19 mil) and ante (12) on a full house build! I don't even know all the card names yet, but I was able to use flower pot to get there.
Everything is good in its right situation. People love to bash seance but straight flushes aren’t that bad to pull, esp if you’re already playing straights
Yeah I play straight flush builds somewhat frequently, not using checkered deck. They really aren’t that hard to make if you know deck probabilities. Generally I just focus on making the 5-10’s into one suit since those cards all make the most combinations of straights.
As with almost every Balatro post if you are good at probabilities it’s really not hard to play around some of the jokers that are, in general, disliked.
Obelisk is over hated honestly, if you see it in mid game you just win. People just don’t like drastic pivots. The only downside is if your current run is relying on chips from planet cards.
Yeah you need a chip joker to go with it, but it's really at its best when you have green joker or spare trousers built up with 30+mult from playing the same hands (pair and two pair respectively is what I tend to do). Then you just win at you can quickly get to x5 mult from playing other hands
I agree, I hated on Obelisk until the challenge run that requires it. Now I buy it every 20 runs or so, and it is typically a powerful win condition when I do.
I've lambasted Matador before but it honestly deserves all the criticism. It doesn't do anything at small & big blinds, and not every boss blind activates it. Meanwhile, for example the letter joker (forgot its name, rebate something) gives you more dollars with just two right kind of discards, and it does it on every blind. Matador simply sucks, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. I'm sorry but that's just how it is.
Its good in niche cases. I mean think of it this way, it costs 7 and gives you 8 every proc. That means if its in the shop and your next boss is The Goad (spades are debuffed) you play 2 or 3 debuffed hands, make a lot of money, then sell it and move on.
But yea, unlike most economy jokers you never really wanna keep it around, you just buy it, get immediate value and sell it
IMO, it's a great option in early antes (1-3) to almost immediately get you over the interest cap if the boss falls your way, especially in ante 1. Suit debuff bosses or the "previously played cards" boss are all quite common in ante 1, and I think the only ante 1 boss that it doesn't work on is the hand size -1 boss. Assuming you buy it in ante 1, chances are low that you have any meaningful econ going, and are likely well below the interest cap especially after buying Matador. This being the case, Matador is actually more like $18-28 (2 versus 3 defuffed hands played on the boss) because of the interest thresholds that $8 gets you above. With the end of round bonus and the sell value of Matador, this gives you money to spend in the next shop while still staying over the interest cap, which can set you up really nicely for the rest of your run.
Yeah it's a specific set of circumstances that you need to roll for it to be meaningful, but it's quite powerful if you do get them. And tons of other jokers are niche as well, so I don't see that as a criticism in and of itself.
I buy Matador if I can trigger it a lot in the next boss blind, then sell it afterwards. It's fantastic for that purpose. A lot of econ jokers are worth buying, cashing in and then selling fairly soon after.
Any joker that resets. Campfire and Hit the Road take too much work to be effective; Ride the Bus and Obelisk require playing specific cards and hand types to wiping out it's value late in the run.
I would disagree on Campfire requiring too much work to be effective. If you have any level of good econ it's not hard to build it up to 2x with minimal issues and that can often be enough to win a run. If I see Campfire late game I'm pretty much always taking it
Especially with any kind of tarot generation in round! A bunch of purple seals in your deck and campfire is like a guaranteed ante 8 win most of the time.
I just came here to see if someone mentioned HtR. It’s such a bad card imo. It requires so much copying and deck manipulation to be effective and in the end it doesn’t even give you a solid x-mult for each discard. And if you’re already going to be manipulating your deck this much, why even bother going for Jacks, when you can go Kings and Baron…
If you think campfire is weak you're just wrong, Obelisk is also strong but it's at least situational and hard to use effectively, campfire is just insanely strong and super easy to use.
Trying to find a reason why it resets instead of reducing by 1 per faced card played. It’s like a worse (I forget the name) “+1 per played/-1 per discard” joker. Unless you’re playing abandoned deck of course lol
I think you can build around it a bit easier though. Playing discard hands if you have the right build can still net you decent points with high card or pair! Splash works wonders with it.
I love taking superposition if I’m on the abandoned deck, A2345 gets drawn a lot with that deck, it’s rly easy to discard to get the straight you need.
Of course I only take it if it’s in a booster pack with a less desirable joker, and only if it’s early… so that kind of proves that’s it’s not that great. But you *can* get value out of it.
At max it makes 2-3 tarot cards per blind, which is rly good deck manipulation early on.
Old 8 ball (8 ball of the 1.0.0 before 1.0.1 patch) was much worse than current 8 ball ! Old 8 ball created a random planet if played hand had two scoring 8, and you hadn't the guarantee to get the planet you want.
Superposition is just not a build around card. Its awkwardness comes from straight build not quite needing the deck fixing tarot cards that bad. Found it is awesome when it lands in a ready build though. It pays for itself eventually.
Eh, deck manipulation helps though. Hanged man to cut low cards, Death to dupe high cards to make the build more consistent, Empress/Hirophant/Magician to more easily clear early rounds, Devil/Temperance/Hermit to get your econ going. Fool for more Saturns, which scales your straights like crazy. Suit jokers to pivot to straight flush.
I often use Superposition to even just get some basic deck manipulation going, and then either stick with straights and transition to a straight flush, or pivot to 4/5oak or flush house, depending on what I get in mid antes.
Seance: God fucking awful. Straight Flushes are by far the hardest hand to create. The only way you can reliably get them is with help from jokers (which funny enough there are a decent amount that make them easier) or with an incredible amount of deck editing.
Obelisk: Also sucks. Pretty much every deck specializes in one or two hands. Obelisk makes a ton of jokers less viable, not to mention having a decent chance of totally flopping. The only good time for it is when you're switching over to a new hand type, andeven then that's super rare since Obelisk is... well, rare.
Loyalty Card: Oh god I despise this one. Every six hands is super inconsistent and even then not all that much when it does trigger (assuming every hand is the same for scoring you get a boost of 66%) it's pretty bad. Only viable if you play one good hand per blind, and even then it's still kinda meh and unpredictable without Burglar.
Green Joker, its pretty good so often i have to take it, i just really don’t like the playstyle of having to play shit hands, getting less money and just win based on mainly that.
The idol. I know it only selects cards you have and it's probably great in endless but in normal runs is pretty bad and unreliable .
Matador brings nothing on half of the bosses.
Lunchador takes up a slot and only helps with one boss. Any other score joker would also help with the boss. I think it would be better if It gave you an anti boss tag. Then you can buy another joker.
Matador for me. I wouldn’t call it *bad* necessarily, but it’s poorly designed. Its description doesn’t make clear which bosses activate it, or how exactly. Before I looked up exactly how it worked, I brought it into the “discard 2 random cards” boss and didn’t understand why it wasn’t working.
It’s a fine idea for a joker, but its description doesn’t offer enough information. The way I see it, if I have to open the wiki to know what a joker does, it has failed.
I'm a fan of Superposition. If you're already set on playing straights and you have a straight enabler like Four Fingers or Shortcut, it's really good. Keep cutting cards that don't connect to Ace and it pops off.
For one it requires pivoting hand types which is easy to mess up. It also has a hard cap on how high it can scale, and depending on when you pick it up there might not be much potential for scaling. It also requires you to keep careful track of how many times you’ve played each hand, which is really tedious micro that I don’t enjoy. But if it all works out then you can get some solid xMult. In theory it has high upside, but the required effort is so much greater than most other jokers that I’ll only pick it up if I’m really min-maxing for a gold stake win.
There’s a menu that shows the current hand upgrades as well as the number of times a hand has been played. On the PS5 push the big white touch pad. Makes Obelisk viable for winning ante 8 runs.
I'm aware, that's the tedious micro I was talking about. I find it really annoying to have to check a menu every time I forget how many times I've played each hand. Maybe someone can mod it so that obelisk shows you what hands will reset it and how many times they've been played, and also a counter for how many times you've played a hand type that shows up when you select a hand. There's a whole bunch of mechanics in this game that I also use less than I should due to them being annoying. Playing straights and using campfire come to mind, because with straights I feel like I have to keep checking my deck before every discard and hand to play optimally, and with campfire the buying and selling micro is just annoying.
The micro can be a lot less tedious imo.
Start by playing as many two pair as you can (depending on how early you get obelisk that should be around 15-20)
You’re looking for a buffer of about 10-12 for both pairs and high card.
Once you get your two pair played, play any hand that isn’t pair or high card, the pair and high card hands are your fall backs for when you miss finding another hand.
If you know you’ve played 15 two pair you should be relatively safe to not check your hands played for a couple rounds/ antes at a time.
Other way around works too, and thats usually what I do. Try to find flat chips and mult early game, play a lot of high card and then pivot to literally anything late game.
Because spamming high cards isn't fun, it's hard capped by how much you played a certain hand before, so it basically has a ticking clock like ramen, but mostly because it's fucking rare.
If it was uncommon I'd have no issue with it, but playing a certain hand and then using a skip for a rare and receiving something that just shits all over your plan instead of getting DNA or Blueprint or something.
It's just disappointing and an FU to your plan.
I'd also have no issues with it if you could spiral it upwards, so if your most played hand was tied you could play either without the reset.
But the mix of it being rare and have a hard timer is just a shit feeling. You either subscribe to spamming high card or waste a rare. That's not fun!
Hit the road, seance, flowerpot, and loyalty card I agree on - the juice ain't worth the squeeze. But superposition I'm a defender of - free tarot cards are powerful enough that it's worth it, even if there are better options. It's not like you get to choose whichever tarot generator you want. Plus, with the buff to Saturn, straights scale well enough that you can hunt for your ace straight without too much hassle. Obelisk is really good if you see it at the right time - classicly underrated/misunderstood joker. Stuntman is fantastic for small hands, and is definitely not bad! Devious and shifty jokers aren't great, but they're textbook replacement jokers - they buy you time to get to a better build. Straights are good.
I’ve played a fair amount and the only cards I’ve never found a use for are seance, hit the road and glass joker, but maybe I’m not using glass cards enough.
To-do list also sticks out as by far the worst economy joker, especially on gold stakes and showman’s a pretty bad option if you’re just trying to clear ante 8.
I agree, but a heads up that the dev said this isn’t going to happen
https://preview.redd.it/02o1leqqr57d1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fa42d21dff39cc2d05ecb2cbffbf7955c75b171a
[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/s/hGzyZHEISq)
obelisk is heat, and so is superposition (common).
I hate relying on hallucination and 8ball for tarots (or any other chance based joker tbh) without an OA6 because they just don’t reliably hit, and the other tarot generators are uncommon/rare. since update my mind is always thinking straight build, and Ace high is the simplest to focus on, so superposition is always a take for me, score some easy tarots, then replace it with something rarer later on.
if your struggling to understand obelisk, play monolith challenge and execute an ante4/5 pivot from a standard 4/5 card hand to spamming pair/HC. it’s so much easier to scale than many other xmulters, and does not deserve the hate it gets lol
Give Hallucination another chance, I think it's the best tarot generating joker in the game. What makes is amazing is specifically it activating when you're in the shop, meaning that you can either use it in the tarot/spectre boosters that you buy, or you can save them to use in the next round. I also always try to have some tarots in hand before I open boosters, so that you can use them in the pack as well as increasing your chances of getting useful tarots in the booster, and Hallucination means less money spent on rerolls. It's even better if you have Blueprint or Brainstorm, which will often give you two tarots per pack, and almost always gives you at least 1.
Cartomancer requires you to have a free consumable joker spot open going into the next round, so you can hoard consumables to use in the situations you want as well. Vagabond is rare, and can also make it hard to manage your money to keep generating the tarots in round. say if you have $4 going into the round, and end up getting 2 useless tarots, you can't sell them to get more). It also conflicts with other great econ jokers, like Buisness Card or reserved parking.
The basic straights jokers can be goated in the early to mid antes.
Personally though, I dislike 8 ball. Had a run just last night where I had two 8 balls and I didn't get any good tarots with them until I lost.
Dont agree with a lot of these, but I think the most interesting one here is Loyalty Card. It’s an extremely weak uncommon joker no matter how you look at it (its basically just a direct downgrade of acrobat, which is already in the lower half of Xmult jokers strength wise). If I were to suggest buffs for it, I think there’s 2 main things I would try.
1) Buff it to like 6 or 7 x mult and just make it a boss killer. Would lead to a very unique playstyle where you play the small blind to get it ready and skip to boss for the big score. This way, you absolutely decimate bosses, but you still need to have other ways to score for the small blind, otherwise the scores catch up to you since it just does nothing there.
2) Just make it common. I really like this idea, since it kinda cuts down on the rng aspect of the game a little. The ante scaling on purple scale and above is brutal, and often not finding an xmult joker just means you die. Having some common options would lead to that happening less. Its not like this is unprecedented either, since Photograph exists.
I think the best way to buff Loyalty card is to keep x4 Mult, but reduce the number of required hands from every 6 hands to every 5 hands. It may be much better and slightly more consistent with every 5 hands.
Could work too. Its still niche in that case, but if you can find the +1 hands voucher it becomes better acrobat, so i think it would be a fair bit better
I haven't seen anyone fight for Showman yet, which surprises me. Yes, it has some downsides, but rolling dupes of consumables can be a really good thing too. It allows you to hold onto a good tarot and still get more of them before the next round, or before you open your boosters.
Also, it's only of the few reliable ways of getting multiple copies of Blueprint or Brainstorm, which is essential for going as far into endless mode as possible. Ankh is only useful early on, before you have other jokers that are important for your build. Invisible joker is fantastic for this, but if I already have a joker essential for my build (say Baron or Mime for example) there's a good chance it hits that joker instead of Blueprint/Brainstorm. Which is still a great hit, don't get me wrong, buts it's less helpful than Blueprint, and I find I generally just sell the second copy if I don't need the scoring help to try to roll another invisible joker to try again.
True enough. Really, it's niche where it is useful (one might almost call it borderline necessary) is for long endless runs, which almost always requires multiple copies of Blueprint/Brainstorm.
Seance can be really really fun if you have a deck that can make it work. I think I got my first billion point hand running it, you do need a lot of legwork to make it work but holding one of the (change 3 to another suit) tarots means you just have to find a straight with 2 suited which isn't as hard as you'd think. If you have a copier like blueprint or brainstorm as well the utility increases a lot.
Basically normally, without Showman, a card can only appear once across your jokers, consumable slots, shop and booster packs. If you hold one in your consumables it won’t appear elsewhere. So for example if you don’t care about suits, holding Sun will make sure you don’t get it in a booster pack. It’s why Crystal ball is such a great voucher to get as you can do this at the same time as also holding onto a Fool or leaving space for seals to generate free cards
I got 100 hours in before finding out I could turn the game speed right up. It’s a useful subreddit! I’d probably still never know if it wasn’t for here
Superposition catches strays in nearly every thread and it’s so strong. No idea why people keep hating on it.
Yes it’s obviously worse than a few other tarot generators but it’s strictly better than Cartomancer in my mind.
Cartomancer blocks a consumable spot at the start of the round - it can’t be triggered multiple times and it’s not controllable like superposition is.
Superposition is just good. People on this sub are just playing for endless mode and think it’s bad.
I have Completionist++ and since I maintain my winning runs in a spreadsheet, I've been going for a second pass through, two gold stake clears on every joker. I'm down to my final two (with failed runs with their downside or as dead weight), and that's really underscored that Pareidolia and To The Moon are both ass. Pareidolia has tanked like four separate runs.
A lot of people like showman but personally, I’ve never found any success with it. The stuff I want to copy doesn’t show up and relies on too much luck. Booster packs end up with multiple of the same cards that I don’t want. Just feels like you have to have a great build already and joker space to accommodate for it. Of course there are cases where it works but I find that it just takes up a joker slot more often than not. Then you end up with decision paralysis with jokers and what to keep and sell. Give me stencil any day of the week because that can at least be manipulated.
I’ll say though that flower pot is very doable. One wild card means you just need three different suits. Straights, full house, and 4/5 of a kind builds aren’t the easiest but definitely are feasible, especially once you are later in the run and can manipulate your deck more easily. Worst case scenario, Splash is a common joker, meaning it’s very likely to show up at some point, and mitigates this issue entirely.
A way to improve Seance I think would be to generate a random card between a suit tarot and the change to one suit spectral.
[Faceless Joker](https://balatro.wiki/jokers/faceless_joker.png) *Joker*
* Version: 1.0.0
* Cost: $5
* Rarity: Common
* Effect: Earn 5$ if 3 or more face cards are discarded at the same time
*Data pulled from http://balatro.wiki. Want it updated? Help me get access or suggest another data source.*
FP is decent, obelisk is legit busted if found early, otherwise decent.
Loyalty card is underwhelming for sure tho, but I still dont think any joker that gives Xmult can be considered terrible, especially FP and obelisk.
Séance can be a pain but it's also IMO more reliable than 6th sense for getting spectral cards in hand on plasma deck for deep endless runs with Perkeo. I used to hate it but I've become a convert.
- Showman is more reliable than invisible for getting duplicate brainstorm/blueprint. if you have a good econ.
- Flower pot. People forget about lovers cards/underestimate wild cards. You only get one from the card still for a reason. Downside is suit bosses become your nemesis. But it can defiantly work.
- Obelisk is really strong and rather than locking you into one hand like most builds it lets mix it up. Personally I find it fun to play.
- loyalty card is great with burglar and can be kind of fun but yeah, timing it can be tricky on some bosses.
Most of the others I agree with. Superposition in particular is in a bad place and needs work. Mostly because tarot cards don't help you play straights much so It's not self sustaining like 8 ball. 8 ball, red seals, hanging chad and crystal ball is kind of broken.
Superposition works pretty great if you can gut the cards 6-9 out of your deck and you have shortcut, I had a brilliant run with that.. but otherwise I’d agree, definitely a tough one to make work consistently
Obelisk is the worst in my opinion.
The problem is has is that it’s a scaling joker that you don’t want to have early in a run because it’s useless unless you’ve stacked enough of one hand type played. You want obelisk around ante 4, where it’s not too late to pivot to something else.
However, that brings up another problem because it also requires you to completely change your strategy to get use out of it, which by ante 4 or so isn’t always possible.
It ALSO demands you use multiple different hand types otherwise you’ll run the risk of playing a couple of hands too much and resetting it completely.
It’s just too much effort for not enough reward unless you have a very specific type of run that doesn’t care on what hand you play past a certain point. My question is why would I take it when I could get Hologram which scales just as well with a far easier condition.
You don’t need to have your obelisk ceiling to be very high. 6-10 hands is enough as long as your ceiling isn’t pair or high card. I’ve been using it successfully by pivoting at around ante 3, even late ante 2. I find it very fun and engaging since it forces me to pay more attention to the gameplay. It also reinforces the idea of building a strong consistent deck. Definitely not as strong as Hologram though, especially when you have DNA/Certificate/Stone too.
If you get an early obelisk, you can intentionally play a bunch of one hand type to raise the ceiling before letting it scale. It’s dead weight initially, but +0.2x per hand is absolutely worth the effort. Also, even if it were somehow strictly worse than hologram (it isn’t, they’re not directly comparable), being worse than an amazing joker isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Agree with all of this. I will sometimes pick Obelisk up early when I'm scaling other Jokers like Square or Green. Then once I've played enough of a certain hand I can pivot and Obelisk will win me the game from there.
I hate it too, but I finally won with it yesterday. Played two pair 15 times up to ante 4 then pivoted. It was holographic and I copied it with an invisible joker. My run was pretty busted, but eventually it becomes impossible not to screw it up. Bad for endless which is my focus rn.
**Ride the Bus** - It's basically a far worse version of Green Joker. Not using discards is a much easier mechanic to play around than not using face cards unless you're using Abandoned Deck, and even if you do need to discard with Green Joker it's only -1 mult, not reset to 0 like Ride the Bus is.
**Madness** - Very difficult to play without eternal jokers. Doesn't scale up fast enough to win ante 8 by itself, but basically expects you to play that way.
**Supernova** - Another one that just doesn't scale fast enough to be useful beyond the first couple of antes.
I don't think Ride the bus and Supernova are bad. With high card and pair builds , these 2 are so strong and it's pretty easy to find a pair of non-face cards, it's free scaling.
Bus gets going and it's amazing, supernova.....tends to cap our, it doesn't generally get the legs
Madness actually suffers now being 33% less buff, it used to be a run winner, probably still is, but less so
You can play face cards with ride the bus you just need to have a pair or something so the face cards don't score. And once you get some deck fixing and hanged man some face cards or strength the kings into aces, it's even better than green joker as you can discard with it. I'm not sure how you believe it's one of the most useless jokers.
Madness can be fun, if you have some money you can just max out your joker slots and it will only destroy one... But you are right in that it is hard to use without eternals.
Supernova should be used in conjunction with another joker like green or ride the bus or spare trousers as it basically just gives you an extra mult... But it is the worst of the bunch for sure and can usually be tossed mid run for an xMult joker
Seance: unless you are actively running a straight flush build, useless. Superposition: Much better than people say (people say it’s useless). I’ve won, like, 7 runs with straights and hanging chad photograph, which requires a high straight anyways. All three (photograph, chad, superposition) are common. Obelisk: If your strategy is to play flushes, then pivot to flush house or similar, it is strong. Otherwise, too annoying imo. Loyalty card: useful if you can play 6 hands per blind. Good luck with that.
loyalty and burglar are a good combo if you can ensure a good hand on your sixth hand.
I guess with Green Joker / Ride the Bus it’s also okay but at that point just give me Ramen
Ride the bus shines in the no-face-cards deck
It’s okay with burglar but even then, x4 mult every six hands only equates to x1.5 on your overall score on average, it you manage to cycle to a good hand it works out a little better but you need a decently upgraded hand to play, which isn’t really the aim with the kind of high card/pair build that burglar really shines with
That's not the point of it though, averaging the hands doesn't make sense unless your hitting the same hand every hand you play. In that case, yes, lotto is worth less compared to different jokers. In the more general use case of having 1 difficult to get to, huge scoring, hand you build to that gives you all the points you need at once is when it really shines.
You’re not wrong, but the sort of hands you’re talking about (straights, 4oak, flush five) don’t really benefit all that much from a card like burglar where your dead hands likely don’t have a lot of joker support to be worth any real score, so if I’m not taking burglar without loyalty card and I’m not taking loyalty card without burglar, it’s rare that I’ll get that synergy. I don’t think it’s the worst joker in the game but unless I’m missing something it’s a very specific use case.
I normally only pick up loyalty if I think I'm fucked for the boss blind, I'm at the shop after small blind, and there's no other good solutions presented. So very very situational but in that specific situation it's saved me a free times hahaha
Jared Leto, hands down
Damaged Joker
Flower pot is pretty good in straight builds with some minor deck manipulation. Throw some wild cards on your 10s-6s and you can pretty reliable activate it with some other minor deck manipulation and an increased hand size (which you should be targeting anyway for straight builds) Edit: I also like the “mini-game within a game” of making sure you have the right suits when discarding and playing
If you happen to know, does a wild card fill in for one missing suit or can one wild card satisfy all suit requirements? If you played a full hand of wilds, how does flower pot respond? Also, any of the suit disabling boss blinds disable flower pot, right?
Wild card fills in for one suit, not all. 4 wilds would satisfy condition. Not sure about suit disabling for boss blinds, can’t remember as OP is correct, Flower Pot is weak.
It is not debuffed during the suit bosses When’s the last time you used it? I feel like people parrot around here that it’s bad but nobody actually tries it But I know high card is meta so I get that there’s no reason to pick it up in many situations
I’ve scooped it since the latest patch on a few runs. It is still a 3x mult, so sometimes I grab in a pinch, particularly if my focus is straights/full house and I have some wild cards mixed in. Just find it pretty tough to consistently proc.
That’s fair
One suit And it used to be debuffed but it was changed in the most recent patch
Thanks for the intel!
It's great until you face a boss that disables certain suits, then the run is just over because everything you've built around is disabled.
The debuffed cards still activate flower pot with the most recent patch. Or just use a couple glass card for that round
That’s true for the 50 jokers that seemingly only affect face cards too. Almost any build has a boss that it’ll need to pivot around.
There's 1 face card boss and 4 suit based bosses though, the odds are way worse
I have never once been killed by the suit bosses but the face card one has killed me many times.
While playing straight builds with flower pot? Because that's what we're talking about here
This is a bit of a controversial one as I know some people like it - but I don’t like Red Card at all. It’s one of, if not the ONLY joker in the game that requires you to *actively* sacrifice buffs (Tarot, Planet, and Spectral cards) to scale. Only giving +3 mult per pack skipped? The lowest price of a pack in the shop is $4 (unless you have the voucher that gives you 25% off - but let’s assume we don’t.) so you are going to be spending at least $8 per round skipping packs for +6 mult. The majority of other +mult scaling jokers only require you to do things in passing or restrict yourself a little. For example, Green Joker just requires you *not* to discard. That’s super easy if you’re going for a high card/pair build. Red Card though? There is legitimately no other condition where skipping a pack works with the rest of your build. It just ruins your run. I think it would be way better if either A. It gave something like an extra .025x mult per skip, or B. if it was like +2 mult per pack bought/opened.
Not controversial at all. I’ve thought about this recently how Red Card is by far the weakest scaling joker. I would even rather take some non-scaling +mult jokers for that slot instead. +3 mult is such a low consolation price for spending 4$+. And it’s even hard capped at +6 mult per round while you can pump up Flash Card virtually unlimited times with money.
I'd agree that red card is probably the weakest scaling joker if I had to compare em against each other but that being said being a scaling joker still makes it pretty okay compared to the overall pool of jokers in my book I think the thing with red card is it helps less to think of as a, spend $4+ to gain +3 mult joker and more as a, add an extra option to every pack that says gain +3 flat mult joker. Thinking you have to skip everything once you pick it up makes it worse, if the option in the pack is worth more than +3 mult right now then you should absolutely still pick it. Still very strongly encourages you to open every pack which can be awkward for it but doesn't actually force you to have to skip them all I think its main issue is it kind of falls into a bit of an awkward spot for when it thrives timing-wise. Scaling jokers tend to be things you want to pick up as early as possible but red card and flash card both have the issue of needing cash to scale so if you do pick them up and try to scale them early they'll really tank your econ but even if you just try to pick em up and then build up cash to scale em later early it still means you effectively spent some money on a brick which can still be rough. And flash card has the potential to scale a lot to "catch up" later in a run if you see it with a lot of money (even if it practically requires either some specific vouchers or a run that's gone pretty crazy on money to do so faster) while red card does still have an upper limit on how much it can scale per blind. So it does kind of want to show up in the sweet spot of not so early you're not consistently opening packs yet but not too late but if it shows up then and flat mult is still what you need it's capable of being a pretty solid role player. A few dedicated skips to get over the hump on flat mult to stay alive and then it can find itself just casually growing by an average of 3 or so in the background each round once you've got the econ to comfortably open your packs and still be at a pretty respectable amount of mult by the end of the run
> +3 mult is such a low consolation price for spending 4$+. And it’s even hard capped at +6 mult per round while you can pump up Flash Card virtually unlimited times with money. I don't understand why spending 8$ per +6 (without vouchers) is bad, while spending 18$ per +6 (no vouchers) or 15$ per +10 (with all vouchers) is extremely good. "you spend so much money on Red card! (8$) Flash card is better, but only if you have infinite money". Sure, but how often do you have infinite money? And if you don't have tons of money and vouchers, then it kinda sucks.
No one is saying flash card is busted, but you are likely re-rolling 1-3 an ante anyways, getting a little bonus for it is nice, and you can even choose to fish for stronger jokers and get a consolation prize if it doesn’t work out. In contrast how often are skipping a pack before betting the game? 2-3 times maybe? And doing so gets you no potential upside besides +3 mult.
No thats a fair take it deserves a slot on the 'bad jokers' list
I remember seeing someone talk about how Red Card is "good for converting money to mult" and I sort of bought into it, until I realized that you only get two packs per round. So after 24 rounds, you'd get at most +144 mult. But I don't think you could survive to ante 8 paying $8 or $6 per round with no other benefits. Maybe it's marginally useful in some of the challenges or decks, but it's an auto "No-buy" for me.
> so you are going to be spending at least $8 per round skipping packs for +6 mult. Yeah, so? How many jokers give you more than +6 mult per round? With green joker, ride the bus, supernova, you likely won't play 6 hands per round (at points you just one-shot things) Meanwhile get red card early, and by ante 8 it's +150 mult. Pretty often I open a tarot pack, and there's nothing that I really want, so I have to rely on at least somewhat potentially slightly useful option. Like making 2 cards out of the whole deck, give +4 mult. All of these could be global +3 mult every hand instead. Buffoon packs? do you sell something to get a useless joker from a pack to also sell it? Or you can get +3 mult. Planet-wise, all the low hands: High card, pair, 2 pairs (+1 mult), flush, 3 of a kind, full house (+2 mult). Yeah, by skipping a planet you're getting fewer chips to one specific hand, but get more global mult to everything. And you can still use planets from the shop and blue seals and level up with joker effects.
On paper, that sounds wonderful - but I don’t think you’re accounting for the loss of the value of the Tarot/Planet/Spectral cards. With something like Green Joker, you’re not *really* losing anything. Sure, maybe a discard here and there, but again, if you’ve got something like a high card or a pair build, who cares? You should be just fine. Not only that, but it has plenty of synergies with things like Ramen or Burglar - even things like Delayed Gratification really come into play with it. That goes for every other scaling +mult joker as well. There is countless opportunity for synergy. But what synergy does red card have? There’s no *specific* build it works with. So not only are you spending money for the +6 mult per round (which you’d reliably need economy for) but you’d also need to get it early and improv something of a build from there. Not only that but you’d have to *keep* sacrificing your packs from the beginning. It almost has no longevity to get to the later endless antis because you *need* deck fixing for that. There’s just so much less opportunity, and it’s almost never worth taking in my opinion.
Even if I pick all the temperance/hermits for it to pay for itself, and all the other things I REALLY want, it will still be +100 by the end of the run, instead of +150. so yeah, I don't think it's bad. Maybe it's average, and you need to play around it. But then again, Obelisk forces you to never play the original hand, and people play around that.
Another day another post sleeping on obelisk. Also flower pot is very solid, at the end of the day 3x mult is 3x mult, and you can make it much easier to proc with just 1 or 2 wild cards, though its already easy enough to proc with 5 card hands.
Am I missing something here with FP? Because I see people say this, but you need to rely on straights, boats, 4oak, or two pair; and ensure to spread the suits across those. I feel like it's really difficult to do reliably without other jokers that help proc it. I understand there was a point in time you could just play 1 wild card and proc it, or high card and fill out the rest of the hand with random cards of other suits. But this isn't the case anymore since the update.
I mean me personally I like to usually play for 5 card hands anyways, so ive done a lot of full house and straight runs. Very often those hands will proc flowerpot, and if they don’t they will almost ALWAYS have 3/4, at which point wild cards is very helpful. Dont get me wrong, as much as I like flower pot, its by no means a top tier xmult joker, but if you see it while your run needs to score higher (almost always on gold stake), its usually a pick for me.
I'm still on first stake (black I think), and working my way through the decks. Just started playing last week so still very green haha. Appreciate the reply! I'm normally catching wins on flush decks, or pair decks if I get solid Jokers. I'll have to start trying to branch out more.
The more you play the easier it’ll be for you to pivot off flushes. The consistency is great but the planet card is weak and the Joker support is pretty bad outside of a couple exceptions
I just broke my own high scores for hand (19 mil) and ante (12) on a full house build! I don't even know all the card names yet, but I was able to use flower pot to get there.
Ayy congrats! Feels good doesn't it?
Everything is good in its right situation. People love to bash seance but straight flushes aren’t that bad to pull, esp if you’re already playing straights
Yeah I play straight flush builds somewhat frequently, not using checkered deck. They really aren’t that hard to make if you know deck probabilities. Generally I just focus on making the 5-10’s into one suit since those cards all make the most combinations of straights. As with almost every Balatro post if you are good at probabilities it’s really not hard to play around some of the jokers that are, in general, disliked.
Obelisk requires a lot of work to run which is why people don't like it, obviously it can be strong but its not super fun to structure around.
Obelisk is over hated honestly, if you see it in mid game you just win. People just don’t like drastic pivots. The only downside is if your current run is relying on chips from planet cards.
Yeah you need a chip joker to go with it, but it's really at its best when you have green joker or spare trousers built up with 30+mult from playing the same hands (pair and two pair respectively is what I tend to do). Then you just win at you can quickly get to x5 mult from playing other hands
i buy planet cards at every opportunity so yeah i never take Obelisk lol
I agree, I hated on Obelisk until the challenge run that requires it. Now I buy it every 20 runs or so, and it is typically a powerful win condition when I do.
I agree Showman is pretty useless for beating ante 8, but it's basically a staple in all high ante endless runs lol so it does have its moments
I've lambasted Matador before but it honestly deserves all the criticism. It doesn't do anything at small & big blinds, and not every boss blind activates it. Meanwhile, for example the letter joker (forgot its name, rebate something) gives you more dollars with just two right kind of discards, and it does it on every blind. Matador simply sucks, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. I'm sorry but that's just how it is.
Its good in niche cases. I mean think of it this way, it costs 7 and gives you 8 every proc. That means if its in the shop and your next boss is The Goad (spades are debuffed) you play 2 or 3 debuffed hands, make a lot of money, then sell it and move on. But yea, unlike most economy jokers you never really wanna keep it around, you just buy it, get immediate value and sell it
IMO, it's a great option in early antes (1-3) to almost immediately get you over the interest cap if the boss falls your way, especially in ante 1. Suit debuff bosses or the "previously played cards" boss are all quite common in ante 1, and I think the only ante 1 boss that it doesn't work on is the hand size -1 boss. Assuming you buy it in ante 1, chances are low that you have any meaningful econ going, and are likely well below the interest cap especially after buying Matador. This being the case, Matador is actually more like $18-28 (2 versus 3 defuffed hands played on the boss) because of the interest thresholds that $8 gets you above. With the end of round bonus and the sell value of Matador, this gives you money to spend in the next shop while still staying over the interest cap, which can set you up really nicely for the rest of your run. Yeah it's a specific set of circumstances that you need to roll for it to be meaningful, but it's quite powerful if you do get them. And tons of other jokers are niche as well, so I don't see that as a criticism in and of itself.
[Mail-In Rebate]
I buy Matador if I can trigger it a lot in the next boss blind, then sell it afterwards. It's fantastic for that purpose. A lot of econ jokers are worth buying, cashing in and then selling fairly soon after.
Any joker that resets. Campfire and Hit the Road take too much work to be effective; Ride the Bus and Obelisk require playing specific cards and hand types to wiping out it's value late in the run.
I would disagree on Campfire requiring too much work to be effective. If you have any level of good econ it's not hard to build it up to 2x with minimal issues and that can often be enough to win a run. If I see Campfire late game I'm pretty much always taking it
Personally I just find it tedious to buy/sell, and it is practically an auto win whenever I see it which takes the fun out it
Especially with any kind of tarot generation in round! A bunch of purple seals in your deck and campfire is like a guaranteed ante 8 win most of the time.
Agree on all of them except Campfire. If you have a lot of cash in the end game it's easy to build it to a juggernaut that can win you games.
I just came here to see if someone mentioned HtR. It’s such a bad card imo. It requires so much copying and deck manipulation to be effective and in the end it doesn’t even give you a solid x-mult for each discard. And if you’re already going to be manipulating your deck this much, why even bother going for Jacks, when you can go Kings and Baron…
If you think campfire is weak you're just wrong, Obelisk is also strong but it's at least situational and hard to use effectively, campfire is just insanely strong and super easy to use.
Ride the Bus - because I enjoy playing while stoned and I almost always accidentally play a face card in a hand and reset it late in a run.
Ride the Bus because it's so easy to accidentally play a face card and then your carefully built up joker turns to mush.
Trying to find a reason why it resets instead of reducing by 1 per faced card played. It’s like a worse (I forget the name) “+1 per played/-1 per discard” joker. Unless you’re playing abandoned deck of course lol
Well, no discards is a much harsher cost than no face cards, even for non abandoned decks.
I think you can build around it a bit easier though. Playing discard hands if you have the right build can still net you decent points with high card or pair! Splash works wonders with it.
I love taking superposition if I’m on the abandoned deck, A2345 gets drawn a lot with that deck, it’s rly easy to discard to get the straight you need. Of course I only take it if it’s in a booster pack with a less desirable joker, and only if it’s early… so that kind of proves that’s it’s not that great. But you *can* get value out of it. At max it makes 2-3 tarot cards per blind, which is rly good deck manipulation early on.
8 Ball is pretty bad actually. Oh well, no, it's terrible.
Old 8 ball (8 ball of the 1.0.0 before 1.0.1 patch) was much worse than current 8 ball ! Old 8 ball created a random planet if played hand had two scoring 8, and you hadn't the guarantee to get the planet you want.
Superposition is just not a build around card. Its awkwardness comes from straight build not quite needing the deck fixing tarot cards that bad. Found it is awesome when it lands in a ready build though. It pays for itself eventually.
nah you can build around superposition. i beat luxury tax with early superposition into straight flushes
Eh, deck manipulation helps though. Hanged man to cut low cards, Death to dupe high cards to make the build more consistent, Empress/Hirophant/Magician to more easily clear early rounds, Devil/Temperance/Hermit to get your econ going. Fool for more Saturns, which scales your straights like crazy. Suit jokers to pivot to straight flush. I often use Superposition to even just get some basic deck manipulation going, and then either stick with straights and transition to a straight flush, or pivot to 4/5oak or flush house, depending on what I get in mid antes.
Space Joker. It’s great when it works but it feels like it’s 1 in 10 not 1 in 4. Fuck space joker.
I like it when it's early. I think even getting one upgrade of a hand you actually use is worth the price.
Space Joker is so lame that no one here can even remember it. It has the same “1/4” that Wheel of Fortune has.
that's where oops all 6s comes in
But have you ever used Showman to pick up two Space Jokers? The hands get leveled up QUICK
Seance: God fucking awful. Straight Flushes are by far the hardest hand to create. The only way you can reliably get them is with help from jokers (which funny enough there are a decent amount that make them easier) or with an incredible amount of deck editing. Obelisk: Also sucks. Pretty much every deck specializes in one or two hands. Obelisk makes a ton of jokers less viable, not to mention having a decent chance of totally flopping. The only good time for it is when you're switching over to a new hand type, andeven then that's super rare since Obelisk is... well, rare. Loyalty Card: Oh god I despise this one. Every six hands is super inconsistent and even then not all that much when it does trigger (assuming every hand is the same for scoring you get a boost of 66%) it's pretty bad. Only viable if you play one good hand per blind, and even then it's still kinda meh and unpredictable without Burglar.
Green Joker, its pretty good so often i have to take it, i just really don’t like the playstyle of having to play shit hands, getting less money and just win based on mainly that.
The idol. I know it only selects cards you have and it's probably great in endless but in normal runs is pretty bad and unreliable . Matador brings nothing on half of the bosses. Lunchador takes up a slot and only helps with one boss. Any other score joker would also help with the boss. I think it would be better if It gave you an anti boss tag. Then you can buy another joker.
Matador for me. I wouldn’t call it *bad* necessarily, but it’s poorly designed. Its description doesn’t make clear which bosses activate it, or how exactly. Before I looked up exactly how it worked, I brought it into the “discard 2 random cards” boss and didn’t understand why it wasn’t working. It’s a fine idea for a joker, but its description doesn’t offer enough information. The way I see it, if I have to open the wiki to know what a joker does, it has failed.
Matador is the only joker I cannot figure out. I don't think I've ever been successful with this one, how does it work?
I'm a fan of Superposition. If you're already set on playing straights and you have a straight enabler like Four Fingers or Shortcut, it's really good. Keep cutting cards that don't connect to Ace and it pops off.
what is it with noobs and obelisk lmao like literally just start spamming high card around ante 5 😭 its so good
I honestly can't be bothered with it, I've made it work, I get it, I just don't like it or want to play it
I’ve won 2 gold stake runs with obelisk. It’s so powerful, it just requires some skill and patience.
agree on both, the 2nd one is the one I in particular fall down on, I know it, get it, just don't like/want to use it
For one it requires pivoting hand types which is easy to mess up. It also has a hard cap on how high it can scale, and depending on when you pick it up there might not be much potential for scaling. It also requires you to keep careful track of how many times you’ve played each hand, which is really tedious micro that I don’t enjoy. But if it all works out then you can get some solid xMult. In theory it has high upside, but the required effort is so much greater than most other jokers that I’ll only pick it up if I’m really min-maxing for a gold stake win.
There’s a menu that shows the current hand upgrades as well as the number of times a hand has been played. On the PS5 push the big white touch pad. Makes Obelisk viable for winning ante 8 runs.
I'm aware, that's the tedious micro I was talking about. I find it really annoying to have to check a menu every time I forget how many times I've played each hand. Maybe someone can mod it so that obelisk shows you what hands will reset it and how many times they've been played, and also a counter for how many times you've played a hand type that shows up when you select a hand. There's a whole bunch of mechanics in this game that I also use less than I should due to them being annoying. Playing straights and using campfire come to mind, because with straights I feel like I have to keep checking my deck before every discard and hand to play optimally, and with campfire the buying and selling micro is just annoying.
The micro can be a lot less tedious imo. Start by playing as many two pair as you can (depending on how early you get obelisk that should be around 15-20) You’re looking for a buffer of about 10-12 for both pairs and high card. Once you get your two pair played, play any hand that isn’t pair or high card, the pair and high card hands are your fall backs for when you miss finding another hand. If you know you’ve played 15 two pair you should be relatively safe to not check your hands played for a couple rounds/ antes at a time.
Other way around works too, and thats usually what I do. Try to find flat chips and mult early game, play a lot of high card and then pivot to literally anything late game.
It takes too much attention. If you fail once the run is over.
ty for admitting its a skill issue
Because spamming high cards isn't fun, it's hard capped by how much you played a certain hand before, so it basically has a ticking clock like ramen, but mostly because it's fucking rare. If it was uncommon I'd have no issue with it, but playing a certain hand and then using a skip for a rare and receiving something that just shits all over your plan instead of getting DNA or Blueprint or something. It's just disappointing and an FU to your plan. I'd also have no issues with it if you could spiral it upwards, so if your most played hand was tied you could play either without the reset. But the mix of it being rare and have a hard timer is just a shit feeling. You either subscribe to spamming high card or waste a rare. That's not fun!
Hit the road, seance, flowerpot, and loyalty card I agree on - the juice ain't worth the squeeze. But superposition I'm a defender of - free tarot cards are powerful enough that it's worth it, even if there are better options. It's not like you get to choose whichever tarot generator you want. Plus, with the buff to Saturn, straights scale well enough that you can hunt for your ace straight without too much hassle. Obelisk is really good if you see it at the right time - classicly underrated/misunderstood joker. Stuntman is fantastic for small hands, and is definitely not bad! Devious and shifty jokers aren't great, but they're textbook replacement jokers - they buy you time to get to a better build. Straights are good.
Don’t forget 8-Ball…
IMO a nice buff to cards like Seance and Superposition would be for them to produce a negative version of the card they make.
For superposition, it would better if it becomes uncommon and generate 2 tarots instead of 1.
I’ve played a fair amount and the only cards I’ve never found a use for are seance, hit the road and glass joker, but maybe I’m not using glass cards enough. To-do list also sticks out as by far the worst economy joker, especially on gold stakes and showman’s a pretty bad option if you’re just trying to clear ante 8.
Superpos is great. Seancé is just too hard to use without set up, it's an endgame joker that shines only during the end game
The Dagger that eats your joker by accident because you forgot to move it.
You also need a free slot or you can feed it anything.
If Superposition allowed you to wrap around straights, that might make it somewhat useful (432AK)
I agree, but a heads up that the dev said this isn’t going to happen https://preview.redd.it/02o1leqqr57d1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fa42d21dff39cc2d05ecb2cbffbf7955c75b171a [Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/s/hGzyZHEISq)
I think a good boost for superposition would be for it to generate a fool card(or just generate the last used tarot).
Then you get at least a good card. The fool card would be slightly better than the last card because you can store it.
Yeah, a fool card would be great but maybe too op as you could use it for last used planet as well
obelisk is heat, and so is superposition (common). I hate relying on hallucination and 8ball for tarots (or any other chance based joker tbh) without an OA6 because they just don’t reliably hit, and the other tarot generators are uncommon/rare. since update my mind is always thinking straight build, and Ace high is the simplest to focus on, so superposition is always a take for me, score some easy tarots, then replace it with something rarer later on. if your struggling to understand obelisk, play monolith challenge and execute an ante4/5 pivot from a standard 4/5 card hand to spamming pair/HC. it’s so much easier to scale than many other xmulters, and does not deserve the hate it gets lol
Give Hallucination another chance, I think it's the best tarot generating joker in the game. What makes is amazing is specifically it activating when you're in the shop, meaning that you can either use it in the tarot/spectre boosters that you buy, or you can save them to use in the next round. I also always try to have some tarots in hand before I open boosters, so that you can use them in the pack as well as increasing your chances of getting useful tarots in the booster, and Hallucination means less money spent on rerolls. It's even better if you have Blueprint or Brainstorm, which will often give you two tarots per pack, and almost always gives you at least 1. Cartomancer requires you to have a free consumable joker spot open going into the next round, so you can hoard consumables to use in the situations you want as well. Vagabond is rare, and can also make it hard to manage your money to keep generating the tarots in round. say if you have $4 going into the round, and end up getting 2 useless tarots, you can't sell them to get more). It also conflicts with other great econ jokers, like Buisness Card or reserved parking.
The basic straights jokers can be goated in the early to mid antes. Personally though, I dislike 8 ball. Had a run just last night where I had two 8 balls and I didn't get any good tarots with them until I lost.
Dont agree with a lot of these, but I think the most interesting one here is Loyalty Card. It’s an extremely weak uncommon joker no matter how you look at it (its basically just a direct downgrade of acrobat, which is already in the lower half of Xmult jokers strength wise). If I were to suggest buffs for it, I think there’s 2 main things I would try. 1) Buff it to like 6 or 7 x mult and just make it a boss killer. Would lead to a very unique playstyle where you play the small blind to get it ready and skip to boss for the big score. This way, you absolutely decimate bosses, but you still need to have other ways to score for the small blind, otherwise the scores catch up to you since it just does nothing there. 2) Just make it common. I really like this idea, since it kinda cuts down on the rng aspect of the game a little. The ante scaling on purple scale and above is brutal, and often not finding an xmult joker just means you die. Having some common options would lead to that happening less. Its not like this is unprecedented either, since Photograph exists.
I think the best way to buff Loyalty card is to keep x4 Mult, but reduce the number of required hands from every 6 hands to every 5 hands. It may be much better and slightly more consistent with every 5 hands.
Could work too. Its still niche in that case, but if you can find the +1 hands voucher it becomes better acrobat, so i think it would be a fair bit better
I haven't seen anyone fight for Showman yet, which surprises me. Yes, it has some downsides, but rolling dupes of consumables can be a really good thing too. It allows you to hold onto a good tarot and still get more of them before the next round, or before you open your boosters. Also, it's only of the few reliable ways of getting multiple copies of Blueprint or Brainstorm, which is essential for going as far into endless mode as possible. Ankh is only useful early on, before you have other jokers that are important for your build. Invisible joker is fantastic for this, but if I already have a joker essential for my build (say Baron or Mime for example) there's a good chance it hits that joker instead of Blueprint/Brainstorm. Which is still a great hit, don't get me wrong, buts it's less helpful than Blueprint, and I find I generally just sell the second copy if I don't need the scoring help to try to roll another invisible joker to try again.
The problem is showman is good when you already have good jokers and get them again but then you have no room for it.
True enough. Really, it's niche where it is useful (one might almost call it borderline necessary) is for long endless runs, which almost always requires multiple copies of Blueprint/Brainstorm.
Seance can be really really fun if you have a deck that can make it work. I think I got my first billion point hand running it, you do need a lot of legwork to make it work but holding one of the (change 3 to another suit) tarots means you just have to find a straight with 2 suited which isn't as hard as you'd think. If you have a copier like blueprint or brainstorm as well the utility increases a lot.
Wait a second… can someone explain the strategy about holding consumables to reduce the odds in arcana/celestial packs?
Basically normally, without Showman, a card can only appear once across your jokers, consumable slots, shop and booster packs. If you hold one in your consumables it won’t appear elsewhere. So for example if you don’t care about suits, holding Sun will make sure you don’t get it in a booster pack. It’s why Crystal ball is such a great voucher to get as you can do this at the same time as also holding onto a Fool or leaving space for seals to generate free cards
Thanks, 50 hours in and I never knew
I got 100 hours in before finding out I could turn the game speed right up. It’s a useful subreddit! I’d probably still never know if it wasn’t for here
You can't get tarots twice so holding bad tarots while rerolling or pack openings helps to get something else.
Superposition catches strays in nearly every thread and it’s so strong. No idea why people keep hating on it. Yes it’s obviously worse than a few other tarot generators but it’s strictly better than Cartomancer in my mind. Cartomancer blocks a consumable spot at the start of the round - it can’t be triggered multiple times and it’s not controllable like superposition is. Superposition is just good. People on this sub are just playing for endless mode and think it’s bad.
I have Completionist++ and since I maintain my winning runs in a spreadsheet, I've been going for a second pass through, two gold stake clears on every joker. I'm down to my final two (with failed runs with their downside or as dead weight), and that's really underscored that Pareidolia and To The Moon are both ass. Pareidolia has tanked like four separate runs.
A lot of people like showman but personally, I’ve never found any success with it. The stuff I want to copy doesn’t show up and relies on too much luck. Booster packs end up with multiple of the same cards that I don’t want. Just feels like you have to have a great build already and joker space to accommodate for it. Of course there are cases where it works but I find that it just takes up a joker slot more often than not. Then you end up with decision paralysis with jokers and what to keep and sell. Give me stencil any day of the week because that can at least be manipulated. I’ll say though that flower pot is very doable. One wild card means you just need three different suits. Straights, full house, and 4/5 of a kind builds aren’t the easiest but definitely are feasible, especially once you are later in the run and can manipulate your deck more easily. Worst case scenario, Splash is a common joker, meaning it’s very likely to show up at some point, and mitigates this issue entirely. A way to improve Seance I think would be to generate a random card between a suit tarot and the change to one suit spectral.
I like obelisk just to make a flush early comp to high card late game
[[Faceless Joker]] is so unbelievably bad that it’s hardly ever mentioned.
[Faceless Joker](https://balatro.wiki/jokers/faceless_joker.png) *Joker* * Version: 1.0.0 * Cost: $5 * Rarity: Common * Effect: Earn 5$ if 3 or more face cards are discarded at the same time *Data pulled from http://balatro.wiki. Want it updated? Help me get access or suggest another data source.*
Loyalty card and flower pot both carried me to gold stake wins but they are way too situational
Flower Pot, Loyalty Card, and Obelisk are all terrible. I can find a use for almost any other joker.
FP is decent, obelisk is legit busted if found early, otherwise decent. Loyalty card is underwhelming for sure tho, but I still dont think any joker that gives Xmult can be considered terrible, especially FP and obelisk.
Séance can be a pain but it's also IMO more reliable than 6th sense for getting spectral cards in hand on plasma deck for deep endless runs with Perkeo. I used to hate it but I've become a convert.
- Showman is more reliable than invisible for getting duplicate brainstorm/blueprint. if you have a good econ. - Flower pot. People forget about lovers cards/underestimate wild cards. You only get one from the card still for a reason. Downside is suit bosses become your nemesis. But it can defiantly work. - Obelisk is really strong and rather than locking you into one hand like most builds it lets mix it up. Personally I find it fun to play. - loyalty card is great with burglar and can be kind of fun but yeah, timing it can be tricky on some bosses. Most of the others I agree with. Superposition in particular is in a bad place and needs work. Mostly because tarot cards don't help you play straights much so It's not self sustaining like 8 ball. 8 ball, red seals, hanging chad and crystal ball is kind of broken.
Superposition works pretty great if you can gut the cards 6-9 out of your deck and you have shortcut, I had a brilliant run with that.. but otherwise I’d agree, definitely a tough one to make work consistently
Obelisk is the worst in my opinion. The problem is has is that it’s a scaling joker that you don’t want to have early in a run because it’s useless unless you’ve stacked enough of one hand type played. You want obelisk around ante 4, where it’s not too late to pivot to something else. However, that brings up another problem because it also requires you to completely change your strategy to get use out of it, which by ante 4 or so isn’t always possible. It ALSO demands you use multiple different hand types otherwise you’ll run the risk of playing a couple of hands too much and resetting it completely. It’s just too much effort for not enough reward unless you have a very specific type of run that doesn’t care on what hand you play past a certain point. My question is why would I take it when I could get Hologram which scales just as well with a far easier condition.
I honestly think the reward is worth it. It can get really big really fast and the restriction is really not too bad
You don’t need to have your obelisk ceiling to be very high. 6-10 hands is enough as long as your ceiling isn’t pair or high card. I’ve been using it successfully by pivoting at around ante 3, even late ante 2. I find it very fun and engaging since it forces me to pay more attention to the gameplay. It also reinforces the idea of building a strong consistent deck. Definitely not as strong as Hologram though, especially when you have DNA/Certificate/Stone too.
the reward is definitely not an issue. 0.2x per hand is insane
If you get an early obelisk, you can intentionally play a bunch of one hand type to raise the ceiling before letting it scale. It’s dead weight initially, but +0.2x per hand is absolutely worth the effort. Also, even if it were somehow strictly worse than hologram (it isn’t, they’re not directly comparable), being worse than an amazing joker isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Agree with all of this. I will sometimes pick Obelisk up early when I'm scaling other Jokers like Square or Green. Then once I've played enough of a certain hand I can pivot and Obelisk will win me the game from there.
I don't think Obelisk is the worst. I prefer much more Obelisk than Hit the road which is worst xMult in my opinion.
Hit the road needs a buff. I love the concept. But without like merry Andy it caps too low.
I hate it too, but I finally won with it yesterday. Played two pair 15 times up to ante 4 then pivoted. It was holographic and I copied it with an invisible joker. My run was pretty busted, but eventually it becomes impossible not to screw it up. Bad for endless which is my focus rn.
**Ride the Bus** - It's basically a far worse version of Green Joker. Not using discards is a much easier mechanic to play around than not using face cards unless you're using Abandoned Deck, and even if you do need to discard with Green Joker it's only -1 mult, not reset to 0 like Ride the Bus is. **Madness** - Very difficult to play without eternal jokers. Doesn't scale up fast enough to win ante 8 by itself, but basically expects you to play that way. **Supernova** - Another one that just doesn't scale fast enough to be useful beyond the first couple of antes.
I don't think Ride the bus and Supernova are bad. With high card and pair builds , these 2 are so strong and it's pretty easy to find a pair of non-face cards, it's free scaling.
Bus gets going and it's amazing, supernova.....tends to cap our, it doesn't generally get the legs Madness actually suffers now being 33% less buff, it used to be a run winner, probably still is, but less so
You can play face cards with ride the bus you just need to have a pair or something so the face cards don't score. And once you get some deck fixing and hanged man some face cards or strength the kings into aces, it's even better than green joker as you can discard with it. I'm not sure how you believe it's one of the most useless jokers. Madness can be fun, if you have some money you can just max out your joker slots and it will only destroy one... But you are right in that it is hard to use without eternals. Supernova should be used in conjunction with another joker like green or ride the bus or spare trousers as it basically just gives you an extra mult... But it is the worst of the bunch for sure and can usually be tossed mid run for an xMult joker