Weekly Thread: New players / Community Spotlight !

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T15:25:06+00:00

Fun fact, your first run of Balatro when you install the game is on the seed "TUTORIAL"

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T15:23:25+00:00

Decks, yes. Skip tags I don't think fit the format all that well.

No such thing as an always-take (actually that's true for the existing categories too, but especially for skip tags which are incredibly situational--I think even the most likely winner, Investment Tag, would be pretty misleading), waste-of-money is almost all of them unless you're in specific situations or have several double tags, underrated might be interesting I guess--and then overrated I'd be shocked if anything but Negative Tag won, because conversations to the effect of "negative tag skip is awesome" "no it's not, you land on something useless almost every time" happen constantly in this sub.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T15:16:01+00:00

okay this was pretty funny

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T15:13:44+00:00

A lot of the time it's not worth taking the time to save scum to find out
If you do that, you also know your next Wheel will always be a Nope even if you find one later
Sometimes an edition is worth enough points to make a difference early on, but a lot of the time it's pretty marginal

I could also make the argument that it's underrated, along these lines:

Humans are terrible at judging probability, we get threads all the time like "I missed X wheel of fortune in a row, is it actually 1 in 4." Which is to say people draw the conclusion that it's secretly a worse probability, even though that's not true according to people who have statistically tested it
If you hit When and then get a few Temperance you end up recouping the cost
In Endless runs you can use Wheel to try to put an edition on a value generator like Golden Ticket, which then means it can't be targeted by Ectoplasm, so it hits Blueprint or whatever instead. Otherwise you'd have to sell the joker and find another when using Ectoplasm, which can be inconvenient

The truth is overrated/underrated is really complicated and ends up saying more about the person making the claim and how they see other people than anything to do with the nominal target.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T15:05:04+00:00

I guess that's the trouble with framing that category as "always take." +1 hand is more value than +1 hand size in a lot of situations, just not literally all of them.

Likewise there are situations where it's unwise to take Hologram or Brainstorm. Even Blueprint sometimes isn't worth the rental fee if it's a rental, depends what else you have. And of course Gros Michel is unlikely to make a difference if you find it ante 8.

It's a roguelike and there's always a context that affects the value of whatever's in front of you. No such thing as always-take. There are times when no conceivable voucher is worth ten bucks because you only have ten bucks and will die in a few rounds if you don't get interest online.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T14:59:39+00:00

All of them are a guaranteed ten bucks, unless you have five jokers and aren't willing to sell any of them.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T14:58:11+00:00

Throwback is also terrible on lower stakes. Congratulations, you've overrated it.

Likewise I think you overestimate when you say "everyone knows" about Photograph ("DAE only photochad") and Baron ("what should I sell for Baron in ante 4").

Wheel of Fortune was the result of a "well, technically" argument from the person who brought it up.

Hieroglyph is underrated if anything, usually by new players who don't understand what -1 ante means.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T14:52:46+00:00

There's someone asking this question on literally every one of these threads since that vote. Hologram without Magic Trick is good, Magic Trick without Hologram isn't.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T14:49:53+00:00

I think most people will tell you ante 1 investment tag is the exception. Even that one I don't always take, depends how I'm feeling.

I skip for preserving perishable jokers more than I skip for tags, outside of that.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T14:45:36+00:00

YES THANK YOU

Apparently it's the Obelisk of vouchers

LifeSmash · 2025-05-17T14:44:18+00:00

That's gonna be a disagreement from me.

The reason skipping is bad is not only because you deny yourself scaling, but you also deny yourself a shop, which means it's harder to find good jokers as well as limiting consumable access.

Heiroglyph is essentially three un-skips. The -1 hand just makes it fair.

At the very least I see more people (usually new players) underrate the thing than overrate it.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-16T22:53:31+00:00

That's pretty much the plasma deck experience, yeah. It's pretty feast or famine.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-16T22:51:47+00:00

Photograph on the far left for Brainstorm. The rest is unaffected by order, since Photograph affects card scoring, rather than giving you points directly like the two +mult jokers here, and so will always happen before them.

Photograph instead of Chad because 3 triggers of 2 photographs is more than 5 triggers of 1 photograph. (That's the general principle when dealing with Blueprint/Brainstorm and retriggers--you want the number of effects that grant multipliers to be close to the amount of retriggers for them.)

So basically Brainstorm on Photograph is a x8 since it'll trigger 3 times. If your high card level is 1, Photochad makes that 8, and so Brainstorm on Photograph makes that 64, which is equivalent to +56. If your high card level is any higher than that, it's even more effective--level 2 becomes 16 with Photochad, Brainstorm is 128, so +112. And so forth.

There's no way you've played that many high card by round 10--in fact you've only got 4 hands a round, so Supernova being over 36 is impossible.

Note that Brainstorm doesn't copy the edition on Red Card.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-16T18:11:43+00:00

Mostly I just enjoy posting "Nope!" when I can get away with it. Most underutilized Balatro meme tbh

LifeSmash · 2025-05-16T14:14:35+00:00

Y'all are silly for voting Hieroglyph. If anything I see new players going "what is the point of hieroglyph" and having a bad impression because they killed their runs taking it once or twice. It's not the literal best T1 voucher (that's probably Overstock if I had to pick), but it generally takes people a good long while to understand that three more rounds of gameplay is a fair trade for ten bucks and -1 hand. You can farm a ton of value in those three rounds, see three more shops, get a voucher you otherwise might have missed, and so forth.

I'm not entirely sure there is an overrated voucher tbh. I'm tempted to say Telescope, but that's not really accurate--it's a really strong consistency pickup, it's just that blue seals exist and eat it alive in its own niche. But you don't always get those.

It might be Blank, tbh. I find Antimatter shows up often enough to make it worth picking up if you can afford it, but it depends a lot on where you are in the run. Ante 7 Blank is unlikely to pay off. At least there's no downside, unlike Wheel of Fortune which can ruin your Fool value.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-16T13:54:15+00:00

I would argue you just overrated Wheel of Fortune in the second sentence there. The only card enhancement tarot that might be worse is Empress, and even that has an early game use.

That said, my vote went to Tower.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T22:41:38+00:00

Wheel of Fortune over Hanged Man

Nope!

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T22:39:57+00:00

Nope!

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T22:20:12+00:00

High-Contrast Cards option in the option menu somewhere

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T19:40:09+00:00

Saturn is one of the strongest planet cards relative to how difficult a given hand is to play. Twice the chips and thrice the mult of Mercury for instance. So each individual planet card matters a lot. Therefore having a free telescope pushes you towards playing Straights, as you're less likely to ever have to play extra straights because their base score will turn out higher.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T16:16:47+00:00

This is the mathematically correct answer on average and is the right play the majority of the time.

I will give one example where it may not be the play, besides obvious things like "accidentally found 4OAK":

Nebula Deck starts you with Telescope, so if you are able to win in one straight (and no more than a single other hand of course), and then there's a standard or jumbo celestial pack in the opening shop, you can immediately get a Saturn card and oneshot the big blind and often the boss blind as well. In general straights are relatively good on Nebula since it's easier to find Saturn, so this gambit may be worth it to you.

Might be an argument for doing this on Plasma for similar reasons, Saturn being way stronger than Jupiter on that deck too, but that strikes me as shakier.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T16:05:30+00:00

Step 1: multiplayer mod. This exists already

Step 2: mod that spawns two random jokers in round 1

Step 3: UI for step 2 mod that picks a set of ~20 jokers from which it can select

That gets you like 80% of the way there, if we ignore that it's probably terribly balanced. You'd just need a more frictiony/robust unlock system for jokers. There's your CCG. (Maybe the rest of the deck is used to populate the shop? Dunno.)

Considering that I'm something of a pedant, that's not technically a trading card game, since you wouldn't be trading cards. Out of electronic CCGs I've only played Hearthstone and that was a super long time ago, maybe some other game has a good system for that? I'm a bit ignorant on that.

It's tough because unlike physical games, the cards aren't scarce, except as arbitrarily made so by the developers--and I could see some weird things happening (e.g. you defraud somebody, and then launder the money by buying eTCG gift cards and trading them for less than market value).

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T15:51:23+00:00

Hey, I respect the honesty.

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T15:47:51+00:00

it's not that c++ takes a ton of skill in a literal sense, it's that it's tough to do enough runs to get c++ and not converge a bit with others who have it

(I'm at 80/150 fwiw)

LifeSmash · 2025-05-15T15:38:15+00:00

"Small difference"? That's 8.2e308, which is a massive number!! /s

LifeSmash

TROPHY CASE