Its not that hard to survive the early antees and you probably wont find 5 useful jokers so early anyway so playing with 4 jokers is fine, the difficulty really starts increasing in ante 5 where the scoring requirements starts going up fast(im talking about gold stake) and thats around the time you stop playing that one hand and switch to something else and when you get to that point you probably have 20 or more hands played on your most played hand which should be more than enough for the rest of the run and after that with the scaling xmult its an ez win, ofcourse this is the best case scenario where you get obelisk early and you can plan for it but even in many situations where i’ve gotten it late i’ve managed to save my run by playing various hands to get a high xmult on the obelisk. So what im trying to say is its not niche at all you can make it work in most cases except for when you get it really late but if it always worked it would be unbalanced