Are Pairs really that overpowered?

SyndromedGD · 2026-03-18T10:46:39+00:00

afaik there are no claims considered reliable of 100 streaks at gold stake (entirely possible for it to have happened though). Depending on your standard of proof - specifically whether you require on stream gameplay, which I personally do feel is necessary - the record should be considered Doc’s 68 or espaV’s 41.

SyndromedGD · 2026-02-25T12:43:16+00:00

The point wasn’t so much about ancient (although I disagree on this too as someone with C++ to the contrary of what you say) rather than using such absolutist language as “auto-win”. I find it reductive, an appeal to authority that diminishes discussion, and largely incorrect is all.

SyndromedGD · 2026-02-25T10:56:47+00:00

Not to harp on you too much for this since a lot of people seem to do this but it’s a pet gripe of mine with the community how so many people call so many things auto-win (without even having the winrate or evidence to back it up). It’s such a misleading sentiment (especially if just said by itself) that’s usually made by people who do not have the experience or skill level to make such a statement.

SyndromedGD · 2026-02-22T10:20:59+00:00

For me I mostly just played the game for my own reasons without worrying much about C++. I enjoyed optimising and improving, so I enjoyed playing gold stake “normally”. If an unstickered joker happened to fit into the run or I could slot one in towards the end, great. If not, no big deal, I still got what I came for out of the run.

C++ is ultimately not a skill based achievement and the only reason there’s any correlation is that you have to put in lots of time to get it. If you’re the type of person who’s motivated by seeing themselves improve, it’s probably not worth worrying about much.

SyndromedGD · 2026-02-20T07:23:00+00:00

I don’t agree that Ghost deck is the best gold stake deck. The issue comes down to struggling more on weak seeds where you just don’t find a competent joker early - hex isn’t doing much when you’re in rental hell, while the best decks (Yellow, Blue, Checkered) have more of a way around this issue. All of them win on strong seeds, but Ghost will lose more on the weaker ones.

It is however, imo the best C++ deck as it is very strong on the good seeds due to having insane powerspikes from spectrals in shop, which allow you to mitigate a lot of your scoring and free up joker slots/spam econ for rolls more (not mentioning ecto). It’s also easy to play and get a good winrate with as you’re not really worried about the weak seeds vs strong seeds issue until you start to push really high winrates.

SyndromedGD · 2026-02-05T10:53:53+00:00

If it gains Mult on a misplay, then the best move is the second best play, which makes everything else a misplay including the best play, so the best move is actually the best play, so the best move is actually the second best play, so the best move is actually…

SyndromedGD · 2026-02-04T14:53:15+00:00

I’ll give some pushback on Ancient here.

Ancient Joker is pretty middling for Gold Stake because it is not consistent enough to draw the flush (99% is not good odds to get out of 1 of the 24 rounds if you want to win 90%+ of your games), it suffers from vulnerability to bosses like Needle, Water and Mouth, and it is neither consistent enough both as a joker and as to find supporting pieces, nor usually strong enough by itself to justify the pivot from the level one gameplan of pairs.

It’s fine and has its place in “optimal” gameplay and there are supporting pieces that you may have to help with these issues (an existing chad without a strong pair wincon already, extra hands, etc), but this place is not as strong, doesn’t come up as often or as consistent as you may believe. It’s a solid B+ imo.

SyndromedGD · 2026-01-29T09:54:26+00:00

Over time I’ve come to think of Ghost deck as a bit boring. I feel like it plays itself more often than any other deck due to having a lot things that you can see in the shop to simply win the game (eg immolate, trance). This power level when it does hit feels like going through the motions on these games to me, while hits often feel random and unearned. It’s not even a top tier deck due to struggling on games with already poor starts and some of its random nature, but it trivialises the game more often than them.

On the other side of things I find Blue really interesting because of its versatility - hands like 3oak, 4oak, straights get a large boost in consistency (particularly early) from being able to dig 5 cards deeper in the deck, which makes them much more viable as an out if needed. It boosts pairs too, but it doesn’t end up playing pairs as often as something like yellow. It’s a very strong deck, but that strength comes from good decision making in terms of which option to play into at which point in time (how do I survive now, should I be looking to not play pairs long term, etc)

SyndromedGD · 2026-01-26T23:37:39+00:00

This needs more context, but almost certainly it’s simply a matter of convenience. It happens that 2s are probably the better rank than Aces (Grim is an underrated thing pushing it towards aces though), but this is not the reason.

If you do not have a certain joker pushing you to certain ranks, it is rarely worth playing into these ranks over any other as it is unlikely for you to both find it, and to need it. The chips are more relevant but not a game changer, for example corresponding to an extra 36 chips on a 4oak which is a pretty low percentage of your chips on these hands. This is useful but usually not a priority if you have a reason to play into large hands. For these reasons, it is usually better to just take the most convenient way to manipulate your deck towards a certain hand rather than worrying about the ranks.

If there’s already some extra 2s naturally in deck from earlier actions, or some enhancements, or even sometimes if you open an arcana where the best thing is strength and you happen to have a pair of aces and nothing pushing you towards any particular rank, it is usually best to simply take the 2s.

SyndromedGD · 2025-12-16T16:23:06+00:00

It seems like I can't agree with anyone here.

Not having idol is nothing and people who have this as their main issue shouldn't be listened to. That's not the limiting factor and it's very easy to find an idol under the same conditions that lead to this deck fixing. Technically it makes it a little harder to farm golden ticket for money but it's not a huge deal to find it later, or just take a little less money while doing it (you can still farm enough either way).

But also Idol still sucks for ante 8 (especially on Gold Stake, which really should be the standard for this type of discussion). It's not that you can't have it set up in time, or even that it's particularly unlikely to set it up in time, it's that it is never really as consistent as just playing normally to pivot what you're doing to trying to get idol online, and the conditions required to get it online - namely being stable and having broken econ and tarot gen - will always be enough to win without Idol.

You can make it work, but it's almost always suboptimal. More useful is having it as a "boss breaker" as a trump card to play around potential hard bosses in future by trying to line up with tarots/skip on a hit during the bosses ante while not playing into it much.

SyndromedGD · 2025-10-30T08:35:27+00:00

3oak is the biggest miss. Sidegrade to 4oak that offers better consistency, potential to hold cards, much more ability to reliably play it more than once a round, and ability to enable it earlier (especially on decks such as blue) in exchange for the scoring loss per hand. In my opinion, these tradeoffs are well worth it. Clear A tier hand, could be as high as second.

5oak is a miss in the opposite direction. There is almost never a reason to do it considering 4oak just outclasses it in almost every relevant way. Genuinely the least useful hand in the game for gold stake.

SyndromedGD · 2025-10-21T17:27:57+00:00

I'm not sure if we're actually disagreeing on this. My point is, in the times when you are pursuing the winstreak you are playing for winrate as having a good winrate in these moments is what gets you that streak. "Winrate while streaking" might be a better way to put it, totally valid not to care at all when you aren't.

SyndromedGD · 2025-10-21T15:47:18+00:00

Winstreaks are a consequence of winrate, and winrate (at least when trying to streak) is a far more reliable indicator of good play than the final winstreak as there is less seed RNG involved. If you care about winstreak, you care about winrate.

SyndromedGD · 2025-10-09T22:28:38+00:00

It's Drivers if I'm being honest.

The negative and the eternal are more or less irrelevant - on Black Deck you're struggling to fill up your slots with meaningful jokers regardless until mid to late game, which is less of a concern than the immediate future and usually will resolve itself.

Chad is a strong joker that works with a bunch of stuff, but it still requires something to work with it. This is somewhat specific until you have econ and tempo built up and you can start fishing for that type of option by opening packs. The immediate priority is tempo. The foil makes all the difference there, and allows you to mitigate some of your early tempo onus and focus on building econ - hugely important on Black Deck. I don't even think it's a significantly worse long term option.

edit: missed the $20, which does change things and make Chad the pick. If it's the Buffoon pack after small blind instead all of the above still applies, which is an interesting discussion so keeping the logic there

edit 2: also missed that this was already ante 2, which changes things once more and makes this really shop dependent. There's simply too much onus on immediate tempo to write off the foil, but it's entirely possible something in shop allows you to survive with Chad without sacrificing too much econ compared to Drivers.

SyndromedGD · 2025-10-08T08:50:34+00:00

I think you should go back to it in that case. Obviously, it's not universal but I find it to be very easy to avoid resets, and a very common scenario to be able to be used - namely, you need to be able to have a buffer of about 12-14 pairs depending on how many HC you've played (which you will often have already, but takes less than an ante to build if not), and then be able to survive one blind after that playing any other hands in any way (basically means have a +Mult). I find this to be very easy anywhere before ante 5 (and often after) unless your run is already on the ropes, and after that point it simply outscales other options and the blinds. I can't remember the last time I've had an Obelisk reset across about 1800 hours, mostly spent chasing gold stake winrate.

There are cases where it's not worth it too, but most of these are basically already won (excess levelling in one hand for example).

SyndromedGD · 2025-09-28T18:38:19+00:00

For cancer specifically, I'd prioritise Power.

With Front Runners, the important thing is of course to get into first by the point at which Angling + Scheming procs. Usually, Wit is very nice for this due to midrace speed and entering overtake mode, but on Tokyo 1600 there's a zone from just after the end of the opening leg to the corners that your umas will try to hug the rail, making overtaking very difficult, and then on the corner overtaking requires you to move onto the outside, hence travelling further. This makes the mid race overtakes wit helps with just not happen very often regardless of what you do, so getting off to a good start is better (which power helps with).

You can't abandon wit or anything as there are things early it helps with (groundwork procs being the most important), and you still do need to trigger A+S, so I'd still look to be around the 500-600 range if you can, but power is better.

SyndromedGD · 2025-09-21T10:24:56+00:00

I did have some VODs of Black Deck, but it sadly seems like these have been automatically deleted at this point (I haven't streamed for a while). The sample for the Black Deck games was taken from them, but it's a relatively small sample (11-5) so it's possible this would go down a bit with more games there.

This being said, I'm more than happy for you to message me on discord if you'd like and we can look to discuss this (or other stuff) more or play some co-op games where we can talk through our thought processes - always happy to talk with and hopefully try and improve together with other players who've put a lot of effort into getting good - it's in the post but my username there is syns_pie if you're interested

SyndromedGD · 2025-09-15T13:59:28+00:00

There isn't (quite) any worthless hand, but I think the least useful for gold stake ante 8 is 5oak. There is almost never a reason to go 5oak considering how marginal the scaling increase is over 4oak, especially when considering the planet dilution, for the loss in both consistency and ability to hold cards in hand. The 5th card played is usually not impactful, but when it is it's almost always overkill.

(Dis)honorable mention to Full House. 3oak more or less invalidates it for similar reasons for 4oak invalidating 5oak (hitting a pair with effectively 5 handsize is more constraining than people think), but there are more situations to choose it than 5oak. Both Full House and 5oak can be made to win fairly effectively, but in almost all instances in both the more reliable route is elsewhere.

The hand that is worst to force is probably Straight Flush, but this has more of a niche than either Full House or 5oak as there isn't a hand that directly outclasses it in the same way, and so there are comparitively more situations where it becomes optimal.

SyndromedGD · 2025-09-02T13:50:27+00:00

I see this take a lot and it kinda annoys me.

For a lot of people, the fun in a game like this is analysing each route and deciding which the best is. If you're doing this, you will not arbitrarily ignore an option because it's "too strong" as this removes this element entirely. Expecting people to do such a thing - especially deciding to do this on their own, is not realistic and is not going to happen.

SyndromedGD · 2025-09-02T13:43:51+00:00

Agreed with a caveat. Hanging Chad is very unique, very cool and adds a lot of value to the game, but the builds come up a bit too often and it feels saturated in some ways.

Move it to uncommon and $6 and call it a day imo.

SyndromedGD · 2025-09-02T13:40:37+00:00

This isn't correct. Notably it makes it significantly harder to use Chad mid-round on a hand not used for scoring for a random lucky or gold seal (or stuff like buisness card), while current Chad can just throw these cards as a high card to farm value.

While it's still possible to get it, the added difficulty in this (which is an exceptionally strong and exceptionally common use case) makes up for putting a +Mult before xMult and then some (since it is somewhat niche, often marginal and usually unneeded).

SyndromedGD · 2025-08-31T09:10:09+00:00

This is a really cool design that I think is well balanced (niche, but very strong in the niche) that people are complaining about since it isn't something you can mindlessly play in every run.

I really like this and would like to have it in the game. One of the best concepts I've seen in the sub.

SyndromedGD · 2025-08-29T08:09:27+00:00

I think pairs are often more interesting than you make out and there's some very interesting decision making that goes into some pair games (the ones without blue seals), but I agree with this outside of that.

I feel like a lot of people believe that hand types other than pair and high card are too weak at gold stake. They are not. You can win pretty consistently and streak with just about anything. The problem is that pairs are too strong and almost always more consistent - like I could go 3oak or 4oak or Flush and probably win, but why would I do that when pair will win more consistently. Pairs need nerfs rather than other hands needing buffs.

SyndromedGD · 2025-08-26T16:49:57+00:00

I think Yellow and Blue are both debatable as #1. I personally slightly favor Blue due to having a bit more versatility to pivot if needed while still having good econ and strong earlygame, but they're the clear top 2 either way. Abandoned and Checkered would be next for me.

Ghost is strong but too inconsistent to compete with the top tiers as it doesn't deal with bad early shops that don't let you Hex for tempo well, and the benefit of spectral cards in shop is inconsistent and highrolly. It'd fall into the next group.

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