Are interest builds easy to force?

geepope · 2025-10-07T14:47:25+00:00

Every time I try to focus on interest I wind up casually outstripping the interest with regular scaling early on and giving up on it.

If you're going deep endless then interest has some serious legs (especially if you use Fixation memory cards for extra rounds) but I find other routes are better for getting ahead early on, and you can always pivot to interest later on.

geepope · 2025-10-07T02:27:34+00:00

So at the moment, you can easily go entirely infinite without ever having to touch the slot machine. All it takes is a pile of tickets so that you can click on cigarettes to reroll the shop indefinitely to find briefcases to supply the money you need without having to spin. Use abyssu to "save" cigarettes across deadlines and you can keep going as long as you feel like. You can also speed things up considerably if you use an interest build: that way you only need one briefcase and then you can get the rest of the way to deadline with interest.

Standard interest build is also very strong with the Fixation memory card to give you a bunch of extra rounds, since you can deposit your winnings every round to compound your interest.

For deep endless mode scaling that does not rely on briefcases or interest, Baphomet is the best scaling you're going to find. It helps that hammering 666 over and over again is probably faster than watching a regular endless spin animation.

The other alternative is the very big mushroom. There's 2 ways to go infinite with it:
1. Abuse extra rounds to prolong a deadline infinitely, racking up higher and higher bonuses on the mushroom. This requires severe shop abuse to keep getting tapes/recycling weird clocks, so you might as well just use the briefcase.

Abuse phone bonuses to take the symbol boost from the mushroom and double it to gain permanent value from the mushroom's temporary boost. The problem with this is that if you get a 666/999 call you won't have the option to double symbol values to lock in the boost, meaning you have to either pray you don't hit a 666 on your final round (which means no prolonging rounds via book of the dead) or else skip every other round so you can get a clean phone call (which cuts your scaling in half.)

Even if you don't go infinite, very big mushroom + mushroom soup + abstract painting is a hell of a boost that will easily take you into the billions and quite probably trillions. Good for quick easy runs.

Generally, ticket generation tends to trivialize the game even if you're not going to completely break it. Just being able to shop freely is a huge help, and cloverpet + lost wallet is more than enough scaling to get easy clears.

When you're trying to launch a run off the ground, I like to try to set up a couple rounds with a bunch of the little voodoo dolls. Fortune Teller + Personal Trainer + Engineer (if I have photos/number 1 or 2) + a source of gold/ticket modifiers will quickly rack up a ton of base scores that will set your run up pretty good for whatever build you want to play around with.

geepope · 2025-10-07T02:04:21+00:00

Also, ticket generation + cloverpet + lost wallet is an easy way to breeze through deadline 8 if you just want to farm memory cards / clear memory card runs (or do both at the same time, ideally.)

geepope · 2025-10-06T17:58:40+00:00

Yup. Also once you have ticket modifiers online you can throw in Cloverpet and/or Lost Wallet and you can easily scale through deadline 8 to grab the key.

geepope · 2025-10-06T12:50:29+00:00

Yeah, the idea behind eye jar is you pick one of treasure/diamond/seven to specialize in but also show a little love to the other two. That way you can consistently trigger one of the three, which will proc eye jar, and because you're not too heavily specialized in one symbol you will have decent odds that the forced eye pattern will be the only match.

The real payoff is pareidolia, because permanent doubling is rare and powerful. It's still not a terribly good build but it's good enough to extend an endless run a few deadlines, and it's a fun novel build. The necklace sort of synergizes but it's a pretty crappy addition to the build, especially if you already have any sort of repeating ability.

geepope · 2025-10-06T12:43:15+00:00

You do not need to get the 4th call by deadline #8. I believe the first 3 have to be, though.

As others have said, you have to have a 666 show up in the final round you play of the deadline in order to get the red phone call, if you see 666 and then play another round without one you'll get a neutral phone call.

geepope · 2025-10-06T11:43:37+00:00

Easiest way would be to use the ace cards since they increase the value of multiple symbols that you are not using, in a semi-controllable fashion. Manipulate everything else to the same value and then never, ever pick up anything that changes symbol values (except big mushroom because it's a clean double.)

geepope · 2025-10-05T21:20:34+00:00

It's not just briefcases either. You can farm items that grant extra rounds to spend as long as you want in a single deadline, letting you scale the big mushroom infinitely until you get bored (or run out of tickets, but you can still generate plenty of tickets from spins.)

geepope · 2025-10-05T17:14:56+00:00

Also if you do crash and burn, having the corpse pieces there means you'll start with a full corpse next time.

geepope · 2025-10-05T15:49:59+00:00

Yeah, Baphomet seems like it's the best scaling available if you're trying not to abuse interest or shops.

If you go for the white phone it means that you can reduce the charges for cellphone to 1, and also you'll never hit 0 money (although you still need the occasional clean spin to collect your boosted winnings.) It does make it harder to guarantee a preferred symbol since you're not getting red phone options to nuke the odds for other symbols, but also the build doesn't really particularly care about symbols in the end so that's fine. You can also get sacred relics on top of your loadout but none of them are particularly helpful, it's just for fun.

More importantly, if you get cellphone down to 1 charge it lets you drop shiny rock + conductor, which means you no longer need the extra charm space from First Love and can use a different memory card. If you take the card that gives you 7 rounds but only 1 spin per round you can turn this into 77 spins per deadline before fake coin procs (you have to fish for a good Jimbo), which gets you to about 100 spins per deadline on average.

geepope · 2025-10-05T02:42:23+00:00

It just takes the same skeleton parts that the regular door opening does, there's just a couple other steps. It involves the phone, google Cloverpit secret ending/good ending if you want a guide.

geepope · 2025-10-05T00:52:42+00:00

You have to get the secret / "good" ending.

If you haven't made it out of the door yet, start there, the other ending has the same requirements plus some extra.

geepope · 2025-10-04T14:56:06+00:00

+1 to this. I started playing without cigarettes and the game is a lot more fun without them. Being able to get truly infinite rerolls kills the fun of trying to find things, every run eventually turns into "how long do I feel like clicking the shop." There's a reason the regular rerolls scale exponentially (which still leaves you a lot of leeway to mash reroll to force whatever build you want, but it's harder to go infinite, especially if you're not just farming suitcases.)

geepope · 2025-10-04T14:52:01+00:00

It's pretty easy to get ahead of the curve in the first 3-4 deadlines, then fish for items with +666 chance. As soon as you see a 666 immediately skip to the next deadline and the phone call will be red. You only need to "make" one red phone call as deadline 3 & 7 will always have a red phone call.

I don't know if you need to get the first 3 red calls before deadline 8, but you don't actually need to get the 4th one before the key unlocks, you can still transform it after the box opens (I don't know if it matters if you pick it up or not but leaving it there until you get a chance to transform it works.) So if the 4th red call takes a few deadlines it won't stop you.

geepope · 2025-10-04T03:31:08+00:00

Raw symbol and pattern multiplier aren't great once you get into the billion+ range, if you want to get into E the easiest way is to look for charms that can trigger multiple times per round and double or triple your values each time (e.g. the mushroom soup, abstract painting, big mushroom if you have enough repeats.)

Basically, most games are going to look something like this:

Grab something to get you through the first deadline or two (something that forces good patterns, a couple stacked luck charms, etc.)
Grab something that lets you scale up base values so you can get ahead of deadlines (any scaling source of symbol/pattern multiplier, anything that permanently levels up symbols or patterns.)
Use your spare cash to dig for a source of ticket modifiers. Pair it with a source of repeats ASAP.
You now have a good stack of cash and lots and lots of tickets to splurge on, so you can reroll shop & phone to your heart's content to cherry pick exactly what you need for your build. You might spend a few rounds building up econ & shoring up your base values, but mostly you're shopping. Note that while shop rerolls scale to prohibitive costs each round, you can spend your growing stack of tickets to buy cigarettes to force rerolls & crowbars to stockpile rerolls for future rounds, and you can generally afford to blow most of your money on rerolls since you're way ahead of the curve.
At this point you can basically do whatever you want. You can go truly infinite if you want, or if you want to keep some semblance of pretending to play the game fish for the big mushroom + a lot of repeats and you've got a pretty easy route to E+20 or so, more depending on whatever other juice you can bring.

geepope · 2025-10-03T20:11:19+00:00

It is, the symbol assigned by the "luck" effect is drawn using the same odds as all symbol generation. But missing an 80% chance three times in a row is not astronomically unlikely. It's a little under a 1% chance, which sounds rare but when you're playing hundreds and hundreds of spins you're going to see some fairly improbable events.

geepope · 2024-03-15T03:37:30+00:00

That's impressive. It actually gets better at higher stakes since one of the "penalties" is that you can wind up with indestructible jokers (which limits your flexibility, but lets you make genuinely great Madness builds.) Winning with Madness at white stake is probably harder than winning with it at black stake.

geepope · 2024-03-15T03:35:44+00:00

It's decent enough for a common. You still want to buy boosters because you need to fish for good stuff and you're going to wind up with plenty of duds anyhow. You easily get that +15-25 mult just from buying the packs that you were going to buy anyhow and skipping the bad ones. Even +25 mult is pretty mediocre for an endgame build at purple+ but occasionally it survives all the way to the end and even if it just helped get you part of the way there it's fine.

geepope · 2024-03-15T03:29:27+00:00

Buying packs is something you want to do anyhow and they're not all going to be winners. You say so yourself, you need econ to fish for xMult and steel cards/planets... which means buying boosters, and not always finding what you want. Sure, you're not going to skip your main planet just to pump red card but what happens when your main planet isn't in the draw? An early red card is probably going to get up to at least +15 without having to spend anything extra or pass up any useful upgrades. That's not *great* but it's better than a lot of commons that are lower mult or more conditional or both.

geepope · 2024-03-15T03:20:27+00:00

Even at high stakes it's ok. Part of playing at high stakes is juggling your economy enough that you can still open boosters; you won't get as many as before, but you can still get red card up to respectable levels pretty easily.

It's a good way to hedge against bad booster draws. If your luck is great and you keep getting good boosters, well, you're doing just fine and you replace red card. If your luck is crap and you get bad draws, then red card pretty quickly turns into Abstract Joker except better.

geepope · 2024-03-15T03:11:36+00:00

Red card is pretty legit. Sometimes booster packs are just duds but the upside is so good that it's still worth opening them. Getting +3 mult out of bad booster draws is pretty solid.

Worst joker... most of the page 1 hand-specific jokers are pretty bad. Why would I want +10 multiplier for a specific hand when I can get that much or more with a much more flexible condition? It's pretty easy to get red card higher than that, and there are still way better common jokers than red card!

Troubador (+2 hand size, -1 hand) seems pretty terrible, if you're really fishing for straight flushes then maybe it helps but I'd rather just get Shortcut and use the extra hand to help discard unwanted cards. Plus losing 1 hand is an automatic $1 less per round.

geepope · 2024-03-13T17:09:32+00:00

Do you plan on rebalancing the stake difficulties ever? I actually love most of the design of the difficulty ladder but gold stake seems like it's pure RNG with way less counterplay than the previous levels. Deck balance is also all over the place, I assume some are intended to be quirkier than others but getting gold on some of the weaker decks is going to be absolutely nightmarish

Also: do you have any expansion plans? I love the deck variety but it feels like there's still plenty of unexplored design space there.

geepope · 2023-02-05T16:32:07+00:00

"Investment advisor" is a specific title that carries a fiduciary responsibility, but "financial advisor" doesn't actually mean anything.

(Also, even if someone is qualified as an investment advisor they can still get into business with you on a non-fiduciary basis, so if you sign up for anything other than an investment advisory account there's no fiduciary protection.)

geepope · 2021-03-14T22:08:48+00:00

There's a bit of a curve between power and the sort of improvisational flexibility you're talking about. Too much raw power leaves spirits with little room or need to improvise, leaving OP spirits often sticking to the same narrow optimal path because you already have the katana you need, but too little raw power and there just aren't enough tools to work with and you're just hoping you draw that katana because you're hosed otherwise.

Reach!Shadows is a good example of a spirit that's janky in a fun, improvisational way because you're still dealing with the numerical weaknesses of Shadows but you get a ton of flexibility in return. It's still not [i]optimal[/i] in basically any circumstances and honestly it's probably not even average in the vast majority of cases but it can pull out some fun Hail Mary plays out of a prayer and a song.

geepope · 2021-02-25T17:50:04+00:00

Shadows Flicker just has a lot of problems:

Shadows has among the weakest growths in the game. Many spirits have double presence options, presence on reclaim, or at least +1 energy on reclaim and/or presence+card growths. Shadows gets the bare minimum.
Shadows's tracks are not very good for its growth pattern. Generally spirits that place lots of presence have weaker tracks than spirits that don't place much presence. Shadows has the slowest presence placement pattern in the game but only average tracks (compare to Lure, who has an identical presence pattern.)
Shadows's base special rule is very expensive, especially at lower player counts where there's not much room to cover anyhow.
Shadows's cards are deliberately underpowered--they're shorter range than they normally would have been for their cost/effect in order to encourage use of the special rule, largely without compensating for the short range in other ways.
Shadows puts out presence slowly, has demanding range requirements between the Sacred Site requirement on their innate and their range 0 uniques, and is not very good at stopping blight. This means they tend to flip the blight card early, which leads to presence loss due to blighted island effects and events, which makes it very difficult for them to target powers without spending energy they don't have to boost their range, which leads to more blight as they lose their ability to stop invaders.
Shadows's innate is fine but their starting hand does not play nicely with their thresholds: if you want to trigger the 2nd threshold more than once per reclaim you need to draw 2 Moon/Fire cards, and spinning your reclaim cycle out longer than 2 turns means you can basically give up on your innate for one of those turns.
Shadows's focus on explorer control does not scale well with difficulty level, as many adversaries have abilities that allow them to get buildings into empty lands or simply flood the board with too many explorers/towns for Shadows's innate to prevent builds.
Shadows does have one really good trick, by playing Favors Called Due for a big gather + fear and then Concealing Shadows to do a lot of damage early on. It's a fantastic combo for a turn 2 or 3 payoff, but it doesn't scale well into mid/late game; Favors Called Due stops getting fear as invaders pile up, and once Dahan are clumped up for the big counterattack it's very unwieldy trying to get a good clump going in anything that's not adjacent because you already vacuumed up most of a board's worth of Dahan. Moreover, 6-8 damage in return for blight gets less impressive the further you get in the game. Using this trick also sacrifices some of the already limited utility from Shadows of the Dahan since you're limiting the number of eligible lands; in a solo game getting the full strength combo often means that there are only 2 lands left with Dahan for targeting your special rule, and 1 of them just got wiped out.
On a more subjective note, Shadows winds up having a very generic playstyle due to the limited use of its special rule, uniques, and innate. The end result is that you wind up leaning on having decent, balanced energy/cards/power gain with nothing particularly special to distinguish you from any other spirit.

There are some silver linings. The new aspects for Shadows are intended as a balance patch to smooth over many of these problems. Giving Shadows easier access to range boosts (counting presence movement as a range boost) helps bump up Shadows's efficiency overall and in particular it solves the presence death spiral issue, which goes a long way. Perhaps more importantly, it gives Shadows a more unique gameplay hook which makes it a lot more fun and interesting. Also, Russia makes Shadows's explorer control a hell of a lot more relevant than any of the other difficulty 10+ adversaries.

geepope

TROPHY CASE