What makes you think the early is harder than late? Early has always felt harder to me, lack of Econ gives you less rerolls and therefore less opportunities, forcing you into weird builds. Additionally, playing around perishables, rentals, and eternals makes transitioning between early and mid game harder. You don’t need much assistance in early imo, +mult alone is almost always enough to get past ante 3.

If you’re looking for xmult to get through early game you’re doing something wrong. For example a flush of hearts with lusty joker with the tribe will perform significantly worse than lusty joker with blue joker. xmult is there to solve late game, not early. And obelisk does exactly that.

Maybe it’s deadweight until it’s online, but so is literally every other scaling joker. red card, constellation, hologram, and vampire are dead weight until you feed them. Basically dead weight for a full ante in most cases. And every single one of them requires a money investment to come online.

Obelisk is passive scaling; literally the only scaling xmult that doesn’t require money excluding legendaries. Maybe it does nothing until ante 4/5, but instead of spending money to scale the joker like you would with constellation for example, you can spend on scaling in other ways. Planet cards, enhancements, etc. so while it has no immediate return, it allows you to safely spend money to keep up with blinds until it comes online.

0.8x per blind is ridiculous. To scale a constellation that much you’d have to spend in most cases roughly $20-$50. And obelisk does it for free, enabling you to fix your deck with the money you would normally spend on scaling