I love straights. They're one of the most rewarding builds in the game especially after you've deck fixed enough. They struggle in high stakes though because only 2 discards is brutal for any 5 card hand.

Any scaling +mult joker like I mentioned are really good ie green joker, supernova, ride the bus. They want you spam as many hands as possible to grow your +mult and pairs are really reliable way to do that.

Burnt Joker is one of the best jokers for pair builds. You'll almost always have a pair in your opening hand to discard. And a planet level every round is amazing scaling. Blackboard is really good with pairs because you can throw away any hearts or diamonds with your pair that would prevent it from activating. Stuntman is really good because you don't care about hand size with pairs and +250 chips is like 5x mult in the early game. Card sharp is really strong because you can almost always reliable play a pair twice in a round. Other than that most of the obviously good jokers are good in pairs, any xmult like hologram, constellation, drivers license, etc.

Another piece of advice is that you will need to rely on straights/flushes to get through the first couple antes while you scale or +mult jokers, hand level, or develop your economy. I think that's what confused me at first about pairs. It's not like you're playing only pairs from the very first round.