Let’s talk more about Balatro (LocalThunk) and life in general. How am I going to tie them together? You shall see. I talked at length yesterday about the challenges in the game and how the last one wrecked me.
I do want to start with a positive. I just did a casual run with the yellow deck, black stake (which I had yet to win) just to see if I could apply what I learned from the Jokerless challenge to a vanilla run. I have been working on the different stakes on different decks for quite some time. White stake is the base stake. I have that on all fifteen decks. I also have the red stake on all decks (the next level up). I have green on all but three decks, and I have black on a few. I have gold (the highest) stake on four decks. I have been struggling with orange on plasma, and I am not having a good time.
After finally beating Jokerless yesterday, I was curious to see if what I had learned from it would help me with the vanilla runs. I did not want to do plasma deck because it’s its own thing and you need to have a very different mindset to play that deck. People in the Balatro know say that it’s the easiest deck of all, but I have really struggled with it. Blue deck was my fave (+1 hand per round) and erratic deck was the most fun (you didn’t know what cards you were going to start with. It changed every time, which was why it was the erratic deck.
I decided to try yellow deck, black stake just because. Instead of using either my two-pair build or my high card/pair build, I went for a straight build. This was all I did for the past two days, and it’s emblazoned in my brain. The yellow deck starts with $10, and now that I know one ace-high straight clears the small blind (300 chips), I would start over if I did not get one. I took the joker that lets you make straights and flushes with four cards and scary face (+30 chips for each face card). When I got the joker that makes every card a face card, well, that made things much easier. Plus Brainstorm that replicates the joker to the leftmost position.
I cruised this run, to be honest. Except for one round that just would not give me what I needed and I had to rely on some sloppy play to get through. Oh, and Mr. Bones, the joker that saves you if you make 25% of the chips you need (and then breaks). I got my straights up to level 18 or so and then did the dang thing. The final boss was Crimson Heart, which disables one joker per hand. Not the worst because it’s a different one per hand, and you can work around it.
Besides that one round, I had no problems crushing this run. So, yes, I took everything I learned from the Jokerless challenge and applied it to the vanilla game. In fact, I might be a straight-build person now.
By the way, that will never NOT be funny to me. Me, a straight person! Heh.
Anyway, back to the Jokerless challenge. What I realized is that this game is not for me. It’s how I feel about From games. I win despite the game and myself not because of them.
I have included again the video by Balatro University in which he explains how to beat Jokerless. And does it in one try. He’s very methodic and patiently explains everything he’s doing. By the end, he is just cleaning up. It’s a fantastic video, but my brain shut down several times while watching it.
Look. I have read countless posts about how to maximize in the game (including deck thinning, changing suits/ranks, chips v. +mults v. xmults, etc.), and my brain just does not accept much of it. My brain says, “That’s not fun.” It’s the same when people who play FromSoft games talk about minmaxing weapons or armors. I don’t fucking care. I’ll wear an armor just because it looks cool (gotta say that Fashion Souls is also a thing) and choose a weapon I vibe with. Which is another reason I hesitate to get Monster Hunter Wilds. I don’t care about the numbers. I just don’t.
Backk to Balatro.
I buckled down for Jokerless and changed so many things about the way I played the game. I thinned like I never thinned before (except when I had to get the deck down to 20 cards for an achievement). I added enhanced cards, but only if they were 6 and above. I only allowed numbers lower than that if they had a blue seal (gives you a level upgrade for the last hand you played). I have come to believe that blue seals are low-key the best seals of all.
The biggest change, though, is that I truly do believe that economy is king now. I’d read about it before and did the ‘yeah, yeah, but I gotta buy everything in the first shop, though’ thing. That money was burning a hole in my pocket, and I needed to spend it. I did learn while playing vanilla Balatro that you get extra money per round if you had a certain amount of money in hand, but I still bought whatever whenever. I still believe it’s worth spending the money sometimes, but this challenge showed me the value in having money in the bank.
I was lucky that I got one or two ‘get $25 for skipping this blind’ in the first few rounds, which really helped jumpstart my economy. Then, when I reached the final shop, I had enough money to reroll a few times. It felt like a luxury, and it was really nice to have.
The thing I learned from that challenge, though, is that I will never be a good Balatro player. Much like I will never be a good FromSoft player. I will always have to do my best and just eke out the wins. No matter how much I maximize, I will never be as good as other people. I probably won’t give up Balatro, but I am not going to be able to plat it (getting gold on all decks, and then getting a gold sticker on every joker–which means winning a gold stake run with every joker).
I watched a video of someone who got the plat in this game, and he was talking about how much he loved mapping out the plat and which joker he needed in order to make progress. That sounds like my idea of hell, honestly, and I think it would kill off all interest I have in the game.
Here’s the thing. When I did the plats for the From games (Dark Souls I – III, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring), it sucked the joy out of the games for me. Dark Souls III was my favorite game of all time when I went for the plat, and doing that plat made me hate the game for several months. Before the plat, I played the game every day. After I got the plat, I did not touch it for several months. SEVERAL.
My theory for why the plats suck so much for From games: they were forced to include them by the publishers so they made them extremely unpleasant. I don’t think Miyazaki would care about something like achievements and would resent having to think about them at all.
Then, Elden Ring came along, and it was supposed to be the game that brought them into the mainstream. To that end, they did not want to make the plat a cruel grind the way they did in the other games. so they really streamlined it. It’s by far the easiest and most pleasant of the plats. The only thing that is remotely ‘hard’ is getting three different endings, but even if you don’t save-scum, you can get that by running through the game three times. If you save-scum, you can get evereeything in one playthrough.
That went far afield, but I’m done for now. More tomorrow.