I have put countless hours into Balatro (LocalThunk). Seriously. I don’t want to even look at how many hours because then I would have to acknowledge that it took over my life for several weeks. I took a break from it when I was getting stuck on–oh.
*SPOILERS*
Orange Stake. Or maybe earlier. This was my last post about the game when I had gotten my first few wins. I have to laugh as I reread my past posts on Balatro because the one theme that ran through them was how complicated and deep this game can get. I didn’t even know. I did not even know.
Where am I now? Let me sum it up the best I can before getting to the meat of this post–what is bothering me about the game. I mentioned in past post that there are several decks, many of them you have to unlock. Fifteen in total (plus, apparently, the challenge deck. You also unlock the challenge runs, which, meh. I’ve tried a few and won one, but I’m not wild about them. And you only unlock new ones after winning old ones. Double meh). I have unlocked all the decks, and my mission for the past month was to win all the stakes on one deck and unlock all the jokers. I thought that was doable and shouldn’t be too hard.
Boy, was I wrong about that. And this is one of my issues with the game. Unlocking the jokers took a lot of the joy out of the game for me. There are 150 jokers in the game. Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Legendary. Some you just have to buy as you come across them in the shops or pick them up as rewards for skipping a blind.
Then, there are the ones you have to mess with the decks so you can get a certain hand in order to unlock a joker. Such as discarding a Royal Flush (Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and Ten of the same suit) in order to unlock Brainstorm (Rare), a joker that copies the leftmost joker in your hand. Or Glass Joker. You have to have five glass cards in your hand to unlock this one. There’s a deck called the Checkered Deck that has only spades and hearts, so you have a much better chance of getting a Royal Flush with this deck (for the first joker I mentioned).
These weren’t bad at all. The only thing that was irritating was that you didn’t actually add the joker to your collection by doing this–you just unlocked it. You had to see it and afford to pick it up, and you’re not guaranteed to get it in any given time, either. The other danger was that I would forget I was looking for a specific joker because as I’ve said, my memory isn’t what it used to be.
As I said, those weren’t bad. I was cruising along and doing this while also doing the different stakes on my beloved Blue Deck. The one with an extra hand. It’s the one that I found easiest by far, and if I wanted to get all the stakes, that would be the deck on which to do it. Red stake is not getting any money on the first small blind.
Interjection: I read a thread on someone asking why they would ever skip a blind. And so many people said they shouldn’t. I had heard this in the RKG Balatro channel, too, but I didn’t think much of it. When I read the thread about it, though, it was nearly unanimous. Some people said that skipping the small blind on red stakes and up madee sense because you didn’t get any money for those (you did get interest, but it was piddling).
So many people were adamant that you should never skip a shop, which floored me. I won red stake, green stake (higher antes), black stake (35% for a Joker in the shop/booster pack to have an eternal sticker–which means you cannot sell it), and blue stake (one less discard) with mostly skipping the majority of the blinds. I would rather take the sure joker in hand (especially different editions or negative jokers (negative jokers don’t take up a space)) than take ten dollars into the shops.
I do understand that I’m letting the fates decide more for me than me deciding myself, but I was ok with that.
A note: I just tried sveral of the challenge runs and won one of them. They are not as daunting as I found them when I first tried them. Since you can unlock them when you have any win on any five decks, that was pretty early on. When you win one, you unlock another one. I think there are twenty in total? And you play with a Challenger Deck that changes to meet the specifics for each challenge. In the challenges, it seems beneficial to skip blinds now and again–especially the ones that don’t give you any money.
Back to that debate about skipping blinds. Here’s the thing. I find the rewards for actually playing the blinds quite stingy. It’s quite rare that I get ten dollars per round unless I have something that bumps up the financial rewards. Things in the shop aren’t cheap, and it’s frustrating to leave without buying anything. There’s a category called vouchers that gives you bonuses that last throughout all the shops of the run. So, let’s say you get the blank voucher. You have to buy it ten times, and you get nothing for it each time. The tenth time, it unlocks the scaled-up voucher that is related to it (every voucher has a scaled-up version), which is antimatter, I believe. This allows you to have one more joker slot. Which is great, but think about that. You have to waste ten dollars on a voucher just for the chance to get the second voucher. And the vouchers change every after every boss beaten (I think). Which is one reason not to skip blinds if you want to get a certain voucher.
One reason to skip blinds, though, is that you can win money as a reward for doing so. There’s one tag that gives you $25 if you beat the boss blind. That’s a shit-ton of money! There’s another that gives you a rare joker, and ones that give you different kinds of cards. A guaranteed rare joker for skipping a blind? Sign me up!
Back to the stakes. Next up was purple. That raises the antes more than before again. This is where it started getting really hard, and it wasn’t enjoyable. I was trying to unlock the legendary jokers at the same time (not on the same runs), and that killed all my joy for the game, too. Why? Let me tell you how the legendary jokers are unlocked.
There is a class of cards called Spectral Cards. They do things like copy one card in your hand twice (Cryptid), and duplicate a random joker in your hand AND give it poly status (1.5 multiplier), but destroys all other jokers in your hand. There are several other ones. There is one called The Soul that looks like a big, white tear drop. You have to have a joker slot open, and this turns into one of the five legendary jokers. They are only found in Arcana packs and Spectral packs of any size (standard, jumbo,and mega packs), and they have a .3% of dropping. Yes, you read that right. .3%.
I found the first two through just playing the game. When I decided to focus on getting the other three, I opened as many packs as possible and did not get them. In desperation, I looked it up. The meta was to use the Anaglyph deck because it gives you a double tag after beating each boss, which maens that when you use it on a blind that you skip, you get two of the rewards. Then, play the game and only use the double tags on arcana or specral packs. Simple, right? Oh, and do it on white stake (base) so you have every blind open to you in which you can get money.
I managed to get the third one with medium grief, but the other two refused to drop. I played so many hands and started over several times when I was not getting the tags I needed AND had weakened and given in to use the double tags I had accumulated. The times I did get four or five Arcana packs or Spectral packs, I felt no joy in opening them, especially when I did not get The Soul. And a few times when I did get The Soul, I got one of the legendaries I already had.
I am very unlucky in these kinds of things. Others in the RKG Discord said it wasn’t that bad, but it took me days to get the last two. And they suck! Or rather, they have downsides that are two steep for me.
That’s all for now. I’ll talk more about stakes tomorrow.