Tag: RNG | A Banana Peeled

Tag Archives: RNG

Balatro, me, and life in general

Posted on March 3, 2025 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

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.

Some thoughts on Balatro–and, indeed, on life

Posted on March 2, 2025 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I can’t quit Balatro (LocalThunk). Every time I think I’m out, something pulls me back in. In fact, I am thinking about buying Monster Hunter Wilds (Capcom) just to tear me away from Balatro. And because everyone is loving it so I have some FOMO.

But I kept going back to Balatro. I was working on doing the stakes on the different decks. A person in the Discord forum had gotten his last gold stakke win and decided to look at the challenges. I had asked him about it because I had done 17 out of 20 of them, but could not do the last three. He said he was not going to even look at them before he got all the gold stakes.

I said that the first seventeen weren’t too bad, but he did mention two I had forgotten. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t easy, either. He got to eighteen, and he acknowledged it was harder than the rest. Hearing him talk about it spurred me to try it myself, and it wasn’t as hard as I remembered it. It wasn’t fun or easy, either, but it wasn’t too bad. It is having to beat each round with one hand–which is one of the big bosses in the vanilla game. There’s also an economic aspect to it that made it a hassle, but not that big a deal.

The next was Cruelty, which had very strict restrictions such as only 3 jokers (though there are ways to game that) and no reward money from either the small blind or the big blind. That one fucked with me the first time around that I tried them, but it wasn’t as bad this time around. In fact, I think I found it easier than the one before (called Golden Needle).

It was the same with this one. The guy in the Discord announced he had finished this one, and I buckled down to do it myself. Not as a competition type of thing, but as a spur/encouragement. I got a few tips from him for the Golden Needle, but I beat Cruelty before he had time to respond.

Then, there’s the last one. It’s called Jokerless, and you can’t have any jokers in the game. Well, there is one way supposedly that you can get one. It’s very fiddly, though, and not worth counting on. If you’re saying that sounds really hard, you would be right. To make it even harder (and I did not realize this until my second day of intense trynig to beat this challenge) that you can only get one of two bosses for this challenge. One is the one that gives you 3 times the total you need to meet (300,000 v. 100,000), the one I call Violent Vessel. It’s actual name is, ah, *quick Google*, Violet Vessel. I actually came up with that on my own, but wanted to double check it.

The other boss is my most hated final boss, I think. It’s called Cerulean Bell (it is). It forces you to do something with the card it picks–either use it or discard it. When you’re running a straight build as I was for this challenge, that can be a heartbreaker. As I found out the first time I reached the final boss.