Balatro Gold Stake
I reached my first Gold Stake win in Balatro today! With the Blue Deck. I still don’t think I am any kind of good at the game, but for posterity, since this game has eaten far too many of my waking hours in the last two weeks, here is everything I’ve learned:
- One good +mult joker in the early game then SAVE MONEY because…
- …money is crazy important. You need it to reroll the shop if your joker luck is bad, or to buy up all the packs to try and turn the tide in your favour.
- Ultimately you want some combination of +chips, +mult and xmult to hit the high scores, and you want to put them in the right order with xmult at the end.
- Shopping priority: Good jokers > useful Planet cards in the shop > Spectral packs > Good vouchers > Tarot packs > Planet packs > Card packs, unless you have jokers that require you to spam tarot/planet/cards, then prioritise those. I almost never buy Buffoon packs, unless I am in a dire situation with shop joker RNG.
- Pairs and High Card are the best Planet cards to invest in because you can make them no matter what hand you draw, however—
- —you have to roll with the punches. If you only get jokers that work with Two Pair, then pump Two Pair.
- Discards generally become unnecessary as you go along, making decks/jokers that reduce your discards not that much of a problem.
- You CAN rearrange your jokers again after Amber Acorn shuffles them around… I did not realise that the first time I encountered this finisher blind and just suffered needlessly through an instant loss.
On my Gold Stake winning round, I hit an extremely lucky combination early on of two scaling +mult cards (Spare Trousers + Green Joker), my favourite xmult card Hologram, and Blueprint, which I used to copy Hologram’s ability. I rode these four all the way to Ante 6, and only added Blue Joker in the last two rounds for +chips (it worked well with my deck that had lots of added cards for Hologram).
According to my stats to date, the jokers I have played the most are Green Joker, Supernova, Hologram, Half Joker (love that guy) and Blue Joker.
Next up: trying some of the funky decks and Challenge mode (I should be sleeping).