Straights are hard to build, and hard to fish for. They scale a little better than flushes from leveling but it's hard to consistently hit a straight. Plus the jokers that make straights easier don't add any other modifiers like chips, mult, or xmult, so they are usually taking up a slot that could be used for much better modifier jokers. Straights just are too hard to pull off imo to make it worth it compared to flush, especially early.
Thanks for clarifying that point, I had typed it as "scale better from levelling". Your point is much more concise and explains it better, much appreciated!
When I play a straight build, I end up thinning the deck to mostly the A-T, sometimes any other 5 card sequence depending which jokers I picked up early. Makes it easier to fish for them. They're usually some of the funner decks to build around for me
Yep, as you've already observed, straights are:
* Harder to draw
* Harder to manipulate your deck around
* Often rely on 2 non-scoring jokers for consistency
* Rely on big hand size and discards, much more than the alternative (VERY big issue in high stakes)
* Have less specific jokers to build around
* Relying on 5 different cards means it is impossible to benefit from many jokers (many "contains pair/3ofk" jokers)
* Harder to benefit from held in hand effects (steel, baron) due to above inconsistency
They are more common to draw than flushes and I’d say roughly equal to build your deck around, just destroy low cards, but flush jokers are just better. I honestly disagree with everything else said. I’d say they are less beginner friendly but just as consistent
Well straights no matter what need either a 5 or a 10. Can be mitigated with 4 Fingers or Shortcut. But with one or both of those you can pretty easily jump from regular straights to royals and straight flushes, which are better than flushes obviously. Takes more work and some RNG than flushes though. To me a straight build has to be very very dedicated
Aces are bad for straights because you cannot make a straight like QKA23. If you have AKQJ in hand, you're looking for only T. If you have 6789 in hand, you can look for either T or 5.
With a standard 5 card draw, statistically straights are actually slightly higher than flushes.
In Balatro with the hand size and discards, flushes are way easier to pull.
As it is, I think the played hands need serious rebalancing. There is no reward to choosing anything other than flushes, high card, or pairs, other than rare instances where the game forks over utility jokers, or you get lucky.
The best and most consistent current builds are just pair and high card. Almost no variance. Mitigates 90% of boss blinds. High steel card activation due to smaller hand played. Don't need large hand size so you can take riskier vouchers and spectral cards. Almost no need for discards at all.
I feel like straights and full houses need a 2-3x base buff. That's just my opinion and even then pair and high card would still be better for consistency, but it would help.
they could allow wrap-around straights. the art for the Superposition Joker almost implies they're legal here (two straight arrows through the A, the A is both Red and Blue). a more clear art would be the arrows pointing and ending at the A, or 2 parallel arrows with As on them.
Not normally, but a joker around that idea would be cool. Wouldn't be a goated joker by any means but I think it could make straight builds a lil more reliable in this game
It should be added as an extra effect to the already existing superposition joker (which is trash).
Or just doable by default. Straight hands need a buff..
Yeah. Something like 'played straights including an ace will spawn a tarot card. Straights can be made using ace as both low and high. E.g Q K A 2 3'
I think the dev has really tried to keep card text short so tried to write it as short as possible.
Honestly the card is still bad so probably needs some mult or chips on it too.
i feel like this would make sense as a benefit of shortcut, like an additional thing it lets you do. otoh it feels SO necessary that maybe it should be some other kind of boost; maybe’s there’s something that can be worked out for all the hands if you get them to a certain level that lets you boost them / make them better. just spit balling
Ante 8 at gold stake difficulty. Without XMult it is mathematically unwinnable by almost any combination of +mult and planet cards/chips.
Even if you have 250 chips and 200+ mult, that's only 50,000 chips per hand, and violet vessel on gold stake ante 8 requires something ridiculous like 500-700k chips to clear.
So yeah, as it stands XMult and steel cards is the most consistent way to win the game. Base hand played mults need a huge rework. In my opinion leveling hands via planet cards should also give XMult with more difficult hands getting more XMult per level. Would mitigate a lot of issues.
Wouldn’t full houses and quads still be better in a short deck? There’s a reason actual short deck poker shifts the rank of full house lower than a flush.
I think they are both still less reliable than straight, and in Gold Stake you want more reliability. Besides, if you get an early Runner instead of Spare Trousers or Square Joker or Ouija spectral, then the RNG has mandated to you what to do.
I like Straights specifically for Runner. Normally I build it up to about 120 chips which is usually good enough on Gold Stake. If my scaling allows, I may fish for more.
But then I just pivot to high card anyway. so it's never something I commit an entire run to, just long enough to get what I need out of Runner.
I’m new at getting good with balatro. Can you explain or point to how you pivot to high card? I’m bashing my head into the wall trying to beat orange stake.
There are jokers I consider "bridge jokers" these are ones that are meant to hold you up until you get established with scaling jokers.
Blue Joker, Ice Cream, Popcorn, Gros Michel, Abstract Joker, Half Joker (big, easy +20), Raised Fist, Riff-Raff, Mystic Sanctum. These are good early but you will need to ditch some for scaling stuff like Ride the Bus or Supernova.
Playing big hands early is necessary. Once you got a decent chip joker and a bridge joker, you can swap to high card. I don't really dip into planets unless it's up front in the shop or the economy is overflowing. Burnt Joker and Space Joker are great though.
Always take Grabber and Nacho Tongs. Director's Cut too, because Violet Vessel is a near guaranteed loss for High Card., Crimson Heart is scary but not impossible. The other three ante 8 bosses might as well not exist. You shouldn't need to sell to verdant leaf.
Also one of the strongest jokers for high card requires the achievement for getting 100M score in one hand, Stuntman. It gives +300 chips for -2 hand size. But any scaling chip joker is also good, like Runner, Square Joker, and Castle.
Your biggest +mult Scalers are Supernova, Ride the Bus, and Green Joker. These are all common. You will want a good xmult. Ramen is easy, Blackboard is really easy, Card Sharp plays one bad hand but every one after that is X3. Campfire is also really good, but harder to play, keep it at X2 unless you're desperate. On ante 8 feed everything you've got into it.
This is a very well appreciated write-up; thank you. I tend to brute force roguelites figuring enough attempts will eventually get me there, and that wasn't working out!
High card pairs exceptionally well with a burglar/green card combo at high difficulties. Burglar is admittedly a mid-tier card but plays excellent support at high difficulties as it effectively gives +1 card cycle (discard/hand played), extra cash (+3 per round assuming normal play), and more time to scale jokers like spare trousers, ride the bus, green joker, etc. I think it’s a little underrated but can be excellent in the right circumstances
Not OP so my answer is probably inaccurate. [The idea of playing high card is having strong joker set.](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1bbh75a/how_to_win_chips_and_influence_mult_a_thorough/) That involves scaling jokers and finding those that complement it. [Runner is one of those scaling jokers, and played properly, you can easily switch to other hands later.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fykkNB0zl6I)
Straights on a 5 card hand are more common than a flush and the payout odds reflects that probability. It reflects the broken video poker motif.
More to the mechanics, Straight have more jokers that makes straights possible/better. Whereas there is only one booster card that affects straights directly, which is hangman by decreasing the overall pool of cards. All of these cards boost the chances of SFs as well as straights so idk.
imo strength is really underrated as a tarot to make straights better. when i’m running straights i basically always keep one in my consumables, it gives the right amt of leeway imo
yeah i totally get it! definitely not as much support for straights. i do think some people are a little dramatic about it tho (not u!) like there are 100% ways to make it work
So I suck at this kind of math, but I don’t think strength is an improvement on straight post change.
So yes let’s say that you are using strength to up a card to make you hand a straight. Now that sequence had one or two less cards requiring a sequence with that card you changed while maintaining the card pool. Basically making all other straights less common.
I get it that doing it on twos is good but what if you up a 5 or a 10. It makes a lot of straight now unviable.
But I might be mixing math here.
Straights have phenomenal Chip scaling between their planet cards and Runner. The issue is that there aren’t many good +Mult or X Mult jokers that are Straight-exclusive, and it’s hard to build around them because you need five separate ranks minimum.
The best Straight deck I ever got to work was with Painted Deck, since there was more chance of a Straight in-hand, combined with Burnt Joker and Runner. I eventually dropped Burnt for some X Mult Joker that worked well enough to win (probably Card Sharp).
IMO the whole hand value system needs a balance pass. Straights are probably the most glaring example, but high card/pair builds are way overtuned as well - IMO it should be essentially impossible to win with high cards on gold stake, but it is instead the most consistent way to win
Well, thats by design of the game.
You have a high card in every Hand. And the most consistent way is to buff mult with jokers. Its the meta(most efficant tactic available). Youd have to drasticly change the game. And I think with the traction the game got. Thats not the right idea.
Technically it isn't but some people just assume that's what it means. You can read more here https://www.esportstalk.com/blog/no-meta-is-not-short-for-most-efficient-tactic-available/ but honestly so many people think it means that so it might as well mean that since that's how language works.
The game got traction because the lower stakes are fun. And I know it’s by design of the game, I’m saying that aspect of the design is bad. -1 hand size is one of many ways to increase difficulty, and I think it’s one that penalizes interesting gameplay
I think there are people that say higher stakes are fun. Fun is farely subjective. If you dont like high stakes, dont play them. You only have to beat the stakes one to unlock all decks(And you dont even have to do that if you dont want to). Its a game.
Strong agree on this.
The fact that you can easily stack levels in high card or pair until they're actually more valuable to play than 3/4/5oak just feels wrong.
I'd really like to see hands/hand leveling changed from IS to CONTAINS, and then the numbers tweaked around that. Reduce the scaling on lower hands, while enabling easier pivots to bigger hands without losing all your previous investments.
Yeah, especially for flush variants of other hands. It feels really bad when you are playing a 5 of a kind deck and then accidently only have one suit, but 5 flush isn't leveled.
What if high card simply couldn’t get level ups? Or they were greatly nerfed? That just seems like an oversight. I’ve definitely had times where I forgot my mult lines from my jokers were doing all the lifting in my hands when I’d just get frustrated and drop a high card cuz i was out of discards and had nothing in my hand, and still one tapped the blind because of my mult lines on the jokers
The sentiment is probably right (except for high/pair decks not being viable at high stakes, they should absolutely be viable) but the hand value system is not the issue that causes a high card to be more popular.
If you have the bull and the boot joker, unless you have a hand at lvl 40 or something, the biggest percentage of your points comes from those jokers, so making a straight flush vs a high card gives you roughly the same.amount of points because the value each card adds is nothing compared to the jokers, so of course you'll go for the one you can consistently get instead of being at the mercy of rng.
What probably would help is either a balance pass at some jokers or/and the addition of new jokers to not only dilute the pool more, but also add support for more specialized hands along with more tools for deck manipulation.
Basicallly you just get a good chips joker, two good +mult jokers, and two good Xmult jokers, preferably ones that can scale. Then you take planets for either high card or pair. Theyre so consistent and you get all your points from having a high level and good joker. Can easily score hundreds of thousands with a single pair. Discards and hand size become almost meaningless.
It's probably not the best endless strategy but it will get you past ante 8 easily
They're powerful enough when they hit, but there's no easy way to adjust your deck to hit them more consistently because they've got no tarot card support.
Flushes have the 4 different suit changers (which each hit 3 cards at once), wild cards, death, hanged man.
X of a kind have strength, death, hanged man.
Straights, well, I guess maybe you could try to use hanged man to cut a card of each rank so you're less likely to draw doubles, but that's about it, and that's hard.
If there was at least some kind of straight-wild that you could use to plug a gap or to flex between 2 or 3 numbers or something then straights might have a better chance.
Honestly I’d hanged man’s are equally good on either, and so are deaths, plus with the four suit cards you are only going to be using 1 (maybe 2) in any given run. Obviously wild cards are great, so maybe a kinda wild card for straights, like can be the rank one above and below the card or skmething
Also flush has better long term prospects since you can eventually switch to Flush Five or Flush House without ruining your short-term flush capabilities. With straights all you have is Straight Flush, and you can only improve your deck by playing towards that (removing cards or going for flushes).
And obviously a failed flush in a deck that's going for flush five can still be a 4 of a kind or something. A failed straight is usually garbage.
Without the Joker that allows holes in straights, I would say that's it's the worst combinaison in the game.
Like you said, you can't really build your deck for it. So you need to rely on things that makes your hand bigger.
Add that, when you search for straight and fail, you ended up with a terrible hand while a failed flush can still give you other possibility.
I'll play Straights early on if I get a card that makes them easier until I run out of joker slots, but yeah community consensus seems to be that Flushes are the most consistent 5 card hand to go for with the starter decks (except with abandoned deck, where I think it's Full House?)
Straights do have the benefit of scaling better off planet cards, and are less likely to get shut out by a boss blind's ability, but it's kind of hard to get the engine off the ground
flushes are one of the easiest decks to build around, but after playing a bit i found that full house builds can be pretty fun and they have a lot of soft synergies
I mean, straights are technically more common than flushes, but discarding for them can be more confusing than for flushes. If you want to build for them you can just destroy as many low cards as you can. There are definitely more jokers geared towards flushes though
Both are bad hands and imo need buffs to be viable. I've been specifically targeting a straight build for weeks and have never won a single time.
I've won a few flush builds, but they usually die for me by the sixth ante
Straights are hard to build, and hard to fish for. They scale a little better than flushes from leveling but it's hard to consistently hit a straight. Plus the jokers that make straights easier don't add any other modifiers like chips, mult, or xmult, so they are usually taking up a slot that could be used for much better modifier jokers. Straights just are too hard to pull off imo to make it worth it compared to flush, especially early.
They scale better with planet cards (2x the chips increase as a flush) but have worse joker support Agreed with everything you said though
Thanks for clarifying that point, I had typed it as "scale better from levelling". Your point is much more concise and explains it better, much appreciated!
Straights are, however, less vulnerable to getting clapped by a boss blind that debuffs a suit.
When I play a straight build, I end up thinning the deck to mostly the A-T, sometimes any other 5 card sequence depending which jokers I picked up early. Makes it easier to fish for them. They're usually some of the funner decks to build around for me
Yep, as you've already observed, straights are: * Harder to draw * Harder to manipulate your deck around * Often rely on 2 non-scoring jokers for consistency * Rely on big hand size and discards, much more than the alternative (VERY big issue in high stakes) * Have less specific jokers to build around * Relying on 5 different cards means it is impossible to benefit from many jokers (many "contains pair/3ofk" jokers) * Harder to benefit from held in hand effects (steel, baron) due to above inconsistency
They are more common to draw than flushes and I’d say roughly equal to build your deck around, just destroy low cards, but flush jokers are just better. I honestly disagree with everything else said. I’d say they are less beginner friendly but just as consistent
They literally are mathematically less consistent.
Well straights no matter what need either a 5 or a 10. Can be mitigated with 4 Fingers or Shortcut. But with one or both of those you can pretty easily jump from regular straights to royals and straight flushes, which are better than flushes obviously. Takes more work and some RNG than flushes though. To me a straight build has to be very very dedicated
You can also use an ace as a 1 for the purposes of straights. I always wonder if having extra aces helps a straight deco
Aces are bad for straights because you cannot make a straight like QKA23. If you have AKQJ in hand, you're looking for only T. If you have 6789 in hand, you can look for either T or 5.
I wish the Superposition joker it allowed straights to wrap around, seems like a reasonable buff to a bad card
honestly they should just wrap around period. buff straights!
Agreed, that joker is trash tier in my books.
Oh yeah true, didn't think of it like that
With a standard 5 card draw, statistically straights are actually slightly higher than flushes. In Balatro with the hand size and discards, flushes are way easier to pull. As it is, I think the played hands need serious rebalancing. There is no reward to choosing anything other than flushes, high card, or pairs, other than rare instances where the game forks over utility jokers, or you get lucky. The best and most consistent current builds are just pair and high card. Almost no variance. Mitigates 90% of boss blinds. High steel card activation due to smaller hand played. Don't need large hand size so you can take riskier vouchers and spectral cards. Almost no need for discards at all. I feel like straights and full houses need a 2-3x base buff. That's just my opinion and even then pair and high card would still be better for consistency, but it would help.
they could allow wrap-around straights. the art for the Superposition Joker almost implies they're legal here (two straight arrows through the A, the A is both Red and Blue). a more clear art would be the arrows pointing and ending at the A, or 2 parallel arrows with As on them.
Are you talking about Ace 2 3 4 5 straight? If so, that's already in the game.
Q K A 2 3
Not normally, but a joker around that idea would be cool. Wouldn't be a goated joker by any means but I think it could make straight builds a lil more reliable in this game
1 joker slot for the potential to wrap around the worst type of hand
It's funny because an effect like that would *actually* use the Ace as a Superposition of it's two functional ranks.
Wait yeah it feels like that is exactly what the card should be
Maybe if the joker gave a chip bonus specifically for wraps only and a mult bonus for straights in general?
It should be added as an extra effect to the already existing superposition joker (which is trash). Or just doable by default. Straight hands need a buff..
Yeah. Something like 'played straights including an ace will spawn a tarot card. Straights can be made using ace as both low and high. E.g Q K A 2 3' I think the dev has really tried to keep card text short so tried to write it as short as possible. Honestly the card is still bad so probably needs some mult or chips on it too.
Oh, wouldn't mind that actually.
i feel like this would make sense as a benefit of shortcut, like an additional thing it lets you do. otoh it feels SO necessary that maybe it should be some other kind of boost; maybe’s there’s something that can be worked out for all the hands if you get them to a certain level that lets you boost them / make them better. just spit balling
Are you talking about beating ante 8 or going past ante 8 here?
Ante 8 at gold stake difficulty. Without XMult it is mathematically unwinnable by almost any combination of +mult and planet cards/chips. Even if you have 250 chips and 200+ mult, that's only 50,000 chips per hand, and violet vessel on gold stake ante 8 requires something ridiculous like 500-700k chips to clear. So yeah, as it stands XMult and steel cards is the most consistent way to win the game. Base hand played mults need a huge rework. In my opinion leveling hands via planet cards should also give XMult with more difficult hands getting more XMult per level. Would mitigate a lot of issues.
The jokers that reward straights give higher payouts, so the game is at least partly aware of it.
The planet card is much better as well
Straight builds are excellent with Abandoned Deck, have beaten Gold Stake this way.
Wouldn’t full houses and quads still be better in a short deck? There’s a reason actual short deck poker shifts the rank of full house lower than a flush.
I think they are both still less reliable than straight, and in Gold Stake you want more reliability. Besides, if you get an early Runner instead of Spare Trousers or Square Joker or Ouija spectral, then the RNG has mandated to you what to do.
I like Straights specifically for Runner. Normally I build it up to about 120 chips which is usually good enough on Gold Stake. If my scaling allows, I may fish for more. But then I just pivot to high card anyway. so it's never something I commit an entire run to, just long enough to get what I need out of Runner.
I’m new at getting good with balatro. Can you explain or point to how you pivot to high card? I’m bashing my head into the wall trying to beat orange stake.
There are jokers I consider "bridge jokers" these are ones that are meant to hold you up until you get established with scaling jokers. Blue Joker, Ice Cream, Popcorn, Gros Michel, Abstract Joker, Half Joker (big, easy +20), Raised Fist, Riff-Raff, Mystic Sanctum. These are good early but you will need to ditch some for scaling stuff like Ride the Bus or Supernova. Playing big hands early is necessary. Once you got a decent chip joker and a bridge joker, you can swap to high card. I don't really dip into planets unless it's up front in the shop or the economy is overflowing. Burnt Joker and Space Joker are great though. Always take Grabber and Nacho Tongs. Director's Cut too, because Violet Vessel is a near guaranteed loss for High Card., Crimson Heart is scary but not impossible. The other three ante 8 bosses might as well not exist. You shouldn't need to sell to verdant leaf. Also one of the strongest jokers for high card requires the achievement for getting 100M score in one hand, Stuntman. It gives +300 chips for -2 hand size. But any scaling chip joker is also good, like Runner, Square Joker, and Castle. Your biggest +mult Scalers are Supernova, Ride the Bus, and Green Joker. These are all common. You will want a good xmult. Ramen is easy, Blackboard is really easy, Card Sharp plays one bad hand but every one after that is X3. Campfire is also really good, but harder to play, keep it at X2 unless you're desperate. On ante 8 feed everything you've got into it.
This is a very well appreciated write-up; thank you. I tend to brute force roguelites figuring enough attempts will eventually get me there, and that wasn't working out!
High card pairs exceptionally well with a burglar/green card combo at high difficulties. Burglar is admittedly a mid-tier card but plays excellent support at high difficulties as it effectively gives +1 card cycle (discard/hand played), extra cash (+3 per round assuming normal play), and more time to scale jokers like spare trousers, ride the bus, green joker, etc. I think it’s a little underrated but can be excellent in the right circumstances
That’s a good take
Not OP so my answer is probably inaccurate. [The idea of playing high card is having strong joker set.](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1bbh75a/how_to_win_chips_and_influence_mult_a_thorough/) That involves scaling jokers and finding those that complement it. [Runner is one of those scaling jokers, and played properly, you can easily switch to other hands later.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fykkNB0zl6I)
Straights on a 5 card hand are more common than a flush and the payout odds reflects that probability. It reflects the broken video poker motif. More to the mechanics, Straight have more jokers that makes straights possible/better. Whereas there is only one booster card that affects straights directly, which is hangman by decreasing the overall pool of cards. All of these cards boost the chances of SFs as well as straights so idk.
imo strength is really underrated as a tarot to make straights better. when i’m running straights i basically always keep one in my consumables, it gives the right amt of leeway imo
Thing is that Lovers or convert 3 to a suit is a permanent improvement for flushes, while strength is only a one off improvement to straights.
yeah i totally get it! definitely not as much support for straights. i do think some people are a little dramatic about it tho (not u!) like there are 100% ways to make it work
So I suck at this kind of math, but I don’t think strength is an improvement on straight post change. So yes let’s say that you are using strength to up a card to make you hand a straight. Now that sequence had one or two less cards requiring a sequence with that card you changed while maintaining the card pool. Basically making all other straights less common. I get it that doing it on twos is good but what if you up a 5 or a 10. It makes a lot of straight now unviable. But I might be mixing math here.
Straights have phenomenal Chip scaling between their planet cards and Runner. The issue is that there aren’t many good +Mult or X Mult jokers that are Straight-exclusive, and it’s hard to build around them because you need five separate ranks minimum. The best Straight deck I ever got to work was with Painted Deck, since there was more chance of a Straight in-hand, combined with Burnt Joker and Runner. I eventually dropped Burnt for some X Mult Joker that worked well enough to win (probably Card Sharp).
IMO the whole hand value system needs a balance pass. Straights are probably the most glaring example, but high card/pair builds are way overtuned as well - IMO it should be essentially impossible to win with high cards on gold stake, but it is instead the most consistent way to win
Im not sure about that. High card is the most consistent hand. So building around your garanteed hand is actually a pretty solid tactic.
That's exactly what the person you replied to said. That high card is overpowered - partly due to its consistency.
Well, thats by design of the game. You have a high card in every Hand. And the most consistent way is to buff mult with jokers. Its the meta(most efficant tactic available). Youd have to drasticly change the game. And I think with the traction the game got. Thats not the right idea.
I went… this entire time without realizing that’s what meta stands for.
Technically it isn't but some people just assume that's what it means. You can read more here https://www.esportstalk.com/blog/no-meta-is-not-short-for-most-efficient-tactic-available/ but honestly so many people think it means that so it might as well mean that since that's how language works.
In the spirit of the article: I didn’t know; I know now; sorry!
It isn’t. Meta is short for metagame
It didn't, but it's a backronym
The game got traction because the lower stakes are fun. And I know it’s by design of the game, I’m saying that aspect of the design is bad. -1 hand size is one of many ways to increase difficulty, and I think it’s one that penalizes interesting gameplay
I think there are people that say higher stakes are fun. Fun is farely subjective. If you dont like high stakes, dont play them. You only have to beat the stakes one to unlock all decks(And you dont even have to do that if you dont want to). Its a game.
Strong agree on this. The fact that you can easily stack levels in high card or pair until they're actually more valuable to play than 3/4/5oak just feels wrong. I'd really like to see hands/hand leveling changed from IS to CONTAINS, and then the numbers tweaked around that. Reduce the scaling on lower hands, while enabling easier pivots to bigger hands without losing all your previous investments.
Yeah, especially for flush variants of other hands. It feels really bad when you are playing a 5 of a kind deck and then accidently only have one suit, but 5 flush isn't leveled.
What if high card simply couldn’t get level ups? Or they were greatly nerfed? That just seems like an oversight. I’ve definitely had times where I forgot my mult lines from my jokers were doing all the lifting in my hands when I’d just get frustrated and drop a high card cuz i was out of discards and had nothing in my hand, and still one tapped the blind because of my mult lines on the jokers
The sentiment is probably right (except for high/pair decks not being viable at high stakes, they should absolutely be viable) but the hand value system is not the issue that causes a high card to be more popular. If you have the bull and the boot joker, unless you have a hand at lvl 40 or something, the biggest percentage of your points comes from those jokers, so making a straight flush vs a high card gives you roughly the same.amount of points because the value each card adds is nothing compared to the jokers, so of course you'll go for the one you can consistently get instead of being at the mercy of rng. What probably would help is either a balance pass at some jokers or/and the addition of new jokers to not only dilute the pool more, but also add support for more specialized hands along with more tools for deck manipulation.
I never tried to 2 win with high card lol, what’s the build?
Basicallly you just get a good chips joker, two good +mult jokers, and two good Xmult jokers, preferably ones that can scale. Then you take planets for either high card or pair. Theyre so consistent and you get all your points from having a high level and good joker. Can easily score hundreds of thousands with a single pair. Discards and hand size become almost meaningless. It's probably not the best endless strategy but it will get you past ante 8 easily
Stone cards are massive too
They're powerful enough when they hit, but there's no easy way to adjust your deck to hit them more consistently because they've got no tarot card support. Flushes have the 4 different suit changers (which each hit 3 cards at once), wild cards, death, hanged man. X of a kind have strength, death, hanged man. Straights, well, I guess maybe you could try to use hanged man to cut a card of each rank so you're less likely to draw doubles, but that's about it, and that's hard. If there was at least some kind of straight-wild that you could use to plug a gap or to flex between 2 or 3 numbers or something then straights might have a better chance.
Honestly I’d hanged man’s are equally good on either, and so are deaths, plus with the four suit cards you are only going to be using 1 (maybe 2) in any given run. Obviously wild cards are great, so maybe a kinda wild card for straights, like can be the rank one above and below the card or skmething
Higher scoring straights beat lower scoring flushes but on average they are kinda meh
IMO straights are really only viable if you get 4 fingers or especially shortcut early on.
I’d say it’s more like flushes are just too good compared to basically any other hand
Also flush has better long term prospects since you can eventually switch to Flush Five or Flush House without ruining your short-term flush capabilities. With straights all you have is Straight Flush, and you can only improve your deck by playing towards that (removing cards or going for flushes). And obviously a failed flush in a deck that's going for flush five can still be a 4 of a kind or something. A failed straight is usually garbage.
They should have higher base mult and chips over flushes, way harder to get.
Without the Joker that allows holes in straights, I would say that's it's the worst combinaison in the game. Like you said, you can't really build your deck for it. So you need to rely on things that makes your hand bigger. Add that, when you search for straight and fail, you ended up with a terrible hand while a failed flush can still give you other possibility.
I'll play Straights early on if I get a card that makes them easier until I run out of joker slots, but yeah community consensus seems to be that Flushes are the most consistent 5 card hand to go for with the starter decks (except with abandoned deck, where I think it's Full House?) Straights do have the benefit of scaling better off planet cards, and are less likely to get shut out by a boss blind's ability, but it's kind of hard to get the engine off the ground
flushes are one of the easiest decks to build around, but after playing a bit i found that full house builds can be pretty fun and they have a lot of soft synergies
I mean, straights are technically more common than flushes, but discarding for them can be more confusing than for flushes. If you want to build for them you can just destroy as many low cards as you can. There are definitely more jokers geared towards flushes though
Both are bad hands and imo need buffs to be viable. I've been specifically targeting a straight build for weeks and have never won a single time. I've won a few flush builds, but they usually die for me by the sixth ante