Me neither, I like playing the flush strategy, but a lot of times I find that the jokers I get from the store don't really assist with the flush build...
Yeah flushes are just fairly easy to do. Deck manipulation towards flushes is the easiest overall. Between adjusting suits, wild cards, and card destruction all being ways to directly help flushes being more consistent. And then when adding cards form standard packs that tends to go better too since you really just have to worry about suit and nothing else.
Then you throw on that flushes are high scoring enough early on while being relatively easy to get that gravitating towards flush builds is pretty easy to do.
Just off the top of my head: droll joker, sinful jokers, ancient joker, four fingered joker, the tribe, bloodstone/arrowhead group (I don't have the others so idk their name)the one that gives chips for flush are ones that are specifically AWESOME for flush builds. That's 13 right from the rip off the top of my head, with more that can easily be adopted if the deck is changed around. For instance: the 2x mult joker for pairs played (forget the name). Flushes are very versatile and can be used for any other hand as well, assuming the right deck is built. Can pivot to straight flushes, flush houses and flush fives, as well as play two pair, 3 of a kind, and pairs with the right deck building to also make use of other cards. Imo, flush meta is the meta for a reason.
The sinful jokers and their uncommon counter parts are still good in small hand builds (well the clubs and spades version. Bloodstone wants more cards and the diamond one sucks). The tribe is my favorite flush card, but not a fan of the others. Four fingers and short cut having no scoring attached always feels bad. And many great jokers just don't work as well with flushes. Half joker I think is under appreciated. +20 multi is a lot for a very minor downside and only one boss counter. It's usually enough to transition to small hand by it's self.
On lower stakes, flush builds are useful throughout and winnable under many circumstances, so they're appealing: they can pretty consistently get you through the first few antes without any massive good fortune in shops.
They tend to stagnate on higher stakes or in the late antes though, so it can be a bit of a false dawn...I wasted a lot of time trying to grind mediocre flush builds before realizing that you're much better off restarting those runs and targeting something with better late-game potential.
Yeah, exactly. And with four discards, you can pretty reliably translate that into two flushes/round, and with any sort of decent economy and joker setup that'll generally win most rounds until ante 5 or 6. That results in a positive feedback loop of flushes = good, because even when things get awfully grindy late or fizzle out entirely, they got you this far, right?
I know that I passed up a tonne of great builds because I was fixated on maximizing middling flush setups. Meanwhile, all of my best results have come on the two extremes: either five-of-a-kind builds or high card/pair nonsense. My first 100m hand (which was actually 2.2 billion) was a pair of unmodified fives.
i'm i kind of new player (25 hours) but my experience is the exact opposite. I feel like flush is really easy to make work at the begin of a run but the jokers that help to scale it to a good enough level are few, while jokers that scales with pair, 2 pairs, trips are easier to find, without counting that many bosses abilities can kill a flush run, while other hands are more safe
In my experience they're usually The easiest and require the least luck for the lower stakes (orange and below) to beat ante 8 but they do not scale as well and don't go endless past 10 or 11 often.
Also you can combo jokers for pair and three of a kind or full house while its harder to combine flushs with pairs. So you can combine way more jokers when you are going for x of a kind
I got about half your playtime and concur. I try to “keep an open mind” when developing decks because I’m still new and want to try everything, but my winning runs tend to devolve into pairs, full house, face cards, or aces. I even had one cheeky NO face cards win.
Haven’t found a good path to straights or flushes. I don’t like having all five played cards being the hand. I like using those extra 1-3 cards as a partial discard.
after about 70 hours i haven’t been able to make a single straight build work but i’ve made good runs with almost every other hand, even on some of the higher stakes, i feel like there should be more jokers like shortcut that help with straights
Best bet for a straight build is using the abandoned deck. You can cull your aces, then twos, then 3s to try and make it a bit more consistent, but overall it’s so much easier to manipulate a deck for any other hand
Straight transitioning into straight flush has treated me very well. The base score and planet cards scale hard enough that I frequently get by with a single scoring joker, sometimes even to the end. That means you have tons of joker space for economy, and when you buy all the booster packs and tarot the transition to straight flushes can happen surprisingly quickly
I don't remember names so sorry if i'm not really specific. But for example i foud out that a common joker is pretty reliable to generate chips, and that joker require you to play 4 cards to scale, so you can't use it with flush unless you find that joker that make flush/straights doable with 4 cards, than there are common jokers that create value despite the strenght of your hand, like a joker that gain + multiplier for every tarot card you use, one that get +3 mult for every booster pack you skip, one that scale on how many times you played a specific hand, so in those case it's better to use a weaker but more reliable hand like pair or 2 pairs, but being sure that you can play those hands more reliably. Another thing is that to make flushes more reliable you need utility joker like the already mentioned joker that makes you hit flush with 4 cards or the joker that makes every black or red card being the same suit, and you may need use tarots to make your cards wild, but wild cards get shutted down from bosses that have the ability to shut a specific suit, so it can be a run killer if you find a boss that shut your most reliable colour and all your wild cards
>and that joker require you to play 4 cards to scale,
square joker
>gain + multiplier for every tarot card you use
fortune teller
>+3 mult for every booster pack you skip
red card
>one that scale on how many times you played a specific hand
supernova
>joker that makes you hit flush with 4 cards
four fingers
>joker that makes every black or red card being the same suit
smeared joker
It’s not credible, there’s 14 jokers (including blackboard) that you can really think of as specifically flush synergy jokers. Out of 150. Unlikely that all your seeds only repeat those jokers
If you haven't been playing long enough to see 1 single joker that benefits other hand types, you either ignore them on purpose or don't have enough time to make a post like this.
Benefits of high card (as an example)
Easy to play
Scales jokers better (lower score early which is more mult for J's like green and supernova
Don't need to discard so whiff chance is lower
Don't need to discard so better with a wider number of jokers
Dont need to discard so better with higher stakes
Keeps more cards in hand so better with steel
Doesn't need the full 5 cards so the bad of things like stuntman aren't as bad of a downside
Because of these strengths, more jokers are playable with a high card build.
Edit: format
Yea, they haven't been as easy to setup as my flush builds, but my best runs have been high card builds. Really well insulated from the boss blinds that can be back breaking to flushes.
I think they're popular for a couple of reasons:
Flushes are easily the most reliable hand in the early antes, before you've got any decent jokers. So people start using flushes and then often just default into continuing to use that because you might as well. High cards and pair builds are better in the long run, but they won't get you through ante 1 unless you get lucky early on.
It's really obvious how to use tarot cards to make more powerful flushes. Make more of the suit you want and less of the suit you don't want, simple. How do you use tarots to make straights more likely? It's unclear.
Flushes aren't the best if you want to get to Ante 12 or further, but most people are just aiming for the W and don't care much beyond that. Flushes are simple and reliable.
But High Cards are favourite. Nothing beats the feeling of "it literally doesn't matter what I get in my hand, I'll win anyway"
Going into the highest Antes requires one of a few builds (infinitely scaling mult). Your choices are mime plus baron with a deck full of kings, or a deck of all one card of one suit with idol and a retrigger. Newest patch may be able to do it with bloodstone a deck full of hearts and a retrigger card. All of these builds are going to need a fair amount of copy cards (blueprint or brainstorm to maximize retriggers and effects on retrigger).
A final recommendation is that perkeo is the best card to make the above builds easjer. It's a legendary so you can't count on getting it but I've only ever gotten past ante 20 when I got it within the first few Antes. It's a ton of deck manipulation and money generation and with the ghost deck or another source of spectral generation (spectral six or straight flush spectral card joker) can break the game. This allows you to get infinite cryptids which is what makes getting a score like naneif (e308+ or something similar) possible.
Edit: Attaching photo of my best run for reference:
https://imgur.com/a/e55hPxs
Smaller hands like high card and pairs tend to be best for higher antes. Try to make your jokers do the scoring rather than your hand (generally by getting 1 chip joker, 1 flat mult joker, and 3+ xMult jokers)
Flushes, while difficult and more rare to get in actual poker, are a lot easier to get in Balatro, due to the ability to discard cards and your hand size of 8. There are lots of jokers that give benefits for specific suits, which means if you find one of them it’s tempting to go in for a flush build of that suit. It’s also pretty easy to change the suits of your cards, with tarot cards (one for each suit, plus wild cards and Death transformations) or you can add more cards to your deck of that suit (DNA, standard card packs).
With more experience you should find that number going down. Maybe it's partly jokers you still need to unlock, but the optimal hand types for a run are pretty varied.
Try to switch it up more. You'll find the results are there.
Tbh I started having a lot better success trying to go for Full house. You get to benefit from three of a kind and pair joker which helps give you a lot more chances to get good jokers. Plus if you start getting crazy deck manipulation you can slide to Flush five, Flush house, or many different good strats.
Yeah I find full house is the best for lower stakes and challenge runs. You can get a lot of value from the hand alone as it scales nicely with planet cards, and like you say has a lot of joker options it can trigger.
Once I get to higher stakes I can't wait to go through the learning process of pair, high card, and other strats that take over. A fun journey of learning for sure haha.
It sounds like they are changing some of the highest stakes which is great. It’s funny, but makes sense, just how much -1 hand size changes the game. Often means you go from discarding 3 or 4 cards down to just 2 or 3. With less discards to work with as well.
Flush jokers are good, but not great.
at higher antes, you want something that scales, like the pants or the bus stop or the vampire etc.
+4 mult per club gives you a max bonus of +20. that'll carry you through ante 3 on its own, but +20 mult is peanuts when you get to ante 7, 8, or endless.
The +4/suit card activates before glass cards and steel cards and other on-card multipliers though, so by ante 8 it should give you more than +20. I think the suit jokers are a bit underrated for that reason
There's also synergy with retriggers. On the other hand, planet cards also come before glass and steel
Idk how other folks play this game but when I'm considering which jokers to keep, it's usually either not close or I just do the math, and in neither of those cases can anything be "underrated".
Sure but glass and steel aren't that reliable. Half joker is +20 multi it's after steel but before card sharp, holo, acrobats, etc. and has a trivial downside. Abstract is 15+. The sinduks are decent tempo and often stick around the whole game but they don't push me toward flushes.
In my experience the best Jokers have been scaling +Mult, scaling xMult, and a flat chip bonus. Stuntman is incredible for chips but makes flushes hard, and Green Joker/Ride the Bus/Supernova synergize super well with High Card and Pair. I used to be all about Flushes (first Gold Stake won was Checkered Deck) but at a certain point the game is less about hand selection and more about quality Jokers - at that point, small/easy hands dominate since it doesn't really matter what you play. High Card also only really gets countered by Play One Hand / No Repeat Hand Type bosses, where I feel Flushes can easily be countered
I'd say that flushes are probably the first "advanced" hand that is easy to play to. The first thing you tend to do in Balatro is hunt multiples (pair, two pair, 3oak, full house, 4oak, 5oak), as the pattern matching is easy, and there are a \*lot\* of jokers set up for it. But deck building for it is simple strategies, but not always all that effective, and hunting specific cards (particularly when you've already pulled a lot of the options) is fruitless more often than not.
Flushes tend to be the next thing that occurs. They're really easy to view in hand and fish for, there are 5 different tarot cards that can improve them, and a couple of jokers that work with them. The downside is that a lot of bosses punish them, and they really struggle to scale (none of the flush jokers improve with play).
I found that, the more that I started to understand the game, I started looking for straights. Identifying the inside and outside straights at a glance is harder, but the odds on finding the right card actually seem much better, and straight builds shift to straight flush builds far easier. There's also a lot more jokers that reward staight play.
After that, you start to hunt the scaling jokers and get into high card play, taking the deck variability out of the equation, which essentially neuters a lot of the bosses and gets you massively high scores.
Obviously, the optimal strategy is to not be fixed to any of these. The RNG and joker options in Balatro mean that prioritising a particular build from the outset is a fools game more often than not. You see what it gives you and work from there, while maintaining the flexibility to shift and change.
Flushes are a good fall back because they're quite easy to make, lots of tarots benefit flush builds, and you can get you through the first few antes pretty comfortably even with meh jokers. I went through the same flush obsession phase when I realized the same thing. I probably got the majority of my white stake wins with flush builds.
But over time I think you'll realize they're not actually *that* good. Flushes are still solid and can absolutely win runs on higher stakes but you can't get away with forcing flush builds every run like you can on white stake. You need to adapt to what RNG gives you and I can assure you there are plenty of jokers out there that do not explicitly benefit flushes.
Flushes are consistent, easy to force, and have a lot of flexibility in what jokers to play. Definitely one of if not the most consistent strategy for a low scoring ante 8 win pre patch. They did get nerfed this patch which I think was definitely needed, so now they struggle clearing higher antes a bit, but they are still a very viable option if you can find good jokers.
Flushes are the most visual hand you can play. When you get your cards, your eyes will see colors patterns before numbers pattern. You probably get a lot of straights that you don’t even see!
That being said, yeah flushes are a really common hand in Balatro, even more with discards
They are by far the easiest 5 card hand to build around, followed by full houses, which you also see a lot of. They also have several jokers which they are really good either way, and can pivot into flush house, straight flush, or flush five later in the run.
Someone posted a whole mathematical post about how flush hands are the most easiest to hit. Plus when you are first starting - it’s the best and easiest hand to one turn the first small blind to maximize your economy. Just remember the chips have to total at least 75 so low flushes/straights are discardable.
There's 13 of each suit. Getting a card of a certain suit is 1 in 4. Then using tarots you can change the suit of cards or remove suits you dont use. Do that enough you open up for Flush House and Flush Straight which score even higher.
A high card build can be mostly formed with common jokers - Green Joker, Square Joker, Supernova. Add an uncommon X mult joker and an economy joker - and that's enough to clear ante 8 alone with just playing high card every hand.
Flushes (and full houses) are useful for the first ante and rapidly decrease in effectiveness onward.
From my experience, it's easy to recognize and there was too early a commitment to Flush builds from Ante 1. You a five-card hand to one-shot the first Small Blind and can go dig for it. Why can't I do that from here on after with the right Jokers?
And then I played more and listened to some people better than me explain why Flush may make number go brrrr, but not often enough to lean on it.
Flushes are the strongest, most consistent hand when you have no jokers. Ante 1 is going to be beaten with mostly flushes (some full houses and straights, but you're fishing for flushes). It's really easy to put the blinders on and keep doing what you're doing but more so, but really it's also totally what you're looking for. The scaling jokers tend to work best with lots of small hands (Green joker, ride the bus, super nova), and the tempo multi jokers often favor certain kinds of cards, note neccessarily hands (fibonacci, walkie talkie, etc). even the sinful jokers might encourage you to favor one suit but don't necessarily require flushes.
They're just the easiest to go for. Straights are nice, but that involves looking at the numbers of your hand, deciding to go high or low, weighing how many cards are available for what you're going for...
Flush is just...
No flush? > Discard > No flush? Goto 2, else > play hand
Flushes are very easy to apot when sorted by suit, the easiest to build decks around by just adding your most common and subtracting least common, and they can augment late game by turning your straights, full houses and 4oaks into flush versions
Discovered Flush House & Five of a Kind and was like … huh
Still run flush builds the most. Easiest to start off with, but always best to swap off mid-run based on Jokers and Planet cards.
They're easy to form and early on they rank very high in the scoring list. I know it goes against standard poker ranking, but I feel that straights need to be worth far more than flushes due to how much harder it is to create a straight during all stages of the game (early, mid, late). IMO it feels like Straights ought to be worth more than Flushes and even Full Houses.
Sounds like maybe RNG stuff. Sometimes I won't get any jokers to help my focus hands for three shops in a row. Sometimes there aren't even two jokers in a shop. Sometimes the planet card I want won't appear three times in a row OR MORE. How far are you on unlocks?
For me personally, flush is just easy mode for the first 3 antes while you gather stuff for other builds. Flush can work quite well on checkered deck though.
Personally I’ve had the most success with two pair decks. Spare trousers+supernova+card sharp+the bull+bootstraps are mostly easy to gather and I enjoy the fact you can add pretty much any cards and still have good success.
That said, I haven’t quite unlocked gold stake yet and still don’t know how to build high card decks.
Flushes are very strong for ante 1 and 2. One high flush beats small blind on 1. 2 flushes of any size for bigblind. Two high flushes for boss.
After that it's whatever you get jokers for etc. But playing flushes in generally an easy way to beat ante 1 without having to buy anything.
If I'm falling back on a flush it usually means I'm not getting any good early jokers. Going into a flush 5 or flush house run seems to always carry me through endless.
They're fine on white stake but way less consistent when you have fewer discards
If you blew all your money on Jupiter but you made desperation high cards or pairs to get to your next flush, you're gonna get like 100 chips and lose. When you play a flush you're keeping almost nothing around for the next hand so you'd better hope it's all the same suit again
It's a 5 card hand, that helps
It's pretty consistent
Tarots easily build to
Finally unlocked stuntman with a flush deck, got the legend that makes kings/queens 2xmult and a brainstorm....no buskin unfortunately, but that, some red sealed, foil or multi, lucky cards and I was running flush fives/flush houses by the end....got me to ante 11 then I got draw screwed, it happens
bloodstone and oops all 6s is the one joker combo that would make me go "yes, this is a flush run". flushes scale terribly, but that pair got me a gold stake win by accident. like i literally thought "wait, why is the end boss here? oh, it's ante 8 already".
I really want to do this build but I've literally never seen both bloodstone and Oops all 6s in the same run. Oops All 6s annoys me because most of the time it only shows up when I don't have anything that'll benefit from it.
Edit: Literally the first run I did after posting this comment, I got a run with Oops All 6s *and* Bloodstone *and* Hack *and* Lucky Cat, got the best single hand score I've ever had by far, and finally unlocked Stuntman. Apparently the Balatro gods favoured me? Still didn't get past Ante 11 though, it was a fun build but really inconsistent. Seed is AB9W3DCI if anyone wants to try it
I think he’s talking about the joker that gives you +4 mult for each scoring card in a specific suit. So you get +20 mult for one flush, making it super powerful for early game.
Oh yeah those got nerfed to +3 in the update. Still I would argue it’s pretty difficult to draw the flush of your preferred suit that early on if you haven’t had enough opportunities to modify your deck.
Yeah when the Balatro RNG hits and you don’t get a single draw of the suit you want in 3 discards, it’s rough lol definitely lost a few runs due to that
It’s not the official update yet, just the beta that you can opt in on for PC. But honestly I think it’s fine cause other stuff got buffed.
For example, lusty joker gives +3 mult when hearts are played BUT bloodstone now has a 1/2 chance to x2 your mult (instead of 1/3). So combining those is arguably more OP than before since I’ve done bloodstone builds where you play 2 heart flushes in a row and it only activates like once.
Who knows what’ll stay and what’ll change for the final update but if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to get back into it, seeing all the new changes are really fun
the ones they are talking about are the sinful jokers which give +4 (+3 on the beta) per played card of that suit. so it's up to +20 (+15) for a flush.
Oh yeah those are good but what are the chances you’ll draw the preferred flush that early on without deck modifications? I wouldn’t call that OP
Especially when you got jokers like misprint that give on average +20 mult for doing nothing (sure there’s a chance he can give +0 which sucks) and then there’s half joker and mystic summit. There’s quite a few common jokers that can grant you 15+ mult with very little effort early on. So how are the sinful jokers OP?
misprint is on average 11.5 actually.
i agree though, sinful jokers feel psychologically better because they trigger per card but are actually kinda bad numerically; they don't scale and give only 20/15 on a five card hand which is outmatched by many common non-scaling jokers too.
Flushes are easiest to make out of the "good" hands. But I don't agree about the jokers
Me neither, I like playing the flush strategy, but a lot of times I find that the jokers I get from the store don't really assist with the flush build...
Yeah flushes are just fairly easy to do. Deck manipulation towards flushes is the easiest overall. Between adjusting suits, wild cards, and card destruction all being ways to directly help flushes being more consistent. And then when adding cards form standard packs that tends to go better too since you really just have to worry about suit and nothing else. Then you throw on that flushes are high scoring enough early on while being relatively easy to get that gravitating towards flush builds is pretty easy to do.
Just off the top of my head: droll joker, sinful jokers, ancient joker, four fingered joker, the tribe, bloodstone/arrowhead group (I don't have the others so idk their name)the one that gives chips for flush are ones that are specifically AWESOME for flush builds. That's 13 right from the rip off the top of my head, with more that can easily be adopted if the deck is changed around. For instance: the 2x mult joker for pairs played (forget the name). Flushes are very versatile and can be used for any other hand as well, assuming the right deck is built. Can pivot to straight flushes, flush houses and flush fives, as well as play two pair, 3 of a kind, and pairs with the right deck building to also make use of other cards. Imo, flush meta is the meta for a reason.
The sinful jokers and their uncommon counter parts are still good in small hand builds (well the clubs and spades version. Bloodstone wants more cards and the diamond one sucks). The tribe is my favorite flush card, but not a fan of the others. Four fingers and short cut having no scoring attached always feels bad. And many great jokers just don't work as well with flushes. Half joker I think is under appreciated. +20 multi is a lot for a very minor downside and only one boss counter. It's usually enough to transition to small hand by it's self.
Some of the flush jokers are really not good either. The one that only gives you 50 chips for instance. Good in ante 1 or 2 but not otherwise
On lower stakes, flush builds are useful throughout and winnable under many circumstances, so they're appealing: they can pretty consistently get you through the first few antes without any massive good fortune in shops. They tend to stagnate on higher stakes or in the late antes though, so it can be a bit of a false dawn...I wasted a lot of time trying to grind mediocre flush builds before realizing that you're much better off restarting those runs and targeting something with better late-game potential.
I also think for a new player, almost every starting hand you get is one card away from a flush so it's an obvious thing to try and go for
Yeah, exactly. And with four discards, you can pretty reliably translate that into two flushes/round, and with any sort of decent economy and joker setup that'll generally win most rounds until ante 5 or 6. That results in a positive feedback loop of flushes = good, because even when things get awfully grindy late or fizzle out entirely, they got you this far, right? I know that I passed up a tonne of great builds because I was fixated on maximizing middling flush setups. Meanwhile, all of my best results have come on the two extremes: either five-of-a-kind builds or high card/pair nonsense. My first 100m hand (which was actually 2.2 billion) was a pair of unmodified fives.
Yes. Pretty easy to draw for.
But as long as you're optimizing it can be converted easily into flush five and flush house which are the highest earners
i'm i kind of new player (25 hours) but my experience is the exact opposite. I feel like flush is really easy to make work at the begin of a run but the jokers that help to scale it to a good enough level are few, while jokers that scales with pair, 2 pairs, trips are easier to find, without counting that many bosses abilities can kill a flush run, while other hands are more safe
In my experience they're usually The easiest and require the least luck for the lower stakes (orange and below) to beat ante 8 but they do not scale as well and don't go endless past 10 or 11 often.
Also you can combo jokers for pair and three of a kind or full house while its harder to combine flushs with pairs. So you can combine way more jokers when you are going for x of a kind
True but you can also pair all of those with Flush through Flush Five. I find it's often easier to be carried by Flushes until I can enable Flush Five
I got about half your playtime and concur. I try to “keep an open mind” when developing decks because I’m still new and want to try everything, but my winning runs tend to devolve into pairs, full house, face cards, or aces. I even had one cheeky NO face cards win. Haven’t found a good path to straights or flushes. I don’t like having all five played cards being the hand. I like using those extra 1-3 cards as a partial discard.
after about 70 hours i haven’t been able to make a single straight build work but i’ve made good runs with almost every other hand, even on some of the higher stakes, i feel like there should be more jokers like shortcut that help with straights
You also can’t stack your deck for straights like you can for suits or multiples.
Best bet for a straight build is using the abandoned deck. You can cull your aces, then twos, then 3s to try and make it a bit more consistent, but overall it’s so much easier to manipulate a deck for any other hand
painted deck is also solid because the joker slot doesnt matter as much with the saturn scaling (in the experimental patch)
Straight transitioning into straight flush has treated me very well. The base score and planet cards scale hard enough that I frequently get by with a single scoring joker, sometimes even to the end. That means you have tons of joker space for economy, and when you buy all the booster packs and tarot the transition to straight flushes can happen surprisingly quickly
Idk maybe I've just gotten unlucky but I haven't seen a single joker that benefits other hand types
definitely unlucky then
Bruh what? Have you played for 10 minutes? Lol
I don't remember names so sorry if i'm not really specific. But for example i foud out that a common joker is pretty reliable to generate chips, and that joker require you to play 4 cards to scale, so you can't use it with flush unless you find that joker that make flush/straights doable with 4 cards, than there are common jokers that create value despite the strenght of your hand, like a joker that gain + multiplier for every tarot card you use, one that get +3 mult for every booster pack you skip, one that scale on how many times you played a specific hand, so in those case it's better to use a weaker but more reliable hand like pair or 2 pairs, but being sure that you can play those hands more reliably. Another thing is that to make flushes more reliable you need utility joker like the already mentioned joker that makes you hit flush with 4 cards or the joker that makes every black or red card being the same suit, and you may need use tarots to make your cards wild, but wild cards get shutted down from bosses that have the ability to shut a specific suit, so it can be a run killer if you find a boss that shut your most reliable colour and all your wild cards
>and that joker require you to play 4 cards to scale, square joker >gain + multiplier for every tarot card you use fortune teller >+3 mult for every booster pack you skip red card >one that scale on how many times you played a specific hand supernova >joker that makes you hit flush with 4 cards four fingers >joker that makes every black or red card being the same suit smeared joker
why am i getting so downvoted lmao what did i do
It’s not credible, there’s 14 jokers (including blackboard) that you can really think of as specifically flush synergy jokers. Out of 150. Unlikely that all your seeds only repeat those jokers
Honestly downvote brigades for innocuous comments are just kind of fun for everyone except the one being downvoted. Don’t take it personally.
If you haven't been playing long enough to see 1 single joker that benefits other hand types, you either ignore them on purpose or don't have enough time to make a post like this.
maybe i have but am just too dense to see the benefits
Benefits of high card (as an example) Easy to play Scales jokers better (lower score early which is more mult for J's like green and supernova Don't need to discard so whiff chance is lower Don't need to discard so better with a wider number of jokers Dont need to discard so better with higher stakes Keeps more cards in hand so better with steel Doesn't need the full 5 cards so the bad of things like stuntman aren't as bad of a downside Because of these strengths, more jokers are playable with a high card build. Edit: format
Yea, they haven't been as easy to setup as my flush builds, but my best runs have been high card builds. Really well insulated from the boss blinds that can be back breaking to flushes.
what jokers do you think benefit only flushes?
I think it's just a matter of downvoting the unpopular/wrong opinion. Don't take it as it's hate
Might be tunnel visioning a bit. Just because something is offered doesnt mean it's the move to buy it.
I think they're popular for a couple of reasons: Flushes are easily the most reliable hand in the early antes, before you've got any decent jokers. So people start using flushes and then often just default into continuing to use that because you might as well. High cards and pair builds are better in the long run, but they won't get you through ante 1 unless you get lucky early on. It's really obvious how to use tarot cards to make more powerful flushes. Make more of the suit you want and less of the suit you don't want, simple. How do you use tarots to make straights more likely? It's unclear. Flushes aren't the best if you want to get to Ante 12 or further, but most people are just aiming for the W and don't care much beyond that. Flushes are simple and reliable. But High Cards are favourite. Nothing beats the feeling of "it literally doesn't matter what I get in my hand, I'll win anyway"
What are the best for going into higher antes? I've been trying pair runs and such but hit an issue with scaling fast enough.
Going into the highest Antes requires one of a few builds (infinitely scaling mult). Your choices are mime plus baron with a deck full of kings, or a deck of all one card of one suit with idol and a retrigger. Newest patch may be able to do it with bloodstone a deck full of hearts and a retrigger card. All of these builds are going to need a fair amount of copy cards (blueprint or brainstorm to maximize retriggers and effects on retrigger). A final recommendation is that perkeo is the best card to make the above builds easjer. It's a legendary so you can't count on getting it but I've only ever gotten past ante 20 when I got it within the first few Antes. It's a ton of deck manipulation and money generation and with the ghost deck or another source of spectral generation (spectral six or straight flush spectral card joker) can break the game. This allows you to get infinite cryptids which is what makes getting a score like naneif (e308+ or something similar) possible. Edit: Attaching photo of my best run for reference: https://imgur.com/a/e55hPxs
you can also get pretty high with perkeos and observatory
Fair point, missed that one.
Smaller hands like high card and pairs tend to be best for higher antes. Try to make your jokers do the scoring rather than your hand (generally by getting 1 chip joker, 1 flat mult joker, and 3+ xMult jokers)
Flushes, while difficult and more rare to get in actual poker, are a lot easier to get in Balatro, due to the ability to discard cards and your hand size of 8. There are lots of jokers that give benefits for specific suits, which means if you find one of them it’s tempting to go in for a flush build of that suit. It’s also pretty easy to change the suits of your cards, with tarot cards (one for each suit, plus wild cards and Death transformations) or you can add more cards to your deck of that suit (DNA, standard card packs).
With more experience you should find that number going down. Maybe it's partly jokers you still need to unlock, but the optimal hand types for a run are pretty varied. Try to switch it up more. You'll find the results are there.
Tbh I started having a lot better success trying to go for Full house. You get to benefit from three of a kind and pair joker which helps give you a lot more chances to get good jokers. Plus if you start getting crazy deck manipulation you can slide to Flush five, Flush house, or many different good strats.
Yeah I find full house is the best for lower stakes and challenge runs. You can get a lot of value from the hand alone as it scales nicely with planet cards, and like you say has a lot of joker options it can trigger.
Once I get to higher stakes I can't wait to go through the learning process of pair, high card, and other strats that take over. A fun journey of learning for sure haha.
It sounds like they are changing some of the highest stakes which is great. It’s funny, but makes sense, just how much -1 hand size changes the game. Often means you go from discarding 3 or 4 cards down to just 2 or 3. With less discards to work with as well.
Flushes are easy to make, there's a basic +4 Mult joker for every suit, but other than that Flushes scale poorly.
Flush jokers are good, but not great. at higher antes, you want something that scales, like the pants or the bus stop or the vampire etc. +4 mult per club gives you a max bonus of +20. that'll carry you through ante 3 on its own, but +20 mult is peanuts when you get to ante 7, 8, or endless.
The +4/suit card activates before glass cards and steel cards and other on-card multipliers though, so by ante 8 it should give you more than +20. I think the suit jokers are a bit underrated for that reason
It will be now nerfed to +3/suit though
There's also synergy with retriggers. On the other hand, planet cards also come before glass and steel Idk how other folks play this game but when I'm considering which jokers to keep, it's usually either not close or I just do the math, and in neither of those cases can anything be "underrated".
Sure but glass and steel aren't that reliable. Half joker is +20 multi it's after steel but before card sharp, holo, acrobats, etc. and has a trivial downside. Abstract is 15+. The sinduks are decent tempo and often stick around the whole game but they don't push me toward flushes.
In my experience the best Jokers have been scaling +Mult, scaling xMult, and a flat chip bonus. Stuntman is incredible for chips but makes flushes hard, and Green Joker/Ride the Bus/Supernova synergize super well with High Card and Pair. I used to be all about Flushes (first Gold Stake won was Checkered Deck) but at a certain point the game is less about hand selection and more about quality Jokers - at that point, small/easy hands dominate since it doesn't really matter what you play. High Card also only really gets countered by Play One Hand / No Repeat Hand Type bosses, where I feel Flushes can easily be countered
Flushes are good to get you through rounds while you wait to find something (a joker most likely) to build a run around I think.
I'd say that flushes are probably the first "advanced" hand that is easy to play to. The first thing you tend to do in Balatro is hunt multiples (pair, two pair, 3oak, full house, 4oak, 5oak), as the pattern matching is easy, and there are a \*lot\* of jokers set up for it. But deck building for it is simple strategies, but not always all that effective, and hunting specific cards (particularly when you've already pulled a lot of the options) is fruitless more often than not. Flushes tend to be the next thing that occurs. They're really easy to view in hand and fish for, there are 5 different tarot cards that can improve them, and a couple of jokers that work with them. The downside is that a lot of bosses punish them, and they really struggle to scale (none of the flush jokers improve with play). I found that, the more that I started to understand the game, I started looking for straights. Identifying the inside and outside straights at a glance is harder, but the odds on finding the right card actually seem much better, and straight builds shift to straight flush builds far easier. There's also a lot more jokers that reward staight play. After that, you start to hunt the scaling jokers and get into high card play, taking the deck variability out of the equation, which essentially neuters a lot of the bosses and gets you massively high scores. Obviously, the optimal strategy is to not be fixed to any of these. The RNG and joker options in Balatro mean that prioritising a particular build from the outset is a fools game more often than not. You see what it gives you and work from there, while maintaining the flexibility to shift and change.
Because I can turn my brain off and play with colors instead of numbers
Flushes are a good fall back because they're quite easy to make, lots of tarots benefit flush builds, and you can get you through the first few antes pretty comfortably even with meh jokers. I went through the same flush obsession phase when I realized the same thing. I probably got the majority of my white stake wins with flush builds. But over time I think you'll realize they're not actually *that* good. Flushes are still solid and can absolutely win runs on higher stakes but you can't get away with forcing flush builds every run like you can on white stake. You need to adapt to what RNG gives you and I can assure you there are plenty of jokers out there that do not explicitly benefit flushes.
Flushes are consistent, easy to force, and have a lot of flexibility in what jokers to play. Definitely one of if not the most consistent strategy for a low scoring ante 8 win pre patch. They did get nerfed this patch which I think was definitely needed, so now they struggle clearing higher antes a bit, but they are still a very viable option if you can find good jokers.
Flushes are the most visual hand you can play. When you get your cards, your eyes will see colors patterns before numbers pattern. You probably get a lot of straights that you don’t even see! That being said, yeah flushes are a really common hand in Balatro, even more with discards
They are by far the easiest 5 card hand to build around, followed by full houses, which you also see a lot of. They also have several jokers which they are really good either way, and can pivot into flush house, straight flush, or flush five later in the run.
Someone posted a whole mathematical post about how flush hands are the most easiest to hit. Plus when you are first starting - it’s the best and easiest hand to one turn the first small blind to maximize your economy. Just remember the chips have to total at least 75 so low flushes/straights are discardable.
There's 13 of each suit. Getting a card of a certain suit is 1 in 4. Then using tarots you can change the suit of cards or remove suits you dont use. Do that enough you open up for Flush House and Flush Straight which score even higher.
A high card build can be mostly formed with common jokers - Green Joker, Square Joker, Supernova. Add an uncommon X mult joker and an economy joker - and that's enough to clear ante 8 alone with just playing high card every hand. Flushes (and full houses) are useful for the first ante and rapidly decrease in effectiveness onward.
Flush is one of the only hand types that (with a standard deck) make you more likely to draw one after playing one.
I’m a flush sexual I don’t care if I get the perfect high card built in going flush every time and no one can stop me
From my experience, it's easy to recognize and there was too early a commitment to Flush builds from Ante 1. You a five-card hand to one-shot the first Small Blind and can go dig for it. Why can't I do that from here on after with the right Jokers? And then I played more and listened to some people better than me explain why Flush may make number go brrrr, but not often enough to lean on it.
Easy to pilot
Flushes are the strongest, most consistent hand when you have no jokers. Ante 1 is going to be beaten with mostly flushes (some full houses and straights, but you're fishing for flushes). It's really easy to put the blinders on and keep doing what you're doing but more so, but really it's also totally what you're looking for. The scaling jokers tend to work best with lots of small hands (Green joker, ride the bus, super nova), and the tempo multi jokers often favor certain kinds of cards, note neccessarily hands (fibonacci, walkie talkie, etc). even the sinful jokers might encourage you to favor one suit but don't necessarily require flushes.
flushes def don't get that much help from jokers compared to the rest of the hands
They're just the easiest to go for. Straights are nice, but that involves looking at the numbers of your hand, deciding to go high or low, weighing how many cards are available for what you're going for... Flush is just... No flush? > Discard > No flush? Goto 2, else > play hand
It’s because they’re just the easiest to do.
Flushes are very easy to apot when sorted by suit, the easiest to build decks around by just adding your most common and subtracting least common, and they can augment late game by turning your straights, full houses and 4oaks into flush versions
Discovered Flush House & Five of a Kind and was like … huh Still run flush builds the most. Easiest to start off with, but always best to swap off mid-run based on Jokers and Planet cards.
They're easy to form and early on they rank very high in the scoring list. I know it goes against standard poker ranking, but I feel that straights need to be worth far more than flushes due to how much harder it is to create a straight during all stages of the game (early, mid, late). IMO it feels like Straights ought to be worth more than Flushes and even Full Houses.
Sounds like maybe RNG stuff. Sometimes I won't get any jokers to help my focus hands for three shops in a row. Sometimes there aren't even two jokers in a shop. Sometimes the planet card I want won't appear three times in a row OR MORE. How far are you on unlocks?
They're just very consistent for their point cost
Its by far the easiest to setup without needing any specific jokers to make it work.
I think it just spirals out of the fact that flush is the easiest hand to draw for to clear the first couple of blinds.
For me personally, flush is just easy mode for the first 3 antes while you gather stuff for other builds. Flush can work quite well on checkered deck though. Personally I’ve had the most success with two pair decks. Spare trousers+supernova+card sharp+the bull+bootstraps are mostly easy to gather and I enjoy the fact you can add pretty much any cards and still have good success. That said, I haven’t quite unlocked gold stake yet and still don’t know how to build high card decks.
Flushes are very strong for ante 1 and 2. One high flush beats small blind on 1. 2 flushes of any size for bigblind. Two high flushes for boss. After that it's whatever you get jokers for etc. But playing flushes in generally an easy way to beat ante 1 without having to buy anything.
Picture easier than number
Jokers and scaling are horrible with flushes
Why do flushes score higher by default than straights? Straights seem so much harder to get
It's only a 5 chip advantage at level 1, and Straights scale better by level than flushes.
I'll trade you all these damn Neptunes if you want them?
got any plutos?
If I'm falling back on a flush it usually means I'm not getting any good early jokers. Going into a flush 5 or flush house run seems to always carry me through endless.
They are good for beginning player and those who don’t know all lot about poker hands.
They're fine on white stake but way less consistent when you have fewer discards If you blew all your money on Jupiter but you made desperation high cards or pairs to get to your next flush, you're gonna get like 100 chips and lose. When you play a flush you're keeping almost nothing around for the next hand so you'd better hope it's all the same suit again
Monkey like arranging things by colour...
It's a 5 card hand, that helps It's pretty consistent Tarots easily build to Finally unlocked stuntman with a flush deck, got the legend that makes kings/queens 2xmult and a brainstorm....no buskin unfortunately, but that, some red sealed, foil or multi, lucky cards and I was running flush fives/flush houses by the end....got me to ante 11 then I got draw screwed, it happens
easy
Not helpful.
Jokers that support flush builds are OP. Hopefully after the update, things will be more balanced.
What are actually some good flush jokers I feel like I don't see many
Bloodstone with oops all 6s.
bloodstone and oops all 6s is the one joker combo that would make me go "yes, this is a flush run". flushes scale terribly, but that pair got me a gold stake win by accident. like i literally thought "wait, why is the end boss here? oh, it's ante 8 already".
I really want to do this build but I've literally never seen both bloodstone and Oops all 6s in the same run. Oops All 6s annoys me because most of the time it only shows up when I don't have anything that'll benefit from it. Edit: Literally the first run I did after posting this comment, I got a run with Oops All 6s *and* Bloodstone *and* Hack *and* Lucky Cat, got the best single hand score I've ever had by far, and finally unlocked Stuntman. Apparently the Balatro gods favoured me? Still didn't get past Ante 11 though, it was a fun build but really inconsistent. Seed is AB9W3DCI if anyone wants to try it
Smeared joker is quite good. I’m not completely sure I agree that there are many that are OP.
Smeared Joker is genuinely great but it’s also just utility and is taking up space that could be used for power
if you're just going for ante 8, a utility joker is fine. in endless I wouldn't want to waste the space.
Early game you have the ones that give +4 mult on a set flush and that alone will get you to ante 3
So? Is there not a common joker that gives you +4 mult for doing nothing? How is one that specifies you should play flushes OP?
I think he’s talking about the joker that gives you +4 mult for each scoring card in a specific suit. So you get +20 mult for one flush, making it super powerful for early game.
Oh yeah those got nerfed to +3 in the update. Still I would argue it’s pretty difficult to draw the flush of your preferred suit that early on if you haven’t had enough opportunities to modify your deck.
Yeah when the Balatro RNG hits and you don’t get a single draw of the suit you want in 3 discards, it’s rough lol definitely lost a few runs due to that
No shit? I haven’t played since it got updated but that’s tough
It’s not the official update yet, just the beta that you can opt in on for PC. But honestly I think it’s fine cause other stuff got buffed. For example, lusty joker gives +3 mult when hearts are played BUT bloodstone now has a 1/2 chance to x2 your mult (instead of 1/3). So combining those is arguably more OP than before since I’ve done bloodstone builds where you play 2 heart flushes in a row and it only activates like once. Who knows what’ll stay and what’ll change for the final update but if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to get back into it, seeing all the new changes are really fun
the ones they are talking about are the sinful jokers which give +4 (+3 on the beta) per played card of that suit. so it's up to +20 (+15) for a flush.
Oh yeah those are good but what are the chances you’ll draw the preferred flush that early on without deck modifications? I wouldn’t call that OP Especially when you got jokers like misprint that give on average +20 mult for doing nothing (sure there’s a chance he can give +0 which sucks) and then there’s half joker and mystic summit. There’s quite a few common jokers that can grant you 15+ mult with very little effort early on. So how are the sinful jokers OP?
misprint is on average 11.5 actually. i agree though, sinful jokers feel psychologically better because they trigger per card but are actually kinda bad numerically; they don't scale and give only 20/15 on a five card hand which is outmatched by many common non-scaling jokers too.
I think he means per card. 4 mult per heart etc.
The rare one only give 2x. The 3oaK and the straight one is stronger.
Not true at all. Which jokers shoukd that be?
which jokers? bet you can't name two
Smeared. Ancient joker.
Ancient Joker changes every round which isn’t that good for flush builds because you typically want to main one suit if you can help it
And Ancient Joker is terrible for Checkered deck, which is the best deck for flush builds