YMMV / Balatro

• Breather Boss:
  • The Mark causes Face cards to be drawn face-down. Not only are there plenty of strategies that don't rely on (or even discourage) using Face cards to be effective, but the face-down Face cards are still fully playable. Face-down cards are only a serious problem for forming straights and flushes, which Face card strategies rarely rely on to begin with, and Face cards comprise of just three ranks, so if you repeatedly discarding Aces and Numbers, sorting by rank, and just blindly picking five face-down cards in a sequence, you are guaranteed a Two Pair at the least and can easily get a Three of a Kind or better. Best of all, you don't have to worry about this Boss Blind at all if you're playing the Abandoned Deck, which starts without any face cards, and you haven't added any yet; even if you did add a few face cards to that deck, it's still easy to pick out which of them were drawn.
  • The Serpent is actually beneficial to the High Card builds which scale well into the higher stakes, as the nature of those builds means there's little to no incentive to discard and playing a card in this blind effectively increases your hand size by 2, giving you more chances to draw cards which activate in your held hand.
  • Among the Boss Blinds fought on every 8th ante, Amber Acorn is the easiest because while it hides and shuffles your Jokers around, it's a complete non-issue if none of them rely on their positions to maximize their bonuses. Even then, you can try memorizing them so you can rearrange them after their animations when they give bonuses play.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: At higher stakes, expect to see a LOT of runs end by spamming Pair/High Card. Intended to be the "weak, but easy to have available" hands, they can often reach comparable scores to big hands just by spamming 1-2 cards with the right Joker setup, while being incredibly simple to find, and in High Card's case, it's literally guaranteed.
• Funny Moments: While there may only be a handful of them, the things which Jimbo the Joker can say when you lose or win a run can be worth a chuckle. Finding some of the secret hands can be this too for some due to their absurdity.
• Game-Breaker:
  • All of the legendary Jokers are very powerful, but there are some that will significantly aid you should you be able to acquire them.
    • Yorick comes with a hefty requirement of 23 discards, but you can achieve that, it quintuples the score of your hands. If you can discard early and frequently, you can make reaching score targets much easier. The 1.0.1 update reworked it so that it instead gains 1x Mult every 23 cards discarded, which takes more active effort throughout a run but largely makes it better, letting it scale every 2-3 rounds while avoiding its previous fatal flaw of being worthless if obtained too late.
    • Chicot disables boss blinds. Considering that certain blinds can completely wreck your strategy, being able to employ it unimpeded makes runs much more manageable.
  • Even some non-legendary Jokers can still be quite powerful: Shortcut allows Straights to have gaps of one rank, meaning that something like A-3-5-7-9 will still count, giving you a lot more possibilities with which to assemble this hand. Four Fingers reduces the number of cards needed for a Flush, Straight, or Straight Flush from five to four. If both of these Jokers show up in the same game, Straights become an absolute joke to get.
  • Vampire gains x0.2 Mult whenever you play an Enhanced Card but removes the enhancement. In theory, this makes it an Awesome, but Impractical Joker, but in practice enhancements typically don't carry a run that far without good synergy, and wiping them in exchange for scaling a multiplier is something almost every build can get behind. It also reaps the benefits of the "played" wording as opposed to "scored", making it easy to slap enhancements onto any cards and play them as they come up instead of needing to fit them into specific hands. With tools such as consistent tarot generation or Midas Mask (turns face cards gold when played, creating an endlessly replicable source of enhanced cards), it becomes one of the strongest multiplier/scaling cards in the game. Unsurprisingly, Vampire was hit with a suite of nerfs in the 1.0.1 patch: it only gains x0.1 Mult per enhancement it eats, only works on scored cards, and was moved to the Rare pool instead of Uncommon.
  • DNA allows you to repeatedly make permanent copies of the best card in your deck. If you can abuse it enough, you can easily set yourself up to play fully enhanced Flush Fives on every single hand — even more so if you use it in tandem with things that let you purge unwanted cards, such as Trading Card or the Death and Hanged Man tarot cards.
  • Jokers that trigger upon cards held in your hand can be incredibly broken — you can only play a maximum of 5 cards, but you can keep many more in your hand. In particular, Baron gives you x1.5 Mult for every King in your hand. When combined with things like steel cards (an additional x1.5 Mult) and red seals (trigger a card again), or Mime (trigger all effects on cards in hand again), it enables absurdly high scores.
  • What's better than having one busted Joker? Having a second copy of it. That's exactly what Blueprint does, copying the abilities of the Joker to the right of it. Brainstorm is similarly powerful, copying the abilities of your leftmost Joker, though its inflexible placement restriction makes it a little less effective than Blueprint. Regardless, you're free to rearrange your Jokers before playing your hand, allowing you to capitalize on Blueprint and Brainstorm, especially if you have both.
• Gateway Series: Many fans of the game have credited this game with making them a fan of other deck building games as the inherent RNG factor of actual playing cards helped ease them into the concepts needed to play others in the genre.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • A certain infamous seed (7LB2WVPK) is associated with an oversight with the game's random number generator where picking the Erratic Deck will cause every card in the deck to default to the 10 of Spades, allowing you to produce a Flush Five every hand and guaranteeing certain synergies that make it insanely overpowered. The bugged RNG was eventually patched out, however.
  • The Certificate generates a random card with a seal upon starting the round, and for some reason, that card's not debuffed by the Boss Blind. However, this was patched out in the v1.0.1 update.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Black Deck is, on a point by point basis, the worst deck in the game. In exchange for having one extra Joker slot, you have -1 hand for every round. While this sounds like a fair trade, in reality this means you will be barely scraping by with barely enough hands to generate income. The lack of income this deck has means that you will be unable to buy Jokers, making it difficult to get the appeal of this deck started. As well, you have a much smaller ratio for clearing blinds, making it very possible for the Black Deck to peter out during Ante 1 if you get particularly unlucky. Overall there is very little reason to pick it over the other decks.
• Memetic Mutation: Nope!^ExplanationThe taunting message given when The Wheel of Fortune fails to go off, which it does approximately 75% of the time....unless you're very unlucky, as most players seem to be.
• Misaimed Fandom: Balatro lacking a score preview for whatever hand you're preparing to play is a deliberate decision by the developer, since adding a preview would reduce much of the suspense of not knowing whether your current choice will push you past the needed ante. Part of the fun involves manually calculating your hand's score once you know the order of operations... only for the actual score to be higher/lower because you miscalculated somewhere. Nonetheless, online fan-made tools for Balatro enable you to quickly figure out the score of your hand.
• That One Achievement: Completionist++ requires you to earn a Gold Sticker on every Joker. With a total of 150 Jokers in the game and a default maximum of 5 Jokers per run, this involves winning a minimum of roughly 30 runs, all on the highest difficulty. This is a very generous estimate, however, as you have no control over what Jokers will appear in your run^note Unless you're playing a seeded run, but good luck finding enough viable seeds for this achievement, and many such as the Legendary Jokers are extremely difficult to come by. Compounding the difficulty is that many Jokers are rather weak or demand prohibitively difficult strategies, making winning a Gold Stake run with them a challenge in of itself. The v1.0.1 update alleviated this somewhat by ensuring that the first Legendary Joker you encounter in an unseeded Gold Stake run doesn't have a gold sticker yet, preventing tedious resetting and grinding should a Legendary with a gold sticker show up.
• That One Boss: Generally speaking, most Boss Blinds can become this if you're reliant on a certain strategy (for example, a face card-centric deck against The Plant, which debuffs face cards), but a few stand out for almost always causing trouble.
  • The Wall has no special gimmicks to speak of — it just has quadruple the base ante. Without a good deal of powerful upgrade combinations, achieving a score this high can be extremely difficult, more so if encountered in the early game where money is scarce and upgrades are harder to buy. Even worse is its Finisher Boss Blind counterpart, Violet Vessel, requiring six times the base ante amount. It's not uncommon to blaze through all 8 antes with a decently powerful deck, only to fall short of a staggering 300,000 score right at the last second.
  • The Pillar debuffs every card previously played in the same ante, disrupting strategies reliant on playing specific cards. If your strategy is particularly inflexible, this boss is an instant loss unless you can reroll it or skip every blind beforehand.
  • Verdant Leaf^note All cards debuffed until a Joker is sold and Crimson Heart^note One of your Jokers are disabled on each hand both have the same issue of eliminating one of your Jokers, destroying any run that can't afford to spare even a single Joker.
  • The Arm levels down a hand type each time you play it. This isn't an effect that wears off once the Boss Blind is defeated, it persists afterwards. This isn't too bad if it shows up as an early boss, but becomes potentially much deadlier if you're deep into a run and depend on highly-leveled hands to score. If your strategy involves spamming one particular type of hand that's been sufficiently leveled up, you can end up in a Morton's Fork situation where either you use other hand types that score a paltry amount, possibly losing the round, or go ahead and use your main strategy...and end up too weak to take on subsequent rounds, possibly even the Small Blind right afterwards. And this is after the update that nerfed this Boss Blind so that it can't reduce your hand levels to 0 anymore.

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