if you only play one card, you can hold more steel/gold/blue seal cards in your hand

this doesn’t matter much for winning normal runs, but if you happen to get jokers that buff steel cards (i.e. Mime and Baron), copy said jokers, find ways to increase your hand size, and make every card in your deck the same card, you can get absurdly high scores and get really far into endless mode

my current high score is 6.817x10^98, which I got with a really good high card plasma deck run

again though, you do need to find exactly the right jokers for this, so building around any other hand type is almost always more reliable for winning ante 8

doesn’t seem to be much activity in this thread, which doesn’t give me hope… reguardless, I thought I’d make some pixel art for this

I don’t mind if these actually get used or not, since making these designs was pretty good practice - I’d be happy to whip up a higher res version of any of these and/or make tweaks if there’s interest, though

for the first icon design, I tried to follow the gooped-up AI button layout as closely as possible while making it look like something you could actually hold, and I kept the general colour scheme the same - originally, I was going to keep the same orientation, too, but figured out quickly that it was too hard to be worth it at this scale

in the second icon, I removed the random squiggles / half-buttons and fit stuff in places that made sense for a real controller, though I didn’t follow a reference for this to try keep the controller generic - this is my personal favourite

the third is my attempt at mixing the lemmy icon’s features with design 2 - it turned out better than I expected, but I’m not sure how much it reads as a lemming, especially at smaller scales

to change it up, the fourth design has the lemmy icon in a gamer headset, which is technically more inclusive to people who don’t use controllers, but also loses some of the recognisability from the previous icon (there’s a twitter joke in here somewhere)

finally, the fifth design is just number 4’s lemming before I covered up the ears - I mainly included this since there’s no reason not to

I agree the econ jokers are in an odd spot (I usually store them all the way on the left), but the Ceremonial Dagger has to eat the Egg.

Most of the other weird joker order shenanigans are caused by Baseball Card, so blame Jim Joker, not me.

Also, Jimbo needs to be in position 149. For optimal reasons.

As others have said, Balatro does not lie to you - the listed odds are always right. But there are some ways to stack the odds in your favor outside of the obvious deckbuilding.

Namely, if you are holding a certain Joker, Planet, Tarot, or Spectral card, you will never see another copy of that card anywhere else through normal means. I’m also fairly certain Jokers, Planets, Tarots, and Spectrals that are currently in the shop offerings will not appear in their respective packs in the shop.

What this means is that you can slightly influence what you get by holding cards you don’t want. This is less useful for Jokers and Spectrals, but if you’re holding 2 Tarot cards and there are 2 in the shop, opening an Arcana pack gives you a 1/18 chance for each Tarot to be the one you’re looking for instead of a 1/22. Same goes for Celestial Packs, but there aren’t that many Planets, which makes the odds that much better.

This also means if you win with the hand you want to level up and have a Blue Seal card in hand, you should use the Planet before you cash out and go to the shop so that it can appear again.

The only exceptions to this that I can think of are having the Telescope voucher, which 100% guarantees that a Celestial Pack will have your most played hand’s Planet, having a Showman, which can even make the same card appear twice in one pack, or the Invisible Joker, which can show up again after you’ve sold it even if you keep the duped joker around.

On getting PhotoChad set up, my only advice is to pick up Riff-Raff (or skip for 2 common Jokers if you’re feeling real desperate) if you already have one of the two, and try to use Tarots to make your deck lean towards face cards. Similar advice for Lucky Cards - either get lucky and pick up Oops! All 6s or anything that retriggers cards, or don’t rely on them hitting to survive the next two seconds.

Finally, the Wheel never hits, except when you have a food joker that dies next round. Then it guaranteed hits on the food joker. /s

p.s. You say you’ll be “starved for either chips or mult” on Plasma? Unless I’m reading you wrong, the whole thing with Plasma is you don’t need to worry about getting both numbers up; you’ve gotta go all in on Chips early, since it’s easy to get a lot added with a few Jokers, then pivot to Mult late game if you can.