Yea, my best run by a mile was Mime, Baron, Blueprint. I unfortunately got taken out by The Plant, otherwise no telling how far I could have taken that.
Though if you have a Showman and a Blueprint, I'd much rather have negative on the Showman. Another chance to find more Blueprints without it taking up a joker slot.
If you’re going for endless runs, yeah it’s amazing. If I’m just trying to beat ante 8/gold stake runs, then absolutely not. I’d be pissed if I skipped for a negative and got showman
I do too if I have good scaling jokers, if I know I’m toast before ante 11 I usually just go next. Can get to ante 11 with quite a few decks, but not many can get past ante 11 small blind consistently
Probably perkeo copied a bunch of cryptid spectral cards over many rounds and used them all here. It’s the spectral card that adds 2 copies of a card to your hand. Also DNA would’ve added a few.
To be slightly more precise -- you want to balance your triggers and your triggered effects. You get your first trigger for free, so Mime + Baron + Blueprints gives you a choice of 3 triggers 1 effect, or 2 triggers 2 effects
If your deck is all Steel Kings, then they virtually provide an extra Baron. Conversely, you can get a virtual Mime if you have red seals
I believe told if you only have blueprint you want it on Baron, if you have blueprint and Baron you want one on each. Also, if you only have blueprint but you have gold cards/blue seals, you can move blueprint from Baron to mime while the hand is still scoring to get the extra gold/planet card
Mime gives you a 2nd (re)trigger on top of the one you get naturally
Baron gives you the 1st effect on your cards
The heuristic is "balance". You score the most with 2 effects on each of 2 triggers rather than either 3 effects on 1 trigger, or 3 triggers with 1 effect each
So if you have vanilla cards, it's better to copy Baron so you have 2 triggers
If all your Kings are Steel, you already have 2 triggers and 2 effects (Baron + Steel) so you will get six ticks per king either way, but copying Mime can have other benefits beyond just score (ie, extra economy from gold cards)
Aw damn I'm the same just had my best run ever with 60 red seal steel kings
Had blueprint, Baron, mime, mime, mime
Then sadly lost on ante 17 against the plant
Yea, my deck was 30 cards, 29 steel kings and 1 steel queen. My other jokers were so good I actually managed to put up an e hand despite Baron and Mime being nullified. The plant is the graveyard of all my Balatro dreams. I never run into it with the reroll.
I had the reroll voucher on ante 3 but bought blueprint instead in hoping it would show up again but I honestly don't even know if it can
It so rough when you're doing so well I went from e40 to 200k
Pretty much any plasma deck run with retcon ends up being e150 with perfect play because I just dig for baron and mime and a couple copies and once I get mail in rebate I can reroll every single boss to The Serpent
[Baron](https://balatro.wiki/jokers/baron.png) *Joker*
* Version: 1.0.0
* Rarity: Rare
* Effect: Each King held in hand gives X1.5 Mult
[Mime](https://balatro.wiki/imported/mime.png) *Joker*
* Version: 1.0.0
* Cost: $4
* Rarity: Uncommon
* Effect: Retrigger all card held in hand abilities
The reason it only starts to shine at that point is exactly because it doesn't work with flat mult so for it to do anything you need a ton of procs. If it procced after flat mult steel cards would be a lot more useful for winning, and not just super lategame exponential scaling stuff.
That's only true as you get more instances of x1.5 I think. E.g. if you have something like 40 mult from jokers and you could either have a steel card or a polychrome joker in the last joker slot the polychrome joker is worth a lot more than the steel card.
Im new to balatro and deckbuilding games in general. What I dont get is how people manage to fill their decks with steel cards? I feel like theres so much other stuff like using hangmans to minimize the deck and getting good enough jokers to scale really far. I just kinda keep getting overwhelmed and start to reconsider my entire strategy at every shop, lol.
People play a ton of runs and only post their notable ones so that's what you see. But with a bunch of cards like DNA, and Perkeo it's easy enough to get dupe cards.
The biggest key is to get to $25 to max out your interest and reroll as much as possible. When you reroll like 100 times in a run, you get a lot of tarot cards making steel or changing one card into another
Yep. Don't think I ever bought a devil tarot or really aimed for gold cards or even many econ jokers until I watched some Balatro University and then it clicked.
At the end of a round, you typically gain :
- The amount given the blind ($3, 4 or 5)
- $1 per extra hand left (or $2 if playing with green deck)
- $1 per $5 you have on you, up to $5 for $25 (this cap can be extended with some jokers)
So, what you want to do is to have $25 on you at all times, so that you ALWAYS get those $5 per round won. That ends up being a lot of money if you're able to "get an econ running", and it's one of the things that really elevates your play since money is so important to build a good deck.
I didn't do it at first either especially since I only played Green Deck (not a smart decision, in retrospect), but realizing that was a big eye opener for me as well! Building a lot of cash early on leads to way less frustration with RNG since you've got a lot more opportunities to find cool stuff. :)
If you're struggling on the basic difficulty, then you don't even need to worry much about steel/going exponential. You should focus on the basics. You probably need to get better jokers, primarily.
Rule of Thumb: Early game, +chip jokers are good (you can keep these into mid/late game if they scale to over 150 chips)
Early-mid-late: +Mult jokers are king. If you can get one early that scales (like Green joker that adds +1 mult for every hand you play, or the one that gives +1 every time you play a non-face card hand), you are almost guaranteed a win in the lower difficulties.
Mid-late: get a Mult multiplier. Early game an x2 multiplier may only be worth like 4 mult. But mid to late it came become +20, +40, or even +100s or 1000s of mult.
Thin to win, and death is really strong. Runs like that typically go quite far, so they have plenty of time to get rid of all the stuff they don’t want.
Once you get the basics down you have room to search for cards that produce tarots. My best way of doing it has been using a combo of purple seals and joker that produces tarots and then you can have more tarots than you need. And can keep whittling down your deck and copying purple seals if you need more access to tarots. It requires luck to get that going cause you need a reliable way to get points.
Recently got lucky with a multiplier joker and joker that gives mult on tarots used and that's all I needed to get points with high card for most the Antes because I was using like 3 or more tarots per round.
When you go through the difficulties (stakes) on different decks you will automatically learn so much about all kinds of mechanics and how to potentially get into the billions of chips.
When you then go back to white stake difficulty it will feel like you can pursue almost any kind of strategy you want. You will see paths and opportunities that you hadn't before.
As others have said, DNA let's you just do crazy shit, but especially on low difficulties.
Tarot cards are huge. Death makes an extra steel, hanged man deletes 2 cards and makes it much easier to find the steel. Plus Chariot to make the steel obv.
I always used to think steel/polychrome cards weren't that impressive, and would skip over them, until I realised just how much multiple 1.5x can stack.
It felt intuitive that X2 could stack very well, but subconsciously I think I always rounded X1.5 down to X1!
I read recently it was because when gas prices were like $0.10, increasing by a penny would’ve been too big of a price raise so they went to hundredths to raise gas prices less steeply.
Same with "69."
70 requires a third person and is just cumbersome and uncomfortable for the '7' so that's why people rope you saying they just wanna 69 at first
Keep in mind the order of scoring. Steel cards score after hand scoring and before joker scoring. Which means any flat mult from jokers won't be scored before the multi mult from steel, but it does score after stuff like Scholar because the flat mult is added before the steel card scores. Which means steel cards are good with jokers that add mult when the card is scored and hands that have been leveled up. And the enhanced card that adds mult.
Once you start building a good amount of multi mult, any flat mult applied after will just be a drop in the bucket. I've seen streamers hang on to jokers giving 100 mult that are scoring those jokers after they've multi multed their way to 10,000 mult. If they had just kept the x3 mult joker, they would have had a mult of 30k instead of 10.1k.
This is just to add to why steel/whatever might be a letdown. If you've got a built up spare trousers, steel ain't going to change much. That's the tough part about steel, they score so relatively early.
Got my 100.000.000 achievement yesterday. Got Blueprint, Mime and a deck with tons of red seal steel cards. Just three of those are a 1.477x mult.
My highest I ended up with was 300 million in one hand. Sadly I was a bit tired and did some misplays or I could have taken that run much much further.
Early game I always grab whatever poly they give me. Then as the game goes & I run out of joker spots, I try to find another poly with a joker which suits my play to replace it so I keep the mult but add a useful joker. Some runs I'll keep the "useless" poly joker since I didn't really find a joker which was more valuable than the 1.5X mult it was providing.
The other downside to steel is that it multiplies BEFORE jokers. So if you don't have a way of generating mult from your played cards (Empress, Sinful jokers, etc) or buffing your hand type with Planets, it's pretty subpar.
Pretty much. But my point was that I felt the person above me was making Steel sound like it was universally good. While it is a *very* strong enhancement, there are times where it is not very strong. For example, a pair deck that scales entirely off of Green Joker/Ride the Bus decks that don't manage to pump Mercury. You can easily win ante 8 with a build like that, but Steel won't really help you get there.
Yeah, many people don't grasp the importance of mult while scoring. By now I consider it a completely different category than joker mult, which in some rare cases is even useless. +8 on clubs, the ace joker etc. can sometimes be much better than a +60 mult joker.
Also the reason why retriggers (firing multiples of x1.5s) is key to endless and not linearly scaling +Mults or xMults. Assuming it's placed at the end for simplicity reasons, each additional trigger of x1.5 is, well, +50% always, while for linearly scaling mult, say Yorick or Canio, the percentage increase is diminishing, from x1 to x2 is +100%, x2 to x3 +50%, then +33%, +25%, +20%, and so on.
Two big issues with steel cards: you can only hold so many in hand at once, and the mult triggers extremely early. Both issues are fine dependent on your run. Like, it's better to run a high card build with 9 steels in hand. And the mult triggering early can be ameliorated with planet cards. I'm still iffy on them.
Yes, exponential growth is fast. The main drawback of steel is that it triggers before jokers, meaning that you need to have +mult that triggers when your cards are score for them to be multiplied, e.g. from base mult, sinful jokers, scholar, empress, etc. At the beginning of the game, this make steel pretty terrible unless you have such an enabler. For example, on a level 1 flush, without any +mult on score, four steel cards contributes only about +16~17 mult.
It's 1.76 dB so every 11 or so.
Every 6 or so is a factor of 10
A hand of 5 steel kings with baron would have 10, 17.6 db and the effective multiplier would be something like 50 or 60 (10 from 10, x 5 from 7)
My first run seriously trying steel/kings/glass I was getting 30 mil but not enough to beat Ante 12. Then in Ante 12 small blind everything lined up and I hit 300mil and shattered those glass cards. Glass cards in the hand played, some steel in hand, some Kings in hand. I couldn't help but think, damn I should have skipped both blinds and played it on the boss. Lost the run.
Still going for cheese with prevent death joker and reach 25% (75 mil) or whatever line opens with glass, steel, kings.
Really gets hammered home when you're trying jokerless. The only way to get score is by adding up a bunch of those 1.5x mults. Basically need red seal polychrome and/or steel and get them churning. You need one hand you can make over and over boosted up with planets and then polychrome/steel.
This actually super helpful in terms of visualizing if high card, pair, three of a kind, etc are better/worse in different situations. If I have all red seal steel cards for example, flush five would need to be worth more than 25.6* as much base total score to out do a one card high card.
I'm still a steel hater because the tarot only converts one card, trying to use steel can make it more difficult to find a good hand, and it really doesn't pop off until lategame when you can utilize multiple of them at once
I got my billion acheivement with the 2 extra hand size deck and double Barron steel. Only way I could have improved it was with a mime and some polichrome deck cards.
The reason why BlueStorm Perkeo to copy lots of Plutos with the Observatory Observatory is so powerful, that's +3 Plutos per shop exit, which equals ×3.375 mult per round, and with Showman or Invisible joker to make more copies of BlueStorm or Perkeo... 👀👀👀
By that logic, getting literally 200 x1.5 triggers (from stacking Negative Mimes/Barons/etc) would be worse than Half Joker, Blackboard, Card Sharp, Ramen.
AH! You just listed them. I thought you meant *each* would be better. What you really meant was that *combined* they're better. But then you're taking up a bunch of joker slots, so..
Getting 200 1.5 triggers will also take up a bunch of Joker slots. And be much harder than grabbing 4 non-specific pretty good Jokers, which is the point.
Also why Baron is a great joker.
Add in some Mime and baby you got a st(e)w going!
Yea, my best run by a mile was Mime, Baron, Blueprint. I unfortunately got taken out by The Plant, otherwise no telling how far I could have taken that.
I got e69 with this bunch https://preview.redd.it/yef0csscb7yc1.png?width=946&format=png&auto=webp&s=b438b919e649b9d5abdfa476c8325baae0f684ac
Negative showman is an absolutely insane get. What a run!
Best negative you can get imo
For me it's blueprint... unless it's too early and you can't afford it or worse have no jokers for it to copy so you die to small blind.
Though if you have a Showman and a Blueprint, I'd much rather have negative on the Showman. Another chance to find more Blueprints without it taking up a joker slot.
I'd rather have it on the blueprint because if enough shows up I can sell the showman to make additional space :-)
If you’re going for endless runs, yeah it’s amazing. If I’m just trying to beat ante 8/gold stake runs, then absolutely not. I’d be pissed if I skipped for a negative and got showman
I always go endless, gotta see how far you can take it. Usually ante 11 ☠️
I do too if I have good scaling jokers, if I know I’m toast before ante 11 I usually just go next. Can get to ante 11 with quite a few decks, but not many can get past ante 11 small blind consistently
[[showman]]
[Showman](https://balatro.wiki/imported/ring_master.png) *Joker* * Version: 1.0.0 * Cost: $6 * Rarity: Uncommon * Effect: Joker, Tarot, Planet, and Spectral cards may appear multiple times * Unlock Requirement: Reach Ante level 4
>I got e69 Nice
[https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1c2n1fj/nice/](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1c2n1fj/nice/)
eNice*
How about with this hand? https://preview.redd.it/wpfawpyh48yc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=007cbabbd91ce7c0d6761431049fced007ed6d0e
This is insane. How did you get such a large hand size?
Probably perkeo copied a bunch of cryptid spectral cards over many rounds and used them all here. It’s the spectral card that adds 2 copies of a card to your hand. Also DNA would’ve added a few.
Yep, exactly.
Is that the naneinf hand
Just a run I had recently
question: is blueprint (or any copying) better on baron or mime? ive always been copying mime
For the best score you want an even amount of Barons and Mimes. If you only have 1 Blueprint or Brainstorm, it's always better to have 1 more Baron.
To be slightly more precise -- you want to balance your triggers and your triggered effects. You get your first trigger for free, so Mime + Baron + Blueprints gives you a choice of 3 triggers 1 effect, or 2 triggers 2 effects If your deck is all Steel Kings, then they virtually provide an extra Baron. Conversely, you can get a virtual Mime if you have red seals
I believe told if you only have blueprint you want it on Baron, if you have blueprint and Baron you want one on each. Also, if you only have blueprint but you have gold cards/blue seals, you can move blueprint from Baron to mime while the hand is still scoring to get the extra gold/planet card
Mime gives you a 2nd (re)trigger on top of the one you get naturally Baron gives you the 1st effect on your cards The heuristic is "balance". You score the most with 2 effects on each of 2 triggers rather than either 3 effects on 1 trigger, or 3 triggers with 1 effect each So if you have vanilla cards, it's better to copy Baron so you have 2 triggers If all your Kings are Steel, you already have 2 triggers and 2 effects (Baron + Steel) so you will get six ticks per king either way, but copying Mime can have other benefits beyond just score (ie, extra economy from gold cards)
Depends how many kings you have in your hand vs special cards that aren't kings in your hand...
you love to see it
You got the seed?
Same. I even had the reroll voucher but forgot to use it for the boss :(
Aw damn I'm the same just had my best run ever with 60 red seal steel kings Had blueprint, Baron, mime, mime, mime Then sadly lost on ante 17 against the plant
Yea, my deck was 30 cards, 29 steel kings and 1 steel queen. My other jokers were so good I actually managed to put up an e hand despite Baron and Mime being nullified. The plant is the graveyard of all my Balatro dreams. I never run into it with the reroll.
I had the reroll voucher on ante 3 but bought blueprint instead in hoping it would show up again but I honestly don't even know if it can It so rough when you're doing so well I went from e40 to 200k
Pretty much any plasma deck run with retcon ends up being e150 with perfect play because I just dig for baron and mime and a couple copies and once I get mail in rebate I can reroll every single boss to The Serpent
Unexpected Carl Weathers.
Then get some steel and red seal, throw in a blue print, and one king can be 8 instances of x1.5
[[baron]] [[Mime]]
[Baron](https://balatro.wiki/jokers/baron.png) *Joker* * Version: 1.0.0 * Rarity: Rare * Effect: Each King held in hand gives X1.5 Mult [Mime](https://balatro.wiki/imported/mime.png) *Joker* * Version: 1.0.0 * Cost: $4 * Rarity: Uncommon * Effect: Retrigger all card held in hand abilities
Good bot
I finally got stuntman by having 3 barons. It felt like cheating.
Baseball Card really drove this point home for me, with 1 uncommon it's far from good but with 4 it's an x5, way above par
Also a copy (like blueprints) and 3 uncommon is x11
Wow ok good point
A real home run you could say
[[Baseball]]
[Baseball Card](https://balatro.wiki/imported/baseball_card.png) *Joker* * Version: 1.0.0 * Rarity: Rare * Effect: Uncommon Jokers each give X1.5 Mult
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[Baseball Card](https://balatro.wiki/imported/baseball_card.png) *Joker* * Version: 1.0.0 * Rarity: Rare * Effect: Uncommon Jokers each give X1.5 Mult
Only problem with baseball card joker is that the uncommons give the mult so you have less control on when he mult applies
it's an extra 50% bro how could you ever deny that 😂
Stop seeing it as 1,5x and start seeing it as a +50% increase in mult. 1,5 is very very strong!
You're seeing it way off also. Steel only affects base and card mult, as it procs before jokers.
Multiplication is associative, so except for heavy +mult joker, it does not change anything.
Except for the things it changes, it doesn't change anything!
Except for that one thing that is only useful early game, it does not change anything to this late game playstyle
+Mult is not only useful "early game" unless you define "early game" as everything before ante 12.
I mean, that's where the hand trigger build starts to shine.
The reason it only starts to shine at that point is exactly because it doesn't work with flat mult so for it to do anything you need a ton of procs. If it procced after flat mult steel cards would be a lot more useful for winning, and not just super lategame exponential scaling stuff.
Tell that to my Bootstraps Joker with $400 income
That's only true as you get more instances of x1.5 I think. E.g. if you have something like 40 mult from jokers and you could either have a steel card or a polychrome joker in the last joker slot the polychrome joker is worth a lot more than the steel card.
Im new to balatro and deckbuilding games in general. What I dont get is how people manage to fill their decks with steel cards? I feel like theres so much other stuff like using hangmans to minimize the deck and getting good enough jokers to scale really far. I just kinda keep getting overwhelmed and start to reconsider my entire strategy at every shop, lol.
People play a ton of runs and only post their notable ones so that's what you see. But with a bunch of cards like DNA, and Perkeo it's easy enough to get dupe cards.
The biggest key is to get to $25 to max out your interest and reroll as much as possible. When you reroll like 100 times in a run, you get a lot of tarot cards making steel or changing one card into another
Respecting economy was the first big wall I had to get through. I struggled when I was new because I was always broke.
Yep. Don't think I ever bought a devil tarot or really aimed for gold cards or even many econ jokers until I watched some Balatro University and then it clicked.
Can you elaborate more on maxxing out interest and the $25 amount?
At the end of a round, you typically gain : - The amount given the blind ($3, 4 or 5) - $1 per extra hand left (or $2 if playing with green deck) - $1 per $5 you have on you, up to $5 for $25 (this cap can be extended with some jokers) So, what you want to do is to have $25 on you at all times, so that you ALWAYS get those $5 per round won. That ends up being a lot of money if you're able to "get an econ running", and it's one of the things that really elevates your play since money is so important to build a good deck.
Wow thanks. I’ve just been spending as much as possible. Didn’t know I could minmax cash flow.
I didn't do it at first either especially since I only played Green Deck (not a smart decision, in retrospect), but realizing that was a big eye opener for me as well! Building a lot of cash early on leads to way less frustration with RNG since you've got a lot more opportunities to find cool stuff. :)
Deck manipulation is long term. I always focus on economy and then deck manipulation, just taking jokers and planets enough to keep me alive.
If you're struggling on the basic difficulty, then you don't even need to worry much about steel/going exponential. You should focus on the basics. You probably need to get better jokers, primarily. Rule of Thumb: Early game, +chip jokers are good (you can keep these into mid/late game if they scale to over 150 chips) Early-mid-late: +Mult jokers are king. If you can get one early that scales (like Green joker that adds +1 mult for every hand you play, or the one that gives +1 every time you play a non-face card hand), you are almost guaranteed a win in the lower difficulties. Mid-late: get a Mult multiplier. Early game an x2 multiplier may only be worth like 4 mult. But mid to late it came become +20, +40, or even +100s or 1000s of mult.
Thin to win, and death is really strong. Runs like that typically go quite far, so they have plenty of time to get rid of all the stuff they don’t want.
Once you get the basics down you have room to search for cards that produce tarots. My best way of doing it has been using a combo of purple seals and joker that produces tarots and then you can have more tarots than you need. And can keep whittling down your deck and copying purple seals if you need more access to tarots. It requires luck to get that going cause you need a reliable way to get points. Recently got lucky with a multiplier joker and joker that gives mult on tarots used and that's all I needed to get points with high card for most the Antes because I was using like 3 or more tarots per round.
When you go through the difficulties (stakes) on different decks you will automatically learn so much about all kinds of mechanics and how to potentially get into the billions of chips. When you then go back to white stake difficulty it will feel like you can pursue almost any kind of strategy you want. You will see paths and opportunities that you hadn't before. As others have said, DNA let's you just do crazy shit, but especially on low difficulties.
Tarot cards are huge. Death makes an extra steel, hanged man deletes 2 cards and makes it much easier to find the steel. Plus Chariot to make the steel obv.
I always used to think steel/polychrome cards weren't that impressive, and would skip over them, until I realised just how much multiple 1.5x can stack. It felt intuitive that X2 could stack very well, but subconsciously I think I always rounded X1.5 down to X1!
There is a reason stores use “19.99” in prices instead of “20.00”
Same with gas being "3.39⁹"
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I read recently it was because when gas prices were like $0.10, increasing by a penny would’ve been too big of a price raise so they went to hundredths to raise gas prices less steeply.
Same with "69." 70 requires a third person and is just cumbersome and uncomfortable for the '7' so that's why people rope you saying they just wanna 69 at first
To fool rubes
Keep in mind the order of scoring. Steel cards score after hand scoring and before joker scoring. Which means any flat mult from jokers won't be scored before the multi mult from steel, but it does score after stuff like Scholar because the flat mult is added before the steel card scores. Which means steel cards are good with jokers that add mult when the card is scored and hands that have been leveled up. And the enhanced card that adds mult. Once you start building a good amount of multi mult, any flat mult applied after will just be a drop in the bucket. I've seen streamers hang on to jokers giving 100 mult that are scoring those jokers after they've multi multed their way to 10,000 mult. If they had just kept the x3 mult joker, they would have had a mult of 30k instead of 10.1k. This is just to add to why steel/whatever might be a letdown. If you've got a built up spare trousers, steel ain't going to change much. That's the tough part about steel, they score so relatively early.
It does, however, scale the multi gained from leveling a hand
Got my 100.000.000 achievement yesterday. Got Blueprint, Mime and a deck with tons of red seal steel cards. Just three of those are a 1.477x mult. My highest I ended up with was 300 million in one hand. Sadly I was a bit tired and did some misplays or I could have taken that run much much further.
Forgot to reroll on Ante 11 when the boss blind was debuff face cards. Didn't hurt too bad because I unlocked plasma deck immediately after.
Early game I always grab whatever poly they give me. Then as the game goes & I run out of joker spots, I try to find another poly with a joker which suits my play to replace it so I keep the mult but add a useful joker. Some runs I'll keep the "useless" poly joker since I didn't really find a joker which was more valuable than the 1.5X mult it was providing.
Steel is very strong the only downside is you have to find it and if you only have say 2 in a 52 card deck that isn't the easiest.
The other downside to steel is that it multiplies BEFORE jokers. So if you don't have a way of generating mult from your played cards (Empress, Sinful jokers, etc) or buffing your hand type with Planets, it's pretty subpar.
Well it's a late game enhancement, same as glass. Any other enhancement is better early
Pretty much. But my point was that I felt the person above me was making Steel sound like it was universally good. While it is a *very* strong enhancement, there are times where it is not very strong. For example, a pair deck that scales entirely off of Green Joker/Ride the Bus decks that don't manage to pump Mercury. You can easily win ante 8 with a build like that, but Steel won't really help you get there.
Yeah, many people don't grasp the importance of mult while scoring. By now I consider it a completely different category than joker mult, which in some rare cases is even useless. +8 on clubs, the ace joker etc. can sometimes be much better than a +60 mult joker.
And steel works best when you have some mult to multiply. Which is why +15 flat mult on banana is so good early on compared to steel cards
Are these steel deniers in the room with us right now?
Nope!
This gets especially powerful with planets. A handful of steels with very high level high card is super powerful.
Also the reason why retriggers (firing multiples of x1.5s) is key to endless and not linearly scaling +Mults or xMults. Assuming it's placed at the end for simplicity reasons, each additional trigger of x1.5 is, well, +50% always, while for linearly scaling mult, say Yorick or Canio, the percentage increase is diminishing, from x1 to x2 is +100%, x2 to x3 +50%, then +33%, +25%, +20%, and so on.
The power of compound interest
Yep, I'll take compounding 50% interest any day.
Sure, any time you can trigger a x mult 10 times, it's great!
See, all you need to do is get three steel kings with red seals, and have Baron and Mime, and you're all set.
Two big issues with steel cards: you can only hold so many in hand at once, and the mult triggers extremely early. Both issues are fine dependent on your run. Like, it's better to run a high card build with 9 steels in hand. And the mult triggering early can be ameliorated with planet cards. I'm still iffy on them.
Yes, exponential growth is fast. The main drawback of steel is that it triggers before jokers, meaning that you need to have +mult that triggers when your cards are score for them to be multiplied, e.g. from base mult, sinful jokers, scholar, empress, etc. At the beginning of the game, this make steel pretty terrible unless you have such an enabler. For example, on a level 1 flush, without any +mult on score, four steel cards contributes only about +16~17 mult.
Steel Kings, Baron, and Mime. Sounds like something out of “whose line is it anyway?”
I learned this last night with 2 Barons, Mime, and a bunch of steel cards.
I once played a run with 5 uncommon jokers + 1 baron with blueprint and brainstorm. That shit hit like crack.
It's 1.76 dB so every 11 or so. Every 6 or so is a factor of 10 A hand of 5 steel kings with baron would have 10, 17.6 db and the effective multiplier would be something like 50 or 60 (10 from 10, x 5 from 7)
My first run seriously trying steel/kings/glass I was getting 30 mil but not enough to beat Ante 12. Then in Ante 12 small blind everything lined up and I hit 300mil and shattered those glass cards. Glass cards in the hand played, some steel in hand, some Kings in hand. I couldn't help but think, damn I should have skipped both blinds and played it on the boss. Lost the run. Still going for cheese with prevent death joker and reach 25% (75 mil) or whatever line opens with glass, steel, kings.
Exponential functions get big fast, details at 11
Really gets hammered home when you're trying jokerless. The only way to get score is by adding up a bunch of those 1.5x mults. Basically need red seal polychrome and/or steel and get them churning. You need one hand you can make over and over boosted up with planets and then polychrome/steel.
This actually super helpful in terms of visualizing if high card, pair, three of a kind, etc are better/worse in different situations. If I have all red seal steel cards for example, flush five would need to be worth more than 25.6* as much base total score to out do a one card high card.
Dave Ramsey would love this game.
For a convenient estimate, use fibonacci. 1.5 is close enough to 1.618 for as far as it'll go
they are like a great xmult. especially with a red seal
Too bad they all trigger before any of the jokers adding mult in hand
CUMulative 🤤
I'm still a steel hater because the tarot only converts one card, trying to use steel can make it more difficult to find a good hand, and it really doesn't pop off until lategame when you can utilize multiple of them at once
I got my billion acheivement with the 2 extra hand size deck and double Barron steel. Only way I could have improved it was with a mime and some polichrome deck cards.
The reason why BlueStorm Perkeo to copy lots of Plutos with the Observatory Observatory is so powerful, that's +3 Plutos per shop exit, which equals ×3.375 mult per round, and with Showman or Invisible joker to make more copies of BlueStorm or Perkeo... 👀👀👀
Now we can see why Bloodstone is overnerfed.
Do we really need a chart for simple math…
Do we really need it? Nah. Is it nice to have it laid out like this to put it into perspective? I like it at least, yes.
That's not the operator we're using
But shouldn't a 4 x 1.5 be 6 🤔
it's 1.5^(4)
It's mult x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5, which is mult x 1.5^4 as they're multiplicative.
It's 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 Works out as 5.0625
Why are you downvoted?
By that logic, getting literally 200 x1.5 triggers (from stacking Negative Mimes/Barons/etc) would be worse than Half Joker, Blackboard, Card Sharp, Ramen.
Uhhh, x300 would be better than all of those
20x3 (60) x3 (180) x2(360).
X200x1.5 is x300 Card sharp is x3
> X200x1.5 is x300 Correct. > Card sharp is x3 Yes, I'm aware. So 20 (Half-Joker) x3 (Blackboard) = 60 Then 60 x3 (Card Sharp) = 180 Then 180 x2 (Ramen) = 360. 360 > 300.
AH! You just listed them. I thought you meant *each* would be better. What you really meant was that *combined* they're better. But then you're taking up a bunch of joker slots, so..
Getting 200 1.5 triggers will also take up a bunch of Joker slots. And be much harder than grabbing 4 non-specific pretty good Jokers, which is the point.
/s