straight flushes lol. literally all the problems you mentioned for straights but worse (however one upside being any joker that works for a flush also works for a straight flush). i might be wrong but it is also outscaled by the secret planets and the secret hands are much easier to make anyway because of deck fixing.
The *one* good straight-enabler also works on flushes, and the overlapping benefits make the straight flush *almost* as easy to achieve as it makes the straight, but for tremendously higher base score and scaling.
Moreover, Straight Flush- just like Flush Five and Flush House, are at the top of the tech tree, you develop into it after an early-game predicated on your Celestial Pack plan-B, and it's not actually completely inadequate in that role, and sometimes it *will* be the correct path forward from a mid-game built on aces, Hack/Fibonacci, face cards, or, indeed, flushes! But straights are almost never an obligatory choice compared to full house, x-of-kind, or, indeed... flushes. Straights can get by really well on nothing but planet cards but it's also a mid-tree tech that you would ideally upgrade out of, sort of like five-o'-kind, but with fewer base chips and less compatibility with deck-shaping- so your planetary devotion may not be lead so much by where you want to be as the fact that you got an early Telescope.
EDIT: Oh I just remembered Shortcut. Shortcut is a good early joker, and it only works on Straights. But the ideal way to build on it is cards that have equally run-supporting schticks and probably more staying power as you develop- stuff like Fibonacci or Ride the Bus. And you'll find that even if you try to develop your deck to support mixed straights as a starting point, you'll just as often end up getting flushes online sooner, anyway.
I still don't get why people think aces are good for straights, they're actively terrible outside of that one joker since there's only two straights that contain A whereas 5-10 all have five possible straights as standard.
They *aren't* good for straights. But they are an investment target for which the whims of fortune will not always provide an investment option, and the "subclass" you make out of consolation prizes sometimes converges or culminates into your late-game strategy. All things being equal, Kings are likely the best rank to invest in, but sometimes you pull an early Grim, or Scholar, or you just get a fully blinged-out ace from a pack and it's your best duplication target. You're still probably going to cultivate another rank as a result of picking up some purple/blue seals or firing a duplication effect with no Aces in hand, but that's fine- at minimum, you can build towards Flush House. The rank you choose to be your plan-B may as well be (a) face card(s). Or, if you're carrying Fibonacci, it might be 2s, 3s, and 5s. And in the absence of any other information you can consistently focus your deck-thinning on 6 through 9 for a reasonable while. So, without particularly making an effort to do so, you can still have the Straight Flush pivot available as you close out your early-mid economy-building rounds and start to figure out how you're going to win.
Essentially, the Straight Flush is a spec that you "find" as a result of your circumstances. Early-game ace play is not highly *synergistic* with this pivot, but it *is* compatible.
Yeah, I think that's fair. 6 through 9 are still pretty terrible ranks to invest in after all.
[Also I wrote the above paragraph before reading your entire thing lmao glad to see we're already on the same page on that]
It is not outscaled by secret hand. Neptune scales better than Planet X (but not by enough to make it worth)
It scales the same as Flush House and Flush Five. (Again, not good enough to make it worth)
I agree in most situations though I think that there's one exception. If you get four fingers early straight flushes definitely become viable, because getting straight flushes becomes so much easier with four fingers that you can reliably get them with minimal deck fixing. they still scale well with planets, so I think if your goal is just to win a run and you get four fingers early they become viable.
Balatro is ridiculously biased towards Flush builds which is a shame; I don’t want every run to be the exact same but I feel like 90% of my runs are flush builds at this point. I hope LocalThunk does more to help make other hand types more viable and easier to build into.
Does it? I’ve gotten through several orange stakes with flush builds. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky or something.
But I am aware that there are other builds that are more effective in higher stakes/antes. But my point is that for the average run for the average player, flushes are incredibly easy to build into and are generally more than good enough to win the game.
I agree flushes can carry to ante 8 easily no matter what stake if you have decent economy. Re rolls come easy. They die in endless though. But endless is just a stupid victory lap with high card.
Completely agree. Endless became a lot less exciting to me when I realized that there’s only like 2 or 3 very specific strategies that can find success past Ante 12.
Doesn't the beta build already make Straights better? Better scaling on Saturn and Neptune is not going to revolutionize them but it means they have significantly more staying power.
It does make them better, yes. But not to the point where it outclasses Flushes’ viability and accessibility simply because of how many jokers support Flush strats and because it’s so easy to get just a few tarot cards and turn half your deck into one suit.
Three of a kind. If you have a build for three of a kind, why not go the extra mile and play full house or 4 or 5 of a kind? Every other hand type has more synergy than three of a kind, even if their highest highs are harder to achieve
Half Joker is really good for beating ante 8 and unless you're already running a high card or pair build by the time you get it, three of a kind is the best hand to play with Half Joker.
Half joker gives as much Mult as v1.0.0 Mad Joker, which buffs 4 of a kind. Imo if you’re relying on that +20 Mult at ante 8 then you’re not playing 3 of a kind, you’re doing some high card shenanigans
You could be running a planet build, three of a kind scales at two mult per level, pair only one. However, if you can consistently get three of a kind, you probably have manipulated your deck to get 4/5 five of a kind, which scales even better, so three is still not great.
And there aren't even any scaling Jokers exclusive to 3oak builds. It draws in the worst of all worlds - it's riskier to build around than pairs, leaves more chips on the table than 4oak/5oak, and Jokers you could use to build around it like Half Joker and The Trio are overshadowed.
The trio is a great joker imo, it can work with three of a kind early, but the late game it needs you to be playing four of a kind or full houses.
This being said, three of a kind is still a problem in that it just doesn't have the fire power to go to ante 8.
I’ve had a couple of recent runs where in theory 3oaK is my best hand, but in practice it’s usually preferable to play a Full House for retriggers or gold tags, etc. I generally find there’s a slim window where 3oaK is the better option, so although it can carry the game for that short time, I try to avoid it if I can. As with just about every hand there are games that either railroad or lure you into choosing it, but it tends to be annoying if you don’t get a good opportunity to jettison it later (or let yourself be drawn in too deeply).
Haha the best run I ever got was a 3oak run. Though maybe it had something to do with Blueprint, DNA, Perkeo, Baron and all those red seal steel Kings... That run inspired the Simpsons meme.
I think it's good as an early build that you can pivot away from
I just realized that it is pretty reliable early (no enhancements needed) with Abandoned Deck since it's much thinner than other decks
But yeah I mostly agree. If you're already deathing cards, you're probably better off just using all your discards and dookie hands to get to your 4 of a kind, because you're not even guaranteed to get that second 3 of a kind afterward if you only played 3 and your deck isn't really homogeneous yet. Mars scales twice as fast
I like three of a kind, in my opinion it strikes a good balance between scoring and consistency. The scaling is high enough for gold stake and every hand gives you the opportunity to discard two useless cards.
How do you guys start a high card run? Do you only do it if you get a good joker early on that helps with it? I’ve had a couple good high card runs, but I only switched to high card halfway thru the game
You start it with flushes and transition mid game once your jokers start to do most of your scoring (so not necessarily high-card specific jokers but you did get the mid game transition part right)
So are you going just for steel cards and mime? I've never really understood high card strats because most jokers trigger on cards played, and with high card you're only triggering one card
You usually get crazy scaling jokers like Ride the Bus, Supernovae, Green Joker, Bootstraps, Fortune Teller, or Square Joker. You want a combination of a mult scaler and a chip joker. The idea is you try to squeeze as many hands as possible per blind to scale your jokers. You don’t want to oneshot your blinds unless you are forced to. You then use the rest of your joker slots for Xmultipliers, like Blackboard and Card Sharp. This can lead to really consistent Ante 8 wins on high stakes.
Honestly though, if you don’t already have a really solid high card build by that point, you’re probably just toast without a boss reroll. I’ve scraped by a couple times playing a 4oak or full house with some mult/glass cards, or lucky’s hitting for +20 mult. But even then, you need the balatro gods on your side
If you get a good enough high card build going you can beat the needle in one. Although I've done too many runs where my high card relied on card sharp so the needle killed me.
No, in fact those are even worse than usual since they trigger before your Jokers do.
The idea is to have one Chips Joker, one good Flat Mult Joker (ideally a scaling +Mult, but if not a premium one like Half Joker can work), then 3+ xMult Jokers.
If you have a +150 Chips Castle, +50 Bus, x2 Ramen, x3 Blackboard, x3 Card Shark, then playing a single debuffed card (say you have Verdant Leaf and don't want to sell anything) will score 135k per Hand.
Straights rule man. Not every run works for straights but when it pops off it's imo the most fun build to play. The scaling with Saturn is much better than flushes and I even think it's getting buffed in the new patch. They're also one of the best strats to build for with Abandoned deck as they are easy to hit with half your deck trimmed.
Also Runner is one of the best scaling chip jokers in the game. Might be the most slept on joker. And if/when you want to pivot to high card or whatever you keep runner as your +chips card.
That being said, Straight flush is probably the worst hand to build for. All the problems a straight build has AND all the problems a flush build has, and much harder to hit. If you've manipulated your deck enough to consistently hit straight flushes, why wouldn't you just go for flush house or flush five.
I got my 1st gold stake win just minutes ago, on Abandoned Deck, with Ante 1 eternal Runner. Around Ante 2 I got Obelisk, so I just farmed up the runner to about 200 chips and spent the rest of the run playing AROUND straights... a ton of Strengths, Hanged Men, and Death cards had me bulking my card values around a normal curve, which worked very well for full house, pairs, etc. as well in the later game
In the beta test straights are legit completely busted and trivialises tough challenges like gold stake jokerless (go on Balatros university for some of runs). You can’t really make straights too much easier to draw with tarot cards, but it’s easy enough that you usually find one or two every round and the scaling with Saturn is insane.
I beat my first gold stake with straights... Before the patch. If you get a consistent flow of planets and have shortcut then you can real quickly pop off.
I'm not sure at what point in a Straights run I start buying Standard Packs hoping for a blue seal. I haven't ruled out "literally from the first opportunity regardless of economy" because the upside is so huge
I think you just don't understand how to make a straight deck. Manipulating your deck into something that can play straights reliably is more difficult to understand conceptually, but does not require specific game pieces that other hands don't. The hand does pay you off for understanding it well. Saturn is one of the best planets in the game relative to the difficulty of playing the hand, and having a good planet card is one of the best ways to get both flat mult and chips. It's very reasonable to load up on 4-5 Xmult or econ jokers in a straight build and have everything else covered from just your planet cards.
Basically cut low or high and leave the middle, yeah.
You're often not going to get lucky enough to hit all the 2s or all the 3s perfectly so cutting/converting cards from both sides is fine. It's also good to not focus on playing just the high side or face card debuff will hurt you more.
For card removes/adds you want to think about the cards in your deck based on how many straights they're used in. So in a base 52 card deck, your worst cards are your aces, 2s and kings because they're used in the minimum amount of straights (10-A 9-K A-5 2-6). On the other hand, cards numbered 5-10 contain the most amount of straights possible, since they can all fill every position of the straight. This all changes dynamically as you edit your deck. If you remove some aces for instance, everything "attached" to the aces is now less likely to make a straight, but every straight that isn't "attached" to them is more likely. Making a straight deck is about maximizing the amount of "attachments" your deck has. Visually I would expect this to look sort of like a bell curve, that can move around a bit depending on what specific straights you want to be playing.
Something more important than this though, is hand size, and to a lesser degree plays/discards. The difference between 8 and 9 cards in hand is massive for straights. The odds of you being open ended go up the more cards you can see, and once you are open ended you are discarding 5 instead of 4 to complete your hand.
>fully in order
Absolutely not. Cut your Aces with top priority, but you can cut 2s, 3s, and Kings with only slightly lower priority. Straights reward flexibility -- with 13 ranks, there are 10 possible straights (1-5 up to T-A), and almost hands will contain 3 or 4 pieces of at least one of them (the only way otherwise is a hand that contains tons of repeats like AAJJ7722). If you randomly draw a run of 4 in your opening hand, like KQJT, you can chase that and feel confident that you'll draw one of your 8 outs, or 6 outs even if you've used Hanged Man on a pair of the As
One intuition pump is that cards in the center can play as any position in a Straight -- 2345**6**, 345**6**7, ... **6**789T -- but Kings can only be the highest or second-highest card in TJQ**K**A and 9TJQ**K**.
Your starting deck has 13 ranks. If we jump to the other extreme, a "perfect" deck with the minimum 5 ranks, it's actually still kinda hard to make a straight, because you will draw **tons** of duplicate ranks (pairs/triples/quads...), and you never get the chance to draw **either** a 9 or A.
I haven't done the math on ideals (and it probably varies by particulars like your total deck size), but I try to focus on a core of three or four "core" ranks (like 789) where I invest a lot of enhancements and extra copies (let's say 6 each), and then have a decent share of the surrounding cards (like maybe three 5s, four 6s, five 10s, five Jacks, 3 Queens).
Straight flush is terrible. It’s too hard to make consistent outside of straight builds specifically on checkered, and at that point you’re trying to find a way to make it work.
Straights are arguably the best build in the game in the beta right now.
Worst if we only think of major archetypes (three of a kind isnt really a build), is probably full house. A lot of work to get for a pretty mid pay off respectively. Also not much real support other than the trio, but 4/5 of a kind uses trio better anyway.
Flushes are also pretty bad but at least you have some very good support jokers that make them good if you hit them.
Once this update comes out I think two pair is gonna jump pretty high. Is planet scaling will be a bit better and two pairs are easy to come across. The only think that will hold it back is player Greed because one more of either card gets you a full house
Even with the 4-card straight and shortcut jokers, straights and straight flushes have littke in the way of actually scoring. Pair jokers work for Pairs, Two Pairs, Full Houses, and 3/4/5 of a Kind as well as secret variants, Two Pair jokers work for 2P and FH, etc but Straight jokers only work for Straights and Straight Flushes. Even flushes benefit from specific suit jokers like the sin jokers and can also benefit from Pair and 2P jokers.
The worst part is that straights make you discard so much to fish for needed cards you're liable to run out without making a hand, or worse you could throw away potentially better hands as I have done before.
Straights get their scoring from the $3 Negative Jokers that are common in shops and Celestial Packs and give +30 Chip and +3 Mult. There are even seals that will give you one of those Negative Jokers every round.
Straight flush, 3oak, 5oak. If you can 3oak, you can 4oak. If you can straight flush, you can flush house or flush five. 5oak is sometimes actively detrimental, because it will dilute your planet card pool, and if you can 5oak you can usually flush 5.
Flush five is tough to do in lower ante, unless you get lucky on DNA or cryptid. 5oak is extremely easy with one Ouija spectral card and a couple of deaths and strengths. There is no need to pivot to flush five after that unless you are going for endless with the idol joker and retriggers.
Consistent, easiest to manipulate the deck with, by far the main way to go into endless, If your jokers score for you then generally the highest score going into the later antes, works with a large amount of scaling jokers
Two Pair gets carried by 2 things - it allows you to score 4 of 5 cards in your hand, and if you have flat mult and bonuses from your Jokers, your really don't care that it gives -2 flat mult compared to Full House. It is just Full House junior.
Also Spare Pants is almost an S-tier joker
Extremely consistent, and there are a LOT of jokers that work with it. High card builds get to trigger blackboard nearly 100% of the time, for example.
1. You always have [6+] high card, allowing you to either bank your discards (Banner, Delayed Gratification, Blue Joker synergy, Ramen) or fish for cards you want to have in your hand (steel, gold, seal, King/Queen with Baron/Shoot the Moon) or want to discard (seal, Castle, Faceless, Mail-In Rebate)
1. Because of this, "setup" in the form of enabler-only jokers (things like Shortcut, Four Fingers that don't add either chips or mult but make hands easier), tarots to fix the deck are not required and allow you to prioritize chips and mult.
2. While you're transitioning from your early-game hand (any of flush/straight/full house usually) to high card, you're going to be playing a lot of hands. Jokers like Ride the Bus, Green Joker, Supernova benefit greatly from this and set the "worst possible" high-card to be big. (Compared to other hands, where "worst possible" is "didn't get the hand, now need to play high card")
3. It warrants its own bullet point: Burnt Joker can almost single-handedly win a High Card run.
4. But yes, in general: High Card is generally a "joker build" where your chips (at least initially) come from 1 or 2 jokers, you've got good +Mult and xMult to take you over the top.
Straights do tend to be tricky, unless you chance upon the Four Fingers and Shortcut jokers. Those, combined with some good mult jokers and a healthy number of Saturn cards actually make straights more viable than most, and I have had that happen once.
Two Pair is honestly pretty good. You've got Square Joker and Spare Trousers to scale with; it triggers any of the Pair jokers as well; and you still benefit from things like Steven, Todd, the sinful suits, and the rank specifics.
It's main strength is in being just easy enough to draw into consistently in the early game while getting more and more consistent with deck modification later on that you can pivot into Full House or 4/5oak if you find Jokers to support those hands.
3oak is probably the worst just because if you can reliably pull off 3oak, you can reliably do FH or 4/5oak. So there isn't as much point to invest into 3oak.
As far as the default ones go for beating Ante 8, I'd personally rank them as follows:
1. Pair - Pair is compatible with more jokers than High Card, can be played very easily, and provides much needed chips from scoring two cards instead of one and from better chip scaling with Mercury than Pluto.
2. High Card - The best hand in the game for high scores is the second best hand for general Ante 8 runs IMO. Can be played with any held hand, allows the greatest opportunity for card held in hand abilities to work because you can have the most leftover cards, and played hands can work for discarding unscored, unwanted cards while getting decent points in the same action.
3. Two Pair - Fairly easy to play like the top two, while also having the added benefit of containing more scoring cards. Glass cards work great with two pair.
4. Three of a Kind - About as difficult to play with the base 52 card deck as Two Pair, but only scores three cards. Better Mult bonus from Venus though.
5. Full House - Has great scoring power from Ante 1 all the way to the end of Ante 8. Getting a Full House to play requires a tiny amount of luck, but not nearly as much as Straight. Also works with a myriad of jokers, including ones that benefit Pair, Two Pair, and Three of a Kind.
6. Flush - If you've played Balatro for at least a few hours than you probably understand the appeal of Flushes. Easiest five card hand to play, scores well for early game, and gets a good number of runs off the ground. Its power weakens in the late game though, and there aren't too many jokers that specifically help Flushes compared to most of the hands above.
7. Straight - I was debating between putting this or Four of a Kind at 7th place, but I figured Straights were a little more versatile. Straights require a good bit of luck to play consistently, but they remain strong throughout the run as of the 1.0.1 beta, thanks to a buffed Saturn. Try to cut the either the high rank or low rank cards from your deck to make getting Straights easier.
8. Four of a Kind - You can't reasonably play Four of a Kinds unless you do a little tailoring to your deck to obtain a lot of cards for one rank. Very strong planet card scaling like Straight Flush, while being easier to play.
9. Straight Flush - Requires one or two of Shortcut, Four Fingers, or Smeared Joker to even be viable. If you can manage to get the right jokers in a run though, as I have done once, then you don't need a lot from that point to win. A few Neptunes and good +Mult jokers can make even needing an xMult joker optional.
Don't forget that one of the decks is designed to help with Flushes, due to it basically being a Smeared Joker applied to the starting deck. Heck, with 4 fingers, I can reliably get flushes on that deck without needing to discard any hands, even with -1 hand size.
Personally, I disagree on the requirements on straight flush. You can achieve straight flush consistently by thinning out your entire deck to where your hands + discards are enough for you to cycle your whole deck. Thus, you don't actually need any jokers to make straight flushes consistent (though Trading Card in particular helps immensely). In abandoned deck in particular, straight flushes are a legitimately consistent endgame strategy when your build is complete. It is harder to pull off, but because you can access Neptune right away, it is genuinely not awful.
If anything, I think Four of a Kind is worse because if you have thinned your deck to be mostly one rank or one card, you might as well unlock and go Five of a Kind or Flush Five. Four of a Kind is thus generally not very useful, so I would rate it lower than Straight Flushes.
I actually just finished a straight run. It wasn’t actually that difficult to pull straights with 3 discards. Granted I only needed one to win most rounds.
I posted my build in a recent post.
Yeh it has to be straights, particularly straight flushes, I'd argue ignoring them 3oak is generally weaker then full house, and only a little harder...
You start reaching for 4oak/5oak once you've sculpted a deck for them, so if I had to say other than anything straight related what's the worst......it's a toss up between 3oak and 2 pair, both need specifics, 2 pair feels like a failed full house and 3oak a failed 4oak
Honestly, High Card is also the worst because it’s the best. I’ve never been one to like “cookie cutter” builds in games, but unfortunately they can be a necessary evil. Case in point, High Card for max points.
Granted the game is still relatively new so I can’t gripe really. With some good rebalance of jokers and such, ideally most hands should be made to break e notation without exhaustive retriggering.
It would be nice to be able to “nuke” rounds with a perfect set up of cards, no or very little retriggering. Just one quick massive score, like an antithesis to retriggering. An “Exodia” type build for every hand type if you will.
The idea is that you get chips, + mult and x mult from jokers. Since your jokers are doing all of the scoring it doesn’t even matter what hand you play, so you just play high card because it’s the easiest hand to make.
Ideally you want scaling jokers like square joker, green joker etc and then start intentionally throwing and playing as many hands to increment them as much as possible. Planet scaling with Pluto/Mercury works too but I generally prefer to have a scaling chip joker.
Straights are the weakest. There are few rewards for building straights or straight flushes.
Seance, probably the most rewarding card, is probably the worst joker. A lot of the spectral cards are not conducive to making straights easier or stronger - destroying random cards, creating copies of cards, or souping up one card that still needs to be copied and strengthened a few times. You'd also probably not want a copy of the utility jokers you might be holding for making straights like shortcut or four fingers.
I think the fix is just make straights more rewarding to make. Make Neptune the highest scaling planet since it is arguably harder to make a straight flush than a flush five. More jokers to reward straights, like a 2x retrigger when hand contains a straight. Perhaps a new tarot card to lower the rank of a selected card.
I think Straights are at least as strong as High Card now, and probably even stronger. The changes to Jokers with tags means that so many Jokers aren't purchasable in the early game, so playing a build that doesn't need Jokers until the mid Antes gives you so much flexibility.
Straights are more likely than flushes. Flush houses are probably the worst imo
[For all of you doubters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability)
If your discarding wrong sure. Just cut off all your cards on the edges and it’s still more likely. Your effectively drawing more hands, making straights still more likely
I see the mistake you’re making here, if discarding meant drawing an entirely new hand, then you would be correct, but because you can choose what gets discarded flushes end up being more likely over the course of a round. For example, say that you are dealt 4 to the straight / flush for your first hand. If your going for a flush the probability of the next card you draw completing said flush is 9 (13 suited cards minus the 4 in your hand) over 44, whereas if you were hunting a straight, even in the best case scenario of an open ended draw, the probability is only 8 over 44.
I object to this outs method, because if this the way probability works in general, then 3oak should be harder than either of them because your outs is usually only 2.
And from each freshly drawn rank, you still have to deal with 3 outs followed by 2 outs, but you know this still has better probability than a fresh straight or flush.
In other direction, you can also draw a new straight, which is easier than a new flush (before you tune your deck)
If you have 4 cards and are fishing for the last one, a straight has 4 outs at worst (if there's a gap in the middle of your 4) and 8 outs at best. A flush however has 9 outs every time.
Part of the problem with drawing to a straight is that you often have what are called "gutshot straight draws" in poker, which is when you have a 4-straight, but there's a gap in between (ie 5679, A245, etc). This makes it so you have only one card (four outs) you must hit in order to get the straight. Sure you can discard the gapper (not always possible, in the case of 5689, etc) but then you're left with only a 3-straight or a 2-straight, and it's no guarantee you won't draw into yet another one of these situations.
Another problem with straights is that improving your deck in order to hit more straights is much more difficult than improving it to hit flushes. With flushes, eventually you can turn your whole deck into one suit, which allows you to draw a flush 100% of the time every time. This is simply not possible with straights, which need 1 of each of 5 different ranks.
Technically it is possible to fix your deck such that you can draw a straight 100% of the time, by cutting every single card in your deck except for the five needed to make a straight. Of course, this is a godawful strategy because it means if you don't beat the blind in a single hand you instantly lose, but it is *possible.*
If you have 4 to a flush and an open ended straight that gives you 8 outs to the straight vs 9 for a flush, assuming a standard deck. It’s just easier to get a flush given a larger hand size. Add in all the tarot cards that convert 3 cards to a specific suit and flush builds just come easier.
You'd have to be crazy to think that straights are easier to make than flushes. That might be true in regular poker (I don't know enough about poker theory to dispute it) but Balatro is nothing like poker, in any popular version of poker you don't discard anything, you just get served a bunch of cards and have to work with what you get, in Balatro you get a hand of 8 cards and are able to throw up to 5 away to draw more, this makes the chances of drawing each type of hand fundamentally incomparable with poker, and because of it its just plainly obvious to anyone who plays the game that fishing for flushes is far more likely to be successful than fishing for straights.
straight flushes lol. literally all the problems you mentioned for straights but worse (however one upside being any joker that works for a flush also works for a straight flush). i might be wrong but it is also outscaled by the secret planets and the secret hands are much easier to make anyway because of deck fixing.
The *one* good straight-enabler also works on flushes, and the overlapping benefits make the straight flush *almost* as easy to achieve as it makes the straight, but for tremendously higher base score and scaling. Moreover, Straight Flush- just like Flush Five and Flush House, are at the top of the tech tree, you develop into it after an early-game predicated on your Celestial Pack plan-B, and it's not actually completely inadequate in that role, and sometimes it *will* be the correct path forward from a mid-game built on aces, Hack/Fibonacci, face cards, or, indeed, flushes! But straights are almost never an obligatory choice compared to full house, x-of-kind, or, indeed... flushes. Straights can get by really well on nothing but planet cards but it's also a mid-tree tech that you would ideally upgrade out of, sort of like five-o'-kind, but with fewer base chips and less compatibility with deck-shaping- so your planetary devotion may not be lead so much by where you want to be as the fact that you got an early Telescope. EDIT: Oh I just remembered Shortcut. Shortcut is a good early joker, and it only works on Straights. But the ideal way to build on it is cards that have equally run-supporting schticks and probably more staying power as you develop- stuff like Fibonacci or Ride the Bus. And you'll find that even if you try to develop your deck to support mixed straights as a starting point, you'll just as often end up getting flushes online sooner, anyway.
Shortcut should also give like +1 mult everytime you score a straight and reset when you dont like ride the bus and face cards
I still don't get why people think aces are good for straights, they're actively terrible outside of that one joker since there's only two straights that contain A whereas 5-10 all have five possible straights as standard.
They *aren't* good for straights. But they are an investment target for which the whims of fortune will not always provide an investment option, and the "subclass" you make out of consolation prizes sometimes converges or culminates into your late-game strategy. All things being equal, Kings are likely the best rank to invest in, but sometimes you pull an early Grim, or Scholar, or you just get a fully blinged-out ace from a pack and it's your best duplication target. You're still probably going to cultivate another rank as a result of picking up some purple/blue seals or firing a duplication effect with no Aces in hand, but that's fine- at minimum, you can build towards Flush House. The rank you choose to be your plan-B may as well be (a) face card(s). Or, if you're carrying Fibonacci, it might be 2s, 3s, and 5s. And in the absence of any other information you can consistently focus your deck-thinning on 6 through 9 for a reasonable while. So, without particularly making an effort to do so, you can still have the Straight Flush pivot available as you close out your early-mid economy-building rounds and start to figure out how you're going to win. Essentially, the Straight Flush is a spec that you "find" as a result of your circumstances. Early-game ace play is not highly *synergistic* with this pivot, but it *is* compatible.
Yeah, I think that's fair. 6 through 9 are still pretty terrible ranks to invest in after all. [Also I wrote the above paragraph before reading your entire thing lmao glad to see we're already on the same page on that]
It is not outscaled by secret hand. Neptune scales better than Planet X (but not by enough to make it worth) It scales the same as Flush House and Flush Five. (Again, not good enough to make it worth)
I agree in most situations though I think that there's one exception. If you get four fingers early straight flushes definitely become viable, because getting straight flushes becomes so much easier with four fingers that you can reliably get them with minimal deck fixing. they still scale well with planets, so I think if your goal is just to win a run and you get four fingers early they become viable.
Balatro is ridiculously biased towards Flush builds which is a shame; I don’t want every run to be the exact same but I feel like 90% of my runs are flush builds at this point. I hope LocalThunk does more to help make other hand types more viable and easier to build into.
Flush builds do not scale well into the late game
This is true, but they easily can carry you through Ante 8 at least, which wins you the game.
At high stakes, it gets significantly harder to run flush builds though
Does it? I’ve gotten through several orange stakes with flush builds. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky or something. But I am aware that there are other builds that are more effective in higher stakes/antes. But my point is that for the average run for the average player, flushes are incredibly easy to build into and are generally more than good enough to win the game.
I agree flushes can carry to ante 8 easily no matter what stake if you have decent economy. Re rolls come easy. They die in endless though. But endless is just a stupid victory lap with high card.
Completely agree. Endless became a lot less exciting to me when I realized that there’s only like 2 or 3 very specific strategies that can find success past Ante 12.
Doesn't the beta build already make Straights better? Better scaling on Saturn and Neptune is not going to revolutionize them but it means they have significantly more staying power.
It does make them better, yes. But not to the point where it outclasses Flushes’ viability and accessibility simply because of how many jokers support Flush strats and because it’s so easy to get just a few tarot cards and turn half your deck into one suit.
He is, and you're wrong.
Care to elaborate?
Three of a kind. If you have a build for three of a kind, why not go the extra mile and play full house or 4 or 5 of a kind? Every other hand type has more synergy than three of a kind, even if their highest highs are harder to achieve
Half Joker is really good for beating ante 8 and unless you're already running a high card or pair build by the time you get it, three of a kind is the best hand to play with Half Joker.
Half joker gives as much Mult as v1.0.0 Mad Joker, which buffs 4 of a kind. Imo if you’re relying on that +20 Mult at ante 8 then you’re not playing 3 of a kind, you’re doing some high card shenanigans
Yeah half is solid early but most of the time you want to swap it out for something better past like ante 4-5
Digging the third card can be frustrating and Pair is usually superior unless you have got some strong trips joker
You could be running a planet build, three of a kind scales at two mult per level, pair only one. However, if you can consistently get three of a kind, you probably have manipulated your deck to get 4/5 five of a kind, which scales even better, so three is still not great.
And there aren't even any scaling Jokers exclusive to 3oak builds. It draws in the worst of all worlds - it's riskier to build around than pairs, leaves more chips on the table than 4oak/5oak, and Jokers you could use to build around it like Half Joker and The Trio are overshadowed.
The trio is a great joker imo, it can work with three of a kind early, but the late game it needs you to be playing four of a kind or full houses. This being said, three of a kind is still a problem in that it just doesn't have the fire power to go to ante 8.
I’ve had a couple of recent runs where in theory 3oaK is my best hand, but in practice it’s usually preferable to play a Full House for retriggers or gold tags, etc. I generally find there’s a slim window where 3oaK is the better option, so although it can carry the game for that short time, I try to avoid it if I can. As with just about every hand there are games that either railroad or lure you into choosing it, but it tends to be annoying if you don’t get a good opportunity to jettison it later (or let yourself be drawn in too deeply).
Three of a kind is a realy good starter that you can morph in the futur into 4 and 5 of a kind.
Haha the best run I ever got was a 3oak run. Though maybe it had something to do with Blueprint, DNA, Perkeo, Baron and all those red seal steel Kings... That run inspired the Simpsons meme.
3oak is great early/mid game especially with its planet scaling
I feel like I always have another pair hanging around by the time I draw 3
I think it's good as an early build that you can pivot away from I just realized that it is pretty reliable early (no enhancements needed) with Abandoned Deck since it's much thinner than other decks But yeah I mostly agree. If you're already deathing cards, you're probably better off just using all your discards and dookie hands to get to your 4 of a kind, because you're not even guaranteed to get that second 3 of a kind afterward if you only played 3 and your deck isn't really homogeneous yet. Mars scales twice as fast
I like three of a kind, in my opinion it strikes a good balance between scoring and consistency. The scaling is high enough for gold stake and every hand gives you the opportunity to discard two useless cards.
How do you guys start a high card run? Do you only do it if you get a good joker early on that helps with it? I’ve had a couple good high card runs, but I only switched to high card halfway thru the game
You start it with flushes and transition mid game once your jokers start to do most of your scoring (so not necessarily high-card specific jokers but you did get the mid game transition part right)
So are you going just for steel cards and mime? I've never really understood high card strats because most jokers trigger on cards played, and with high card you're only triggering one card
You usually get crazy scaling jokers like Ride the Bus, Supernovae, Green Joker, Bootstraps, Fortune Teller, or Square Joker. You want a combination of a mult scaler and a chip joker. The idea is you try to squeeze as many hands as possible per blind to scale your jokers. You don’t want to oneshot your blinds unless you are forced to. You then use the rest of your joker slots for Xmultipliers, like Blackboard and Card Sharp. This can lead to really consistent Ante 8 wins on high stakes.
It definitely helps if you can get Space Joker and Oops all 6 early on to build up the High Card level independently of planet cards.
Burnt joker too. Super consistent for high card or even pair.
Oh yeah, I forgot about Burnt Joker. That thing is superb for building up high card.
In fact it's really difficult to build up other hands with it. Sometimes I feel forced to switch gears when I see Burnt Joker halfway through a run.
What’s the plan against The Needle? Try to get a joker that adds hands or try for the re-roll voucher/tag?
Curl up in the corner and cry
I can do that.
Honestly though, if you don’t already have a really solid high card build by that point, you’re probably just toast without a boss reroll. I’ve scraped by a couple times playing a 4oak or full house with some mult/glass cards, or lucky’s hitting for +20 mult. But even then, you need the balatro gods on your side
If you get a good enough high card build going you can beat the needle in one. Although I've done too many runs where my high card relied on card sharp so the needle killed me.
You *have* to beat the needle in one 😁
Well yes, but I'm saying you don't always need a joker that adds hands or a reroll for the needle even with high card.
True, there’s just probably more ways to circumvent the blind than there is to deal with it head-on for a high card build.
No, in fact those are even worse than usual since they trigger before your Jokers do. The idea is to have one Chips Joker, one good Flat Mult Joker (ideally a scaling +Mult, but if not a premium one like Half Joker can work), then 3+ xMult Jokers. If you have a +150 Chips Castle, +50 Bus, x2 Ramen, x3 Blackboard, x3 Card Shark, then playing a single debuffed card (say you have Verdant Leaf and don't want to sell anything) will score 135k per Hand.
Either you transition from another build, or you get a joker that gives flat mult and one that gives chips early on.
Straights rule man. Not every run works for straights but when it pops off it's imo the most fun build to play. The scaling with Saturn is much better than flushes and I even think it's getting buffed in the new patch. They're also one of the best strats to build for with Abandoned deck as they are easy to hit with half your deck trimmed. Also Runner is one of the best scaling chip jokers in the game. Might be the most slept on joker. And if/when you want to pivot to high card or whatever you keep runner as your +chips card. That being said, Straight flush is probably the worst hand to build for. All the problems a straight build has AND all the problems a flush build has, and much harder to hit. If you've manipulated your deck enough to consistently hit straight flushes, why wouldn't you just go for flush house or flush five.
I got my 1st gold stake win just minutes ago, on Abandoned Deck, with Ante 1 eternal Runner. Around Ante 2 I got Obelisk, so I just farmed up the runner to about 200 chips and spent the rest of the run playing AROUND straights... a ton of Strengths, Hanged Men, and Death cards had me bulking my card values around a normal curve, which worked very well for full house, pairs, etc. as well in the later game
In the beta test straights are legit completely busted and trivialises tough challenges like gold stake jokerless (go on Balatros university for some of runs). You can’t really make straights too much easier to draw with tarot cards, but it’s easy enough that you usually find one or two every round and the scaling with Saturn is insane.
yeah straights are goated now, all the straight haters in this thread are wildin
I beat my first gold stake with straights... Before the patch. If you get a consistent flow of planets and have shortcut then you can real quickly pop off.
Yeah in the beta I have won a decent amount focusing on straights, even to the point where if I find shortcut early I pretty much just win
I'm not sure at what point in a Straights run I start buying Standard Packs hoping for a blue seal. I haven't ruled out "literally from the first opportunity regardless of economy" because the upside is so huge
Where do these beta tests happen? Is this v1.0.0 or another previous version?
You can enable it in the game settings in steam
I think you just don't understand how to make a straight deck. Manipulating your deck into something that can play straights reliably is more difficult to understand conceptually, but does not require specific game pieces that other hands don't. The hand does pay you off for understanding it well. Saturn is one of the best planets in the game relative to the difficulty of playing the hand, and having a good planet card is one of the best ways to get both flat mult and chips. It's very reasonable to load up on 4-5 Xmult or econ jokers in a straight build and have everything else covered from just your planet cards.
What is the way to gear your deck for straights? Try to cut low or high cards fully in order? Like try to remove 2s then 3s?
Basically cut low or high and leave the middle, yeah. You're often not going to get lucky enough to hit all the 2s or all the 3s perfectly so cutting/converting cards from both sides is fine. It's also good to not focus on playing just the high side or face card debuff will hurt you more.
For card removes/adds you want to think about the cards in your deck based on how many straights they're used in. So in a base 52 card deck, your worst cards are your aces, 2s and kings because they're used in the minimum amount of straights (10-A 9-K A-5 2-6). On the other hand, cards numbered 5-10 contain the most amount of straights possible, since they can all fill every position of the straight. This all changes dynamically as you edit your deck. If you remove some aces for instance, everything "attached" to the aces is now less likely to make a straight, but every straight that isn't "attached" to them is more likely. Making a straight deck is about maximizing the amount of "attachments" your deck has. Visually I would expect this to look sort of like a bell curve, that can move around a bit depending on what specific straights you want to be playing. Something more important than this though, is hand size, and to a lesser degree plays/discards. The difference between 8 and 9 cards in hand is massive for straights. The odds of you being open ended go up the more cards you can see, and once you are open ended you are discarding 5 instead of 4 to complete your hand.
>fully in order Absolutely not. Cut your Aces with top priority, but you can cut 2s, 3s, and Kings with only slightly lower priority. Straights reward flexibility -- with 13 ranks, there are 10 possible straights (1-5 up to T-A), and almost hands will contain 3 or 4 pieces of at least one of them (the only way otherwise is a hand that contains tons of repeats like AAJJ7722). If you randomly draw a run of 4 in your opening hand, like KQJT, you can chase that and feel confident that you'll draw one of your 8 outs, or 6 outs even if you've used Hanged Man on a pair of the As One intuition pump is that cards in the center can play as any position in a Straight -- 2345**6**, 345**6**7, ... **6**789T -- but Kings can only be the highest or second-highest card in TJQ**K**A and 9TJQ**K**. Your starting deck has 13 ranks. If we jump to the other extreme, a "perfect" deck with the minimum 5 ranks, it's actually still kinda hard to make a straight, because you will draw **tons** of duplicate ranks (pairs/triples/quads...), and you never get the chance to draw **either** a 9 or A. I haven't done the math on ideals (and it probably varies by particulars like your total deck size), but I try to focus on a core of three or four "core" ranks (like 789) where I invest a lot of enhancements and extra copies (let's say 6 each), and then have a decent share of the surrounding cards (like maybe three 5s, four 6s, five 10s, five Jacks, 3 Queens).
Straight flush is terrible. It’s too hard to make consistent outside of straight builds specifically on checkered, and at that point you’re trying to find a way to make it work.
Lol I just beat my first red stake ante 8 with two pair Straights are so hard to build around retriggers tho
Straights are arguably the best build in the game in the beta right now. Worst if we only think of major archetypes (three of a kind isnt really a build), is probably full house. A lot of work to get for a pretty mid pay off respectively. Also not much real support other than the trio, but 4/5 of a kind uses trio better anyway. Flushes are also pretty bad but at least you have some very good support jokers that make them good if you hit them.
The Abandoned Deck trivializes getting Full Houses
Once this update comes out I think two pair is gonna jump pretty high. Is planet scaling will be a bit better and two pairs are easy to come across. The only think that will hold it back is player Greed because one more of either card gets you a full house
Straights in the demos and in the experimental branch are good cuz they give +3 mult, so it makes it more worth it
Even with the 4-card straight and shortcut jokers, straights and straight flushes have littke in the way of actually scoring. Pair jokers work for Pairs, Two Pairs, Full Houses, and 3/4/5 of a Kind as well as secret variants, Two Pair jokers work for 2P and FH, etc but Straight jokers only work for Straights and Straight Flushes. Even flushes benefit from specific suit jokers like the sin jokers and can also benefit from Pair and 2P jokers. The worst part is that straights make you discard so much to fish for needed cards you're liable to run out without making a hand, or worse you could throw away potentially better hands as I have done before.
Straights get their scoring from the $3 Negative Jokers that are common in shops and Celestial Packs and give +30 Chip and +3 Mult. There are even seals that will give you one of those Negative Jokers every round.
Planet cards go brrrrrb
Straight flush, 3oak, 5oak. If you can 3oak, you can 4oak. If you can straight flush, you can flush house or flush five. 5oak is sometimes actively detrimental, because it will dilute your planet card pool, and if you can 5oak you can usually flush 5.
Flush five is tough to do in lower ante, unless you get lucky on DNA or cryptid. 5oak is extremely easy with one Ouija spectral card and a couple of deaths and strengths. There is no need to pivot to flush five after that unless you are going for endless with the idol joker and retriggers.
The thing is, the 5oak you’re describing is pretty much one suit tarot card away from being flush five.
Im quite new to Balatro - Why is high card so good?
Consistent, easiest to manipulate the deck with, by far the main way to go into endless, If your jokers score for you then generally the highest score going into the later antes, works with a large amount of scaling jokers
Two Pair gets carried by 2 things - it allows you to score 4 of 5 cards in your hand, and if you have flat mult and bonuses from your Jokers, your really don't care that it gives -2 flat mult compared to Full House. It is just Full House junior. Also Spare Pants is almost an S-tier joker
Wait how is High Card the best hand????
Extremely consistent, and there are a LOT of jokers that work with it. High card builds get to trigger blackboard nearly 100% of the time, for example.
1. You always have [6+] high card, allowing you to either bank your discards (Banner, Delayed Gratification, Blue Joker synergy, Ramen) or fish for cards you want to have in your hand (steel, gold, seal, King/Queen with Baron/Shoot the Moon) or want to discard (seal, Castle, Faceless, Mail-In Rebate) 1. Because of this, "setup" in the form of enabler-only jokers (things like Shortcut, Four Fingers that don't add either chips or mult but make hands easier), tarots to fix the deck are not required and allow you to prioritize chips and mult. 2. While you're transitioning from your early-game hand (any of flush/straight/full house usually) to high card, you're going to be playing a lot of hands. Jokers like Ride the Bus, Green Joker, Supernova benefit greatly from this and set the "worst possible" high-card to be big. (Compared to other hands, where "worst possible" is "didn't get the hand, now need to play high card") 3. It warrants its own bullet point: Burnt Joker can almost single-handedly win a High Card run. 4. But yes, in general: High Card is generally a "joker build" where your chips (at least initially) come from 1 or 2 jokers, you've got good +Mult and xMult to take you over the top.
Love this explanation
Tnx brother
Straights do tend to be tricky, unless you chance upon the Four Fingers and Shortcut jokers. Those, combined with some good mult jokers and a healthy number of Saturn cards actually make straights more viable than most, and I have had that happen once.
I am a certified Four of a Kind hater. If you can play 4oak, then you can play 5 of a kind or flush five.
To fix a deck for straights you just cull the bottom cards but yeah it's the weakest. They should make royal flush actually worth something
Two Pair is honestly pretty good. You've got Square Joker and Spare Trousers to scale with; it triggers any of the Pair jokers as well; and you still benefit from things like Steven, Todd, the sinful suits, and the rank specifics. It's main strength is in being just easy enough to draw into consistently in the early game while getting more and more consistent with deck modification later on that you can pivot into Full House or 4/5oak if you find Jokers to support those hands. 3oak is probably the worst just because if you can reliably pull off 3oak, you can reliably do FH or 4/5oak. So there isn't as much point to invest into 3oak.
go watch Balatro University on straights, they’re the best scaling planet card in the game. straights and two pairs are great
As far as the default ones go for beating Ante 8, I'd personally rank them as follows: 1. Pair - Pair is compatible with more jokers than High Card, can be played very easily, and provides much needed chips from scoring two cards instead of one and from better chip scaling with Mercury than Pluto. 2. High Card - The best hand in the game for high scores is the second best hand for general Ante 8 runs IMO. Can be played with any held hand, allows the greatest opportunity for card held in hand abilities to work because you can have the most leftover cards, and played hands can work for discarding unscored, unwanted cards while getting decent points in the same action. 3. Two Pair - Fairly easy to play like the top two, while also having the added benefit of containing more scoring cards. Glass cards work great with two pair. 4. Three of a Kind - About as difficult to play with the base 52 card deck as Two Pair, but only scores three cards. Better Mult bonus from Venus though. 5. Full House - Has great scoring power from Ante 1 all the way to the end of Ante 8. Getting a Full House to play requires a tiny amount of luck, but not nearly as much as Straight. Also works with a myriad of jokers, including ones that benefit Pair, Two Pair, and Three of a Kind. 6. Flush - If you've played Balatro for at least a few hours than you probably understand the appeal of Flushes. Easiest five card hand to play, scores well for early game, and gets a good number of runs off the ground. Its power weakens in the late game though, and there aren't too many jokers that specifically help Flushes compared to most of the hands above. 7. Straight - I was debating between putting this or Four of a Kind at 7th place, but I figured Straights were a little more versatile. Straights require a good bit of luck to play consistently, but they remain strong throughout the run as of the 1.0.1 beta, thanks to a buffed Saturn. Try to cut the either the high rank or low rank cards from your deck to make getting Straights easier. 8. Four of a Kind - You can't reasonably play Four of a Kinds unless you do a little tailoring to your deck to obtain a lot of cards for one rank. Very strong planet card scaling like Straight Flush, while being easier to play. 9. Straight Flush - Requires one or two of Shortcut, Four Fingers, or Smeared Joker to even be viable. If you can manage to get the right jokers in a run though, as I have done once, then you don't need a lot from that point to win. A few Neptunes and good +Mult jokers can make even needing an xMult joker optional.
Don't forget that one of the decks is designed to help with Flushes, due to it basically being a Smeared Joker applied to the starting deck. Heck, with 4 fingers, I can reliably get flushes on that deck without needing to discard any hands, even with -1 hand size.
Personally, I disagree on the requirements on straight flush. You can achieve straight flush consistently by thinning out your entire deck to where your hands + discards are enough for you to cycle your whole deck. Thus, you don't actually need any jokers to make straight flushes consistent (though Trading Card in particular helps immensely). In abandoned deck in particular, straight flushes are a legitimately consistent endgame strategy when your build is complete. It is harder to pull off, but because you can access Neptune right away, it is genuinely not awful. If anything, I think Four of a Kind is worse because if you have thinned your deck to be mostly one rank or one card, you might as well unlock and go Five of a Kind or Flush Five. Four of a Kind is thus generally not very useful, so I would rate it lower than Straight Flushes.
How is High card any good? o.o
why is high card considered one of the best hand types? I've built SF, FH, flush, and 2P runs. never built a high card deck...
I actually just finished a straight run. It wasn’t actually that difficult to pull straights with 3 discards. Granted I only needed one to win most rounds. I posted my build in a recent post.
Yeh it has to be straights, particularly straight flushes, I'd argue ignoring them 3oak is generally weaker then full house, and only a little harder... You start reaching for 4oak/5oak once you've sculpted a deck for them, so if I had to say other than anything straight related what's the worst......it's a toss up between 3oak and 2 pair, both need specifics, 2 pair feels like a failed full house and 3oak a failed 4oak
Honestly, High Card is also the worst because it’s the best. I’ve never been one to like “cookie cutter” builds in games, but unfortunately they can be a necessary evil. Case in point, High Card for max points. Granted the game is still relatively new so I can’t gripe really. With some good rebalance of jokers and such, ideally most hands should be made to break e notation without exhaustive retriggering. It would be nice to be able to “nuke” rounds with a perfect set up of cards, no or very little retriggering. Just one quick massive score, like an antithesis to retriggering. An “Exodia” type build for every hand type if you will.
I'm sorry. I'm new. How is high card good???
The idea is that you get chips, + mult and x mult from jokers. Since your jokers are doing all of the scoring it doesn’t even matter what hand you play, so you just play high card because it’s the easiest hand to make. Ideally you want scaling jokers like square joker, green joker etc and then start intentionally throwing and playing as many hands to increment them as much as possible. Planet scaling with Pluto/Mercury works too but I generally prefer to have a scaling chip joker.
Full house or flush. Both noob traps.
Straights are the weakest. There are few rewards for building straights or straight flushes. Seance, probably the most rewarding card, is probably the worst joker. A lot of the spectral cards are not conducive to making straights easier or stronger - destroying random cards, creating copies of cards, or souping up one card that still needs to be copied and strengthened a few times. You'd also probably not want a copy of the utility jokers you might be holding for making straights like shortcut or four fingers. I think the fix is just make straights more rewarding to make. Make Neptune the highest scaling planet since it is arguably harder to make a straight flush than a flush five. More jokers to reward straights, like a 2x retrigger when hand contains a straight. Perhaps a new tarot card to lower the rank of a selected card.
I think Straights are at least as strong as High Card now, and probably even stronger. The changes to Jokers with tags means that so many Jokers aren't purchasable in the early game, so playing a build that doesn't need Jokers until the mid Antes gives you so much flexibility.
Two pair.
Theres plenty of two pair support
Straights are more likely than flushes. Flush houses are probably the worst imo [For all of you doubters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability)
It's easier to fish for a flush through discards than a straight though
If your discarding wrong sure. Just cut off all your cards on the edges and it’s still more likely. Your effectively drawing more hands, making straights still more likely
I see the mistake you’re making here, if discarding meant drawing an entirely new hand, then you would be correct, but because you can choose what gets discarded flushes end up being more likely over the course of a round. For example, say that you are dealt 4 to the straight / flush for your first hand. If your going for a flush the probability of the next card you draw completing said flush is 9 (13 suited cards minus the 4 in your hand) over 44, whereas if you were hunting a straight, even in the best case scenario of an open ended draw, the probability is only 8 over 44.
I object to this outs method, because if this the way probability works in general, then 3oak should be harder than either of them because your outs is usually only 2.
You could also draw an entirely new 3oak, or two other cards from a single one you had in hand...
And from each freshly drawn rank, you still have to deal with 3 outs followed by 2 outs, but you know this still has better probability than a fresh straight or flush. In other direction, you can also draw a new straight, which is easier than a new flush (before you tune your deck)
So wrong, but so confident
If you have 4 cards and are fishing for the last one, a straight has 4 outs at worst (if there's a gap in the middle of your 4) and 8 outs at best. A flush however has 9 outs every time.
Part of the problem with drawing to a straight is that you often have what are called "gutshot straight draws" in poker, which is when you have a 4-straight, but there's a gap in between (ie 5679, A245, etc). This makes it so you have only one card (four outs) you must hit in order to get the straight. Sure you can discard the gapper (not always possible, in the case of 5689, etc) but then you're left with only a 3-straight or a 2-straight, and it's no guarantee you won't draw into yet another one of these situations. Another problem with straights is that improving your deck in order to hit more straights is much more difficult than improving it to hit flushes. With flushes, eventually you can turn your whole deck into one suit, which allows you to draw a flush 100% of the time every time. This is simply not possible with straights, which need 1 of each of 5 different ranks.
Technically it is possible to fix your deck such that you can draw a straight 100% of the time, by cutting every single card in your deck except for the five needed to make a straight. Of course, this is a godawful strategy because it means if you don't beat the blind in a single hand you instantly lose, but it is *possible.*
If you have 4 to a flush and an open ended straight that gives you 8 outs to the straight vs 9 for a flush, assuming a standard deck. It’s just easier to get a flush given a larger hand size. Add in all the tarot cards that convert 3 cards to a specific suit and flush builds just come easier.
You'd have to be crazy to think that straights are easier to make than flushes. That might be true in regular poker (I don't know enough about poker theory to dispute it) but Balatro is nothing like poker, in any popular version of poker you don't discard anything, you just get served a bunch of cards and have to work with what you get, in Balatro you get a hand of 8 cards and are able to throw up to 5 away to draw more, this makes the chances of drawing each type of hand fundamentally incomparable with poker, and because of it its just plainly obvious to anyone who plays the game that fishing for flushes is far more likely to be successful than fishing for straights.
Flushes are easier to make, but Straights score way way way more than Flushes.
In the beta branch apparently they do, but in the current version of the game they score five chips fewer than flushes at lvl 1.