Thanks again. I am getting the hang of it and even got to Ante 7 once.
My favorite Joker so far is Four Fingers. I always buy Celestial cards when I can, especially Two Pair, Straight and Flush.
There are some interesting quirks. Like if you have a high level on Two Pair, choosing a Full House will screw you.
Now I need to learn Tarot cards.
I’m hooked.
Something common to most of my runs is that I tend to make most of my points from Two Pair.
The most powerful hand in the game is the high card, albeit mostly for a different reason than the level of the hand.
Money, money, money.
IMO, the most powerful Tarot cards are Hermit (double money, up to $20) and Temperance (money equal to the value of your jokers). A fun combo is Egg joker plus Temperance - you can earn lots of money this way, even though the Egg takes up a joker slot. I almost never sell an Egg. Add the Swashbuckler Joker (+mult equal to the value of other jokers) and you are well on your way - just need some chips and xMult.
It would have a to be a very specific circumstance (maybe Death on a blue seal) to skip a Hermit or high-value Temperance.
Then Devil, because Gold cards are another source of money.
Then Hung Man (removing cards) and Death (turn a card into a copy of another).
In case you don’t know, you can move the cards around in your hand before playing a hand or a tarot card. This is essential for making Death work right, but can also help improve scoring since cards trigger from left to right.
You can also move your jokers around, so that the +Mult jokers score before the xMult jokers do. Also so that can arrange a Blueprint (copy joker to the right) or Brainstorm (copy joker on far left).
It’s a nice one to have, Particularly at low stakes and especially with the Checkered deck. Throw in Shortcut joker and you can regularly hit straight flushes. (Don’t use the Smeared joker with checkered though. Not only do you not get an advantage, but you will screw yourself with any of the boss’s that nullify specific suits by neutering half your deck.)
The main problem with the checkered deck is at high stakes, unless you have Shortcut and Four Fingers, flushes are frequently a trap. Because they don’t scale very well. You need to get plenty of Jupiters to keep up with the ante scaling.
Or blue seals, of course. The most overpowered card enhancement in the game.
Working on getting gold stickers on as many jokers as I can helps identify which combos are strong enough to carry one or two “bad” jokers. Photograph + Hanging Chad, of course. But lots of interesting interactions can work, with some luck.
Just had a Yellow Deck gold stake run that was carried by Half Joker, Red Card, and Vampire. Hallucination to generate the enhancements tarot cards for the Vampire to eat. Was about to lose at Ante 7 but a late Seeing Double (x2 mult with a club + one other card) and then a Blueprint (replacing Seeing Double and copying the x5 or so Vampire) got me through. Was able to get a gold sticker on Odd Todd (not a weak chips Joker, but not the strongest) and Hallucination.
Just got my 100th gold stake sticker. I’ve found blue deck to be the easiest going - the extra hand is easy mode after playing black deck so long.
In an update that literally no one’s cares about, my gold total is up to 129. I’ve knocked out all the Rares and Legendaries. I suspect Seltzer is going to be the hardest to get - can’t just slot it in with nothing to do and rely on the other jokers. At least with Luchador and Diet Soda you decide when to get rid of them.
Remind me how many there are total? I have like 80% of the total stickers, but I’m sure I’m way under that for gold stickers. Is there a way to easily see how many of each sticker you have rather than the overall percentage?
Replying to myself, I see there are 150 total jokers. Just manually counting them I have gold stickers on 80 of them. Completionist++ is going to take awhile, since I can generally only get one gold one win a day.
Completionist++ is done. Seltzer was hard to get, but I got Lucy finding it in Ante 8. The hardest to find was Mr. Bones - I actually saw it in a Round 2 Buffoon pack, but it was a rental, and the run fizzled out quickly without money. It’ll be nice to reacquaint myself with my family again…
I get the joy of rediscovering you…
I sunk many hours into this to get C++. That was months ago? I haven’t touched the game since then, just waiting for new content at this point
Finally got naneinf! Ended on ante 25 when I rerolled the boss-blind and got a “must play 5 cards.”
Really my deck wasn’t that great. 2x blueprints and only 1 each of baron, mime, and mindstorm. I had a showman joker for like 6 antes and never saw another relevant card to swap it for. Early Perkeo and ankh to clone the blueprint and there’s no thought anymore, just swap the Perkeo before the hand to clone the maximum number of cryptids, switch back when playing the card. Repeat 50 times.
Wow, nice! What deck/stake were you on?
Plasma deck, I’ve been playing specifically to try to get that score so there’s not a real reason to use another deck.
I think the max possible ante is like 39 or something, so I was nowhere near that. I was using 4x cryptids per hand to get the required score to advance, and that’s how much I generated per hand, so if I wanted to go for high ante vs just score I would have had to get some new jokers pretty quick or just gradually burn down the stack of negative cryptids I had.
Well, I finally did it! C++ complete.
And it took some epic luck which probably nobody wants to read about. But since nobody here at home will listen (or understand) here it is for your enjoyment.
Had a very good start with an early Ride the Bus (Hexed since I was playing the Ghost deck). Super-solid pairs lineup with Half Joker (Foil), Acrobat (Foil), and the Bus. The other two spots kept rotating but I got a good number of steels and blue seals and it was almost certainly going to be a win… I just needed the last joker needing a gold sticker (Diet Cola) to appear.
Which it finally did, around Ante 5. That’s a bit early to have a completely useless joker but the pairs were so strong a win seemed inevitable. Kept maxing out the bus, and getting Mercuries from my seals. Had a few red seal gold cards for the economy.
The one scary thing in the back of my mind was that I never got the re-roll voucher… and there was always the risk of Violet Vessel. Which, of course, is what Ante 8 was. My pairs could score 100k without the Acrobat, with the x3 from Acrobat being more than enough to win the blinds, but that wasn’t going to come close to the 1.2M of the Vessel.
So I was desperate… and then the first miracle happened. I hit a Soul card out of a tarot deck. OK, all I need is the legendary joker that disables the boss ability! And it hit Canio (xMult for each face card destroyed). Damn. No way I can destroy face cards in the two blinds left before the boss.
OK, sell it and re-roll some more. Hit a Lucky Cat. I had a few red seal lucky cards… if I can get this cat up to x2 or so I just might be able to do it. Had about 6 lucky cards triggered against the Big Blind… and only one of them hit. Damn. 1.25x isn’t going to cut it.
OK, re-roll some more. I had stashed a few glass cards in my deck, so there was one more out. And with the final re-roll before I ran out of money, there it was - Hanging Chad. If I could just hit that last hand (with the x3 from Acrobat) with a glass card pair it just might be enough.
Cutting to the chase, I used all hands, all draws, with nary a glass card in sight and on the very last draw picked up a glass 3 to use with the Chad to eke it over the line and get C++.
I guess Naneinf is the white whale now.
I hated trying to get the naneinf. Maybe because I’m not great at the game, but it felt just like extreme luck. The Baron/Mime/Blueprint/Mindstorm and rebuilding the deck to be full of red seal kings isn’t that bad, but the Perkeo and the Cryptid… plus you need to get them early enough to build up a stack of negative cryptids. Took me well over 100 tries I’d guess.
Yeah, not sure I’m gonna bother. Maybe just play around with some of the decks I don’t use much (Abandoned, Nebula) for a while. It does seem very much an RNG grind, which is not really my thing. Playing so many games just to see a Diet Cola (and then almost losing it to the final boss) was a PITA.