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Video GamesJan 23, 2025 4:05 pm CT

Get your first wins in Balatro with these beginner and intermediate tips

While we do cover a lot of different video games here at Blizzard Watch (including, you know, Blizzard games), it’s not exactly a secret that several of our staff (and readers!) have gotten, to some degree, into Balatro. It even came up in the running for our 2024 Game of the Year! Still, it’s a game with a lot of intricacies and little points to explore — some of which I’ve seen people just discovering after literally hundreds of hours in the game — and so when I was asked to drum up a tips and tricks post about the game I couldn’t shut up about last year, how could I say no? Let’s get right into it.

Make sure to rearrange your cards and Jokers (because you can do that, by the way)

  • Joker order matters! When your Jokers trigger, they do so from left to right — so ideally you want to put anything providing flat mult (e.g. Ride the Bus) before anything providing multiplicative mult, commonly referred to as “xmult” (e.g. Blackboard), so that the flat mult gets multiplied by the xmult. Jokers that provide chips, however, can really go anywhere. This also applies to Jokers that trigger for each card in hand (you want Lusty Joker to the left of Bloodstone to get the biggest benefit out of them) or that trigger at the beginning of the Blind (if you have Riff-Raff to the left of Madness, Riff-Raff will produce two Jokers before Madness randomly destroys one). This does not really matter for Jokers that just provide a passive effect, like Hanging Chad.
  • This also applies to cards played and, to a much lesser degree, cards in hand. If you’re running the Raised Fist and Baron, relocating the lowest card in your hand to the left of your kings is technically the best option each turn. More importantly, if you’re running the aforementioned Hanging Chad, you’ll need to want to make sure that the card you want retriggered multiple times is the leftmost one in your played hand.
  • And on that note, you can move your Jokers and cards in hand! If you’re using a mouse, just click and drag the Jokers to the order you want, or move the playing cards around in your hand. If you’re using a controller, holding down A (or, on PlayStation controllers, the cross button) and using the directional pad will let you move cards and Jokers left and right.

Maximize your economy by knowing which consumables are worth it

  • The second biggest tip I can give to making it further into runs and seeing rarer and more powerful Jokers is to manage your econ very carefully. The game gives you $1 in interest at the end of a round for every $5 you have in your bank, up to a max of $5 if you have $25 (increasing to maximums of $10 and $20 with the Seed Money and Money Tree vouchers, respectively). Getting to and staying above interest cap to rake in that extra money is the best way to ensure you can reroll for more Joker options, and that — in cases where you see an upcoming Boss Blind is absolutely going to hose you — enables you to have an emergency fund to dig for things like Luchador to save you.
  • I’ve seen a lot of people commenting “why would I want to destroy cards?” (from Joker effects like Trading Card). Balatro is a deckbuilder at its heart, and part of a deckbuilder is drawing the cards you want, when you want them. If you’re using something like Triboulet that wants you to play specific cards, any card you draw that isn’t one of those is just useless chaff’; if you want to draw more Kings, nuking things in your deck that aren’t Kings, or turning other cards into Kings, makes it more likely that you’ll draw Kings.
  • Also, skipping a Blind is almost never worth it. Yes, you may get one free Joker, but you’re relying on randomness to give you a good one, and you’re passing up a huge array of benefits to do so: scaling Jokers during play, seeing an entire shop, getting money or free hand levels from gold cards or blue seals, and so on. If you skip a blind, you better be sure the opportunity cost is absolutely worth it — typically this is either skipping to get a Reroll Tag that will reroll a Boss Blind that will absolutely end your run, or an Investment Tag in Ante 1 which can easily set you up for the entire game.
  • Hands scale at different rates when you get new Planet cards; this much is obvious. In general, hands that are harder to make (like Straights, Four of a Kind, or the illegal hands like Flush House and Flush Five) start at higher values and scale faster with each Planet. That said, do not sleep on lower value hands like High Card and Pair, especially with how easy some of them are to make, and definitely do not disregard Three of a Kind — for an easy-to-make hand, it scales very quickly with each new Venus you acquire.
  • Finally, while negative hand size — such as from Spectral cards like Ectoplasm or Jokers like Merry Andy — mostly just seems like a drawback to forming larger hands, you will actually instantly get a game over if you have a max hand size of 0. This is most likely to happen if you use multiple Ectoplasms in one run. Buyer beware!

Balatro 102: Know Your Jokers (or at least, some of them)

Lastly, here’s a smattering of non-obvious tips, unusual uses, or fun strategies for specific Jokers.

  • The game is not messing with you: the Blank voucher does not, in fact, do anything. But buying it ten times unlocks the much more powerful Antimatter, which gives you an empty Joker slot with no drawbacks. Once you’ve unlocked Antimatter, on future runs you will need to buy the Blank voucher when it appears to make Antimatter possibly appear in shops later in the run.
  • Almost everything in the store is unique; this is why Showman is interesting — you can find the same Joker twice, or the same card multiple times in the same Tarot pack, or so on. But what’s not obvious at all is that this applies everywhere on screen — if you have a card in your consumable slot or Joker lineup, or if it is currently in the shop, it will not appear in any packs in the store! If you have a Jupiter in your consumables, it will not appear in Celestial Packs (unless you also have the Telescope voucher and Flushes are your most-played hand).
    • This fact, which the game never teaches you, enables a neat trick: if there is a consumable you are hunting for, holding consumables you don’t want in your consumable slots will make those not appear. Let’s say you’re actually hunting for Jupiters in the shop and in Celestial Packs. If you have, say, a Saturn and an Earth in your consumable slots, you can be guaranteed (Telescope voucher and Showman Joker notwithstanding) that those two will never appear in Celestial Packs or on shop rerolls, making it more likely that the card you want will.
  • You can tell by reading it that Four Fingers makes both Flushes and Straights easier to play by only requiring 4 cards instead of 5, but what’s not immediately obvious is that it also makes it easier to play Straight Flushes: if you play something that Four Fingers would consider to be both a Flush and a Straight, it will give you a Straight Flush. Example: playing a 4, 5, 6, and King of Hearts is a Flush when using Four Fingers. If you also add in a 3 of any suit, which means the hand both contains 4 Hearts (a Four Fingers Flush) and 3-4-5-6 (a Four Fingers Straight), the hand will be scored as a Straight Flush.
  • Having issues with The Needle Boss Blind and its restrictive 1 hand to win? Get yourself a Burglar. Besides being a strong economy joker (losing all discards to gain +3 hands is almost always a monetary gain), the Burglar still gives you +3 Hands after The Needle whittles your hands down to 1, giving you 4 hands to beat it. Need more? Use Blueprint or Brainstorm to copy the Burglar’s effects.
  • Matador seems like a very powerful economy Joker, but you’re going to find that a lot of bosses you think should activate it don’t. In general, any Boss Blind that debuffs cards (such as The Goad debuffing all Spades) or cause hands to be not scored (such as trying to score a repeat hand against The Eye) will trigger the Matador. Matador will also give you money if The Arm reduces a hand level, if The Ox sets your money to $0 (in fact, it will trigger after The Ox does, so you get to keep your $8), or every single hand versus The Flint. Nothing else causes Matador to work.
  • Obelisk seems very tricky to use, and it is — but it’s also very powerful once you know how to use it. The trick is to build up a buffer of one hand type early, and then stop playing that hand type late game as you scale the Obelisk to truly silly levels of xmult. The most typical setup is to play a lot of High Card or Pair early, then transition into other hand types late. You also don’t need as many for a buffer as you think — 15-20 hands of one kind will typically let you get past Ante 8 and into the early parts of Endless Mode with little difficulty.
  • Finally, I’m not even sure this one counts as advanced, it’s just fun: the only way to get the powerful Cavendish to appear in the shop — a common-rarity x3 xmult Joker with a mere 1/1000 chance of deleting itself each Blind — is to buy the Gros Michel early and hope that it it makes itself go extinct via its own card effect; selling it, letting it get destroyed by other Jokers, etc. does not suffice. Why? Because the Gros Michel used to be the world’s leading commercial banana cultivar until Panama disease made it nearly impossible to grow and ship, effectively rendering it almost extinct, at which point banana producers began growing the more hardy Cavendish instead. So grab that banana Joker early!
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