Tips and tricks for each unlockable deck in Balatro

Once you’ve started racking up a few wins in Balatro, you’ll start unlocking additional decks. The first few are fairly simple to grasp — the Red Deck gives you an extra discard, the Blue Deck gives you an extra hand to play each Blind, and the Yellow Deck gives you more sweet, sweet cash (to start with, anyway). However, the knock-on effects of each Deck are occasionally not as straightforward, and sometimes can run fairly deep, requiring you to adapt your strategy or lean into specific hand types to see victory.

Here’s a rundown of each deck in Balatro (not counting the Challenge Deck, which is exclusive to the game’s 30 puzzle-like challenges), and what you should keep in mind playing each.

Collection Decks

• Red Deck (unlocked from the start) is one of the two most basic decks, giving you an extra discard per Blind. There’s not a lot to say about this — it makes certain Jokers like Banner and Delayed Gratification better — but really this deck shines when you start getting into higher stakes, where you get fewer discards than usual.
• Blue Deck (unlocked by discovering 20 items in the collection — basically by buying 20 Jokers, vouchers, consumables, etc.) is the other basic deck, giving you an extra hand per Blind. However, the real power of this deck is that it’s essentially an economic bonus: if you’re playing well, one extra hand per Blind is one extra dollar at the end of the Blind. As we’ve established, economy is king in this game, so the Blue Deck is deceptively powerful for a basic deck.
• Yellow Deck (unlocked by discovering 50 items in the collection) is powerful for the same reason that an Ante 1 Investment Tag is powerful: early money up front can either set you up with powerful Jokers you can’t usually afford from the first few shops, or it can help you hit interest cap even faster than usual, making it easier to roll that bonus through the rest of the run. However, be careful not to squander this early bonus, as once you’ve used up your bonus money, the Yellow Deck effectively has no additional power.
• Green Deck (unlocked by discovering 75 items in the collection) is somewhat weird in that you can ignore everything I said about interest! This means you can freely roll down in many shops to find more stuff, and also means that some vouchers and cards are just not worth buying — you don’t need something that grants you extra interest when you don’t earn any. This incentivizes you to use both hands and discards sparingly, since they’re both a source of income, and if you can find a build that lets you win in fewer easy-to-build hands, that’s the key to victory in the Green Deck.
• Black Deck (unlocked by discovering 100 items in the collection) is widely regarded, especially at higher difficulties, as the most difficult deck. Having to win in 3 hands instead of 4 when your build might be weak is rough already, but then the subtle part is that Black Deck is savaging your economy: you’re earning $1 less per Blind automatically, and it’s very likely (especially early) that you’ll get $0 from hands when you do win. Black Deck requires you to play very carefully early on, but in exchange it’s easy to set up Joker combos that require multiple cards to be effective.

Decks unlocked by winning

• Magic Deck (unlocked by winning a run on any difficulty with the Red Deck) is interesting not just for the ability to effectively get one Tarot card or Planet card three times right off the bat, but also for the fact that by starting with the Crystal Ball (+1 consumable slot) voucher, you have a chance of finding the Omen Globe (Spectral cards can appear in Tarot packs) — which normally requires you to purchase the Crystal Ball first — very early in a run. That said, this deck often spikes in power very early by just finding a Hermit card in an early Tarot pack and getting to play it three times in a row, which effectively just makes it a better Yellow Deck with a little bit of luck.
• Nebula Deck (unlocked by winning a run on any difficulty with the Blue Deck) starts you off with the Telescope voucher — great for people who like to pick a hand and play just that! — but you get one less consumable slot, making it harder to carry around things like Death or suit-changing cards for deck fixing. It also means Boss Blinds like The Arm (lowers hand levels of played hands — permanently), The Eye (no repeat hand types), The Ox (playing your most played hand sets your money to $0), and others can be absolutely devastating if your deck is only set up to do just one thing. Nebula Deck can be very good at boosting a single hand to astronomical levels, just be ready to adjust in a hurry or have a backup plan (whether that’s another hand your deck can play, or run-saving jokers like Luchador, Chicot, or Mr. Bones).
• Ghost Deck (unlocked by winning a run on any difficulty with the Black Deck) is a very good deck to both ensure that your first Joker remains useful for a very long time thanks to that free Hex card, and also that you can get some truly ludicrous effects thanks to being able to buy Spectral cards in the shop. There’s not a lot of obvious downsides to Ghost Deck other than that you have an additional card type possibly showing up in the shop — Ghost Deck is a pretty comfortable deck if you want to just try to make a build to the moon.
• Abandoned Deck’s (unlocked by winning a run on any difficulty with the Green Deck) biggest drawback is low chip count early on due to not having any face cards. If you can overcome this, you’ll find that due to its low card count, it can be much easier to put together more complex and higher-scoring hands. Also, Ride the Bus is just free scaling flat mult!
• Checkered Deck (unlocked by winning a run on any difficulty with the Blue Deck) is another deck that can be easy to take to higher Antes and higher difficulties — as long as you like playing Flushes! In exchange for invalidating a lot of Boss Blinds, though, and making it very easy to figure out what kind of deck fixing you want to gravitate towards, you mostly have to overcome the one weakness of Flushes: they scale very badly because of how easy they are to make.
• Zodiac Deck (unlocked by winning a run on Red Stake difficulty with any deck) is great in some ways — with the free vouchers you start with, you’re more likely to see Planets or Tarot cards more often, and start with 3 shop slots instead of 2 — but at the same time, that also means you’re less likely to see Jokers sometimes because you’re seeing more Planets and Tarots. On the other hand (is that three hands?), that’s effectively $30 in value right off the bat and opens up 3 second-tier vouchers in the voucher pool. It can be fun, but sometimes the Joker luck can feel really bad on this one when the shop just keeps showing you Planets instead.
• Painted Deck‘s (unlocked by winning a run on Green Stake difficulty with any deck) biggest upside is that it makes it much easier to put together hands that require a lot of specific cards, like Straights or Four of a Kind. It’s really advantageous when using Jokers that rely on lots of cards in hand too, like Baron. The downside is that Joker combos that rely on multiple Jokers are much harder to use here, and it’s nearly impossible to maintain a free slot for an economy Joker like Rough Gem. Be extra judicious with your purchases — especially in higher stakes when you can occasionally get saddled with Eternal unsellable Jokers — and Painted Deck can be a lot of fun.
• Anaglyph Deck (unlocked by winning a run on Black Stake difficulty with any deck)  is a total crapshoot — either it’s going to give you constant small benefits, it’s going to give you one giant obscene bonus when you get something ludicrous like 10 Investment Tags in a row, or it’s going to do absolutely nothing for your entire run. In my opinion, the best use for Anaglyph Deck is for achievement hunting — if you can stack up a bunch of Double Tags by playing normally, skip for a Negative Tag in ante 7 or 8, and carry a bunch of otherwise hard-to-use Jokers over the finish line, it can make it a lot easier for people hunting for the game’s coveted Completionist++ achievement.
• Plasma Deck (unlocked by winning a run on Blue Stake difficulty with any deck) is, frankly, weird. The effect is not entirely clear, either, on first reading. What it does when scoring is calculate your chips and mult normally, then add them together, then divide them by 2 and set your chips and mult to those values — for instance, if you score a hand that gives you 100 chips and 26 mult (for what would normally be a score of 2600), those will be added up to 126, divided into two, and set to 63 chips and 63 mult (for a score of 3969). However, due to making it easier to get high scores, all required values to win are doubled. On lower stakes, stacking chips up can be a method for victory; in higher stakes, this is made more difficult because the recommended strategy is to stack chips early and then pivot to xmult cards, as their values start to overtake anything additive chip Jokers can provide. As a result, bad luck with shops can just hose a high-stakes run on Plasma Deck. Still, if you’re a fan of Big Number Go Up, this is absolutely the deck for you.
• Last but not least, there’s the Erratic Deck (unlocked by winning a run on Purple Stake difficulty with any deck). Sometimes this deck can just give you a deck that’s just slightly off normal, and you end up playing what seems like a very normal run of Balatro. Sometimes, it will give you 10 Kings, or 25 cards of a single suit. You never know until you fire it up, and if you like the randomness of roguelikes, this is the deck you want. The best part about Erratic Deck is that it can be very easy to figure out what direction you want to build towards simply by looking at your cards — did the Erratic Deck give you 8 10s and 8 4s? Sounds like you should dig for a Walkie Talkie.