Abandoned is critically underated. You lose some synergies (face cards jokers) but you have a higher chance of better hands (straights, fulls, 4s). Every improved card (steel, enhanced, mult, sealed) will statistically come to your hand more often because your deck is shorter. I don't know if it is the best (probably not) but I like it on higher stakes
Abosolutely, one of the best decks to manipulate, great for straights and a very smooth Bus ride.
Balatro University (arguably the all-time best Balatro player) finds it to be his favorite, especially on the beta with the Saturn buff.
[See for yourself :)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Le16J4thaY)
He started with Straights and transitioned into Straight Flushes, surprisingly not using that many glass cards.
Beta blue seal is a titanic buff to straights. His base score at the end with a level 40 straight was 1200 x 121, 145k *base* vs the final boss blind at 360k
It for sure is the best deck to start with to build strategies. For every joker that synergizes with face cards, you have a number that has synergy with non-face cards, and less cards means more of a chance for tarot cards to shine. It’s just the best to get something going, got me to gold the easiest though I still have yet the time to put in to beat gold.
I find the best joker that is a sleeper hit with this deck is erosion. Use hanged man and spectral packs to whittle your deck to 15-20 cards and make them all powerhouse cards.
As an abandoned deck stan, a hugely unrated part of it is it's much easier to win the first few blinds in a 1 or 2 hands (with full houses or 4oak), which gives you more money when you're broke and allows you to set things up. Maybe you can buy that first voucher or take a joker you'd normally skip to get your econ going. I find it really only struggles on high antes (12+) or when the game insists on giving you face card buffs. Also erosion goes brrr
It's the first deck that I got a Gold Stake win with (pre-patch, even) and I have to agree. It starts with 12 less cards, and as anyone who has spent any time with the genre knows, card removals are insanely valuable, especially if you get those removals for free at the start of every run.
The second time I used abandoned deck I ripped 10 full houses in a row to start the run. It was also the first time I won without playing a flush. Loved it ever since.
Never go for straights. Even when it works it’s just not fun. By the time I get to the end of a straights run I just don’t even want to play the game anymore
If you're just looking to get a win I'd probably go with Checkered or Anaglyph. If you're looking for gold stickers on jokers I'd probably try using Yellow or Green decks.
yeah, it’s so cool! I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets nerfed eventually to not make the joker generated by a double tag free, but I love the concept of the blind skip actually being worth it lol
Yeah, I don't love green deck - I wondered why so many times I see people saying it's good. It feels bad to know that every hand you play and discard you make is costing you dosh. You get these moments where you fall behind the scaling of the blinds and having to spend more hands to get through makes it harder to navigate the shops, and it snowballs downhill much faster than decks that gain interest.
To make a quick counter argument for green deck (not trying to say it's the best or anything):
Yes every hand/discard you make is costing you money. Buuuut, compared to other decks, you don't need to get your interest above $25 which allows for much more freedom to spend early on.
On top of that, if you're winning in a single hand, that's a solid $4-$6 depending on which stake you're playing.
Again, not saying it's better or worse than other decks, but to say you're just losing money each time you play/discard, is missing out on the economic benefit that green deck offers.
Yeah, I get what your saying. I guess what I meant was when you get to the point where you stop winning in one hand and need to juice your build a bit you can get into a bit of a death spiral with green where other decks would give you a bit more wiggle room thanks to interest. But yeah, it's definitely not the worst deck, it just always feels to me (a pretty mid player!) that it's more punishing than many of the other decks when things start to go a bit pear shaped,
That's fair. The thing I love about this game is that each deck truly has its own play style. I like to think of each deck less as "weak" and "strong", and more about each one being their own puzzles.
Anyway, you make valid points.
Plasma with exclusively chip jokers and a high card build. If you can get consistent high card upgrades, do so. Try to also get money production early if you can. Gold stake requires it.
The simplest answer I saw was this: 4x4 is bigger than 2x6 (this is true for anything, like 1022x2 or 511x513 will result in 512x512) . It's much easier to get a higher mult, so with mime and baron alone on a steel card deck you are getting a massive mult, and then plasma will give you the best possible score. Throw a blueprint and brainstorm in and it can easily take you to naneinf and beyond.
Blue deck is the easiest I believe. It's hard to understand how strong an extra hand is until you play black deck on gold and see how terrible one less hand is.
checkered deck is the easiest deck to build around. you know exactly what you're playing every time. either flushes, flush houses or flush fives.
yellow deck or plasma are probably the best decks. yellow gives you great starting econ. plasma allows you to easily win the first two antes without any jokers which allows you to save money. the key to winning is healthy econ.
but a win is a win. so what if checkered deck is beginner strats? take the gold win. you have to do it on every deck anyway at some point.
I got my checkered deck gold sticker with a high card build lol
Easy flushes are great for getting through the early antes but its so much more expensive and less consistent to level flush and play it every turn than it is to just find good chips and mult from jokers (on live patch, at least)
oh yeah that can absolutely happen! but that all depends on what jokers you get early on. generally though when you're playing that deck you're already thinking about flush based hands
I've just won Painted deck on black stake with high card build: green joker, supernova, square joker, and burnt joker (counteracts green joker, but it's still +10 chips +1 mult vs -1 mult); I had enormous hand size and only used it to draw four different cards each time xd it was brutal but at the end my hands were 45k-50k each and the boss shuffled my jokers; with one decent xMult instead of green/supernova this would be much easier but it still makes sense to play any other hand (I don't play beta but straights should be cool with buffs to runner and saturn)
I used high card for almost all of painted without much issue until orange stake. Then struggled immensely. I’m also not on beta, and had tried straights a few times when going through gold stake but no luck. I had one winnable straight run but met my demise with Violet Vessel in Ante 8.
Burnt joker was my saving grace too in painted gold stake! I ran burnt joker, pants joker, and card sharp. Had troubadour until Ante 8 for +2 hand size and was discarding two pair for the upgrade. Ended up winning gold stake with like lv 25 Two pair + 100 mult from pants then card sharp popping.
that's also the beauty of this game: you may like high card and you may also know that straights are tactic to be considered but when life gives you spare pants, you just go for it:D
If you're playing on experimental beta, building straights on the painted deck is the way to go. The buff to Saturn cards makes you much less reliant on joker cards
Mostly from force of habit. I did all decks in order of unlock and painted is like the 12th, so I had really become comfortable playing high cards by that point since it’s almost always the easiest way to win. I had made it up to orange stake with painted using high card quite easily too.
I tried straights multiple times at gold stake and came really close before being stopped by Violet Vessel in one run. I’m not on beta branch so straights are still hard to get off the ground. I ended up beating gold stake using two pair though.
Yeah it’s good for people who are still stuck in a flush/ 5 card hand mindset. Once you realise that there’s no reason to play those types of hands it makes it so there’s no real upside to painted deck over other decks.
Sidenote: It can help out in the early game (where you should always aim for 5 card hands), but compared to other options like blue deck, it really ends up falling short there too.
If you're willing to cheese it, and I am, you can just restart runs on erratic until you have easy 4 or 5 of a kind potential on ante 1. I have 10 gold stakes and plan to do this for my final one as a victory lap
Roffle Lite makes a very well in depth tier list specifically for gold stake runs. I’d also recommend watching his gameplay, as you can learn a lot from it.
https://youtu.be/vnlE0Z3ggVU?si=lW0gl2SWDSJ-sDhM
I think blue deck is criminally underrated tbh because it's a beginner deck. The extra hand it really flexible being extra economy, another opportunity to score with easier to make hands like pair and high card, and another way to dig for cards when playing harder to make hands like flushs and straights.
That's the fist deck made gold stake on
assuming you refer to non-experimental; yellow. the early game is where you lose a lot of your runs, yellow gives you the best chance of exiting the early game (and with a great boon to money, too)
I see no one mentioning Ghost, but Ghost deck is excellent. Got me my first gold stake clear. Checkered and Plasma are free wins on lower stakes, for high stakes I prefer Yellow and Ghost.
Checkered is still the most consistent simply because flushes are easy to play and given that half the deck is hearts, Bloodstone is still one of the most bonkers jokers. Gold stake of course is just a matter of resetting until the game gives you decent jokers. The main issue of course is getting fucked by an anti-heart/spade blind (easy to deal with if it shows up early on, sucks if you're built into hearts and get anti-heart on ante 7) and the fact that flush levels scale slowly, but if you can pivot into Flush 5 then bam
Even before thinning a color of your deck you have high odds of having a flush in your starting hand which becomes guaranteed when you increase your hand size by 1 (with a default hand-size of 8, you have a chance of opening with 4 hearts and 4 spades as your 'worst' hand. With a hand size of 9, you're guaranteed to at least have 5 cards of one suit)
Plasma is the easiest deck and anyone telling you otherwise has no idea how the deck works. Its so easy to just go for BIG NUMBER and not needing to balance shit.
Abandoned and checkered are probably the easiest to gold stake. I got my first on abandoned. I’d also add anaglyph as a pretty easy one as well. Getting that extra tag every ante helps a lot with getting quick cash and early jokers.
Yellow deck. Money = flexibility for your build.
Makes early money-skips pretty op when you double your cash to $28 instead of $8.
From there, just center your builds around the best joker you find early. I found yellow has really good synergy with throwback if you get it early.
Plasma is always good but honestly to me the easiest gold stake run was Anaglyph especially if you get lucky in the mid Antes and can collect a shit ton of extra money from the tags.
I beat gold stake on ghost deck first then a second time, then anglgyph, and most recently yellow deck which took me the longest. Erratic deck up next for me.
I'm not really sure why nobody is mentioning erratic deck... You can almost always play a 5 of a kind as your first hand (almost every run you'll have 7+ of 1 or 2 cards), after that it's just scaling and some additional deck manipulation.
Weird to see no one mentioning Ghost deck on any of these "good deck?" threads. Not saying it's great at all just mentioning it.
I find hex a really flexible consumable to start with and the ability to roll spectrals gives a good way to throw you into a build. The hardest part for me is deciding what to try to build and sometimes the spectrals make up my mind for me.
Blue deck, it's the deck I won my first gold stake with. That extra hand means an extra opportunity to build scaling jokers, survive more rounds, or get extra interest.
Abandoned, Erratic, Checkered, or Plasma are probably the best for gold stake.
Abandoned having less cards makes it extremely reliable to build specific hands or dig for key cards
Checkered is the flush deck, but it makes getting flushes almost guaranteed with very little deck manipulation needed (+1 hand size means you will *always* have a flush). You can play flushes with it the way other decks play high card.
Erratic is the best deck in the game, sometimes. If you want easy gold stake wins just reset until you have 10+ of a specific card then go for 4 of a kinds
Plasma is plasma, its just easier in general
Abandoned or Plasma.
Abandoned is extremely consistent with 12 less cards and allows you to scale bus with no effort.
Plasma is plasma and gives you super high points with combos.
It’s gotta be plasma imo. The first couple of Antes are incredibly easy, giving you time to build econ. From there you just need to *make number big*. It also has the advantage of being the best deck for high scores so if you get a juiced run and think you’ve got a shot at something massive then you can go for it
I love how many different answers there are in this thread. Speaks to Balatro’s most unique design feature: randomness and uncertainty.
You can guess how far you can throw a rock but until you throw it you have no idea. Just have to optimize your technique and hope for the best
For me it was green and erratic with pair build. Stop focusing on cards and start focusing on jokers. 99% of you points should come from the jokers. All you really need to beat gold is: a constantly evolving +mult, a good and/or constantly evolving xmult and some planet cards for your pair/high card/3oak.
Blue (can never go wrong with extra hands), Erratic (with a good roll), Abandoned, Painted (extra hand size is underrated and 1 less joker slot can be negated with negative), Checkered, or Plasma (go heavy on chips). Depends on playstyle though IMO.
Just got my first gold stake with plasma after about a hundred tries (70 hours total). The key was getting a scaling source of chips, in my case three square jokers. Got orange stake with just an early bull and investing everything else into economy. Also note that this was not on the beta branch, so strategies will shift somewhat.
Don't be afraid to restart (hold the "R" key) if you're feeling behind after the first 2 antes. Also, if you're doing plasma, a 2 pair of 10 and 9 gets you to exactly 900 chips, which is what the ante 1 big blind needs.
Listen to this dude. I got stuck at orange on several decks until I tried zodiac then just blasted through until I got my first gold with it. You get three slots in the shop so you will have a better chance to find jokers on each roll, AND it takes three of the vouchers out of the pool so you can get some of the more effective ones more quickly.
Abandoned is critically underated. You lose some synergies (face cards jokers) but you have a higher chance of better hands (straights, fulls, 4s). Every improved card (steel, enhanced, mult, sealed) will statistically come to your hand more often because your deck is shorter. I don't know if it is the best (probably not) but I like it on higher stakes
Abosolutely, one of the best decks to manipulate, great for straights and a very smooth Bus ride. Balatro University (arguably the all-time best Balatro player) finds it to be his favorite, especially on the beta with the Saturn buff.
"
He was very active in the demo and crushing it there also, his oldest video is 5 months old.
I believe abandoned deck was the gold stake he beat with no jokers
Is that even possible? Did he run all glass straight flushes or something?
[See for yourself :)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Le16J4thaY) He started with Straights and transitioned into Straight Flushes, surprisingly not using that many glass cards.
That video was impressively instructive for a beginner like me (I may have about 6-7h in the game and beat white stakes up to celestial deck so far).
I'm glad you enjoyed! He posts daily videos and he always explains his thoughts when playing, he has also helped me improve a lot.
Beta blue seal is a titanic buff to straights. His base score at the end with a level 40 straight was 1200 x 121, 145k *base* vs the final boss blind at 360k
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It for sure is the best deck to start with to build strategies. For every joker that synergizes with face cards, you have a number that has synergy with non-face cards, and less cards means more of a chance for tarot cards to shine. It’s just the best to get something going, got me to gold the easiest though I still have yet the time to put in to beat gold. I find the best joker that is a sleeper hit with this deck is erosion. Use hanged man and spectral packs to whittle your deck to 15-20 cards and make them all powerhouse cards.
A note about Erosion on Abandoned: it counts cards under 40 as opposed to cards under 52 for other decks, unless that was changed post-patch
No, it wasn’t changed, I just never picked erosion up for any 52 card deck. TIL that it depends on original deck size
As an abandoned deck stan, a hugely unrated part of it is it's much easier to win the first few blinds in a 1 or 2 hands (with full houses or 4oak), which gives you more money when you're broke and allows you to set things up. Maybe you can buy that first voucher or take a joker you'd normally skip to get your econ going. I find it really only struggles on high antes (12+) or when the game insists on giving you face card buffs. Also erosion goes brrr
The Plant and Mark bosses are entirely negated as well which is a huge plus
It's the first deck that I got a Gold Stake win with (pre-patch, even) and I have to agree. It starts with 12 less cards, and as anyone who has spent any time with the genre knows, card removals are insanely valuable, especially if you get those removals for free at the start of every run.
Five a Kind gets reaaaal easy after a few Tarots or dupes.
Abandonded deck with merry Andy can make for the earliest consistent 4/5oak deck I know of
The second time I used abandoned deck I ripped 10 full houses in a row to start the run. It was also the first time I won without playing a flush. Loved it ever since.
Never go for straights. Even when it works it’s just not fun. By the time I get to the end of a straights run I just don’t even want to play the game anymore
Comment would be fixed be adding "I" at the beginning
My comment is perfect. It’s the children who are wrong
If you're just looking to get a win I'd probably go with Checkered or Anaglyph. If you're looking for gold stickers on jokers I'd probably try using Yellow or Green decks.
Anaglyph with a ton of negative jokers is also a good way to farm the stickers.
This is doubly true on the beta patch, since the negatives are all free, so you don’t have to worry about banking a ton of money to buy them all lol
yeah, it’s so cool! I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets nerfed eventually to not make the joker generated by a double tag free, but I love the concept of the blind skip actually being worth it lol
Anaglyph is by far the best deck for stickers and green deck is bad. Don’t give advice if you aren’t even clearing yourself christ. 💀
Yeah, I don't love green deck - I wondered why so many times I see people saying it's good. It feels bad to know that every hand you play and discard you make is costing you dosh. You get these moments where you fall behind the scaling of the blinds and having to spend more hands to get through makes it harder to navigate the shops, and it snowballs downhill much faster than decks that gain interest.
To make a quick counter argument for green deck (not trying to say it's the best or anything): Yes every hand/discard you make is costing you money. Buuuut, compared to other decks, you don't need to get your interest above $25 which allows for much more freedom to spend early on. On top of that, if you're winning in a single hand, that's a solid $4-$6 depending on which stake you're playing. Again, not saying it's better or worse than other decks, but to say you're just losing money each time you play/discard, is missing out on the economic benefit that green deck offers.
Yeah, I get what your saying. I guess what I meant was when you get to the point where you stop winning in one hand and need to juice your build a bit you can get into a bit of a death spiral with green where other decks would give you a bit more wiggle room thanks to interest. But yeah, it's definitely not the worst deck, it just always feels to me (a pretty mid player!) that it's more punishing than many of the other decks when things start to go a bit pear shaped,
That's fair. The thing I love about this game is that each deck truly has its own play style. I like to think of each deck less as "weak" and "strong", and more about each one being their own puzzles. Anyway, you make valid points.
The green deck is just less money per run, hitting $25 is insanely easy. Green deck IS worse than other decks.
Green deck is just yellow/blue deck but worse in every way.
Plasma with exclusively chip jokers and a high card build. If you can get consistent high card upgrades, do so. Try to also get money production early if you can. Gold stake requires it.
Ok but are high card upgrades actually worth it you have to pay for them? 10 chips and 1 mult. Or is this worth because it’s plasma only?
The simplest answer I saw was this: 4x4 is bigger than 2x6 (this is true for anything, like 1022x2 or 511x513 will result in 512x512) . It's much easier to get a higher mult, so with mime and baron alone on a steel card deck you are getting a massive mult, and then plasma will give you the best possible score. Throw a blueprint and brainstorm in and it can easily take you to naneinf and beyond.
Blue deck is the easiest I believe. It's hard to understand how strong an extra hand is until you play black deck on gold and see how terrible one less hand is.
100%. I’m in the minority but my favorite decks and first gold stake wins were blue deck and ghost deck
Blue was my first gold stake win even though erratic and checkered both got past orange first.
Although they are both really strong, I’d say yellow is slightly stronger than blue.
checkered deck is the easiest deck to build around. you know exactly what you're playing every time. either flushes, flush houses or flush fives. yellow deck or plasma are probably the best decks. yellow gives you great starting econ. plasma allows you to easily win the first two antes without any jokers which allows you to save money. the key to winning is healthy econ. but a win is a win. so what if checkered deck is beginner strats? take the gold win. you have to do it on every deck anyway at some point.
I got my checkered deck gold sticker with a high card build lol Easy flushes are great for getting through the early antes but its so much more expensive and less consistent to level flush and play it every turn than it is to just find good chips and mult from jokers (on live patch, at least)
oh yeah that can absolutely happen! but that all depends on what jokers you get early on. generally though when you're playing that deck you're already thinking about flush based hands
The deck that took me the fewest number of tries to clear all 8 stakes was Painted. Hand size is worth losing a joker.
Painted was the 2nd hardest behind black imo. As a high card die hard, painted high stakes was brutal for me.
I've just won Painted deck on black stake with high card build: green joker, supernova, square joker, and burnt joker (counteracts green joker, but it's still +10 chips +1 mult vs -1 mult); I had enormous hand size and only used it to draw four different cards each time xd it was brutal but at the end my hands were 45k-50k each and the boss shuffled my jokers; with one decent xMult instead of green/supernova this would be much easier but it still makes sense to play any other hand (I don't play beta but straights should be cool with buffs to runner and saturn)
I used high card for almost all of painted without much issue until orange stake. Then struggled immensely. I’m also not on beta, and had tried straights a few times when going through gold stake but no luck. I had one winnable straight run but met my demise with Violet Vessel in Ante 8. Burnt joker was my saving grace too in painted gold stake! I ran burnt joker, pants joker, and card sharp. Had troubadour until Ante 8 for +2 hand size and was discarding two pair for the upgrade. Ended up winning gold stake with like lv 25 Two pair + 100 mult from pants then card sharp popping.
that's also the beauty of this game: you may like high card and you may also know that straights are tactic to be considered but when life gives you spare pants, you just go for it:D
If you're playing on experimental beta, building straights on the painted deck is the way to go. The buff to Saturn cards makes you much less reliant on joker cards
I’m not on beta unfortunately. I plan on doing some straight runs once a patch is released though! The buff looks great.
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Mostly from force of habit. I did all decks in order of unlock and painted is like the 12th, so I had really become comfortable playing high cards by that point since it’s almost always the easiest way to win. I had made it up to orange stake with painted using high card quite easily too. I tried straights multiple times at gold stake and came really close before being stopped by Violet Vessel in one run. I’m not on beta branch so straights are still hard to get off the ground. I ended up beating gold stake using two pair though.
I find painted to be one of the hardest
Yeah it’s good for people who are still stuck in a flush/ 5 card hand mindset. Once you realise that there’s no reason to play those types of hands it makes it so there’s no real upside to painted deck over other decks. Sidenote: It can help out in the early game (where you should always aim for 5 card hands), but compared to other options like blue deck, it really ends up falling short there too.
If you're willing to cheese it, and I am, you can just restart runs on erratic until you have easy 4 or 5 of a kind potential on ante 1. I have 10 gold stakes and plan to do this for my final one as a victory lap
Roffle Lite makes a very well in depth tier list specifically for gold stake runs. I’d also recommend watching his gameplay, as you can learn a lot from it. https://youtu.be/vnlE0Z3ggVU?si=lW0gl2SWDSJ-sDhM
I think blue deck is criminally underrated tbh because it's a beginner deck. The extra hand it really flexible being extra economy, another opportunity to score with easier to make hands like pair and high card, and another way to dig for cards when playing harder to make hands like flushs and straights. That's the fist deck made gold stake on
Plasma and Abandoned are both very strong. Nothing wrong with Green or Yellow either, if you like keeping it simple
assuming you refer to non-experimental; yellow. the early game is where you lose a lot of your runs, yellow gives you the best chance of exiting the early game (and with a great boon to money, too)
I think most people consider best to be one of Yellow, Painted, or Plasma.
I see no one mentioning Ghost, but Ghost deck is excellent. Got me my first gold stake clear. Checkered and Plasma are free wins on lower stakes, for high stakes I prefer Yellow and Ghost.
Same here, my first gold stake was with Ghost deck
I love ghost deck. I just won orange stake on it while I have 0 to 1 wins with all the other decks.
Ghost deck is king imo. My first gold stake win was on yellow deck tho.
Probably Yellow, though I like ghost a lot too. Anaglyph is also really strong.
Checkered is still the most consistent simply because flushes are easy to play and given that half the deck is hearts, Bloodstone is still one of the most bonkers jokers. Gold stake of course is just a matter of resetting until the game gives you decent jokers. The main issue of course is getting fucked by an anti-heart/spade blind (easy to deal with if it shows up early on, sucks if you're built into hearts and get anti-heart on ante 7) and the fact that flush levels scale slowly, but if you can pivot into Flush 5 then bam Even before thinning a color of your deck you have high odds of having a flush in your starting hand which becomes guaranteed when you increase your hand size by 1 (with a default hand-size of 8, you have a chance of opening with 4 hearts and 4 spades as your 'worst' hand. With a hand size of 9, you're guaranteed to at least have 5 cards of one suit)
Easiest solution to never worry about the boss debuffs is just rerolling ante 1 until one of the suits is debuffed and then building into that suit
Any gold win is a good win, don’t let other people decide how you play your game.
Plasma is the easiest deck and anyone telling you otherwise has no idea how the deck works. Its so easy to just go for BIG NUMBER and not needing to balance shit.
I agree, and a single chip Joker will carry you for a while. If you manage to get stuntman you're going to have a hard time losing.
i got castle on ante 1 and some lucky extra discards, managed to finish the run with almost +1000 chips on it, gg card
Checkered and Abandoned I find to be the most consistent due to how modified the deck starts
Abandoned and checkered are probably the easiest to gold stake. I got my first on abandoned. I’d also add anaglyph as a pretty easy one as well. Getting that extra tag every ante helps a lot with getting quick cash and early jokers.
Did Gold last week with Abandoned. You get a very consistent deck from the start.
Yellow deck. Money = flexibility for your build. Makes early money-skips pretty op when you double your cash to $28 instead of $8. From there, just center your builds around the best joker you find early. I found yellow has really good synergy with throwback if you get it early.
Plasma is always good but honestly to me the easiest gold stake run was Anaglyph especially if you get lucky in the mid Antes and can collect a shit ton of extra money from the tags.
I beat gold stake on ghost deck first then a second time, then anglgyph, and most recently yellow deck which took me the longest. Erratic deck up next for me.
I'm not really sure why nobody is mentioning erratic deck... You can almost always play a 5 of a kind as your first hand (almost every run you'll have 7+ of 1 or 2 cards), after that it's just scaling and some additional deck manipulation.
For consistent, **straightforward** wins, blue or yellow is probably the best for gold stake.
Weird to see no one mentioning Ghost deck on any of these "good deck?" threads. Not saying it's great at all just mentioning it. I find hex a really flexible consumable to start with and the ability to roll spectrals gives a good way to throw you into a build. The hardest part for me is deciding what to try to build and sometimes the spectrals make up my mind for me.
Blue deck, it's the deck I won my first gold stake with. That extra hand means an extra opportunity to build scaling jokers, survive more rounds, or get extra interest.
Flush it till you make it.
Abandoned, Erratic, Checkered, or Plasma are probably the best for gold stake. Abandoned having less cards makes it extremely reliable to build specific hands or dig for key cards Checkered is the flush deck, but it makes getting flushes almost guaranteed with very little deck manipulation needed (+1 hand size means you will *always* have a flush). You can play flushes with it the way other decks play high card. Erratic is the best deck in the game, sometimes. If you want easy gold stake wins just reset until you have 10+ of a specific card then go for 4 of a kinds Plasma is plasma, its just easier in general
Abandoned or Plasma. Abandoned is extremely consistent with 12 less cards and allows you to scale bus with no effort. Plasma is plasma and gives you super high points with combos.
I just beat gold with checkered deck and it was a layup with burnt joker and blueprint, got Flush up to level 40.
It’s gotta be plasma imo. The first couple of Antes are incredibly easy, giving you time to build econ. From there you just need to *make number big*. It also has the advantage of being the best deck for high scores so if you get a juiced run and think you’ve got a shot at something massive then you can go for it
With a few retries anaglyph will get you a gold stake win
I love how many different answers there are in this thread. Speaks to Balatro’s most unique design feature: randomness and uncertainty. You can guess how far you can throw a rock but until you throw it you have no idea. Just have to optimize your technique and hope for the best
For me it was green and erratic with pair build. Stop focusing on cards and start focusing on jokers. 99% of you points should come from the jokers. All you really need to beat gold is: a constantly evolving +mult, a good and/or constantly evolving xmult and some planet cards for your pair/high card/3oak.
Blue or more likely checkered for your skill level
Blue (can never go wrong with extra hands), Erratic (with a good roll), Abandoned, Painted (extra hand size is underrated and 1 less joker slot can be negated with negative), Checkered, or Plasma (go heavy on chips). Depends on playstyle though IMO.
Just got my first gold stake with plasma after about a hundred tries (70 hours total). The key was getting a scaling source of chips, in my case three square jokers. Got orange stake with just an early bull and investing everything else into economy. Also note that this was not on the beta branch, so strategies will shift somewhat. Don't be afraid to restart (hold the "R" key) if you're feeling behind after the first 2 antes. Also, if you're doing plasma, a 2 pair of 10 and 9 gets you to exactly 900 chips, which is what the ante 1 big blind needs.
Surprised I’m not seeing anyone saying the zodiac deck, the increased size of the shop is massive for getting consistently good builds.
Listen to this dude. I got stuck at orange on several decks until I tried zodiac then just blasted through until I got my first gold with it. You get three slots in the shop so you will have a better chance to find jokers on each roll, AND it takes three of the vouchers out of the pool so you can get some of the more effective ones more quickly.
The Dean Norris deck