Balatro relies heavily on RNG, even by the standards of roguelikes. That is to say, completing a successful run depends in no small part on dumb luck. The increasingly wide variety of power-ups available for players also means that drawing the right ones becomes increasingly rare as the game progresses and more items are unlocked. On the flip side, those late-game additions enable more complex strategies.

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Three things are important to remember when planning a new strategy: using Planets to upgrade poker hands, buying the right Tarots to edit the deck in favorable ways, and, above all else, being able to adapt when a newer, better strategy appears. Because Balatro relies so much on chance, choosing a strategy before the start of a run can be a death sentence. The same goes for strategies decided early in a run: pivoting to a superior strategy mid-run is a common move in Balatro, one that is often necessary to win.

Updated February 2, 2025, by Stephanie Harris: Balatro appears to be going from strength to strength, with the addictive indie game picking up a number of impressive accolades at the Game Awards late last year, and more and more players trying the game, only to realize how truly great it is. It’s true that strategies are consistently important throughout Balatro, and that changing strategy regularly, depending on what hand is dealt, is often the key to success, so this article has been updated to reflect some more important considerations when choosing a strategy.

All Flushes

Best With Smeared Joker Or Checkered Deck

All Flushes isn’t quite the best strategy in the game, but it’s an easy way to build a strong deck. It’s also a hard strategy to get wrong, especially if a player starts with the Checkered deck or if they find a Smeared Joker soon into the run. The Smeared Joker is the more advisable choice, as it can benefit from every suit-related Joker in the game.

The strategy is as follows: acquire a Smeared Joker, start with the Checkered Deck (one of the best decks in the game), or change the deck, as much as possible, into one suit. Then, get the appropriate Jokers for the most common suits in the deck. For example, a deck focused on Spades should use the Arrowhead and the Wrathful Joker.

Pair, Three Of A Kind, Four Of A Kind

Best With Jolly, Zany, Sly, And Willy Jokers

This is a strategy that values adaptability over anything else, and it rests on a simple fact that many Balatro beginners might not know. The Jokers that give Chips and Mult when a hand contains a Pair or a Three of a Kind also work with larger hands: a Full House will also count as a Pair and a Three of a Kind, as will a Four of a Kind.

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A potential problem with this strategy is that it requires quite a few specific Jokers to work properly. Besides the fact that those Joker slots could be better used, there is no guarantee that the cards mentioned before will spawn at all. And without them, this strategy isn’t all that strong.

Pareidolia, All Face Cards

Best With Scary Face, Smiley Face, Business Card, Sock and Buskin

Despite its name, the All-Face Cards strategy doesn’t rely on gathering lots and lots of face cards. Instead, by using the Pareidolia Joker, players can treat every card in their deck as if it were a face card. This doesn’t do anything on its own, but it allows other Jokers to be applied to the entire deck.

Some of the best Jockers to play with Pareidolia are the Scary Face, which adds 30 Chips to the value of every face card, and the similar Smiley Face, which adds a +4 Mult. If players have Pareidolia, and every card is also triggered by the additional Scary Face and Smiley Face jokers, any deck can quickly become seriously powerful. Many cards are triggered by playing or discarding a face card, but Sock and Buskin might be the best for this strategy. This card simply activates every face card twice during scoring, triggering each face-related Joker twice.

Know Your Mult

Ensure Maximised Mult Based On Joker Order

Beginner players of Balatro are likely unaware of the importance of joker order, but this can come in very handy when trying to beat large blinds. In particular, players should make sure that their + chips jokers and + mult cards are placed before their x mult jokers in order to maximize their success.

What this means is, placing jokers like Popcorn, which increases the round by +20 mult, to the left of the arrangement of jokers, so that more powerful cards like Acrobat, which awards x3 mult in the final hand of the round, can sit to the right. This works because joker cards are scored from left to right, so the accumulated mult score can then be multiplied to a much bigger number.

Shortcut To Straight

Best With Shortcut, Four Fingers, And Runner

The Shortcut is one of the best Jokers in Balatro and could be considered one of the most broken elements of any roguelike deck-builder. It’s so unbelievably good that a player could build an entire strategy around it, as many already have. Shortcut is so good that it’s worth pivoting away from a different strategy and onto a Straight focused on the moment this card becomes available.

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The Shortcut makes building a Straight way easier than before by allowing the player to skip one rank in between each card. It’s obvious how this makes scoring a hand much easier, but it’s even better when paired with Four Fingers, which allows Flushes and Straights to be made of just four cards, putting a Straight Flush strategy within reach. Of course, buying the right Planets is also vital, as it’s the only way to reliably boost the Straight Poker Hand.

Synergetic Jokers

Best With Jokers That Have Similar Abilities

As players gain experience with Balatro, they will quickly come to realize the importance of their jokers working together for a common strategy. This is why it’s important not to start with a strategy, but to develop one as new jokers become available that can work well together. A lot of jokers in Balatro are not that good on their own, but paired with others they can become virtually unstoppable.

For example, cards that retrigger played hands, like Mime or Dusk, work well with the iconic Blueprint joker, allowing the cards to be retriggered once again. Another example could be using Splash and Hiker together to quickly amp up the amount of chips players can earn in each round of the game.

Ceremonial Dagger And Lots Of Money

Best with Green Deck And Egg

The Ceremonial Dagger isn’t a particularly great Joker, but it can become one under the right circumstances. There are two main circumstances: if the player has lots and lots of money or if they find the Egg Joker early in the run. The Ceremonial Dagger is one of many Jokers that improve during the run, but this one is special. Its Mult value improves by the resell value of the Joker to its right, which it destroys once the blind is selected. This strategy can be very dangerous and isn’t very powerful.

One tactic for using the Ceremonial Dagger is to simply buy and destroy lots and lots of Jokers. To do this effectively, getting a discount voucher is highly encouraged. The alternative is buying an Egg early on, waiting until its resell value (which grows by $3 with every passing round) reaches into the dozens, and then sacrificing it when necessary. Of course, those two strategies should ideally be used in tandem: acquiring an Egg early in the run and then feeding weaker Jokers to the Knife until the Egg is ready.

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Strategy

Digital Card Game

Roguelike

Released

February 20, 2024

Developer(s)

LocalThunk

OpenCritic Rating

Mighty