The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Prepare to get the Balatro music stuck in your head all over again, but with the Mother 3 “soundfont,” a word that I’m not thrilled with. I don’t hate it, it’s just that there’s already good ways to refer to that concept, like “instrument set.” Ah. Oh well. Anyway. Here it is. (4 minutes – wait, the Balatro music is only four minutes long?)
A trick was discovered a scant few days ago in Balatro that will outright tell you what the top card on your deck is, it’s been in the game since the original demo release, and its an intentional inclusion by the game’s creator.
One of the many Jokers you can obtain in the game is Misprint. (See right) Misprint’s function is to add a random number from 0 to 23 to the hand’s “Mult,” the chip value it’ll earn. It displays this, amusingly, as glitched description text that changes, and occasionally displays random, apparently garbled text.
Well as it turns out, it’s not random text at all. It’s a code that tells you what the card on top of your deck is! It’s the rank of the card (2-14 for its rank) and its suit (H for Hearts, etc.)!
Balatro is unusually devoid of other deck-peeking abilities. While there’s abilities that affect chips, Mult, Mult-multipliers, money, Tarot cards, Spectral cards and lots more, and you can at any time review what possible cards might be waiting in your deck, nothing will absolutely tell you what’s waiting for your next hand. And you don’t even have to have this Joker in play to use it, which is good, because it’s not great in many circumstances. If you go to the card’s spot in the Collection (provided it’s been gained at least once) and look at its description there, it still works! It’s been noted that it’ll even reveal the hidden identity of Stone Cards, which have their original values obscured by a layer of rock.
How does this affect the game? Well I’m going to go out on a limb and say, not as much as you’d think? It only reveals one card, and doesn’t say anything about its Enhancement, Edition or Seal. If you have more than one of a card, it’ll just tell you its rank and suit. That can still be used to deduce other properties of a card (if your only Red-Sealed Glass card is a 7 of Hearts, it’s a giveaway if Misprint reports a 7H) but it’ll require some setup, which is like nearly every other aspect of the game. It does slightly help you make specific hands, but even the best games of Balatro eventually run afoul of its ruthless ante scaling.
Every Set Side B post needs a link to a Youtube video, right? Here’s a breathless two minute one from BelenosBear explaining the trick:
Of particular note, Balatro University says they’ve known about this all along (18 seconds):
It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:
The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.
High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.53130, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.
So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.
With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!
The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.
It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.