my balatro ideas (maybe for a mod)
last modified 2 weeks, 6 days ago
I'd like to come out publicly as one of Balatro's many victims. Y'know, see if I get money out of the eventual class-action lawsuit against LocalThunk for the damages this game has done to my psyche.
To give you an idea of how much time I spend thinking about Balatro, even when I'm not playing the game: some time ago, I1 started writing down ideas for changes I'd like to see in the game, maybe as a mod. I'm the sort of person who gets very attached to objects and such, so I get like, personally offended at the fact of certain jokers not being very good or viable at any point in the game...
Anyway, that's the subject of this post.
I think, if I changed the game up, my first order would be to create a huge buff for straights. Y'see: currently, straights suck! Getting a flush is always easier and scores more points. And that's a shame, 'cause I think straights are fun. So I think I'd like to switch around the default scores achieved by flushes and by straights.
I also think a straights-focused deck would be really cool. I've been calling it the Baker's Deck in my head, and it's sort of an inverted version of the Checkered Deck. Instead of the deck being repeated "hotdog style" (by suits), it's repeated "hamburger style" (by numbers). The Baker's Deck would have 12 cards per suit, and they'd be numbered 6 through Jack, twice. (So in total, you have eight sixes, eight sevens, eight eights, eight nines, eight tens, and eight Jacks). I specifically picked six through Jack because it's a middle-of-the-deck straight and because it serves as an indirect buff to the Hit the Road joker.
(Though you'd have to thin your deck quite a bit to actually make use of Hit the Road with it, and you'd have to pick up something like the Four Fingers joker, too... I think Hit the Road could be additionally buffed to give x1 Mult not "per Jack discarded", but "per Jack in hand" instead. Or, if you wanted to keep the theming intact, simply make it so the effect resets at the end of an Ante instead of a round; that's way better!)
Oh, and obviously, a buff to straights means a buff to all straights-based jokers... I think a buff to straight flushes would be good too, honestly. Making straights better is sort of a straight flush downscale, actually, embarrassingly enough, because they level up separately, so if you've leveled regular straights beyond straight flushes' base mult, accidentally making a straight flush rather than a regular flush is a drop in score. I think you could buff straight flushes by simply having a way of making flush or straight level-ups have a chance of leveling the straight flush up too. (This could be a joker!)
I'd also like to buff Superposition. Buffing the score requirements for straights would already make it better, but you could go further and make it have a chance of spawning a Planet card rather than a Tarot. A further buff could be a small chance of spawning a Spectral. (You could use the numbers the game uses to decide whether any given shop's packs will be Tarot, Planet or Spectral packs).
(Alternatively, if you don't mind the complexity — I mind, but you do you — you could make Superposition spawn a Planet card under regular circumstances, but spawn a Tarot card if your straight hand contains an Ace and a face card. If Superposition's Planet cards were affected by the Telescope voucher, this would massively buff Ace-through-5 straights specifically, because every time you played an Ace-through-5 straight, you'd get a Planet card for the straight hand, and therefore increase its level. It would become a more complex Burnt Joker, essentially...)
The 8 Ball joker doesn't exactly NEED a buff, but if I HAD to buff it, I would (and this is maybe a really silly change) turn its 1-in-4 odds (2-in-8) into 3-in-8 odds (1.5-in-4). This is a very minimal change, but it means that if you also get the Oops! All Sixes joker, 8 Ball produces a Tarot card 3/4ths of the time. THAT SAID: Just to be a dick, it would be very funny if 8 Ball was upped to 3-in-8, but was also blacklisted from Oops! All Sixes, so that it was stuck at 3-in-8. (This would actually be a huge nerf...) But again, I don't think 8 Ball needs a buff. It starts slow, but it can pick up steam!
Here's a true fact: I really like the Wild Card enhancement and its associated The Lovers tarot card, and I'm really mad they suck. My initial proposal is to make Wild Card an edition, rather than an enhancement. It'd encourage a high-risk, mid-reward flush strategy. A bunch of glass Wild Cards, plus any combination of jokers that give score to a specific suit, would mean a crazy crazy flush (and flushes aren't exactly the most optimal, but they're fun). But they'd also mean you're vulnerable to any boss that nerfs a certain card suit.
That said, Wild Card as an edition doesn't solve the fundamental problem of Wild Cards. The Lovers card only enhances one card into a Wild Card at-a-time, and Wild Cards are vulnerable to all four of the bosses that nerf a single suit. Meanwhile, there are four other tarot cards, all of equal rarity to the Lovers, that each turn three cards into one specific suit, which only makes them vulnerable to a single nerf-suiting boss. For Lovers to be equal to the Star, Sun, Moon, or World, Wild Cards would need to be considered like a suit in and of itself (and therefore support both Enhancements and Editions), AND Lovers would have to turn two or three cards into Wild Cards at-a-time. Obviously, Wild Cards are more powerful than any particular suit, since they trigger any joker that requires a specific suit to be played; but I think this is balanced out by the aforementioned boss vulnerability.
I think turning Wild into a "secret suit" the way Flush Five & their ilk are "secret hands" could be fun, but might also go against the spirit of things... Rather, I'd like to focus on buffing synergies with Wild Cards.
And y'know, I think the Flower Pot joker sucks... It's really hard to get a Four of a Kind without rigging your deck, and even if you rig your deck, getting consistent Fours of a Kind that are all a different suit specifically is difficult, too.
So, my proposed changes: make Wild Cards trigger Flower Pot solo, and additionally, make Flower Pot a scaling-per-ante joker rather than a flat x3 Mult. Something like, "x2 Mult per hand played containing every suit, resets after defeating a Boss Blind". This would take Flower Pot and Wild Card from pretty bad individual options to a really cool synergy.
(If you did go ahead and make Wild a "secret suit", too —and this is why I think a "secret suit" would be OP—, you could combine this with the infamous Baron-Mime-Red Seal-Steel Kings strategy for even more x Mult, simply by making all the Red Seal Steel Kings also be Wild Cards. ...or, actually, you could do this if Wild Cards were an Edition rather than an Enhancement, too, lol. Well, the fault doesn't lie with my Flower Pot changes, it lies with Baron-Mime-Red-Seal-Steel-Kings!)
This is not a nerf nor a buff but a secret third thing (fan-made joker idea): combining Burglar and Baron into a "Robber Baron" joker would be very very funny. A non-rigged Baron deck kinda forces you to dig through it to maximize your score, so unless you've already rigged your deck, combining Baron with Burglar makes Baron suck a little more ass. But, conversely, it also makes an already-rigged Baron deck a little better, since you have more hands to score with. Therefore, a Robber Baron joker further locks the player into a Red Seal Steel King Mime Baron deck... (the name isn't thematic except as a combination of Baron and Burglar, though. So I don't think this is very vanilla at all... [not like anything else in this post is...] it's very moddy, which is fine, but it's a different thing. I like it better than Mimaron, anyway...)
...To be honest, my default nerf idea for many of the more OP jokers is to make them take up more than one joker slot, but that's kind of lame. I guess upping their rarity is a good idea and probably the most unintrusive. It's definitely easier than a whole overhaul. I do like the nerfs to Photograph and Hanging Chad that I've heard the Multiplayer mod has, though. (It makes Hanging Chad retrigger the first two played cards once each, rather than retrigger the first played card twice. Which is so nice! So nice you scored it twice!)
Some more buffs, before I get into my scant ideas for new jokers... Ban Showman dupes from appearing with Showman, for one. And you could make Obelisk not reset; if this is too OP, something like Green Joker's +1 mult and -1 mult might be better. (And a slight numerical buff). So, something like "This Joker gains X0.25 Mult per hand played that is not your most played poker hand, and loses X0.25 Mult per hand played that is your most played poker hand".
Oh, and Matador shouldn't be a money joker, because it just sits pretty until you get to a boss... I think it being a score joker (flat or multiplicative Chips or Mult, anything works) that triggers each time you smack the boss blind's challenge & then lasts until the next boss blind could make it, like, viable. I think right now it triggers every time you play a nerfed card, but it would be more fun if it triggered for all boss challenges... So, for example, it would trigger once per discard that The Water takes away from you (if you had three discards, it would trigger thrice, and so on forth). I think this would be more fitting, thematically, because it would take Matador from being a vague bit about how bullfights look very luxurious & rake in a lot of money/fame, to a straight-forward depiction of a bullfight: the bullfighter dodging the bull's horns once (Matador trigger), twice (Matador trigger again), before going for the kill (racking up sufficient x Mult [or x Chips] to beat the blind).
well, Splash should get a buff too. I don't know what kind... Splash just plum sucks, lol. You're never really put into a position where you want to play a hand and additional cards that do score but aren't part of your played hand. I do think the Flower Pot buff would help Splash, too, though... if Flower Pot only hands out its bonus if all suits are scored in the hand played, then Splash would allow you to score more suits, even if they don't fit in the hand type you're playing. But this is a band-aid solution.
(I did have an idea for a Splash buff where it would trigger cards until five cards were triggered, but that might go the other way and make it too OP. The way it would work is that it would loop back. So if you played [left to right] an Ace of Hearts, an Ace of Spades, and an Ace of Diamonds, then you'd score the Ace of Hearts, then Spades, then Diamonds, then Spades again [a "fourth" card scored], then Hearts again [a "fifth" card scored]. This would mean High Card would score five times. You can imagine how this would synergize with Red Seel Steal Kings Mime Baron... see, too OP! Splash is a hard joker to balance!)
Wait, no, I did have an idea for a nerf. Make Perkeo have a chance of consuming a consumable (or, to be really mean, all negative consumables). He drinked them, sorry :[
Driver's License could count individual enhancements rather than enhanced cards. Alternatively, it could scale. x4 Mult per 16 enhanced cards in your deck, or something. (Maybe more x Mult than 4, but upping it from 3 to 4 is already scary...)
Speaking of straight flushes, Séance could be super-duper-trooper improved by making it also create a Tarot card whenever you play a regular straight. ...that's about it. Séance depends on straight flushes and, as we've established, straight flushes suck...
Hmmm... I don't think Raised Fist needs a nerf, but a good thematic one would be that it's not triggered if your lowest card in hand is a King or Queen, for obvious reasons. (Communism). Other changes we've already made already buffed Raised Fist, though (particularly the Baker's Deck). And I really like this change. So, there you go.
Black Deck obviously needs a buff to not be suffering incarnate... obviously, changing its downside from -1 Hand to things like -1 Hand size or -1 Discard would make it not suffering, but I think it'd be boring. Rather, I think tacking on additional bonuses would be good. Starting with a voucher could be cool. Any non-Grabber, non-Blank voucher would work, but I like Crystal Ball, Clearance Sale, Hone, Reroll Surplus, or Seed Money the most.
Oh, and Spectral cards should sell for more. Less than $10, so that the Ghost Deck doesn't make the Yellow Deck obsolete. Maybe like $5? It's at $4, upping it to $5 doesn't hurt, I don't think.
Wait, Showdown Blinds. Make it so The Mark doesn't appear when using the Abandoned Deck, and The Club & The Window don't appear when playing the Checkered Deck. That's about it.
And the last thing would be the new jokers. I've outlined a couple already and won't rehash them; I've only got two more, after those.
I'd like to see a "Jack in the Box" joker. "+2 Mult, triggers once per Jack not in hand". This specific phrasing makes it less powerful, because Blueprint next to "Jack in the Box" would only give you an additional +2 Mult, rather than straightforwardly duplicating the +mult Jack in the Box would offer. But I don't really like making OP jokers, so this is fine.
And finally, I would also like a joker with scaling chips that go up every time you play a hand that shares no suits with the cards left in your hand. So for example, if you have exactly five Hearts cards and no more in hand, and you play all five of them as a Flush, this would trigger the joker and make the amount of chips it grants you go up. It would pair really nicely with Blackboard, actually, 'cause I played Blackboard with the Checkered Deck by running Heart flushes once and it was funzies (if suboptimal, but ¿who cares about optimization?????)
And yeah, that's about it, I think! This is just a fun post about a videogame I enjoy playing. I kind of wrote it in one sitting-ish... It's fun to just hammer something out rather than leaving it to languish for months. Lately I've been doing that; isn't it crazy? Writing? You just put your ideas down. It's fun. It's so nice, I made this joke twice.
And, as always,
thank you for reading!
was waiting at the supermarket register queue, and was really bored, so I↩