When you check your collection on Balatro, you can see that the numbers add up very quickly. In this guide, we’ve told you how to beat the ante 16 and move up fast.
Run Start
When you open your collection and look at the blinds, the numbers go up real fast. Here’s how to go up faster. I capped out because I couldn’t find troubadour to replace juggler, but it was a heck of a lot of fun. This seed also seemed to have 0 negative rolls, so that did not help. Following this template and getting a luckier seed to get negative copies of dna/blueprint would go way higher than I did, which was up to e27 at ante 18.
I find it easiest to start out in the rich get richer challenge (challenge #3), since you start the game with $100 and basically no downside. Early jokers are always good, just stabilize and look for baron, red seals and steel on kings, dna, blueprint, and mime (in that order). The base layout you want to get looks like this:
Hand Fixing, Scaling Up
After you find your jokers to get the combo going (will explain shortly, just grab the setup in the first photo), you’ll want to focus on making your deck entirely steel kings with red seals. In addition, grab most of these vouchers, ESPECIALLY paintbrush, every card in hand when you combo adds ~xe2 to the end score.
Combo Particulars
The combo is pretty straightforward, and can be scaled up if you find a better seed for copying jokers. Start with a full hand of steeled red sealed kings and order your jokers like so, to make as many dna copies off the first hand as possible. The first hand will win the round until you get past ante 15 or so.
After the first hand stops winning, all you need to do is change the order of blueprints to maximize king triggers in hand. I play on 4x speed, so I can’t be entirely sure, but with two blueprints and one each of baron and mime, the order does not seem to matter much.
Adding hand size any way you can, whether through extra dna copies or troubadour/juggler, will boost the combo several orders of magnitude.
Base hand size 9, 3 dna triggers:
Base hand size 10 3 dna triggers:
Two more triggers would beat ante 18, and so on. Technically with negative jokers there is not a hard limit, but I would imagine not being able to get higher than e35 doing this strat, unless you take several years to find the perfect seed to copy blueprints.
There you have it, run seed I used: 8TB9SLIE
and end game screen:
Thanks for tuning in, hope I helped make the numbers go up. Great game 🙂
