Something that stresses me out is when the game tosses me into scaling +mult with Ride the Bus, and then trying to discard face cards while playing something like pairs. Only scored face cards reset the bus, and if you have a hand full of them with no discards, you will be screwed if you don’t burn them in earlier hands. Every time I toss what should be an unscored face card into a hand, I get a bit of a sweat I fucked it up and will blow the run. A learned stress after absently mindedly clicking and making a two pair instead of a pair on more than one occasion, it’s not a nice feeling!

1. Buy Joker Stencil and Lucky Cat
2. Drag Joker Stencil over Lucky Cat

Oops sorry, that was my bad! Thanks for the heads up, and too bad about the run. What a buzzkill that must’ve been.

The answer for this setup is basically luck, but also some unlocks and strategy of course. The pillars holding this up are:

• Pekero, a Legendary Joker which can only be acquired at random after finding a 0.3% chance The Soul card while opening a Spectral or Tarot pack in the shop. There are several, but this one is required for the effect to make a negative copy of a consumable item you hold after exiting the shop.
• Ghost deck, required to obtain spectral cards in the shop. It is otherwise incredibly difficult to obtain spectrals as a consumable, and you need to have Pekero make negative copies of Cryptid specifically.
• Cryptid, a spectral card which creates two duplicates of a selected card in your hand. When in a blind, this means you are temporarily increasing the cards held in hand by two as well.
• Brainstorm, a rare joker only unlocked after discarding a Royal Flush. Brainstorm copies the ability of the leftmost joker slot, meaning if you have Pekero there before exiting the shop, you can create multiple negative copies of a consumable such as Cryptid. Blueprint is similar, but for the joker to the right of it instead.
• Baron, a rare joker which makes Kings give 1.5x xMult while held in hand. In this case, the ideal setup is a red seal steel king, so the xMult effect triggers several times, alongside Baron being duplicated by Brainstorm.
• Joker duplication, as you normally only get access to one at any given time. This can be achieved through the destructive spectral cards at an opportunistic time (like Ankh when you only have one joker), or getting lucky with Invisible joker, a rare joker unlocked by winning a run with only ever having four jokers at one time. After two completed blinds you can sell it for a random duplicate. You can also hold onto Showman, an uncommon joker which allows duplicates to show up in the shop. Ideally you’d duplicate both blueprint and Brainstorm, but I assume this run didn’t get the chance. You’d also normally have Mime, to further retrigger held in hand effects.

After all that, you’d just keep beating blinds, accumulating Cryptids, and whenever you’re ready, duplicate an unholy amount of red seal steel kings and have like 100 kings in a ridiculous hand. Play high card, and let the fun start!

Favorite deck is definitely Anaglyph, no question. The feeling of hitting several negative tags is just far too fun for me, but obviously it gives you much more flexibility for skipping to really turn around something you’re behind on (like economy as you mentioned). I also like Ghost deck a lot given the free polychrome, and the unique ability to get spectral cards in the shop.

I think people hating on Black deck is pretty much the norm, so I’ll say another one that bothers me is Nebula deck. It’s not even that it’s particularly super hard as much as it is that I can’t stand only having one consumable until maybe Crystal Ball shows up as a voucher. I want to collect tarots to utilize in the shop before opening a tarot pack, so I have to hold one fewer card. I want to gamble on High Priestess and Emperor sometimes (or maybe just pump numbers up for Constellation or Fortune Teller), but they are way less useful. Sometimes I’ll just take one absent-mindedly and then realize, that’s right, I’m on dumb Nebula deck and only get one card roll. Sometimes I want to hold onto a copy of the fool and utilize a blue seal, or maybe two blue seals, and I can’t do that either. Ante 1 telescope voucher is not worth this price.

As for Erratic deck, I was expecting a lot more than what it actually is because I guess I didn’t consider probability properly. Most of the time when I check the deck for any given seed I get a somewhat even suit spread with all cards somewhere between like 2-6 in quantity. I already reset for an actually useful small blind skip tag, no way I’m also tacking on significantly more for a much more rare interesting Erratic deck.

What do they say about the furry femboy, Jimbo?

I am a simple man. If I see negative tag, I skip the blind.

3QLZUZ15

…and STEEL! Wait, where is the steel card?

Anaglyph deck my beloved.

If you want your glass cards to stop breaking pick up Glass Joker, they’ll fall in line if they know breaking benefits you.

Congrats on completing them all, that’s awesome! Would you be just starting the challenges now, or do you just have a couple left? I just finished up blue stake for the decks and the only challenge I’ve got left is Jokerless. That one I think is going to give me hell, but the others were fun to go through!

Wait seriously? That’s crazy, I assume that’s a bug? Either way thanks for that info, I would’ve never tried that on purpose.

I will say that no discards means you can never use purple seals. If you suddenly get access to them, or already have a few of them in your deck, you will lose out in a handful of tarot cards you could’ve got by discarding them throughout your run. It will also suck for The Needle if you aren’t prepared (i.e. explicitly going for a high card / pair run where it doesn’t matter much what cards you play) for the single hand you have. But yeah, if you’re focusing lower tier hands and have a less useful joker to replace with this one, it could absolutely pull some weight with extra economy and score for a while.

Everyone in life is dealt a different hand, let’s not be blind to that fact. Discard your prejudice and ante up to compassion, the world would be better without such wrathful jokers.

Personally I don’t grab the negative tag hoping for an actually good joker, I grab it so I can ensure Verdant Leaf has free fodder for my run (I get it a lot and greatly prefer it when I have a negative tag seed). You give me garbage and I give it right back game!

Yup, they retrigger both in hand and when scored! Fantastic for steel cards, but they’ll do other stuff too (e.g. trigger gold cards twice).

Baron (the king there) gives 1.5x multiplier for each king held in hand. Mime retriggers all held in hand effects, meaning you’ll make Baron’s effect much more powerful. Get yourself a bunch of red seal steel kings and watch the magic happen.

Thank you Chicot, I can now enjoy my deck full of wild cards in peace.

Side effects may include: Nope, nope, nope, nope…