Balatro

Completionist+ is a true grind that will test your Balatro skills and patience in ways that are only eclipsed by the C++ achievement. I am writing this lengthy guide to somewhat memorialize my journey and effort applied to unlock it, help other players, and ultimately express my love for this game.

15 decks x 8 stakes = 120 wins, with a handful of those being very hard to get. At least 50% of the challenge and effort required, if not more, comes down to just one of those 120 wins: Gold Stakes on Black Deck.

In this guide, I will provide my thoughts on each deck around general strategy and things to watch out for when completing each gold sticker. My comments on each deck are not really general deck commentary, but specifically aimed at Orange and Gold Stakes considerations, as I will assume since you're hunting for C+ that you are already an above-average Balatro player.

The guide is presented in my personal ranking of order-of-difficulty to achieve Gold Stakes for each deck -- ranked from #1 (easiest) to #15 (hardest). I realize this is subjective, but roughly speaking this should help you plan your attack:

1.) Yellow Deck (easiest)
2.) Blue Deck
3.) Green Deck
4.) Red Deck
5.) Abandoned Deck
6.) Checkered Deck
7.) Ghost Deck
8.) Plasma Deck
9.) Erratic Deck
10.) Anaglyph Deck
11.) Magic Deck
12.) Zodiac Deck
13.) Nebula Deck
14.) Painted Deck
15.) Black Deck (hardest)

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General Strategy for Completionist+
While each deck requires its own tactics, you should formulate a meta-strategy across all decks and all runs that basically says this: in Balatro, modifiers provided by Jokers, Decks, Spectrals etc serve as strong hints for a way you should adapt your play. Trying to brute force your flush build that works on your favorite deck at White or Red Stakes, no matter what deck you’re playing or what Jokers show up, is a recipe for ruin unless you are blessed with crazy good fortune (Nope!)

Balatro, and life, is about going with the flow. Marcus Aurelius says “the obstacle is the way” — in Balatro, you must use the conditions you’re presented with, and make the most of them. Rather than fighting against a deck’s “limitation,” or quirk, instead fully commit: lean into that angle and seek to exploit it to your advantage.

Finally, some notes on some of the key game conditions and elements that are highly relevant for Gold Stakes across all decks in pursuit of the Completionist+ achievement:

Eternal Jokers
No big deal, just don’t grab one unless you’re confident that you can build a run around it (if you find it early), or can incorporate it into your mental model of where your build is evolving (mid-late game). Have a plan for how many of each type of Joker you need (Chip, +Mult, xMult, Econ/Utility), and don't impulse commit to a bunch of random Eternals that spoil your master plan.

Note that Eternal Jokers cannot be destroyed by Jokers like Madness or Ceremonial Knife; they also can’t be eliminated by Spectral cards that cause Joker destruction. Use this knowledge to your advantage to take some of the bite out of these usually harsh consequences.

Perishable Jokers
Annoying, but workable. I typically avoided them except very early on when I needed a bridge Joker or two to keep me scaling with the blinds. They’re primarily useful when you like one or two aspects of your build (hence, why you haven’t simply restarted), but you’re a little underpowered on the Joker front — and you believe that with the right pull or two, you could have a winning setup. If you’re still buying/relying on these into mid-game, and it’s not because you’re trying to feed Ceremonial Knife or something similar, it’s a sign you should probably just restart.

Rental Jokers
I avoided them like the plague the vast majority of the time they were available, especially in the first 4 antes. The drain on your economy is simply too punitive given all the spending needs required to have a successful Gold Stakes run, particularly on the harder decks. Taking these in late-game, when they’re a Foil/Holographic/Polychrome xMult joker, is usually fine as their power-to-price utility consideration makes sense, and your economy should already be solid by then anyway.

Blind Skip Tags
For all decks on Gold Stakes, you will want to skip the Round 1 small blind. What tag you opt to target depends somewhat on your playstyle and preferences. On the harder deck Gold Stakes runs, I restarted hundreds (thousands?) of times until I got a Holographic or Polychrome tag (more on this in the Black Deck section below). For certain decks, occasionally I would take the Coupon or Investment tags depending on how badly I was struggling with economy in my runs.

As a guiding principle, don’t skip too many blinds. The Shop is where you get more powerful; on Gold Stakes, you simply can’t afford to pass up too many of these power stations before the score requirement curve leaves you far behind in the dust. Again generally speaking (yes there are exceptions), you would do just fine to limit yourself to skipping max 2 (maybe 3) blinds in an entire Gold Stakes run, including the very first small blind.

Director’s Cut
100% of the time, buy it. Especially on the harder decks, there is an incredible amount of restarting and grinding required to spin up a build that can make it to Ante 8 with a chance to win; give yourself the insurance policy to save your sanity and time.

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Completionist+ Guide by Deck (ranked in subjective order from easiest to hardest)

#1 - Yellow Deck (Start with an extra $10)
Attempting Gold Stakes on Yellow Deck should give you a fair idea of whether you're ready to really go for the C+ achievement without endlessly bashing your head against a wall, as it is the easiest deck. Economy is everything in Balatro, and Yellow Deck gives you a gigantic head start that virtually guarantees that your econ engine never sputters out.

If you are struggling for a prolonged period on Yellow Deck/Gold Stakes, you need to either brush up on your Balatro fundamentals, or you have a serious leak in your game around spending habits.

I'll use the Yellow Deck section, then, to speak more generally about econ strategy in Balatro. For all decks really, you must carefully control your spending until you've reached $20 (or ideally $25) in the bank — only buying absolutely what is needed to scale with the blinds — and once your engine is running thanks to interest payments, try to maintain a healthy balance. Only ever dip into the $9-$14 range to grab a game-breaking Joker or to save your run in an emergency; and then, cool off your spending for a round or two to recover again. The exception is if you have a powerful Joker-provided (or Tarot/Spectral-powered) economy that gives you confidence the next paycheck will be very soon and very large.

All of this econ strategy is very, very relevant on all decks’ Gold Stakes — and ironically it comes full circle in significance as you attempt Black Deck/Gold Stakes at the end of your C+ journey (more on this later).

To sum up: Buying stuff you don’t need now, out of impulse, habit, or because you know it’s going to be strong later, is a recipe for economic ruin. You will waste all your hands trying to clear the blind in front of you (losing the unused hand end-of-round payout), and as a result will be constantly 1-2 purchases in the hole every shop. This only leads to a financial death spiral as you watch your funds circle the toilet bowl into a bright red Game Over screen.

A perfect example of this impulse spending issue is xMult vs. +Mult Jokers in early shops; sure, that Constellation Joker looks juicy sitting there in Shop #2, but most of the time it’s a trap. Due to the way blind scaling and chip total calculation works, you actually need +Mult (flat mult) far more than xMult in early rounds to survive. Buying Jokers with your mind on what you’ll need in Ante 7 or 8 is a great way to make it super likely you won’t even live to use it.

To wrap this up and bring the focus back to Yellow Deck specifically, the extra $10 means that you’ll hit max interest/income much sooner in your run than usual, so if you control your spending in the first 2-3 shops and follow the guidelines above, you will have the funds required to build the type of deck and Joker stack that you know by now is capable of winning a run, given that you are attempting this achievement in the first place.

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#2 - Blue Deck (+1 hand every round)
Blue Deck is the mirror image of Black Deck; in the ways that Black Deck is heinously punishing, Blue Deck is correspondingly benevolent and providing. Having +1 hand every round provides three extremely important benefits:

- More margin for error to reach the required chip score total
- More available opportunities to scale played-hand-based Jokers such as Square Joker, Spare Trousers, Green Joker, etc
- More income coming in from unused hands each round (do not overlook this, it has a massive impact on your entire run)

Like my comments for Yellow Deck, if you are struggling with Blue Deck/Gold Stakes, your issues probably revolve around Gold Stakes considerations more generally, or you tend to “waste” your played hands without too much thought about the lost income potential. Everything comes back to economy.

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#3 - Green Deck (No interest earned; gain $2 per unused hand, $1 per unused discard at end of round)
The comments for Blue Deck about wasted hands are significantly more relevant here, as you no longer earn interest at the end of your round, which upsets the traditional econ engine that the vast majority of Balatro runs are built around.

Instead, Green Deck makes it up to you by giving a huge amount of funds in accordance with how efficient you can be in clearing the blind. Your entire playstyle for the first 4-5 antes especially must be centered around preserving as many unused hands/discards as possible (obviously). When in doubt, use up your discards to preserve hands, as the bounty for these is overwhelming — particularly if you can pick up the Grabber/Nacho Tong vouchers.

Overall, it’s another fairly easy deck in terms of the deck conditions themselves; similarly to Yellow Deck, your runs should be characterized by an abundance of dollars at each shop by mid-game. If this isn’t your experience, it’s a sign that your spending habits or awareness of the income system for the deck needs to be calibrated.

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#4 - Red Deck (+1 discard every round)
Another fairly straightforward deck; think about what advantages more discards give you:

- More chances to draw to a harder hand to achieve (i.e. Flush, Full House, 4OAK, Straight Flush, 5OAK, Flush House, Flush Five)
- More opportunities to trigger discard-based Jokers such as Faceless Joker, Mail-In Rebate, Castle, and Yorick
- With more chances to make your targeted hand, you should be “wasting” fewer total hands per round, leading ultimately to a stronger economy throughout your run

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#5 - Abandoned Deck (Deck contains no face cards)
No other deck has fewer cards in it by default than Abandoned Deck (40 total). The deck is missing all Jacks, Kings, and Queens.

What this means for you functionally and strategically speaking is consistency, in the same way that using Hanging Man ensures consistency as you thin your deck to boost the probability that the cards you want will appear during the round.

Typically, this meant that I usually avoided Standard Packs during my Abandoned Deck runs, as the thinness of the deck is the entire point of the exercise.

Abandoned Deck brings 4OAK (four-of-a-kind) and Straight Flush-based Jokers into play given its consistency; it also is the easiest deck to make Straights with. Overall, the deck allows you to use some of the more finicky, but very powerful Jokers like Wee Joker, Hiker, The Order, or even Stuntman.

The two main strategies I see when it comes to Abandoned Deck/Gold Stakes are to use the aforementioned exotic but high-powered Jokers that require precision of hand drawing ability, or a straightforward Straight or Flush build. For Flushes in particular, starting with only 40 cards means that you can thin out unwanted suits even more quickly than usual.

Overall, the consistency provided by Abandoned Deck puts it in my mind as the easiest of the non-beginner (Blue, Red, Green, Yellow) decks.

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#6 - Checkered Deck (26 Spades, 26 Hearts - no Clubs/Diamonds)
A case could be made to swap Abandoned Deck and Checkered Deck in this ordering, as Checkered Deck is a Flush lover’s dream and quite easy to exploit. Flushes are among the most popular hand types to build runs around, and I admit I used them more than any other hand type by far during my C+ journey.

I found success on Gold Stakes here by running a dual flush build, with Jokers that provided flexibility for both red or black Flushes. The Tribe is the ideal Joker pickup here, obviously, while Paintbrush and Palette should be instant buys in the shop.

You could alternatively treat either red or black as your focus suit, opting to only enhance one of them with Tarot cards and treating the others as trash that you delete or discard in-round.

If you are a heavy Flush build player, Checkered Deck is a decent candidate to be your first non-beginner deck gold sticker, as it’s certainly one of the easiest.

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#7 - Ghost Deck (Spectral Cards can appear in the Shop; start with a Hex Spectral Card)
Ghost Deck offers one of the most astonishing immediate benefits of any deck available, with hardly any downside: you get to make your chosen first Joker a Polychrome edition every single time. This also allows you to target a Skip Tag other than my usual favorite (Polychrome Tag).

My approach was to select my very first Joker with the intention of using Hex immediately, as having just one Joker is the only way to control which Joker gets the Polychrome.

Where possible, I liked to use Hex on an economy-focused Joker (Golden Joker, Rough Gem, etc) — this grants more utility out of a Joker slot that would otherwise only have one function (generating dollars), and is almost like getting a free one-half of a Joker slot back thanks to the dual benefit provided.

Be careful, though, as if you take this strategy on Gold Stakes, you will need to urgently find a +Mult (flat mult) Joker to pair with the Polychrome as soon as possible, or you could be outclassed by the chip requirements as soon as Ante 2. If the Shop stubbornly refuses to offer a +Mult choice in the next few rounds, you could be toast. Therefore, you may find it safer to apply Hex to a standard +Mult Joker like Abstract Joker, Misprint, Fibonacci, etc.

As far as the Spectral Cards appearing in the Shops, this is a bit of a double-edged sword and where arguably Ghost Deck becomes a little tougher than Abandoned or Checkered. As you know by now, Spectral cards have powerful consequences, and depending on your build you may not be willing to randomly blow up a huge chunk of your deck or thin your hand size, as many Spectrals require.

If you’re targeting Cryptid or Deja Vu, you could blow through cash chasing them with re-rolls only to repeatedly find Familiar or Grim; you'll waste precious dollars without improving your deck, and end up right back at the familiar economy death spiral. Also, the presence of Spectral Cards in the Shop necessarily reduces the frequency of Tarot/Planet card appearance, making it harder to target cards from those collections to reliably improve your deck in the fashion that’s probably second nature to you by now.

Overall, a free Polychrome on your chosen Joker — plus the power a few good Spectral Card rolls can provide — still make Ghost Deck worthy of inclusion in the easier half of the decks to attain a gold sticker.

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#8 - Plasma Deck (Take average of Chips and Mult before score is calculated)
I’ve written about Plasma Deck before, notably in my 100,000K achievement guide to unlock Stuntman. It’s arguably the most unique deck, as it completely changes the way your hand chip score total is calculated.

In the early rounds, this works tremendously to your benefit, as you will naturally have far more chips than Mult — the averaging effect will allow you to effortlessly clear blinds in early game. However, endgame becomes harder, as you can no longer pile on the +Mult until you brute force high numbers; your low chip totals drag your total Mult value way down.

Functionally and tactically, what this means for you is that Plasma Deck runs must focus on chip-based Jokers in the first half and transition to xMult Jokers in the second half. Ideally, you will retain at least one chip-dedicated Joker through your entire run to mitigate the score balancing effect.

By mid-game, you will not need more than one +Mult (flat mult) Joker dedicated; potentially zero if you have applied Empress to your deck enough (or leveled Planets sufficiently). One chip Joker, maybe one +Mult Joker, and the rest focused on aggressive xMult isn’t just the key to Gold Stakes with Plasma Deck, it’s bar-none the easiest way to achieve scientific notation scores (the “e” numbers) in Balatro.

If you think about it, economy is also very important for Plasma Deck, as the easiest and most powerful xMult Jokers to use have a scaling effect that requires purchases (think Constellation which is powered by usage of Planet Cards, or Hologram, scaled through card additions).

Plasma Deck is quirky because of the scoring conditions, but it’s definitely the easiest of the second (harder) half of decks to attain a gold sticker.

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#9 - Erratic Deck (All Ranks and Suits are randomized in deck)
Very RNG-dependent. It really all depends on if you roll a busted deck; if you’re really struggling, just keep restarting until you’re given something absurd like a deck with 9 Kings to start.

Really, you should begin your run by seeing what you have, and designing your played hand and Joker pickups around what Erratic Deck has given you — it’s as straightforward as that, although perhaps easier in theory than practice.

If you roll an Erratic Deck that doesn't have an obvious "imbalance" such as lots of one Rank or Suit, just roll again. You're looking for the deck makeup to represent an obvious exploitable imbalance that you can immediately begin structuring your build around.

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#10 - Anaglyph Deck (Earn a Double Tag after each Boss Blind)
This is kind of an odd deck; it plays very "vanilla" until the moment you decide to unleash your Double Tags.

The traditional way to approach Anaglyph Deck is to keep stacking those Double Tags after each Ante level until you hit an offered Negative Joker tag — ideally around Ante 6 or 7 so that you get a ridiculous amount of Negative Jokers, leading to a stupidly overpowered stack (hopefully).

Alternatively, you could trigger the pile of Double Tags on an econ-based offered tag and simply go buck wild in the Shop (or, if you have a Joker like Bootstraps or Bull, sit on your gold hoard and make massive chip score totals).

I suppose you could also use the tags more frequently, granting yourself only two or three copies of the new tag you select, but I don't think this approach is aggressive enough to provide the true game-breaking advantage required to overcome all of the Gold Stakes limitations.

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#11 - Magic Deck (Start with Crystal Ball voucher and 2x The Fool tarot card)
There’s nothing particularly challenging about this deck, but I listed it this late because the “advantage” it offers is somewhat lackluster. The Crystal Ball voucher (extra consumable slot) isn’t anything to write home about, and those copies of The Fool can really only take you so far -- unless I suppose you held them into mid- or late-game for a Death tarot to target a really nasty card you’ve crafted, like a Steel + Red Seal King. I'm assuming the spirit of Magic Deck is intended to help craft these crazy broken builds; but that's a White Stakes parlor game diversion, and we're here to do battle for Gold.

So what the lack of true advantage means is, you’re forced to essentially raw dog a Gold Stake run without a real angle to sink your teeth into; other than, I suppose, a Tarot-focused deck and run strategy. Theoretically, you could deploy an exotic approach where you pick up the Observatory voucher and just leave 3 Planet cards in there at all time for the xMult boost, but even then you’d lose the utility of the slots themselves.

One thought or silver lining is that, I always recommend where possible saving the usage of your Tarot consumables until you’re in-round playing a blind, versus immediately in the Shop or Pack screen. This allows you to have a backup plan, get yourself out of a jam if you don’t pull the hand you want, etc. With a third consumable slot available from Ante 1, you have some extra breathing room with this strategy — but again, it’s pretty minor and cold comfort against the rigors of Gold Stakes.

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#12 - Zodiac Deck (Start with Overstock, Tarot Merchant, and Planet Merchant vouchers)
By far, the hardest part about Zodiac Deck is that it’s an absolute nightmare to find usable Jokers in the Shop thanks to the overwhelming prevalence of Planet and Tarot cards. Overstock serves to mitigate this somewhat, but not much.

If you are on the receiving end of RNG god wrath, you may have literally unwinnable seed after seed thrown your way with Zodiac Deck on Gold Stakes as the Shop just doesn’t offer enough to keep you alive out of the early rounds.

Therefore, the first 1-2 Jokers are absolutely crucial with Zodiac Deck, and you will need to restart continually until you have something you can work with. Once you get going, you’ll still need to be more Tarot/Planet focused than average in terms of the way you’re gaining power between rounds; otherwise, you’re fighting against the current of what the deck wants to give you. Here, Empress, Justice, and Chariot will need to be liberally applied to make up for what is likely to be a disappointing Joker selection for most (if not all) of your run.

I would say that Zodiac Deck is up there with Painted Deck and Black Deck as the most restart-heavy Gold Stakes experiences.

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#13 - Nebula Deck (Start with Telescope voucher but -1 consumable slot)
Nebula Deck was surprisingly annoying; the limitation of having only one consumable slot has a way of insidiously slowing down your runs and making your approach much more inflexible. Telescope is nice, but you’re faced with an indirect nerf of taken-for-granted benefits like Purple Seals, Hallucination Joker, Emperor, High Priestess, etc. Over the course of a run, it makes a big difference.

Going with the theme of not fighting what the deck is giving you, Planet Card packs early and often will need to be a huge component of your approach. Look to scale your hand ahead of the blind score curve to take advantage of the ubiquity of Planets. Pick a hand (I like Flushes) and level it to the moon (no pun intended) right from the start, safe in the assurance that your investment will always be guaranteed to improve your deck.

Consider targeting Constellation Joker with Nebula Deck, as the two synergize extremely well and you will need the xMult anyway.

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#14 - Painted Deck (+2 hand size, -1 Joker slot)
I found Painted Deck to be extremely difficult. Winning a Gold Stakes run with 4 Joker slots, even with the expanded hand size, was no walk in the park. While Painted Deck is one of the easiest on White Stakes, I found it to pretty clearly be the second-hardest on Gold.

I already know what you're thinking -- no worries, you’ll get a couple of usable Negative Jokers during your run, problem solved. But think about this: with the amount of restarting you’ll have to do, and the luck/effort required to get deep enough in a run, you are far from guaranteed on any one specific run to get a Negative that does anything for your build at all. Enjoy skipping a Shop and falling behind to get that sweet tag that gives you a Negative Rental Credit Card! Instead, plan your 4 Joker slots with the assumption that a glorious Negative will never befall you.

With limited space, you probably can’t afford to use a slot on an econ-focused Joker anymore; instead, the build probably looks like a chip Joker, a +Mult Joker, and two xMult jokers. Beware rationalizing to yourself that a Polychrome econ or utility joker counts as an “xMult” Joker, as it most assuredly does not — with only 4 slots, that piddly 1.5x is going to mess your run up if it’s one of only two xMult effects, even if you do manage to avoid Violet Vessel.

What worked for me was thinking about the advantage given: a +2 hand size from the beginning. This means that it will be easier to hit higher-scoring (but harder to construct) hands like Flushes+ with consistency and regularity. These hands also have the benefit of scaling much more aggressively than hands like High Card/One Pair/Two Pair.

Knowing that you will be choosing a hand like Straights, Flushes, Full Houses or 4OAK, you can use Tarot and Planet Cards to build a lot of your deck’s scoring power, and thin out anything that doesn’t serve you to gain even more confidence that you can pull what you need if you face a bad boss like The Water, etc.

All of that said, with Painted Deck, nothing beats a lucky Joker stack. Unless you get some of the better Jokers in the game, or one super-busted one like Blueprint, you will be doing a lot of restarting. A lot.

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#15 - Black Deck (+1 Joker slot, -1 hand per round)
It’s all come down to this — you’ve got 14 gold stickers, and only one deck stands between you and the very rare Completionist+ achievement. Unfortunately, I have bad news: it’s insanely hard to beat Black Deck on Gold Stakes.

Yes, you have 6 Joker slots, which in itself is fun to play with and sounds like an incredible advantage. In some ways, it is — if you make it to late Ante 6/early Ante 7, you have a pretty good shot of at least getting a crack at the final boss. However, with only 3 hands per round, and the demands of Gold Stakes chip requirements, you are facing several serious problems to even get that far.

To start, the obvious observation with 3 hands is that you have only 3 chances to score enough chips in a round to clear the bar — this hurdle is daunting enough to overcome, and exacerbates the already monumental chip totals required by jacking up the per-hand score requirement by 33%.

However, and much worse, what you may not immediately realize is the horrifying reality of what having only 3 hands per round does to your economy over the course of 8 Antes. It's likely that, for most of your run, you will feel broke and like you’re barely keeping up with power requirements and maintaining key interest accrual levels.

The twin challenges of a kneecapped economy and zero margin for error to reach score requirements, plus the nightmarish burdens of Rental and Perishable Jokers specifically, create a crucible that serves to gatekeep all but the most skilled and dedicated Balatro players from succeeding.

It probably took me about 15 hours or so just on Black Deck/Gold Stakes, if not more, to win. Multiple times, I made it to Ante 8 only to get heartbreakingly thwarted by the perfect counter-boss, or tragically unable to pull all 5 flush cards on the final hand with no discards left (Nope!)

I don’t even know how many times I restarted including at the beginning to get the Polychrome Tag I wanted - it has to be 1,000 or more.

Your Black Deck run indeed starts with determining the Skip Tag you want at the outset, which to some degree comes down to personal preference, but logically for Black Deck/Gold Stakes I’m having a hard time seeing more than a few viable options:

- Holographic Tag
- Polychrome Tag
- Investment Tag
- Coupon Tag (borderline)

Again, with 3 hands everything comes down to a limited economy, which means you have to do more with less at all times. This is why I found starting with either a Holographic or Polychrome tag to be indispensable; I needed this to jumpstart my scoring power and let me spend a few precious extra dollars searching for what I needed to get my build online.

Alternatively, if you like pain, I could see taking the Investment Tag ($25 after Boss Blind) as long as you consider all of Ante 1 to be masochistic self-flagellation at the altar of the RNG gods in the hope you can pull usable Jokers in the Ante 2 Shop. In reality, when you suffer through Ante 1 in this manner multiple times only to be greeted by Seance or Luchador for your efforts, you’ll see why I wanted to start discovering my Joker fate as early as possible so I could just restart sooner and end my misery.

I can’t stress this enough — there are a TON of functionally unwinnable Black Deck/Gold Stake seeds out there. You will need to get used to restarting liberally in the 2nd Shop at the latest if you don’t want this to take you 50+ hours to complete.

There are certain mental checks you need to make along the beginning of your Black Deck/Gold Stake attempt to confirm you’re not wasting your time. It goes something like this:

- New Game
- Is the Skip Tag you want offered? If no, restart
- Repeat the above between 1 and 25 times until the Tag appears
- Play Ante 1 big blind with no Jokers and only 3 hands (really 2 hands if you want that crucial extra dollar); if you don’t pull the needed two flushes/full houses, go back to beginning of this sequence
- Reach first Shop; be greeted by Turtle Bean and Mr. Bones — scream in agony for the 500th time and restart
- OR; assuming you were playing the Holo/Poly Tag strategy as I was, see it applied to Blueprint ($11, you have $9) -- collapse as nihilistic despair envelops you and restart
- OR; see it applied to an ideal Joker like Hanging Chad, Onyx Agate, or The Tribe… but it’s also a Perishable and Rental. Curse your ancestors and restart
- OR; see it applied to a less exciting but workable Joker, keep playing and reach the next Shop
- Reach next Shop; be greeted with exclusively Strength and Tower Cards, plus a few Neptunes and a $7 Foil Drunkard to really rile you up, and then again for the next 2-3 shops in a row… restart and begin mumbling to yourself incoherently
- …etc

You get the picture, especially considering if you’ve already beaten all Orange Stakes and maybe Gold on a few decks, you know how this goes. However, with Gold Stakes the Rental Joker dynamic really adds an oppressively difficult extra layer and limits your early Shop choices. Taking your very first Joker as a rental virtually dooms your run all by itself without some very specific mitigating circumstances developing, as you will enter the financial death spiral almost immediately.

All of this to say, the degree of RNG blessing required to make it to Ante 4 and beyond with a Joker stack that has a halfway decent chance at being winnable is significant. I’ll readily admit that while I’m a pretty good Balatro player, I’m not elite, and I’m aware that people have strung together consecutive Black Deck/Gold Stakes wins. Your mileage may vary.

To sum up: Black Deck/Gold Stakes tests your knowledge of systems and skills in Balatro in every conceivable way, but none moreso in my opinion than your ability to manage your economy and work within what you can afford. It will force you to take Jokers you usually avoid simply because it adds a few crumbs of +Mult in a pinch, and you desperately need it to see another sunrise. Or, you take it simply because it's the only non-rental, non-perishable thing you've seen in ages and you have no choice. Adaptability is key -- the obstacle is the way.

Finally, there is of course the Black Deck advantage, which is that 6th Joker slot. Assuming you can survive long enough, the extra slot is crucial to compensate for the 1 fewer hand and the massive per-hand average required. Pump xMult and economy like your life depends on it, because it does. With 6 slots, you can afford a dedicated econ Joker, so make it count.

Black Deck/Gold Stakes is beatable.

Breathe deep. Slow down. Really think about your next move.

Spend wisely and ask yourself twice if you really need that Celestial Pack to keep pace or if you’re just popping it open out of habit. Prioritize bringing your +/xMult engine online ASAP to keep up with the 3 hand requirement. Focus mostly on what you need right now, resist the urge to use the forward-looking build strategy that served you well up through Purple/Orange Stakes.

And for the love of all that is holy, if you see Grabber, do whatever it takes to buy it.

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Conclusion
In my opinion, the Completionist+ achievement is really the “Black Deck/Gold Stakes” achievement — in terms of pure pound-for-pound difficulty, the others absolutely pale in comparison to that experience. I completed the Jokerless challenge in about 1/3 the time Black Deck/Gold Stakes alone took me.

Above all, restart mercilessly to save yourself excessive demoralization and time sink. It’s not just you; the RNG really didn’t want you to win that seed. Off of new game restarts that had the Skip Tag I wanted (not counting restart re-rolls to get the Tag to show up), I probably only took 1 out of 5 runs to Ante 4+ without failing or manually restarting.

If you’ve made it to 14 gold stickers and Black Deck is all you have left, you can definitely do this. Dig deep, use the lessons you’ve learned along the way, and manage your budget like a financial pro.

The way I see it, much like the pre-ordained circumstances of a person’s life, a run’s random parameters could have its fate pre-defined: you can be doomed entirely from the outset; you can have a slight favorable edge or slight disadvantage; or you can be so lucky that you barely have to try.

In each case, it’s what you do with those circumstances that count. The seed is the seed; focus on what you can control. Make good choices.

I'll see you in Endless Mode.

To get this achievement you need to have won gold stake difficulty, which is difficulty level 8, with all 15 decks in the game. Some of the 15 decks are quite easy and fun, whereas others are just downright hell.

Its worth saying now that this is a time-consuming achievement, largely random, and requires a lot of skill and understanding of how to play the game. This achievement alone will take upwards of 100 hours play time.

There is also no way to skip through the stakes, you must complete all 8 difficulties in turn with the 15 decks, meaning you must complete the game 120 times.

The 8 Stakes adds an effect as you go up, while keeping all the previous effects from the earlier stakes, which are

White Stake - Base Difficulty
Red Stake - Small blind no longer gives any reward money
Green Stake - Required ante scores scale faster
Black Stake - 30% chance for all Jokers in the shop to be Eternal (if selected, they can't be sold or destroyed)
Blue Stake - minus 1 Discard for the run
Purple Stake - Required ante scores scale even faster
Orange Stake - 30% chance for all Jokers in the shop to be Perishable (the effect of the joker is debuffed after being in your hand for 5 rounds)
Gold Stake - 30% Chance for all Jokers in the shop to be rentals (costs $3 per round), but the first soul card found will give you a Legend joker that does not have a Gold sticker)

To complete a run you just need to complete ante 8. Quitting the game at ante 8 will give you the reward but continuing into Endless mode will not effect any reward.

The best advice I can give is learn what each joker does and how it helps your deck. https://balatrogame.fandom.com/wiki/ is a great website for helping you understand Jokers and strategies. Watching playthroughs is also a great way to understand the game. Roffle Lite (https://www.youtube.com/@RoffleLite) is a youtuber who has completed the game several times over and streams twice a week playing all the decks on Gold run, and has a ton of videos on strategy for Gold Stakes.

Another point to make is Ante 8 on Gold run usually requires an ante of around 3-400,000 without taking in account any boss modifiers . If you are near Ante 8, and you are not getting close, restart and try again.

Other than that have fun. This achievement is not for the feint hearted, if your going for this you are probably already putting 2-300 hours into the game for the Completionist ++ Achievement, a lot of the above is for anyone looking to achievement hunt and wanted to understand what is needed for 100%.

To get this achievement you need to have won gold stake difficulty, which is difficulty level 8, with all 15 decks in the game. Some of the 15 decks are quite easy and fun, whereas others are just downright hell.

Its worth saying now that this is a time-consuming achievement, largely random, and requires a lot of skill and understanding of how to play the game. This achievement alone will take upwards of 100 hours play time.

There is also no way to skip through the stakes, you must complete all 8 difficulties in turn with the 15 decks, meaning you must complete the game 120 times.

The 8 Stakes adds an effect as you go up, while keeping all the previous effects from the earlier stakes, which are

White Stake - Base Difficulty
Red Stake - Small blind no longer gives any reward money
Green Stake - Required ante scores scale faster
Black Stake - 30% chance for all Jokers in the shop to be Eternal (if selected, they can't be sold or destroyed)
Blue Stake - minus 1 Discard for the run
Purple Stake - Required ante scores scale even faster
Orange Stake - 30% chance for all Jokers in the shop to be Perishable (the effect of the joker is debuffed after being in your hand for 5 rounds)
Gold Stake - 30% Chance for all Jokers in the shop to be rentals (costs $3 per round), but the first soul card found will give you a Legend joker that does not have a Gold sticker)

To complete a run you just need to complete ante 8. Quitting the game at ante 8 will give you the reward but continuing into Endless mode will not effect any reward.

The best advice I can give is learn what each joker does and how it helps your deck. https://balatrogame.fandom.com/wiki/ is a great website for helping you understand Jokers and strategies. Watching playthroughs is also a great way to understand the game. Roffle Lite (https://www.youtube.com/@RoffleLite) is a youtuber who has completed the game several times over and streams twice a week playing all the decks on Gold run, and has a ton of videos on strategy for Gold Stakes.

Another point to make is Ante 8 on Gold run usually requires an ante of around 3-400,000 without taking in account any boss modifiers . If you are near Ante 8, and you are not getting close, restart and try again.

Other than that have fun. This achievement is not for the feint hearted, if your going for this you are probably already putting 2-300 hours into the game for the Completionist ++ Achievement, a lot of the above is for anyone looking to achievement hunt and wanted to understand what is needed for 100%.

Completionist+ is a true grind that will test your Balatro skills and patience in ways that are only eclipsed by the C++ achievement. I am writing this lengthy guide to somewhat memorialize my journey and effort applied to unlock it, help other players, and ultimately express my love for this game.

15 decks x 8 stakes = 120 wins, with a handful of those being very hard to get. At least 50% of the challenge and effort required, if not more, comes down to just one of those 120 wins: Gold Stakes on Black Deck.

In this guide, I will provide my thoughts on each deck around general strategy and things to watch out for when completing each gold sticker. My comments on each deck are not really general deck commentary, but specifically aimed at Orange and Gold Stakes considerations, as I will assume since you're hunting for C+ that you are already an above-average Balatro player.

The guide is presented in my personal ranking of order-of-difficulty to achieve Gold Stakes for each deck -- ranked from #1 (easiest) to #15 (hardest). I realize this is subjective, but roughly speaking this should help you plan your attack:

1.) Yellow Deck (easiest)
2.) Blue Deck
3.) Green Deck
4.) Red Deck
5.) Abandoned Deck
6.) Checkered Deck
7.) Ghost Deck
8.) Plasma Deck
9.) Erratic Deck
10.) Anaglyph Deck
11.) Magic Deck
12.) Zodiac Deck
13.) Nebula Deck
14.) Painted Deck
15.) Black Deck (hardest)

===

General Strategy for Completionist+
While each deck requires its own tactics, you should formulate a meta-strategy across all decks and all runs that basically says this: in Balatro, modifiers provided by Jokers, Decks, Spectrals etc serve as strong hints for a way you should adapt your play. Trying to brute force your flush build that works on your favorite deck at White or Red Stakes, no matter what deck you’re playing or what Jokers show up, is a recipe for ruin unless you are blessed with crazy good fortune (Nope!).

Balatro, and life, is about going with the flow. Marcus Aurelius says “the obstacle is the way” — in Balatro, you must use the conditions you’re presented with, and make the most of them. Rather than fighting against a deck’s “limitation,” or quirk, instead fully commit: lean into that angle and seek to exploit it to your advantage.

Finally, some notes on some of the key game conditions and elements that are highly relevant for Gold Stakes across all decks in pursuit of the Completionist+ achievement:

Eternal Jokers
No big deal, just don’t grab one unless you’re confident that you can build a run around it (if you find it early), or can incorporate it into your mental model of where your build is evolving (mid-late game). Note that Eternal Jokers cannot be destroyed by Jokers like Madness or Ceremonial Knife; they also can’t be eliminated by Spectral cards that cause Joker destruction. Use this knowledge to your advantage to take some of the bite out of these usually harsh consequences.

Perishable Jokers
Annoying, but workable. I generally avoided them except very early on when I needed a bridge Joker or two to keep me scaling with the blinds. They’re generally useful when you like one or two aspects of your build (hence, why you haven’t simply restarted), but you’re a little underpowered on the Joker front — and you believe that with the right pull or two, you could have a winning setup. If you’re still buying/relying on these into mid-game, and it’s not because you’re trying to feed Ceremonial Knife or something similar, it’s a sign you should probably just restart.

Rental Jokers
I avoided them the vast majority of the time they were available, especially in the first 4 antes. The drain on your economy is simply too punitive given all the spending needs required to have a successful Gold Stakes run, particularly on the harder decks. Taking these in late-game, when they’re a Foil/Holographic/Polychrome xMult joker, is usually fine as their power to price utility consideration makes sense, and your economy should already be solid by then anyway.

Blind Skip Tags
For all decks on Gold Stakes, you will want to skip the Round 1 small blind. What tag you opt to target depends somewhat on your playstyle and preferences. On the harder deck Gold Stakes runs, I restarted the vast majority of the time until I got a Holographic or Polychrome tag. Occasionally I would also take the Coupon or Investment tags depending on how badly I was struggling with economy in my runs.

In general, don’t skip too many blinds. The Shop is where you get more powerful; on Gold Stakes, you simply can’t afford to pass up too many of these power stations before the score requirement curve leaves you far behind in the dust. Again generally speaking (yes there are exceptions), you would do just fine to always only skip 2 (maybe 3) blinds in an entire Gold Stakes run, including the very first small blind.

Director’s Cut
100% of the time, buy it. I failed my Black Deck run for my final golden sticker 3 times in a boss encounter; once was bad RNG where I couldn’t draw the hand I needed with no discards left, and the other two were Violet Vessel rolls that I just missed by 100-200k. Especially on the harder decks, there is an incredible amount of restarting and grinding required to spin up a build that can make it to Ante 8 with a chance to win; give yourself the insurance policy to save your sanity and time.

====

Completionist+ Guide by Deck (ranked in subjective order from easiest to hardest)

#1 - Yellow Deck (Start with an extra $10)
Attempting Gold Stakes on Yellow Deck should give you a fair idea of whether you're ready to really go for the C+ achievement without endlessly bashing your head against a wall, as it is the easiest deck. Economy is everything in Balatro generally, and Yellow Deck gives you a gigantic head start that virtually guarantees that your econ engine never sputters out.

If you are struggling for a prolonged period on Yellow Deck/Gold Stakes, you need to either brush up on your Balatro fundamentals, or you have a serious leak in your game around spending habits.

I'll use the Yellow Deck section, then, to speak more generally about econ strategy in Balatro. For all decks really, you must carefully control your spending until you've reached $20 (or ideally $25) in the bank — only buying absolutely what is needed to scale with the blinds — and once your engine is running thanks to interest payments, try to maintain a healthy balance. Only ever dip into the $10-$15 range to grab a game-breaking Joker or to save your run in an emergency; and then, cool off your spending for a round or two to recover again. The exception is if you have a powerful Joker-provided (or Gold Seal or Magician-powered) economy etc that gives you confidence the next paycheck will be very soon and huge.

All of this econ strategy is very, very relevant on all decks’ Gold Stakes — and ironically comes full circle as you attempt Black Deck/Gold Stakes at the end of your C+ journey (more on this later).

To sum up: Buying stuff you don’t need now, because you know it’s going to be strong later, is a recipe for economic ruin as you waste all your hands trying to clear the blind in front of you (losing the unused hand end-of-round payout), and are constantly 1-2 purchases in the hole every shop. This only leads to a financial death spiral as you watch your funds circle the toilet bowl into a bright red Game Over screen.

A perfect example of this impulse spending issue is xMult vs. +Mult Jokers in early shops; sure, that Constellation Joker looks juicy sitting there in Shop #2, but it’s a trap. Due to the way blind scaling and chip total calculation works, you actually need +Mult (flat mult) far more than xMult in early rounds to survive. Buying Jokers with your mind on what you’ll need in Ante 7 or 8 is a great way to make it super likely you won’t even live to use it.

To wrap this up and bring the focus back to Yellow Deck specifically, the extra $10 means that you’ll hit max interest/income much sooner in your run than usual, so if you control your spending in the first 2-3 shops and follow the guidelines above, you will have the funds required to build the type of deck and Joker stack that you know by now is capable of winning a run, given that you are attempting this achievement in the first place.

—

#2 - Blue Deck (+1 hand every round)
Blue Deck is the mirror image of Black Deck; in the ways that Black Deck is heinously punishing, Blue Deck is correspondingly benevolent and providing. Having +1 hand every round provides three extremely important benefits:

- More margin for error to reach the required chip score total
- More available opportunities to scale played-hand-based Jokers such as Square Joker, Spare Trousers, Green Joker, etc
- More income coming in from unused hands each round (do not overlook this, it has a massive impact on your entire run)

Like my comments for Yellow Deck, if you are struggling with Blue Deck/Gold Stakes, your issues probably revolve around Gold Stakes considerations more generally, or you tend to “waste” your played hands without too much thought about the lost income potential. Everything comes back to economy.

—

#3 - Green Deck (No interest earned; gain $2 per unused hand, $1 per unused discard at end of round)
The comments for Blue Deck about wasted hands are significantly more relevant here, as you no longer earn interest at the end of your round, which upsets the traditional econ engine that the vast majority of Balatro runs are built around.

Instead, Green Deck makes it up to you by giving a huge amount of funds in accordance with how efficient you can be in clearing the blind. Your entire playstyle for the first 4-5 antes especially must be centered around preserving as many unused hands/discards as possible (obviously). When in doubt, use up your discards to preserve hands, as the bounty for these is overwhelming — particularly if you can pick up the Grabber/Nacho Tong vouchers.

Overall, it’s another fairly easy deck in terms of the deck conditions themselves; similarly to Yellow Deck, your runs should be characterized by an abundance of dollars at each shop by mid-game. If this isn’t your experience, it’s a sign that your spending habits or awareness of the income system for the deck needs to be calibrated.

—

#4 - Red Deck (+1 discard every round)
Another fairly straightforward deck; think about what advantages more discards give you:

- More chances to draw to a harder hand to achieve (i.e. Flush, Full House, 4OAK, Straight Flush, 5OAK, Flush House, Flush Five)
- More opportunities to trigger discard-based Jokers such as Faceless Joker, Mail-In Rebate, Castle, and Yorick
- With more chances to make your targeted hand, you should be “wasting” fewer total hands per round, leading ultimately to a stronger economy throughout your run

—

#5 - Abandoned Deck (Deck contains no face cards)
No other deck has fewer cards in it by default than Abandoned Deck (40 total). The deck is missing all Jacks, Kings, and Queens.

What this means for you functionally and strategically speaking is consistency, in the same way that using Hanging Man ensures consistency as you thin your deck to boost the probability that the cards you want will appear during the round.

Typically, this meant that I usually avoided Standard Packs during my Abandoned Deck runs, as the thinness of the deck is the entire point of the exercise.

Abandoned Deck brings 4OAK (four-of-a-kind) and Straight Flush-based Jokers into play given its consistency; it also is the easiest deck to make Straights with. Overall, the deck allows you to use some of the more finicky, but very powerful Jokers like Wee Joker, Hiker, The Order, or even Stuntman.

The two main strategies I see when it comes to Abandoned Deck/Gold Stakes are to use the aforementioned exotic but high-powered Jokers that require precision of hand drawing ability, or a straightforward Straight or Flush build. For Flushes in particular, starting with only 40 cards means that you can thin out unwanted suits even more quickly than usual.

Overall, the consistency provided by Abandoned Deck puts it in my mind as the easiest of the non-beginner (Blue, Red, Green, Yellow) decks.

—

#6 - Checkered Deck (26 Spades, 26 Hearts - no Clubs/Diamonds)
A case could be made to swap Abandoned Deck and Checkered Deck in this ordering, as Checkered Deck is a Flush lover’s dream and quite easy to exploit. Flushes are among the most popular hand types to build runs around, and I admit I used them more than any other hand type by far during my C+ journey.

I found success on Gold Stakes here by running a dual flush build, with Jokers that provided flexibility for both red or black Flushes. The Tribe is the ideal Joker pickup here, obviously, while Paintbrush and Palette should be instant buys in the shop.

You could alternatively treat either red or black as your focus suit, opting to only enhance one of them with Tarot cards and treating the others as trash that you delete or discard in-round.

If you are a heavy Flush build player, Checkered Deck is a decent candidate to be your first non-beginner deck gold sticker, as it’s certainly one of the easiest.

—

#7 - Ghost Deck (Spectral Cards can appear in the Shop; start with a Hex Spectral Card)
Ghost Deck offers one of the most astonishing immediate benefits of any deck available, with hardly any downside: you get to make your first Joker a Polychrome edition every single time.

My approach was to select my very first Joker with the intention of using Hex immediately, as having just one Joker is the only way to control which Joker gets the Polychrome.

Where possible, I liked to use this on an economy-focused Joker (Golden Joker, Rough Gem, etc) — this grants more utility out of a Joker slot that would otherwise only have one function (generating dollars), and is almost like getting a free one-half of a Joker slot back thanks to the dual benefit provided.

Be careful, though, as if you take this strategy, you will need to urgently find a +Mult (flat mult) Joker to pair with the Polychrome as soon as possible, or you could be outclassed by the chip requirements as soon as Ante 2. If the Shop stubbornly refuses to offer a +Mult choice in the next few rounds, you could be toast. Therefore, you may find it safer to apply Hex to a standard +Mult Joker like Abstract Joker, Misprint, Fibonacci, etc.

As far as the Spectral Cards appearing in the Shops, this is a bit of a double-edged sword and where arguably Ghost Deck becomes a little tougher than Abandoned or Checkered. As you know by now, Spectral cards have powerful consequences, and depending on your build you may not be willing to randomly blow up a huge chunk of your deck or thin your hand size, as many Spectrals require.

If you’re targeting Cryptid or Deja Vu, you could blow through cash chasing them only to repeatedly find Familiar or Grim, wasting precious dollars without improving your deck, leading to the familiar death spiral. Also, the presence of Spectral Cards in the Shop necessarily reduces the frequency of Tarot/Planet card appearance, making it harder to target cards from those collections to reliably improve your deck in the fashion that’s probably second nature to you by now.

Overall, a free Polychrome on your chosen Joker — plus the power a few good Spectral Card rolls can provide — still make Ghost Deck worthy of inclusion in the easier half of the decks to attain a gold sticker.

—

#8 - Plasma Deck (Take average of Chips and Mult before score is calculated)
I’ve written about Plasma Deck before, notably in my 100,000K achievement guide to unlock Stuntman. It’s arguably the most unique deck, as it completely changes the way your hand chip score total is calculated.

In the early rounds, this works tremendously to your benefit, as you will naturally have far more chips than Mult — the averaging effect will allow you to effortlessly clear blinds in early game. However, endgame becomes harder, as you can no longer pile on the Mult until you brute force high numbers; your low chip totals drag your Mult value way down.

Functionally and tactically, what this means for you is that Plasma Deck runs must focus on chip-based Jokers in the first half and transition to xMult Jokers in the second half. Ideally, you will retain at least one chip-dedicated Joker through your entire run to mitigate the score balancing effect.

By mid-game, you will not need more than 1 +Mult (flat mult) Joker dedicated; potentially zero if you have applied Empress to your deck enough. One chip Joker, maybe one +Mult Joker, and the rest focused on aggressive xMult isn’t just the key to high scores with Plasma Deck, it’s bar-none the easiest way to achieve scientific notation scores (the “e” numbers) in Balatro.

To put a finer point on it, economy is also very important for Plasma Deck, as the easiest and most powerful xMult Jokers to use have a scaling effect that requires purchases (think Constellation which is powered by usage of Planet Cards, or Hologram, scaled through card additions).

Plasma Deck is quirky because of the scoring conditions, but it’s definitely the easiest of the harder half of decks to attain a gold sticker.

—

#9 - Erratic Deck (All Ranks and Suits are randomized in deck)
Very RNG dependent. It really all depends on if you roll a busted deck; if you’re really struggling, just keep restarting until you’re given something absurd like a deck with 9 Kings to start.

Really, you should begin your run by seeing what you have, and designing your played hand and Joker pickups around what Erratic Deck has given you — it’s as straightforward as that, although perhaps easier in theory than practice.

—

#10 - Anaglyph Deck (Earn a Double Tag after each Boss Blind)
This is kind of an odd deck; it plays very vanilla until the moment you decide to unleash your Double Tags.

The traditional way to approach Anaglyph Deck is to keep stacking those Double Tags after each Ante level until you hit an offered Negative Joker tag — ideally around Ante 6 or 7 so that you get a ridiculous amount of Negative Jokers, leading to a stupidly overpowered stack (hopefully).

Alternatively, you could trigger the pile of Double Tags on an econ-based offered tag and simply go buck wild in the Shop (or, if you have a Joker like Bootstraps or Bull, sit on your gold hoard and make massive chip score totals).

—

#11 - Magic Deck (Start with Crystal Ball voucher and 2x The Fool tarot card)
There’s nothing particularly challenging about this deck, but I listed it this late because the “advantage” it offers is somewhat lackluster. The Crystal Ball voucher (extra consumable slot) isn’t anything to write home about, and those copies of The Fool can really only take you so far unless I suppose you held them into mid- or late-game for a Death tarot to target a really nasty card you’ve crafted.

So what that means is, you’re forced to raw dog a Gold Stake run without a real angle to sink your teeth into, other than I suppose a Tarot-focused deck and run strategy. Theoretically, you could deploy an exotic approach where you pick up the Observatory voucher and just leave 3 Planet cards in there at all time for the xMult boost, but even then you’d lose the utility of the slots themselves.

One thought or silver lining is that, I always recommend where possible saving the usage of your Tarot consumables until you’re in-round playing a blind. This allows you to have a backup plan, get yourself out of a jam if you don’t pull the hand you want, etc. With a third slot available from Ante 1, you have some extra breathing room with this strategy — but again, it’s cold comfort against the rigors of Gold Stakes.

—

#12 - Zodiac Deck (Start with Overstock, Tarot Merchant, and Planet Merchant vouchers)
By far, the hardest part about Zodiac Deck is that it’s an absolute nightmare to find usable Jokers in the Shop thanks to the overwhelming prevalence of Planet and Tarot cards. Overstock serves to mitigate this somewhat, but not much.

If you are on the receiving end of RNG god wrath, you may have literally unwinnable seed after seed thrown your way with Zodiac Deck on Gold Stakes as the Shop just doesn’t offer enough to keep you alive out of the early rounds.

Therefore, the first 1-2 Jokers are absolutely crucial with Zodiac Deck, and you will need to restart continually until you have something you can work with. Once you get going, you’ll still need to be more Tarot/Planet focused than average in terms of the way you’re gaining power between rounds; otherwise, you’re fighting against the current of what the deck wants to give you. Here, Empress, Justice, and Chariot will need to be liberally applied to make up for what is likely to be a disappointing Joker selection for most (if not all) of your run.

—

#13 - Nebula Deck (Start with Telescope voucher but -1 consumable slot)
Nebula Deck was surprisingly annoying; the limitation of 1 consumable slot has a way of insidiously slowing down your runs and making your approach much more inflexible. Telescope is nice, but you’re faced with a nerf of all sorts of benefits like Purple Seals, Hallucination Joker, Emperor, High Priestess, etc. Over the course of a run, it makes a difference.

Going with the theme of not fighting what the deck is giving you, Planet Card packs will need to be a huge component of your approach. Pick a hand (I like Flushes) and level it to the moon (no pun intended), safe in the assurance that your investment will never trigger a disappointing selection.

Consider targeting Constellation Joker with Nebula Deck, as the two synergize extremely well.

—

#14 - Painted Deck (+2 hand size, -1 Joker slot)
I found Painted Deck to be extremely difficult. Winning a Gold Stakes run with 4 Joker slots, even with the expanded hand size, was no walk in the park.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a couple of usable negative Jokers during your run, but think about this — with the amount of restarting you’ll have to do, and the luck/effort required to get deep enough in a run, you are far from guaranteed to get a Negative that does anything for you at all. Instead, plan your 4 Joker slots with the assumption that a glorious Negative will never befall you.

With limited space, you probably can’t afford an econ-focused Joker anymore; instead, this probably looks like a chip Joker, a +Mult Joker, and two xMult jokers. Beware rationalizing to yourself that a Polychrome econ or utility joker counts as an “xMult” Joker, as it most assuredly does not — with only 4 slots, that piddly 1.5x is going to mess your run up if it’s one of only two xMult effects, even if you do manage to avoid Violet Vessel.

What worked for me was thinking about the advantage given: a +2 hand size from the beginning. This means that it will be easier to hit higher-scoring (but harder to construct) hands like Flushes+ with consistency and regularity. These hands also have the benefit of scaling much more aggressively than hands like One Pair/Two Pair.

Knowing that you will be choosing a hand like Straights, Flushes, or 4OAK, you can use Tarot and Planet Cards to build a lot of your deck’s power, and thin out anything that doesn’t serve you to gain even more confidence that you can pull what you need if you face a bad boss like The Water, etc.

All of that said, with Painted Deck, nothing beats a lucky Joker stack. Unless you get some of the better Jokers in the game, or one super-busted one like Blueprint, you will be doing a lot of restarting.

—

#15 - Black Deck (+1 Joker slot, -1 hand per round)
It’s all come down to this — you’ve got 14 gold stickers, and only one deck stands between you and the very rare Completionist+ achievement. Unfortunately, I have bad news: it’s insanely hard to beat Black Deck on Gold Stakes.

Yes, you have 6 Joker slots, which in itself is fun to play with and sounds like an incredible advantage. In some ways, it is — if you make it to late Ante 6/early Ante 7, you have a pretty good shot of at least getting a crack at the final boss. However, with only 3 hands per round, and the demands of Gold Stakes chip requirements, you are facing several serious problems to even get that far.

The obvious observation with 3 hands is that you have only 3 chances to score enough chips in a round to clear the bar — this hurdle is daunting enough to overcome and exacerbates the already monumental chip totals required by jacking up the per-hand score requirement by 33%.

However, and much worse, what you may not immediately realize is the horrifying reality of what having only 3 hands per round does to your economy over the course of 8 Antes. For most of your run, you will feel broke and like you’re barely keeping up with power requirements and key interest levels at the $5 increments.

The twin challenges of a kneecapped economy and zero margin for error to reach score requirements, plus the nightmarish burdens of Rental and Perishable Jokers specifically, create a crucible that serves to gatekeep all but the most skilled and dedicated Balatro players from succeeding.

It probably took me about 15 hours or so just on Black Deck/Gold Stakes, if not more, to win. Multiple times, I made it to Ante 8 only to get heartbreakingly thwarted by the perfect counter-boss, or not being able to pull all 5 flush cards on the final hand with no discards left. I don’t even know how many times I restarted including at the beginning to get the Tag I wanted - it has to be 1,000 or more.

Your Black Deck run indeed starts with determining the Skip Tag you want at the outset, which to some degree comes down to personal preference, but logically for Black Deck/Gold Stakes I’m having a hard time seeing more than a few viable options:

- Holographic Tag
- Polychrome Tag
- Investment Tag
- Coupon Tag (borderline)

Again, everything comes down to a limited economy, which means you have to do more with less at all times. This is why I found starting with either a Holographic or Polychrome tag to be indispensable; I needed this to jumpstart my scoring power and let me spend a few precious extra dollars searching for what I needed to get my build online.

Alternatively, if you like pain, I could see taking Investment making sense if you consider all of Ante 1 to be self-flagellation at the altar of the RNG gods to hope you can pull usable Jokers in the Shop at Ante 2. When you suffer through Ante 1 in this manner multiple times only to be greeted by Seance or Luchador for your efforts, you’ll see why I wanted to start discovering my Joker fate as early as possible so I could just restart and end my misery.

I can’t stress this enough — there are a TON of functionally unwinnable Black Deck/Gold Stake seeds out there, you will need to get used to restarting liberally in the 2nd Shop at the latest if you don’t want this to take you 50+ hours to complete.

There are mental checks you need to make along the beginning of your Black Deck/Gold Stake attempt to confirm you’re not wasting your time. It goes like this:

- New Game
- Is the Tag you want offered? If no, restart
- Repeat the above between 2 and 25 times until the Tag appears
- Play Ante 1 big blind with no Jokers and only 3 hands (really 2 hands if you want that crucial extra dollar); if you don’t pull the needed two flushes/full houses, go back to beginning of this sequence
- Reach first Shop; be greeted by Turtle Bean and Mr. Bones — scream in agony for the 500th time and restart
- OR; assuming you were playing the Holo/Poly Tag strategy as I was, see it applied to Blueprint ($11, you can’t afford it)
- OR, see it applied to a perfect Joker like Hanging Chad, Onyx Agate, or The Tribe… but it’s also a Perishable and Rental. Curse your ancestors and restart
- OR, see it applied to a less exciting but workable Joker; keep playing and reach the next Shop
- Be greeted with exclusively Strength and Tower Cards, plus a few Neptunes to really rile you up, for the next 2-3 shops in a row… restart and begin mumbling to yourself incoherently
- …etc

You see where this is going, especially considering if you’ve already beaten Orange Stakes on a few decks, you know how this goes. However, the Rental Joker dynamic really adds an oppressively difficult added layer, as taking your very first Joker as a rental virtually dooms your run in itself without some very specific mitigating circumstances developing, as you will enter the financial death spiral almost immediately.

All of this to say, the degree of RNG blessing required to make it to Ante 4 with a Joker stack that has a halfway decent chance at being winnable is significant. I’ll readily admit that while I’m a pretty good Balatro player, I’m not elite, and I’m aware that people have strung together consecutive Black Deck wins. Your mileage may vary.

To sum up: Black Deck tests your knowledge of systems and skills in the game in every conceivable way, but none moreso than your ability to manage your economy and work with what you can afford. It will force you to take Jokers you usually avoid simply because it adds a few crumbs of +Mult in a pinch, and you desperately need it to see another sunrise. Taking a Rental too early (or at all?), overspending even a little, or failing to reach power thresholds in time are all instant run-killers.

There is of course the advantage, which is that 6th Joker slot. Assuming you can survive long enough, the extra slot is crucial to compensate for the 1 fewer hand and the massive per-hand average required. Pump xMult and economy like your life depends on it, because it does.

Slow down. Really think about your next move. Spend wisely and ask yourself twice if you really need that Celestial Pack or if you’re just popping it out of habit. Prioritize bringing your +/xMult engine online ASAP to keep up with the 3 hand requirement.

And for the love of all that is holy, if you see Grabber, do whatever it takes to buy it.

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Conclusion
In my opinion, the Completionist+ achievement is really the “Black Deck/Gold Stakes” achievement — the others absolutely pale in comparison to that experience. Above all, restart mercilessly to save yourself excessive demoralization and time sink. It’s not just you; the RNG really didn’t want you to win that seed. From restarts that offered the Tag I wanted (excluding insta-restarts to get the Tag to show up), I probably took 1 out of 5 to Ante 4.

If you’ve made it to 14 gold stickers and Black Deck is all you have left, you can definitely do this. Dig deep, use the lessons you’ve learned along the way, and manage your budget like a financial professional.

Much like an individual’s life, a run’s random circumstance can doom you entirely from the outset, make your life slightly easier/harder, or give you a tremendous advantage. But in each case, it’s what you do with those circumstances that count. Make good choices.