Best Starting Decks In Balatro

Summary

• The Blue Deck is beginner-friendly with forgiving gameplay and bonus earnings after blinds.
• The Green Deck offers an alternative to hoarding cash, suitable for players struggling with money in Balatro.
• The Nebula Deck focuses on enhancing a single-hand type and mimics the Telescope voucher effect for strategic runs.

In Balatro, the deck is often the most important aspect of the run. It is the first decision the player makes, rendering certain strategies easier and others impossible. The first deck players will use is the Red Deck, with Blue, Yellow, and Green following shortly after. All other decks are unlocked by winning rounds. The easiest decks to unlock in Balatro only grant a minor bonus, like an additional hand or discard per round. Sometimes, decks come with larger rewards at a small cost, but they rarely affect the game too much.

Meanwhile, the more advanced decks that unlock late in the game come predisposed to certain strategies, but they also have much larger weaknesses compared to the more basic ones. Ultimately, the best deck depends on the player’s desired game structure and their unique goals for a run. The following decks are a good place to start to get a feel for the game.

Updated on December 30, 2024, by Stephanie Harris: Everyone is still obsessed with Balatro. Most recently, it won Indie Game of the Year and Best Mobile Game at the Game Awards – a significant feat for a game with such humble beginnings. This year has also seen significant updates that have improved gameplay and the user experience. In May, updates were made to Jokers, tags, seals, tarot, and planet cards, the first significant update since the beta, which streamlined and cleaned up the gameplay process. In September, it was released on mobile for the first time, expanding to a lot more players, and the recent Friends of Jimbo series of updates has created fun new face cards, customizable with character designs from other popular games. What’s not to love about that?

1

Plasma Deck

Balance Chips And Mult When Calculating Score, X2 Base Blind Size

Calculating the balance of Chips and Mult is one of the most important skills in Balatro; the Plasma deck turns this into an afterthought. With a bonus as good as this, doubling the value of each blind in the run is almost reasonable.

One immediate but surprising effect of the Plasma deck is that it turns Balatro into a much more luck-based game, especially early in the run. Whether the player finds enough powerups to deal with the massive blinds is down to pure luck, and while that is also the case for the rest of the game, it is never more evident than with this deck.

2

Checkered Deck

Start With 26 Spades And 26 Hearts In Deck

The Checkered deck seems straightforward enough, but it doesn’t take long before some problems become apparent. For one, playing with just two suits makes some of the best Jokers in Balatro, like the Smeared Joker, completely useless or redundant. This deck is also incredibly vulnerable to the Goad and Head boss blinds, with each de-buffing half of the deck.

But the Checkered deck’s strengths are just as evident: Flushes are easy to pull off without having to dedicate a slot to the Smeared Joker. By opening a few Tarot packs, much more complex hands, like Four of a Kind Flush, also become viable.

3

Zodiac Deck

Start With Tarot Merchant, Planet Merchant, And Overstock Vouchers

The Zodiac deck is an alternative of sorts to the Ghost and Magic decks, which allow players to find more Tarots and Spectral cards. The Ghost deck even has players start with one of the best Spectral cards. Compared to them, the Zodiac deck appears almost balanced.

This deck lets players start with an enhanced shop, making more Tarots and Planets available in the shop outside their respective packs. It also equips shops with an additional card slot, bringing the available cards for purchase from two to three. It’s hard to say which deck is best for Tarot-focused runs, but with its three bonus vouchers, the Zodiac is one of the most powerful decks in the game.

4

Abandoned Deck

Start With No Face Cards In The Deck

Unlike other great Balatro decks which mainly make the player’s life easier, the Abandoned deck is quite difficult to play correctly. Unlike the other decks, this one starts with only 40 cards numbered one to ten and lacks any face card. In short, it switches Balatro’s usual poker deck with the standard 40-card deck used in many classic old card games.

What makes the Abandoned deck worth trying is that, while Jack, Queen, and King are some of the most useful cards in the game, starting a run without those 12 cards makes it much easier to fine-tune the deck. Players will need to use fewer discards to find a Straight, and Jokers that only trigger when playing even and odd numbers will be much more effective.

5

Nebula Deck

Starts With The Telescope Voucher, -1 Consumable Slots

The Nebula is the best deck for runs focused on playing a single kind of poker hand. The Nebula imitates the effect of the Telescope voucher, which ensures that a Planet pack will always boost the player’s most used hand for the run.

Chances are that the most used poker hand is also the most important hand for the run and the one that needs enhancing the most. And while the Telescope voucher only costs $10 and doesn’t include the Nebula’s drawback of removing a consumable slot, this effect is better used early in a run, making the increased safety of a deck preferable to the uncertainty of a voucher.

6

Red Deck

+1 Discard Every Round

The red deck is the first deck players can use in Balatro and a great starter deck to test out the game. The additional discard helps players get familiar with different hands, reshuffling and rearranging for their convenience. Of course, as the base deck, players don’t have to do anything to get this deck, making it the easiest access throughout the game.

One downside of the red deck is the complacency it instills in players through its extra discard. If players begin on the red deck and get too used to it, then transitioning to the additional decks may be hard, because their lack of discards can be unforgiving. Of course, players can look for the Wasteful voucher in the shop, increasing their discard allowance, but this cannot be guaranteed.

7

Green Deck

Gain $2 Per Remaining Hand And $1 Per Remaining Discard, Earn No Interest

There are only a few reasons players need to hold a lot of cash during rounds: perhaps to improve a Joker card or when trying to reach $400 to unlock a special Joker. Otherwise, hoarding vast amounts of money isn’t a great idea. The only way to make interest useful in Balatro is to leave every shop with at least $25, for a profit of $5. Not exactly a great deal.

Using the Green deck is much more advisable, especially for those struggling with money. This way, players will gain $1 per remaining discard and $2 (instead of the usual $1) for every hand not played during the round. This means an average profit of at least $7 per round, far more than the alternative $5 of interest.

8

Yellow Deck

While this deck is definitely not the most useful of all in Balatro, there’s something to be said about starting with surplus money. The yellow deck does not offer any great advantages in terms of moves, offering no additional hands or discards, but it does give players $10.

The starting $10 is hard to use in the first shop, with the best jokers and card packs usually reserved for later rounds of the game, so it helps players accumulate a solid base of money, including interest, which begins to grow right away. This all means more opportunities to buy vital items as time goes on.

9

Blue Deck

+1 Hand Every Round

The Blue deck is one of the simplest decks in the game and the best choice for beginners approaching their first victorious run. While it’s not incredibly powerful, its ability to play an additional hand every turn makes it incredibly forgiving, turning a fatal mistake into a simple lost opportunity.

Another, less obvious benefit of this deck is that having one more hand every round is being paid $1 more after every blind. Usually, the player receives $1 for every hand not played following a small, big, or boss blind. It goes without saying that if one additional hand isn’t used, it is transformed into a little bit of spare change.