A breakout success in 2024,Balatrohas cemented itself asone of the best roguelikesout there and even one of the best games released in recent memory. Part of the draw is the virtually endless variety of runs that the player can play through, some resulting in record-breaking high scores and others struggling to make it past the first boss. The whole game revolves around a random set of options and challenges that the player can learn to overcome and get better at identifying which cards are the best to pickup in a given situation or stage of a run.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of playing the game is the ability to share and enjoy runs that other fellow players have discovered themselves. Often times a run might be fairly unremarkable, but every once in a while, the stars align and deliver an unforgettable set of cards that lead to mind-blowing results for anyone to enjoy. Sometimes, it’s nice to go into a run with a good idea of the kinds of hands that the game will offer cards for. As an example, a run may present several Flush modifiers to incentivize buffing that specific hand type and letting the player center the deck around it as a win condition. There is no shortage of insane seeds for all kinds of playstyles and approaches; It just comes down to what the player is feeling at the time and the kinds of challenges they are willing to take on.
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Foil After Foil
A lot of seeded runsend up looking roughly the same, using cards like Blueprint, along with a few similar legendary Jokers to create high scores and carry virtually any hand through the entire run. But this seed presents the player with a clear reason to go all-in on the Flushes, and it all comes fairly early in the antes. Having the Droll Joker gifted within the first few blinds, which gives +10 Mult if the played hand contains a flush, is a huge factor for dictating how the player plays out the remaining blinds, and having such a powerful tool so early on, trying to play any other hand seems silly.
The run also contains a few other tools, like a negative Blueprint, a foil Smeared Joker, a Constellation at ante 3, and a polychrome Cartomancer, so there is more than enough card generation built into the run to allow players to keep buffing up hand types, and building up a deck full of foil cards for some insane chip scores later on. Flushes might not be the flashiest hand in the world, but they are pretty damn consistent and with so many extra tarot cards entering the player’s hand every blind, the Droll Joker can do most of the heavy lifting as the pile of cards keep stacking up higher and higher.
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Spades, Spades, And More Spades
The premise is pretty straightforward: having consistent multipliers like the Mystic Summit, as well as a few tarot generators with the goal to get as many celestial packs as possible to keep leveling up Flushes over and over. This is helped even further by the Telescope voucher, which ensures that Celestial Packs always contain the planet card that corresponds to the player’s most played hand for that run, which in this case would be the Flush, with the hand levelling going well into the double digits by the end.
It has quite a simple strategy in mind and players have a good amount of flexibility to try out a few new things or experiment with a different combination of Jokers whilst keeping the core the same. A good approach is to use the added hand size of the Juggler, in combination with Misprint and the Mystic Summit, to manufacture the perfect hand full of buffed-up cards to take out the blind in a single hand. It is a pretty decent seed to try for newer players as the complexity level is fairly low, and with such clear win conditions right from the start, players will struggle to say goodbye to even a single Joker.
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Flush Five All The Way
The seed starts out a bit rough and can take some time to really get going, with Jokers like the Business Card and Mail-In Rebate being incredibly useful tools to help get through thetrickier phases of the run. But the biggest asset in the run is Triboulet, who is found a little bit later into the run and gives x2 Mult for each King and Queen played when scoring. And when combined with a series of buffs and deck additions that make Flush Fives almost guaranteed, it turns one Joker into an absolute monster.
A standard hand of five Kings or Queens, alongside Triboulet, would result in a x32 Mult, which is already pretty insane for a single Joker. So, combined with a set of destruction cards that remove unwanted low-value cards from the deck and add a few extra royals into the mix, the player can consistently make Flush Five hands that dominate any blind and lead to some otherworldly scores that can barely even be shown on screen. Along the way, players can also grab a Baron to make the King multiplication hit astronomical levels, and if the player is lucky enough to find a Sock and Buskin down the line, then the seed is all but over.
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All Black Everything
This seed has quite a lot to unpack, but once the run is understood, Endless Mode is an adventure just waiting to be conquered. The run is centralized around two Onyx Agates, which grant every played club a +7 Mult when scoring. Then, thanks to some nice spectral luck, those Jokers both end up being holographic, so with just two Jokers and a focus on Club flushes, the run basically takes care of itself. Simple Jokers like the Baseball Card are great additions to the run, as most, if not all, Jokers needed are uncommon, which gives the Baseball Card a pretty substantial multiplier that explodes hands into the stratosphere.
In terms of income, To The Moon keeps the money flowing, and by making it negative, thanks to a handy Spectral Card, the player can keep it around as a purely income-based Joker whilst not taking a slot away from one used for scoring. There are a couple of extra treats that wait along the way, and all in all, the scores enter the millions with ease and go even beyond that towards the later Ante’s, so it is a great seed to have a go at, using just a few clubs to take out boss ante after boss ante until there are none left standing.
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Straight Up Lunacy
The Erratic Deck has a fairly self-explanatory name. By randomizing both the ranks and the suits ofevery card in the deck, any kind of cohesion or expectation goes completely out the window, and the player is at the mercy of the RNG lords to decide their fate. But that all changes with this seed, which flips the script on the randomness and instead presents an entire deck full of 10 of Spades, which means that the player can start the run off with hand after hand of Flush Five, and never have to worry about not finding the right card in the deck.
Things get even crazier with a slightly different version of the seed, as “XEQH7CP9” offers the same full 10 deck but also makes it so every single shop offers exclusively holographic Jokers up until ante 10. It is a hilarious seed to play with and can actually be a lot harder than it sounds, depending on which cards are chosen and the ante the player manages to get to. With so many combinations possible, there are bound to be similar seeds to this containing a full deck of Two’s, Jacks, or even Aces, each providing a unique challenge to the player, but all bringing so much fun with it.
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Ghostly White
It all starts out with the White Stake and the Ghost Deck, which allows Spectral Cards to appear in the shop, as well as giving the player a Hex to start the game with. Then the run works around using Oops! All 6s to double all probabilities, combined with the Bloodstone, which effectively means that every single heart card that is played provides a x1.5 Mult when scored, leading to a ridiculous set of scores and a pretty simple game plan that breaks the score counter in no time.
On top of that great combination, the player will have access to three blueprints throughout the run, as well as Sock and Buskin, which, when considering the prospect of a handful of hearty royals and time-based multipliers, it’s no wonder that players can reach insanely high rounds with this seed and all it takes is a bit of careful planning and some great combinations to pull off. The run overall can be quite tricky to get the hang of so it is worth looking over the comprehensive breakdown that the Reddit user provided, but for players looking for a simple outline and a more open path to victory, then jumping in with a basic idea of what’s to come is the best way to experience this insane seed.
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Another Erratic Deck seed, and it is pretty open-ended and offers plenty of options when it comes to building around Flush Fives and executing some hilarious combos to break the game as quickly as possible. A big part of the seed’s success is thanks to the Spectral Cards that are abundant along the way, each one providing substantial modifers to the run and deck, but none is more coveted and valuable than The Souls, which creates a single Legendary Joker for the player to enjoy, which alone is enough power to carry an entire deck.
Triboulet, Perkeo, Yorick, and the rest, having multiple Legendary Jokers in a single run is like Christmas come early, and being able to combine their insane multipliers and effects with a Flush Five deck, that already gives a ludicrous base multiplier, it’s like playing the game on easy mode and there are more than enough extra toys throughout the rest of the run to make this seed well worth trying and playing through several times to fully experience everything it has in store and the delights that hide in the later antes.
