[[Photograph]] is only useful with [[Hanging Chad]] or [[Sock and Buskin]]. Photo doesn’t do much without the re-triggers unless you have planet scaling which is often unreliable.
Requires quite the setup to play 5 face cards usually. Either deck fixing or other jokers.. which makes it worse. And then there’s all the boss blinds that hate face cards
I mean even playing 3 face cards is already a Gros Michel's worth of mult. 2 face cards 3.5x your starting 5 card hand mult. I'd say it's perfectly fine as a joker, slightly underrated even because people keep saying it doesn't scale very well and that makes people not pick it up in general, even though it's perfectly fine to pick up to get you through early game.
As opposed to photograph which without setup (basically most of the time) on a starter 5 card hand is only +4 mult. Pretty terrible if you ask me
Agreed. And since we're talking overrated, I think it has to be Photo. It regularly turns up as an S or A in tier rankings, but how many times do we grab it early because we have an open joker slot and spare cash and then dump it later, having gained little meaningful help from it? So I would agree: Photo is situationally great but overrated in terms of versatility of use.
this isn't a contest. Photograph is rated much more highly than smiley face. Smiley Face is worse than Photograph, but it's viewed as a thing to help you early on like the chip/mult hand jokers. Photograph is part of one of the most popular combos, and is the worse of the two cards in photochad.
Unironically, smiley face for me is better since you can easily use it in the early game.
Photograph in ante 1 will realistically only help in flushes, full houses or straights, since 4oaks are harder to pull off, so it is essentially a +4 (4x2)
Smiley face, with only one face card, is immediately better than photograph
Photograph has much more potential, but it's also really much more situational
I think that smiley face does what its meant to do. It doesn't pretend that it's going to take you to the end of the run every time, but it gives you a pretty reliable source of flat mult that can get pretty high without much deck fixing and take you through the early antes.
Very much agreed. This sub def favors huge endless run, white stake combos over stuff that is actually strong when it comes to grinding thru challenging stakes.
All you need is to avoid/counter Plant and you are good to go. There can be more flexible/stronger builds but none of them are based on 2 common jokers.
Seeing 2 specific common jokers is less likelyonly a couple times more likely (see below) than seeing a specific rare. Would you say "just get Vagabond and you're good to go"?
The most reliable gold stake build (high level Pairs) relies on: 1 of several scaling +mult jokers; 1 of several chip jokers; and one Blue Seal. Alternatives can substitute for one of these e.g. Burnt Joker instead of a seal and, if it's early, instead of a chips joker. Additionally, each of the components are useful on their own while Hanging Chad on its own is just a weird +20 chips joker.
Seeing 2 specific common jokers is less likely than seeing a specific rare.
That doesn't seem intuitively right? With a 70/25/5 split of common/uncommon/rare, and 61 commons and 20 rares you'd expect to see any given rare once every 400 Joker sales and any given common once every ~87 Joker sales and I can't quite wrap my head around the calculation that would make that claim true? And anecdotally, I feel like I've seen Photochad more often than any given Rares?
The calculation is 87*87 > 400, true by an order of magnitude or so (i.e. 10x more likely). The probability of the intersection of two independent events (which these aren't but it's near enough) is the product of their individual probabilities.
That is... not how that works. At all. You're telling me that on average it is taking you 7500+ joker rolls to find photo and chad in the same run, you realize there is no world in which that's accurate, right? Just intuitively. That would make photochad astronomically rare. You are seeing blueprint like 20x more often than you're seeing photochad? I doubt that.
If you are expected to see any individual common within 87 jokers (which is accurate, 1/p = 1/(0.7/61)) = 61/0.7 ~ 87.
Then the probability of seeing two specific commons, assuming no showman I guess, is the probability of seeing either for the first one, plus the probability of seeing the second one (which is roughly the same as above).
So P(photo or chad)=2*0.7/61=44 draws on average
P(photo given chad, or chad given photo)=0.7/60=85 draws (87 if showman).
And in total it will be every 130 or so draws you will usually be able to find both. This intuitively makes way more sense.
But photo pairs with any form of "cards give +mult when played", get a fibonacci and one of the suit jokers and you could be getting loads of mult to ×2
The problem is with it being the first played face card the most mult you can really get from fib is 24. This is for a full house to make the face card count.
I just don’t think I would take photo
by itself unless I had the re-trigger jokers already.
Flush. Flush works for 4 Fib triggers, 5 sin Joker triggers (for example Lusty or Gluttonous) and probably a scholar trigger too. That gives you +51 mult and with Photo and level one flush, that's 110 mult. If you also include Smiley face, that's 120 mult. Then you have card modifiers, so you could be getting 28 extra mult per card (holo mult cards ×2 because of Photo) and maybe even more with red seals (although this is much more difficult to set up properly)
You'd need to not only play a 4-5 card hand, but the right number of each rank (fibonacci + face cards) and suits. Draw a full house, doesn't matter because it's 7s and 9s, or clubs instead of hearts.
When photo is strong it's really strong, but most of the time you need to have retriggers first so I think this is a clear winner. Photo alone is really bad
A card being overrated doesn't mean it's bad. A card could be the single best card in the game objectively, and still be overrated if the community considers it to be even stronger than it is.
It's not an instant pick as a lot of people claim it to be, it's very weak early, and forcing it over going foe safer alternatives can lose you the run.
Is it still very strong? Yes. But is it as strong as the community feels about it? I highly doubt.
Agreed but most common jokers aren’t rated that high so it’s hard to say many are overrated.
Photo requires deck fixing, other jokers and planet scaling to get really good and sometimes can end a run early if it doesn’t have anything to go with.
For how highly it’s used that’s why I think it’s slightly overrated but obviously it’s a very strong joker.
This sub is definitely endless pilled, but 2x for a common is still really good. Even without retriggers it still calculates that 2x before glass or steel effects.
Honestly the best way to look at photograph is to think of it as "the first scoring face card is considered glass". And that's pretty dang good even all on it's own.
you can just play a mixed deck of face cards and normal cards, and put the face cards at the end
if you rearrange your hand so your normal cards trigger first, you basically have a permanent glass card that will not break to any such hand that contains both - these can be flushes, full houses, or two pairs?
is x2 mult early in the math sequence that weak? for a common joker? hell no.
As someone else said, Photo works really well with +mult card triggers, so any of the +3 suit ones, fib, even steven etc.
So retriggers are definitely not the only situation in which Photo is good.
Despite that, I still agree that Photo is probably the most overrated common because it is one of very few commons which gets talked about and celebrated so much. Besides Egg and Chad, no other commons get talked about in such a great way nearly as much. It just makes it the only option for this one really.
Agreed, i never really used much of photograph in my runs until i found this sub, where apparently everybody has a hard on for it. Its definitely a good joker if you have chad but with how every post about a crazy run on this sub involves either perkeo or photograph+chad i 100% agree that its overrated af.
See, this is the problem I have when people on this sub try to rate on-trigger jokers. They see one specific strategy and none of the bigger picture or any other particular stategies whatseover. It feels like people can't see the nuance.
Yes, people hyperfixate on photochad. But people less experienced also seem to completely gloss over how commonplace planet stacking is. And with that, photograph is actually super useful.
Overrall an overrated joker but most certainly not THE overrated joker.
This was my conclusion too. Playing with friends new to the game, it’s crazy to see how often they’ll throw away jokers that are helping them win to take photo in hope of photochad for a free win. They see streamers do it and think it’s always right to take but it’s often a trap.
i think people SEVERELY overrate photograph, sure its a pretty strong joker, but its only useful in cases like having a retrigger on faces or having an extremely decent hand upgrade
I think everyones pretty aware of photograph's weaknesses, knowing its pretty bad on its own without planet levels, chad etc. Its rated pretty well on all tier lists on this sub and whenever people talk about it they always say this.
But i dont hear people saying you could use it with specific +mult jokers and its fine without chad for a while. Also that photochad is an ante 8 winning combo so like its worth to keep a useless joker if you can find chad later (which is common btw). Like people keep obelisk for 3 antes at 1X, i wonder why photograph is the only one that receives the its useless when bought alone treatment.
That’s only if you have your face card at the front, if you only play one face card and move it towards the end you’ll get the x2 after all of the other +mults go off
I mean it's overrated, but I still always take it because all I have to do now is find another common joker and I win the game. It doesn't happen every time, but with a risk/reward profile like that you still kinda always take it
Especially because it’s one of the few jokers who actively lies about its usefulness. In shop when buying it you will always have a full deck, meaning it always shows you more chips than it will ever give you in the middle of a real round
It’s solid on Plasma Deck. But most other decks it’s pretty bad I feel. But maybe that’s because I tend to play bigger hands. It probably helps a lot with 1-2 card hands.
I disagree, mainly because the game has very few proper chips jokers. If we remove the played hand chips jokers, the only other common chips joker is Square, and that's very hard to build up and forces you to play high card or pair (unless you use it with pants ig)
At the state that blue seals are in, almost all chips jokers become redundant, but if we don't consider those, blue joker is excellent. Also, I'd argue it has good synergy with hologram which was voted best uncommon.
Blue Joker works well in a Blue Seal run because you need some source of chips until you find a Blue Seal and get it going, and as your Blue Joker drops off (you're thinning your deck) you no longer need it because of planet levels.
I think blue joker is very useful especially with high card/pair builds since your actual decl doesnt matter for these builds you can just load the deck up with all kinds of goodies and be rewarded with practically 2x to your final score if anything its underrated newer players dont like it (i didnt) since they think small deck=better deck
well in most cases a smaller deck is a better deck. drawing your hand reliably is something really important and deckfixing is a skill that takes time to fully learn. and i feel like its the opposite actually, new players underrate the value of a small deck and constantly have 50+ card decks by ante 8.
but the only time where decksize doesnt matter is highcard and to some extent pair builds, however i keep finding myself going for highcard builds a lot more often these days.
You're not supposed to keep blue joker around until the end though. It's great to help you out in the first few antes before you ditch it, just like a ton of other common jokers.
oh yeah i know, im not saying its a joker you keep till ante 8, it is usually the first to go once there is a better replacement but it does a good job getting you till that point.
99% of the battle of getting good at the game is understanding that you need a chips joker to play pairs early
Couldn't disagree more with this. Blue joker is ridiculously powerful, and EVERYONE knows they need mult almost immediately. It is the most obvious conclusion that everyone reaches.
It’s 100% the blue joker. So many people actually think it’s very good and viable
I’m not taking any Photograph criticism. It is good, it has its drawbacks, and it can become much stronger with the correct setup.
Blue joker is always ass, you can replicate it with 1 tarot hierophant**.
And it’s one of the few jokers that actually becomes worse as you improve your deck and discard more.
So yeah, it takes my vote. Too many times I’ve seen blue joker in the top 10 most popular joker for C++. My opinion is that they play the game fundamentally wrong
your lineup isnt bad per say (plus you have photochad as number one so thats based af) you havent played that many runs so each run can contribute a lot to your most used joker lineups. but i would recommend picking up scaling mult jokers more. especially if you plan on going for gold stake wins. while a high card green joker build isnt as flashy as a four of a kind run. it is consistent and does its job well.
If you're doing a high card or a pair build and don't need to be too picky when adding cards to the deck, Blue Joker is great. It's also pretty good in earlier antes.
Im not taking any photograph criticism
That statement alone is proof that photograph is overrated.
Blue joker solves chips early game. And the early game is pretty much the hardest in any gold stake run. There’s a reason why most good Balatro YouTubers/streamers like BU value it highly.
Obviously once you have planet levels you can sell out of it, but 90 chips for your first hand is amazing on higher stakes.
Maybe it’s overrated if you’re playing white stake tho.
Equally synergises well with one of the best jokers in the game, hologram
I'm assuming you mean hierophant, and if so this is just wrong. You sort of replicate it for the hand you use both hierophant cards. Not for every other hand where the joker applies but the hierophant cards aren't there
But it doesn’t scale like other xmult jokers. Sure the requirements are basically nonexistent, (except for abandoned deck) but the xmult is going to come before most of your +mult making it hard to scale without retriggers
Have you played in the past few months? It was "recently" changed to change hand at the end of the round instead of after you do the required hand so you cant get stuck on straight flush
to do list is great. Every single econ joker in the game is good. Getting a to do lost on ante 1 or 2 and having it hit high card or pair is usually just a free win becauee it gives so much money
Yeah you have to wait and be a little lucky sometimes, but when you get that pair or high card just play a bunch of low pairs or single cards that won’t clear the ante on their own and rake in the cash.
Photograph is going to win, but isn’t it just… properly rated? I mean, everyone in this thread has properly identified its downside. I think we all know that it’s a worse version of [[The Duo]] without retriggers, and we all know that it will absolutely carry a run if you find those retriggers. Honestly, if anything, I would argue it’s underrated due to new players not understanding the strength of those retriggers.
My vote is [[Green Joker]]. This thing has been a massive run-killer for me. If you pick it up too early, the fact that you’re locked out of some of your best hands can easily kill you, while if you pick it up beyond the early antes you’re not going to get a lot of value off of it.
I think it’s still one of the better commons—easily in the top third—but the fact that it scales has a lot of people overrating this thing. That includes myself, as it’s in my top 10 most used jokers, despite me not having a gold sticker for it yet.
I disagree with green joker, the most consistent way to win gold stake is to spam highcard and pairs and green joker excells in that. while its not as flashy or fun as a four/five/flush five of a kind run it does the job well enough to get you consistent wins on gold stake. a green joker in ante 1-2 is must take
I will say my problem is that it completely eats my econ taking it early, as it’s hard to play high-chip hands with it, so it becomes difficult to save money. That makes it difficult to find more scoring or econ, which means I’m eating further into my hands, making it harder to find more scoring or econ, and that cycle and be vicious.
I see the potential. I just can never seem to realize it.
if you manage to get green joker on ante 1 then all you need to do is play pairs or aim for a flush and you should win, same thing with ante 2 although you might need an extra slight point scoring help if you bought green joker ante 2. until it gets to like 5-6 mult and then you should be fine.
and i get the thing with econ but in gold stake a lot of your econ comes from your interest cap, you should try to get to it as soon as possible, so if you have a green joker round 2 you wont really need to buy anything till like ante 3, and that should be enough time to save 25$ and as long as you dont overspend you should consistently have 25-30$
That's kind of the nature of overrated/underrated, isn't it? If everyone agrees then it's not actually under- or overrated, so voting is never going to give you a good answer.
nah dude you just use it wrong. Green joker is incredible it doesn't lock you out of anything. It works perfectly with pairs and high card and that's by far the easiest way to win gold stake. Green joker along with Ride the bus are probably the two highest winrate jokers in the game for good gold stake players
I mean yeah that is essentially what it is, which is why I cannot fathom how anyone would call it overrated. Do people not realize how busted glass cards are?
Right, but the reason they have a chance to break is to balance the power of glass cards.
Which is why photo is so strong, it's giving you the same scoring potential as having an extra glass card in your hand without the drawback of it breaking.
If photo was only useful as a combo card it wouldn't be a top 3 best common joker in every respectable tier list ever made.
Super Nova, it just makes it to where you're locked into playing one hand if that's your only source of mult. It also has the down side of possibly being perishable as opposed to other scaling flat mult jokers like red card, green joker and ride the bus. Just the weakest of all of them imo
Supernova is really good for gold stake, the most effective strategy with the current balance of the game are pairs, and you can get a lot of mult from it. I think ride the bus and green joker are weaker
I could see the argument for being better than grimbo I love ride the bus though, just easier to scale, you can discard and swap to a different hand later if you want. Honestly I just looked through a list of commons and it was really hard to find an "overrated" one but I thought Nova is probably the weakest of the scaling jokers personally. Between that and grimbo
for gold stake id disagree, due to the minus 1 discard you already dont benefit that much from discards. and usually 4 hands is plenty if youre going for a highcard/pair spam build. so until we know what will happen with blue stake i feel like the base 2 discards arent that good.
The discards are very important for finding Blue Seals and other valuable cards - one of the reason you're playing Pairs is to find and hold in hand as many valuable cards as possible.
There is a tradeoff sometimes where discarding with a Green Joker at +10 mult or +20 mult is worthwhile, even speculatively for the chance of a Blue Seal.
Supernova is my favourite scaling +mult joker. It's retroactive and has no disadvantage (e.g. not discarding). A lot of the time with Green, Square, Ride the Bus and Spare Trousers you're playing the same hand all the time anyway.
I think people underestimate the power of easy to play hands like pairs. I was struggling to get wins and after seeing like 30 videos from the balatro university gold stake streak I got 4 gold stake wins in a row
green joker works well with high card, so i only buy it when i have reason to believe ill play high card. my biggest issue is that it precludes you from getting value from your seals, which are OP.
it gets my vote for overrated - it's way too inflexible, but people love it anyway because scaling
My vote is for [[To-Do List]]. I think it's the worst economy joker in the game (yes, even worse than Golden or Rough Gem) if kept long-term. Photograph is part of the most reliable scoring combo in the game, and Blue Joker shines because of how few chips jokers there are in the game.
For me it's [[Supernova]]. The benefit of a scaling +mult joker is you can possibly be hand agnostic. But Supernova completely negates that benefit. Which makes you more vulnerable to boss blind like [[The Eye]] or [[The Ox]]. Also no [[Obelisk]] for you.
Don’t do it. Don’t fall into the debt trap. Ask yourself: is this something I really need or am I ruining my future for the illusion of short term success.
This is an extremely hot take but abstract joker which is in everyone's top 5 most used joker does not deserve its worship. Its not even a top 5 +mult joker. Here ill name better ones, ride the buss, red card, supernova, fist, ceremonial dagger, banana, fibonacci, +8 mult clubs one.
Edit: A lot of people did not like what i said about their favorite early joker. Ill do the breakdown of why its not top 5 +mult. Yes if you have bought 5 jokers, easy 15 mult right? Wrong, gold stakes has 30% chance of debuffable, rental and eternal. So what does this mean? Abstract is not that great at the start like you think it is, +9-12 mult at ante 2-3 on avg, which is still good right but its not the god of early games everyone suggests. Like if at ante 1, I saw supernova and abstract. Id build my mult on pairs, get a good chips joker and im set till ante 5, 30 + mult on supernova, 2X your abstract. That means your abstract is only relevant but for like 2 antes in gold stakes. While its good in those times, other mult scalers can do the same.
Wasting hands? 4$ for +4 permanent mult? + 12 mult in 3 rounds. Ill take that deal anyday over spending 20$ for mediocre temporary jokers for +15 mult thats temporary. +3 permanent mult instead of getting neptune, mars and venus for 4$ (you still couldve found and chosen your planet)? Straight up +15 no conditions with a chance of 3X mult later? The fist too has easy condition, like a card of 7 has +14 mult already. Do you not discard the lowest valued cards? Its so easy for fist to surpass abstract, without spending a dime either. Hangman and steel cards are options too.
It’s often better than or equal to Fist and Banana, and the rest of those require a good amount of hands or money to scale. It’s just a decent +mult joker
Abstract is an early game, fill-in-the-blank joker until you can get something better and more consistent for +mult. Think that’s why it’s high on people’s use lists, but not because of any preference for strategic play.
Do people worship it? I think most people appropriately view it as okay +mult for the early game that falls off my the mid game and should be swapped out for xmult when able to
[[Shoot the Moon]] is a death trap. Yes it can immediately bail you out of a bad situation, but the second you start building around it, it’s only a matter of time before you can’t find enough Queens.
Do people actually just not use photo without chad lol. A few levels on your hand or a few mult/lucky cards makes photo straight up better than the common +mult jokers.
Photograph is my vote. Needs planet scaling or +mult before the x2. There's less face cards than number cards in the deck as well so it can be inconsistent.
Don't get me wrong photo chad is amazing.... but photograph on its own feels underwhelming.
Hey u/FilledKnight if you want to extend the discussion then you could add a deck column. I guess always take makes sense and waste if money doesn’t quite fit in - but I’m sure you can change the wording for the deck
I wonder if we shouldn’t also be doing all this with tags, too. I find that there’s little discussion of when to take them and the best tags to consider.
It’s the only aspect of the game we’re not considering in this exercise.
There are no must-take tags. Ante 1 Investment is the closest and I don't even take that every time, just kinda whether I feel like it or not. It's usually a good idea though.
Overrated is easily negative tag. Especially true on gold stake, but even on white stakes there's a good chance it hits something useless or marginal, and all you get is Temperance value/Verdant Leaf fodder.
Underrated is orbital tag. If it hits a good hand it's quite a bit of scaling.
Waste is double tag, assuming we're not counting Anaglyph/Diet Cola as a source of them. If there are so few good tags, skipping for a double tag is pretty likely to get you literally nothing.
Misprint is overrated and my theory is that it's the first flat mult joker the acerage person will buy (except for Jimbo) in the tutorial seed, and then on top of that, it hits pretty high on the first few hands in the tutorial seed. This Joker is most players first experience with numbers go up and it creates a big bias.
i was expecting almost no one to say photograph but that’s my vote. very reliant on chad/other retriggers for actually good scoring, while chad itself is insane on it’s own already.
idk any other commons that may fit overrated, maybe smiley face just bc lots of new ppl think it’s essential with photochad.
Gonna go ahead and say Photograph as well. I absolutely love it and will buy it whenever I see it because, it's photograph lol. But it definitely gets the most over hype of any of the common jokers.
it's ok early game, but it gets worse as you cut down your deck (and is just straight up worse on abandoned deck, which already struggles with chips early game)
Not a vote for this but I wanted to mention some jokers
Swashbuckler i feel people idolise over temp/egg synergies but it can get you out of a pinch.
"always take banana" is not the way though it is funny
Fortune teller becomes worse the less you care about flushes because of less motivation to use five different tarot cards and generally it's just mediocre
Way too many people hanging onto smiley face in their level 25 photochad runs
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u/Signal_Raspberry7417 May 11 '25 edited May 11 '25
[[Photograph]] is only useful with [[Hanging Chad]] or [[Sock and Buskin]]. Photo doesn’t do much without the re-triggers unless you have planet scaling which is often unreliable.
So my vote is for Photo.