Top 10 Most Annoying Balatro Boss Blinds
Picture this: you're playing the first two blinds of Balatro, minding your own business and learning how to play the game. But then, BAM! You get hit with a boss blind that gives you a difficulty spike with the potential to mess up your run.
Some blinds debuff cards of a certain type, draw cards face down, or even take away part of your hand size. Either way, this list will round up the boss blinds that make us want to throw our keyboards at the monitor.
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The Plant
By far the most annoying boss blind in the whole game. The Plant debuffs all of your face cards. Doesn't sound so tough? What if I told you most of the best builds you can make contain face cards, and this blind appears in later antes, when that build has already been perfected? That's when The Plant really puts a hurt on you.
Fortunately, there are some strategies besides selling Luchadors and using Chicot. Make sure you have a good amount of number cards and jokers that synergize with them, like Hack or Fibonacci. Flush builds are also useful against The Plant because they can be played with ranked cards and Aces. If you have Pareidolia, sell it because your build is basically useless against The Plant.
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The Pillar
One of the most annoying early ante boss blinds. This one debuffs cards that were previously played during the small and big blinds.
A good workaround might be to skip one of the blinds if you feel confident enough to get that cool skip tag or scale the Throwback joker. If it's the boss blind of the first ante, only skip the big blind because you can use a five-card hand to finish the small blind and use whatever money you have to acquire jokers and level up poker hands.
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The Flint
Don't you find it annoying when your base chips and mult are halved by this boss blind?
Worry not, because there are strategies against this one. Make sure you have jokers that award chips and mult, whether it's per scored card or after the played hand. Especially with the X mult jokers, because multiplying your mult also multiplies the chips you get. Cards and jokers with foil, holographic, and polychrome editions are useful too, because they award +chips, +mult, and X mult respectively.
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The Water
Resets your discards to zero for this boss blind. Different builds have different workarounds for this blind.
If you like to play flushes, having tarot cards for the largest suit in hand can really help. Using Strength helps with straight builds because it can get one card to the rank needed for the hand. Death and Cryptid work well with builds that depend on held-in-hand cards because they can make copies of them.
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The Arm
This boss blind reduces the level of your played poker hand. Really annoying if your most dependent poker hand is one you hardly leveled up this early in the game.
Countering this blind can be done by having a planet card for the targeted hand in your consumable slot so you can level it back up once the blind is over. If you have the right amount of cards, you can even play hands that have high base mult at level one, like Flush House or Five of a Kind, to get through The Arm.
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The Needle
A boss blind that only allows you to play one hand. If you face this blind early in the game, finishing it in one hand is never a guarantee.
Having a well-leveled poker hand and joker selection can be good for countering The Needle. Jokers that normally trigger their abilities during the last remaining hand like Dusk or Acrobat will activate, and they're pretty powerful for the circumstances you're facing. Avoid using jokers that activate with hands that contain only one card, like DNA or Sixth Sense, because high card has low base mult, and that can finish your run unexpectedly.
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The Eye and The Mouth
Two boss blinds for the price of one. The Eye only allows you to play unique poker hands, and The Mouth only allows you to play the first poker hand. The former is annoying if you play builds dedicated to one hand, and the latter makes pulling off a rare hand that doesn't finish the blind a regret.
Fortunately, each blind has its own strategies. For The Eye, you can have first-hand high card jokers like DNA be the one that gets blacklisted from the rest of the blind. If your best poker hand has a good amount of mult and synergizing jokers, you can finish the blind in one hand.
The same applies with The Mouth, but I wouldn't advise using high card jokers here. If you do, high card becomes the only hand you're allowed to play, and it can mess up your run in aggravating ways.
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Verdant Leaf
Finally I get to talk about one of the finisher boss blinds, which you encounter at the end of the 8th ante. Before that sweet "You Win" screen, you have to face some of the most challenging difficulty spikes possible that may render your best strategies useless.
This blind debuffs all of your cards until you sell one of your jokers. What a tragedy. You have a perfect build that you need to sacrifice just to declare yourself a winner. No more Photochad. No more Baron and Mime. No more Blueprint and Brainstorm madness.
Fortunately, there are workarounds. If you have jokers that are useless late in the game or jokers that suck (Obelisk and 8 Ball), sell them without a second thought. If you have useless negative jokers from those negative tags you got, sell them. On later stakes, don't just stock up on eternal jokers because you can't sell them. If any of your perishable jokers stop working, just sell them.
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Amber Acorn
Another annoying finisher blind, with this one flipping and shuffling your jokers. With all of your jokers out of order, your played hands may not go according to plan. You can't even tell which jokers go where because they're all flipped upside down.
Thankfully, some jokers are uniquely designed so you can identify them even when drawn face down. There are more ways to tell what jokers are what than there are unique strategies for this finisher blind:
- Square Joker and Hanging Chad: Both jokers have a square-shaped design.
- Half Joker: The design depicts a joker with the bottom half missing.
- DNA: You can see the joker shaking side to side, helping you identify it.
- Blueprint: If you see two adjacent face-down jokers trigger the same ability, the one on the left is Blueprint. It's harder to tell with Brainstorm because it can copy the leftmost joker regardless of where it's positioned. You can put Blueprint and the adjacent joker on the far left to get the most out of Brainstorm during your run.
- Hanging Chad: As the only joker capable of retriggering a card more than once, you can tell what it is by watching a face-down joker activate twice.
- Wee Joker: The last of the uniquely designed jokers, with this one being so small it looks like it shrunk to its center of mass.
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The Hook
This one discards two random cards when playing a hand. Pretty annoying for builds that depend on held-in-hand cards, especially early in the game. Make sure you have cards with more than two of the same held-in-hand ability, because you'll still be able to trigger it, though not as many times as you'd prefer.
The discards also trigger jokers that are activated by discarding. They can scale Hit the Road and Yorrick, but can mess up Ramen and Delayed Gratification.