@IntrepidVector @wallhackio i also wish to know

@IntrepidVector @holly it's not one reason but a myriad of factors:

• the majority of hands will have a pair to available play, so it's safe to build a strategy around playing them
• even though pairs have a small base score, there are many scaling jokers that synergize with them well. Supernova (the card which adds Mult for every time the current poker hand has been played) scales extraordinarily well will pairs, since you are typically twice as many pairs as you would with larger scoring hands like straights or flushes (I typically get x30 - x50 Mult on a Supernova by Ante 8 which is absolutely bonkers). Ride the Bus (+1 Mult every time you play a hand without face cards), Red Card (gain +3 Mult every time you skip a booster pack), or if you have no other choice Green Joker (+1 Mult per hand played, -1 Mult per discard) also scale very well with pair builds. It is extraordinarily likely you will encounter at least one of these scaling jokers early in the run since they have common rarity.
• blue seals and golden cards, which are extremely powerful cards, are safe to fish for with pair builds because you can aggressively discard to fish for them. on the other hand, if i am playing a flush build and have four clubs in my hand and a gold card, i can only discard four cards instead of five to keep the four clubs and the gold card. With a pair build you can keep a pair and a gold card and discard five cards in hopes of finding more blue seals and gold cards.
• cards which reduce the numbers of cards in your hand are less risky because pairs are still very likely to appear. by similar reasoning Hologram (gains 0.25 XMult for each card added to your deck), one of the easiest endgame viable Jokers to play in the game, is lower risk than usual because polluting your deck with random cards won't meaningfully reduce the risk of playing pairs

High card is also extremely good for all of the same reasons, but pairs are so likely to be available the additional chips from playing additional cards and higher base chips/mult is worth the slightly reduced likelihood of playing pairs relative to high card. The one exception is if you get Stuntman early (+250 chips, -2 hand size) which significantly reduces the probability of playing pairs enough to justify playing high cards instead.

@wallhackio @IntrepidVector this is really great advice and i think i might play some balatro today lol

@holly @wallhackio it might get me out of my "always flush forever" ways lol

@IntrepidVector @holly that's how i started!

@wallhackio @IntrepidVector welp, took a game to ante 10 on the green stake plasma deck with pairs. not too shabby

@IntrepidVector @holly @wallhackio shouldn't you always flush? I mean I've HEARD "if it's yellow let it mellow..." etc but I don't know in today's era if that's good advice