My Plasma Deck is cursed. Every time I try to play it, the game’s RNG dunks on me every chance it gets. I’ll be starved for either chips or mult with no way out. I can’t even win White Stake. Got Bootstrap? My arcana packs will never have Temperance. Got Photograph? I’ll never see Hanging Chad and I probably won’t even have any face cards in my standard packs. Lucky cards almost never trigger. Wheel of Fortune is a 95% “Nope!”, of course.
This isn’t a problem if I play Red Deck or Painted Deck. Chance-based cards actually work sometimes, and lucky cards have a knack for hitting +20 mult if I would die without it.
I think the game’s RNG does calculations for how much a certain effect would help your current run, and puts a thumb on the scale one way or another. The game attempts to keep each run viable but not brokenly good. I think Plasma Deck and maybe Ghost Deck result in the game thinking I’m always overpowered and due for some bad luck, permanently.
I have to be careful when considering this, but I’m trying to rule out confirmation bias. Is there any such mechanic mentioned in LocalThunk’s posts or the game’s LUA scripts? Am I just on tilt and making up superstitions?
This is true. I’m sure Balatro addicts have pored over every line of LUA script in the game, and they would have spotted anything resembling a pity system. Balatro is unusual for not fudging the probabilities at all, and I just had to wrap my head around that. That one time my lucky cards triggered 7 times and didn’t give me any +mult and I died… that was just 7 honest misses in a row, which had a 21% chance of happening.
I actually went back and tried Plasma Deck yesterday, Playing like I have a brain, I finally beat White Stake, made it to ante 12, and got the achievement for 100,000k in a single hand. I kept my options open and adapted to the upcoming boss blinds like I should, and I had a good run.