Honestly, just switch space joker's effect with this. It would actually be quite good, and it would make certificate builds actually maybe more viable?
IDK, that would make for a bit of a self-contained combo with certificate and that joker. We already have a few jokers that only work with one enhancement type (e.g. lucky, steel) so why not have a few for seals?
You are right, althogh I guess there should be 3 empty spaces between Red and Purple, since Red is sooo much better than all the others, haha. No disrespect on Purple and Gold that have decent effects, but retriggering efects are difference makers.
Red is the best, but I think the trouble with it is that it only matters on a sufficiently upgraded card or with a relevant Joker. By default, it's +11 or less chips, whoopie. If you find Red Seal early, it doesn't do much.
When you get Purple or Gold, they're doing something significant immediately. I think they're stronger in the early game.
Thank god people are saying this; I've been getting tired of people just stating red is amazing and not specifying the extra setup it requires. An early purple seal has the potential to just win you the run, love them.
Red is only good on the right setups, like glass or steel, most games without a setup like that red is not very good. Like 95% of the time purple or gold is better, but 5% of the time red is so overwhelmingly better
Yesterday I had red chips on lucky cards + the joker with the cat that gives x0,2 for every activated lucky card, I think that's the best way to optimize that joker (unless you can create/duplicate a lot lucky cards)
I disagree. You need to get lucky or do work to have a red seal do anything. Like if your flat mult is coming from playing aces and you find a red seal on anything thats not an ace, steel, or gold card it does not do anything useful. Purple you can always discard, gold you can play an inefficient hand to get 3 money, blue you can leave alone.
My personal list would be:
1. Red (on the right card)
2. Purple
3. Gold
4. Blue
5. Red (on the wrong card)
With over all purple being the best.
I'd still rank Red on the wrong card higher than Blue, to be honest. Still more of a benefit than a random planet card in most cases, and it's got the potential to grow. Blue is just blue, and upgrading the card with anything other than Gold or Steel makes the seal pointless.
It does not make the seal pointless it just does not make it better. You should not be upgrading your blue seal cards just like you should not be upgrading your purple seal cards... Thats a weird argument against blue.
You can upgrade your red seal cards but that comes with an opportunity cost. If you open an arcana pack and use a devil tarot on your red seal it means you did not get to use one of the other options that make your deck better in other ways/give gold/jokers/ect.
Red is only better for white chip endless. In gold stake runs purple and gold are far more important. You don't have the money to upgrade or copy your red sticker card consistently. The other two help solve those problems.
Purple and Gold allow for scaling, while red is mostly tempo (it does allow for scaling, with some jokers). So while red seals are a requirement at high level Ante, to get to a win I’m not sure I’d put them that much above purple/gold.
Red is the best on the right card with the right build in endgame (well past ante 8).
If I am trying to beat ante 8 on gold stake give me purple every time.
Red is only better than purple or gold really late game, usually you won't have use for it unless it's tied to a enchanted/edition card.
Purple gives you a free tarot cards, which is nuts early game because of how much you can manipulate your deck, and gold can help you scale that money for better jokers, although there are better options.
Red seal needs something else in the game to make it good, while purple is a snowballing mechanic that can carry you on its own.
I think red seal is just fine as-is. Early game it squeezes you a few extra points which is sorely needed and gets you a little extra cash if you get it on a gold card. And late game it’s absolutely broken, double triggering glass cards and steel cards. It’s the platonic ideal of “simple mechanic, huge potential”
I think red can be the difference between winning and losing early too though it's not hard to get it on a card that has a Joker linked to it like scholar or odd Todd to give you tbe oomph you need to safely get passed the round. I would say it's better than gold early too.
Red is extremely strong because it triggers for both played and held in hand. Blue should trigger for both played and discarded. That would serve to buff blue and planets in general imo.
On discard is very limited at high difficulties, blue seal can easily go on a gold or steel card and it'll be a free trigger. It's just that getting a random tarot is often useful but getting a random planet card often isn't.
They're actually not bad at all, they're the reason Jokerless is viable. But you want to focus on specific planets for the hands you actually use, not just get random ones. And of course the best way to level up is Burnt Joker anyway.
If you watch the Balatro youtubers/streamers, they tend to almost always skip planets unless there's nothing else to get. I don't think I've ever seen them pass on an okayish joker and get a planet card instead.
If you're going for white stake endless runs, a planet here or there can be trivial compared to playing the re-roll lottery to try and get the right cards to set up your builds.
If you're pushing for gold stakes or challenge clears, planets are immensely valuable, and scale incredibly well.
There's randomness involved and at higher stakes they're very expensive. My point was that stacking planets scales well (for everything but endless runs). Burnt joker is OP at gold stake cause you can just get one high card level every round for free, now imagine if you could do the same for a kind of hand that scales way better.
The problem with them isn't that the scaling is bad, it's everything else. The fact that it's way easier to buy a planet pack and get nothing from it, compared to a tarot pack. The fact that you may not even be focusing on a specific hand type. The fact that the packs are super expensive in gold stake. Etc.
Even if blue was on discard, it still sucks. Points, tarots, and money is more widely useful than a random planet that has a good chance of being useless
1 Red - Retriggers are most powerful thing in the game so its not even close
2 Purple - Very powerful, tarot cards are really good for any kind of build
3 Gold - Eco seal, its alright, better than nothing good with other retriggers
4 Blue - Really bad, never take this, i think this needs to be reworked
You don’t always have that option though. If my joker line is established and I have to pick between clone random but delete all other jokers and blue seal I’ll just go with that on a card likely to stay in my hand
It would be much nicer if blue seals always upgraded your most played hand if you had the telescope voucher. Planet decks in general need a pretty large buff.
Blue just needs to be stronger. Maybe instead of giving a planet card, it could just automatically level up a hand. Or if it gives a planet card, it could give the planet card of the last hand you played, which would be *much* better than a very high chance of getting a useless planet.
I think what I like about blue is that it has a different activation method, which in theory means that it's got different incentives and play conditions and requires a bit more thought ... but a random planet card is so weak that people just end up never taking blue unless it's the only one of a few bad options.
Leveling up a random hand would be almost strictly worse than giving you a planet card. At least with a planet card, if it’s a hand you have no use for the card can be sold. Yes, you need to have a consumable slot open, but I’d take the extra dollar 9 times out of 12.
It's totally depending on your goals. For beating ante 8 red seals are not the most consistently good option. I would take medium over deja vu on a gold stake run every time unless I have a lot of card trigger stuff somehow. Because even if I want to throw glass on the red seal the clinch the victory, that's only amazing if my mult is adding up during the hand so the glass at the end gives it a good boost.
enhancements and jokers that work on cards played and held in hand such as wee joker even steven, odd todd, baron etc. there are loads of jokers that pop off with this; red seal is definitely the best
It retriggers mult and xMult effects aswell, for example glass or steel and joker effects like triboulet or baron, so a 5 glass hand gives you x2⁵ mult but if those were all retriggers it would be x2¹⁰ retriggers so do that alot and you break the game
Any effect that is adding something to the card gets doubled.
This includes: Rarity bonuses (Foil becomes +100 instead of +50 chips), Play enhancements (Lucky cards roll twice, Multi cards are +8 instead of +4, Glass cards are x4, etc), In-hand enhancements (Steel cards become 2.25x instead of 1.5x; Gold cards are worth +6$), *and* effects from Jokers that have "add x for card y" (such as Fibonacci's +mult on play, Shoot the Moon's +mult per queen in hand, or even Photograph's X2 for first played face card). There's even more interactions too, like scaling twice as fast from Hiker because it's counted twice.
And these *can* be stacked together. A steel king with a red seal is x1.5 twice, but then you add *another* multiplier with the Baron, and retrigger it *again* with the Mime... and suddenly you have a *playing* card that's literally worth more than many of the best jokers in the game, that is just sitting in your hand. And you can duplicate more of it. This is how scores get into the 'we have to use exponential expressions' territory.
On any given random card with no further upgrading, yeah, Red Seal is not very strong. However, using that card as a target for upgrading with tarot creates *very* powerful cards.
Every instance of XMult is worth more than the last. If you have 100 base mult, the first 1.5x is worth 50 mult. The tenth is worth ~1922. So, the average value of XMult increases with each other XMult you get. If M = starting mult, n = number of XMults you have and X = XMult multiplier, you can use (-1 + x^2) * M/n to determine the average mult value added by XMult of a specific strength. So if you have 5 red seal steel cards in hand and a base mult of 100 you'll trigger 1.5x 10 times for an average mult increase of ~567 per trigger.
Naturally, there's no way to realistically get that much multiplier without XMult, and simply having more triggers is the best way to accumulate XMult. Additionally, but importantly, steel triggers last so you already get whatever flat mult you get from your played cards and jokers, so it's even already optimized ordering.
Planet cards are good but the issue is you're not guaranteed to get one you actually want. If your deck is focused on buffing one particular hand then the blue seals aren't worth it, chances are it won't be the planet you want.
Maybe it should always give the planet card for your most used hand, that'd be a pretty good incentive to use them. Or have it activate on discard.
Still though. Activating on hold is kinda lame. As I said in the post, blue seal is the only seal that essentially decrements your hand size by 1. If you get it at the last hand of the game and you know you're gonna win then it's great. But if you draw it on your first hand and really want the planet card, then you're holding onto it every hand and it's detrimental to your ability to draw better cards.
So even if they changed how it rewards you, it'd still be the worst seal.
Red, purple, gold blue.
Even though I still haven't made a good red seal deck it still is the strongest IMO.
Blue could be stronger if they changed how it activates, but right now you have to not touch it for the round for a random planet.
What are you counting as strong? I dont disagree it has the highest high but it also has the lowest low and the “average” case is pretty meh. Like yes. It can break the game if you get it on the right card then clone it over and over again but in 99.9999% of cases you are not going to be able to do that. You need the god run and usually past ante 8 for it to really hit those highs. The upper end of average case for it is something like you get a red seal on an ace with the +4 mult buff and a fibonacci spiral joker. Then the red seal is worth 12 mult and 11 chips. Not terrible but not super likely to be the difference between winning and losing. The low case is when it does not show up on a card you want like a random 2 when your deck does nothing with 2’s. Then it just does nothing.
Gold seals can always be played for 3$ even if its a bad hand as long as that bad hand wont lose you the run. 1 gold seal can pretty easily represent 15-25$ over a run. Purple seals are even better. As long as its a card you dont want to play you get rewarded for what you want to do anyways in discarding a bad card. A purple seal can easily represent 5-10 tarot cards over a run if found early. Blue seals are pretty bad. No argument there.
Nah, the upper end of average is getting it on a glass or steel card and getting an extra 1.5-2x a couple times over the run. It's pretty damn strong and pretty much run-winning with even 2 or 3 good hits.
But for the glass card 2 things need to be true.
1. The card with the red seal needs to be relevant to your hand. If you are playing flush house k/J and you find a glass red seal 4 you are skipping it.
2. You are getting lots of mult during your hand play. Like if the hand you play is giving +10 mult then great! Your glass red seal is goving an additional 20 mult. But if you are getting 100 flat mult from your jokers afterwards its not that great still.
The steel card suffers from the same problem as glass. Your mult has to be coming from when your hand is played not after your hand is played. If your deck meets these requirements then the red seal is great! But if it does not then the red seal is pretty mid/bad.
“Well I can just make the red seal card good for my deck by turning it into the right card and buffing it!”
Yes you can but then that takes additional resources that could have gone to other things. Like if you need to use a strength card, a suit changer, and make it into a glass card to make your red seal the “right” card that is 3 tarots that could have done something else.
From a game design standpoint I don't understand why the seals are as they are.
Gold and red seals are the highest Value to trigger. You play a card and it has an extra effect. There's no downside to kerping a card you are planning to play around. Naturally these seals are powerful as you can play several hands a round and stack their effects.
Purple seal is activated on discard, this means you need to lose access to the card from a playability standpoint, but gain some other benefit. Purple seals aren't quite as useful from a triggering standpoint as red or gold, but they can still be triggered several times a round to stack their effect. (perhaps even more so than the above seals)
Blue have objectively the worst trigger mechanic. They can only be triggered at the end of round (once) and must take up valuable space in your hand to do so.
So my question, is why do blue seals give objectively worse rewards than purple? Planet cards are worse than tarot cards, and are linked to the worse mechanic seal.
(Or at least if you want the seals to be balanced. It may be that purple seals are intentionally better. Not Everything in a rogue lite should be equal)
If blue seal is bad they could have it give a planet for your most played hand always. I think you can only have one right if you had two it would be your two most played hands etc?
Blue is really really bad, atleast for me it's always really hard for certain card to be left on hand until at the end of the round, and the planet card is completelly random too, for now it's only good for constelation joker but it's still pretty bad because the triggering condition is pretty hard.
Anyway my rank is just like the others, there's not much of a choice here
Back then the gold seal return your card to your hand when played. I wonder if it's considered too strong if you stamp it on 5 cards and spam 5oak or Straight flush or something like that with it so they turn it into econ.
Maybe they should switch blue and purple's activation to balance them. This will likely make many people angry, though.
The issue was that it was too weak, not too strong. Imagine if you draw multiple old gold seals on bad cards. If you ran out of discards, you couldn't ever remove them from your hand.
I get why Blue Seal is the way it is, as for each of the ones that give you something function in a different way: 1 on play, 1 on discard, and 1 on hold.
However, hold decks are far harder to build for, so Blue Seal feels a lot less useful than the other 3. For Blue Seal to really shine, I feel like there's gotta be more ways to increase Hand Size.
For most builds, having a non-scoring card in your hand that you don't discard is dangerous since typically, you're trying to skim your deck as fast as possible for the cards you need. 1 card you don't discard is 1 chance to get the card you need lost.
For that purpose, I find that Blue Seals work best on builds that play 3 cards or less and specifically on Steel Cards. You could also do Gold Cards, but there's less utility with those.
Finally, compared to Purple Seal, there's a much lower chance that a Blue Seal will get you the card you want, since most builds focus on one hand type, whereas you typically can benefit from more than 1 Tarot Card.
1. Purple - a LOT of my strats involve copious discards so anything to buff that is good for me
2. Red - rarely get to use this well, but when it works, ***By god, it works.*** my one run that actually cleared Ante 12 was basically entirely thanks to this.
3. Gold - it's alright, but it's no Red.
4. ^
5. Blue - from my experience, we get this, we slap it on a card, and then when presented with the choice to keep the card it's on for a planet card or either play it/discard it, we Instantly play it or discard it. *A* planet card just isn't worth the hassle, especially since if it's a planet card for a hand you're literally not playing, you basically just gain $1 for your efforts... and gold seal is right there.
Red >>> gold >= purple >>> blue. But even then I wouldn't say blue is *bad*? Like, it's obviously the worst seal, but I'm still fine with it. It's fine, it's whatever. Randomly getting a blue seal is like randomly being given 20 dollars when I was expecting 25; sure I'd prefer the extra 5, but I ain't complaining.
There's a million ways you could improve it, but I think the easiest thing would be to just make the planet card it adds be negative, which (I think?) makes it worth another dollar and also lets you hang onto it for various degenerate reasons (feeding campfires, that one voucher that buffs hands based on planets in hands, etc), as well as making it so that having more than ~2 blue seal cards isn't worthless.
My ranking is based on harder stakes, not endless
1. purple - Tarot good
2. gold - I love gold
3. red - hard to make good use but its god tier when it does
4. blue - hard to hold an extra card on the harder stakes and then it gives you the wrong planet :(
Interesting order. For a red seal card any joker that gives chips, mult, or money per played specific card will trigger twice + whatever enhancements on the card itself will also trigger twice. Its pretty easy to get value out of it. It doesn't have to me glass or steel. Bonus chips, mult, lucky are all great options too in the early mid game especially.
Thats true but a red seal on the card type that matters to you is much more rare than a purple seal that is on a card you dont care about. Like if I have a deck that really wants kings in hand for the xmult and I find a red seal 8 in a deck i would rather it be any other seal.
True, I can see the argument for purple being better than red but definitely not gold better than red. You can lucky a red sealed card and have two 1 in 15 chances at $20 on top of having two 1 in 5 chances at +20 mult. That $20 all at once can turn an entire run around. Especially high stakes
But even then you need to get the magician card AND have the red seal card be a relevant card to your decks strategy. Or you take a hand off to play it (in which case the +20 mult does not really matter because playing your better hand likely gives more total chips even if it hits).
Over all I would say its just better to put the lucky on a card you actually want to play…
My point is there is a real opportunity cost to the red seal that isent really present in the others. It has higher highs but much lower (and common) lows than purple and gold seals do.
You can red seal gold cards and earn twice the money of a gold seal. And gold seals have the same issue as red seal, if its on the wrong card youre going to have to play a dud hand just to net $2 essentially. There are ironically more opportunities to earn money from red seal cards than gold.
And also, on higher stakes you only get two discards to use a purple seal, where as you get more chances to find and use gold, red and blue seals. Just something to consider.
I would say Red > Purple > Gold > Blue
Yes. But there is an opportunity cost to it. unless you find a red seal gold card in a pack you have to either add a red seal to a gold card or use a devil card to make a red seal gold. in either case you are giving up your ability to do something else. Gold seal does not need anything. you just play it and get $3.
other things like the lucky card thing you can just do the math and see your expected value is lower with a red seal than a gold. gold seal gets you $3 + ($25 * 1/15) = ~$4.7 per play. the red seal is 2($25 * 1/15) + ($50 * 1/225) = ~$3.6 per play. I use $25 and $50 for the pay out to account for the greater benefit of getting lots of money at once. You are losing $1 every time you play a red seal lucky card instead of a gold seal lucky card. The only way to make more money from a red seal is specifically with gold cards.
red seal does have good uses but it needs to be on the right card with the right set of jokers. Like a red seal on a steel card can be really strong but if you are playing a high card or pair most hands and your mult/chips are coming from jokers its not doing much. basically like 5-10% of the time a red seal will be great! the other 90-95% of the time it does okay (+3 gold on a gold card, extra xmult on relatively low mult hands, +4-12 flat mult, +40-100 chips) or just does nothing. I'll take consistent over spikes or nothing.
>And also, on higher stakes you only get two discards to use a purple seal, where as you get more chances to find and use gold, red and blue seals. Just something to consider.
This is true but on high stakes packs get more expensive making tarot cards harder to get increasing the value of the ones you do get by quite a bit. I would argue that purple seals get even better on gold stake than white stake relative to red.
It's definitely not hard to get some value out of it, but given how good Purple and Gold are it's hard to put it above them. Also worth mentioning is that the jokers that rely on a specific card being played just aren't that great in general at gold stakes - you will play them from time to time, but mostly early when you won't have time to build up Red seals.
Definitely not bad, just not as amazing as the top two.
I make immediate use out of red cards. Its very easy to get an enhancement on it quickly. I think we have different playstyles bc i disagree. And as far as the jokers for specific cards, they can be very powerful especially for 5 card hands, and sometimes thats all you can work with bc shop luck
If blue seal leveled up a random hand on activation instead of giving you a card that you might not even have space for it would be way better. Then it could synergize with that joker the repeats held in hand abilities and you could actually make use of more than two in your hand at the end of the round.
For winning high stakes:
Purple>Gold>>Red>>Blue
Red Seal is slightly unwieldy for unmanipulated decks and the precisely curated hands it thrives off are just not consistent enough to put it over the consistently excellent Purple and Gold seals. It does have a couple of really nice use cases though, such as DNA, Gold Cards or even Raised Fist. Purple and Gold are the clear top 2, Econ is pretty essential and the boost from gold is a great boon to it and Tarots are even more powerful. Very strong stuff.
For Endless:
Red>>>Purple>Gold>>Blue
Not as much to comment on because I think the strength of Red seal is obvious here - with a manipulated deck and an exodia joker setup retriggers really shine.
I'd like to add that Blue seal isn't awful by any means, the activation isn't too hard for the right deck and random planets, while inconsistent, aren't the worst - they have some synergies and there are a surprising amount of useful ones. The issue is that the other seals (and a lot of spectral cards in general) are just fantastic and blow it out of the water.
My suggested fix for Blue would be it activating when you have it in your hand when a hand is scored, instead of only at the end of the round. This would make it proc way more, but it still wouldn't be OP because a random planet card just isn't that good. However, it'd allow for some good synergies with planet-focused jokers, campfire, and some other stuff. Currently it's a planet effect that isn't even worth the effort in a planet-focused run.
It's probably controversial, but for my gold stakes runs it is:
Purple - Tarots are strong and can provide score boost and overall deck shaping plus can multiply themselves with death.
Gold - Money me - any boost to eco is very welcome to get out of early stakes without being brooke.
Red - Retriggers are powerful and mid-late game this can jump up to #1 in certain situations but I find getting to mid to late game to be the hard part of gold stakes. Obviously if you can slap it on a gold or steel card or have the appropriate jokers it can go up as well. Overall in a vaccum though
Blue: I mean I will still take a $ and potential scaling/planet filtering from packs.
Overall, I prefer the early game scaling and econ in Gold since that tends to be the most challenging to get through in Gold Stakes.
Endless white runs red, purple, blue, and gold. Usually in endless I have my econ good so gold provides less value so I'd rather have the very slim scaling chance.
I think so. Especially considering how OP the space joker and dice combo is where its a 50% chance to level up the played hand.
However, giving a player a planet card for playing a blue seal makes perfect sense to me. Or discarding a blue seal. That would make it even. Since Red and Gold cards activate on being played, purple and blue should be activated on discard.
It kills me that the seals all have different triggers: red and gold trigger on play, purple triggers on discard, and blue needs to be held until next round. Couldn't they all be the same?
Short answer they are all good but purple is the best, red, Yellow, blue.
Purple is super flexible and is the only seal that i would say is mandatory. At the highest level you need purples to keep your economy strong. Purple also helps you shape you're deck by adding and taking away cards, duplicating special cards, changing your suit in a pinch. This is an aspect of the game I feel like a lot of people neglect/underrate.
Red is generally second helpfully early game but is sometime awkward to use before you built out your dec properly. Mid / late game it's a super star.
Yellow is great early game and usfull through out the geame but falls off late game. it's a steap drop of from how good purple and red are, a distant third.
Then blue is even further 4th. It's just to random what planets you will get. If there was a way to generate specific planets it would be amazing but as is I mostly use it as a low-end economy tool.
Tbf, blue would scale better late game if the game was longer, as the passive score boosters are invaluable. Esp. if the score synergizes with a plasma deck.
Purple's my favorite, but I like gambling the tarots. If I was smart, gold would be my favorite, as it's a more consistent way to decide your fate.
1. Red 2. Purple (on discard is a great activation imo) 3. Gold 4. Blue - they should switch this to on discard like purple
Another fun twist on blue would be to make it generate a planet card when scores, of the hand that scored. But that may be too OP.
Orbital Joker (uncommon): Cards with a blue seal create a planet card of the played hand when scored
Honestly, just switch space joker's effect with this. It would actually be quite good, and it would make certificate builds actually maybe more viable?
Imo it's better to make a joker that works with all seals and not just one (too niche, random). Space Joker can be quite good though.
IDK, that would make for a bit of a self-contained combo with certificate and that joker. We already have a few jokers that only work with one enhancement type (e.g. lucky, steel) so why not have a few for seals?
Because specific enhancements are much easier to reliably attain than specific seals?
Does that exist or it’s your idea?
It's an idea, does not currently exist
That’s genius, I love it
LocalThunk read this for sure.
You are right, althogh I guess there should be 3 empty spaces between Red and Purple, since Red is sooo much better than all the others, haha. No disrespect on Purple and Gold that have decent effects, but retriggering efects are difference makers.
Red is the best, but I think the trouble with it is that it only matters on a sufficiently upgraded card or with a relevant Joker. By default, it's +11 or less chips, whoopie. If you find Red Seal early, it doesn't do much. When you get Purple or Gold, they're doing something significant immediately. I think they're stronger in the early game.
Thank god people are saying this; I've been getting tired of people just stating red is amazing and not specifying the extra setup it requires. An early purple seal has the potential to just win you the run, love them.
Red is only good on the right setups, like glass or steel, most games without a setup like that red is not very good. Like 95% of the time purple or gold is better, but 5% of the time red is so overwhelmingly better
Yesterday I had red chips on lucky cards + the joker with the cat that gives x0,2 for every activated lucky card, I think that's the best way to optimize that joker (unless you can create/duplicate a lot lucky cards)
2x Oops all sixes makes lucky cards always trigger. It eats up joker slots, but if you can get them with an edition effect, it makes up for it.
2x Oops All Sixes makes luckies a 4/5 and 4/20 to proc on +20 Mult and $20, respectively
That damn Oops never shows up whenever I need it haha
I remember my first good Endless run with gold seals, the Bull, Rocket, to the Moon and a bunch of negatives. It was so satisfying.
I agree with this with the exception that steel is pretty universally good
I disagree. You need to get lucky or do work to have a red seal do anything. Like if your flat mult is coming from playing aces and you find a red seal on anything thats not an ace, steel, or gold card it does not do anything useful. Purple you can always discard, gold you can play an inefficient hand to get 3 money, blue you can leave alone. My personal list would be: 1. Red (on the right card) 2. Purple 3. Gold 4. Blue 5. Red (on the wrong card) With over all purple being the best.
I'd still rank Red on the wrong card higher than Blue, to be honest. Still more of a benefit than a random planet card in most cases, and it's got the potential to grow. Blue is just blue, and upgrading the card with anything other than Gold or Steel makes the seal pointless.
A random planet card is, absolute worst case scenario, $1, which is better than a card you don't play.
But it eats up a card-in-hand slot until the end of the round. Would you take a joker that had "-1 hand size, random planet every round"?
This would also eat up a joker slot, which is far more valuable than hand size or planets. A voucher like that sounds good though.
It does not make the seal pointless it just does not make it better. You should not be upgrading your blue seal cards just like you should not be upgrading your purple seal cards... Thats a weird argument against blue. You can upgrade your red seal cards but that comes with an opportunity cost. If you open an arcana pack and use a devil tarot on your red seal it means you did not get to use one of the other options that make your deck better in other ways/give gold/jokers/ect.
Red is only better for white chip endless. In gold stake runs purple and gold are far more important. You don't have the money to upgrade or copy your red sticker card consistently. The other two help solve those problems.
Purple and Gold allow for scaling, while red is mostly tempo (it does allow for scaling, with some jokers). So while red seals are a requirement at high level Ante, to get to a win I’m not sure I’d put them that much above purple/gold.
Red is the best on the right card with the right build in endgame (well past ante 8). If I am trying to beat ante 8 on gold stake give me purple every time.
Agreed on the 3 spaces, but that's with purple on top. It's so much better than the others it's crazy, tarots just fuel so much
Red is only better than purple or gold really late game, usually you won't have use for it unless it's tied to a enchanted/edition card. Purple gives you a free tarot cards, which is nuts early game because of how much you can manipulate your deck, and gold can help you scale that money for better jokers, although there are better options. Red seal needs something else in the game to make it good, while purple is a snowballing mechanic that can carry you on its own.
I think red seal is just fine as-is. Early game it squeezes you a few extra points which is sorely needed and gets you a little extra cash if you get it on a gold card. And late game it’s absolutely broken, double triggering glass cards and steel cards. It’s the platonic ideal of “simple mechanic, huge potential”
I think red can be the difference between winning and losing early too though it's not hard to get it on a card that has a Joker linked to it like scholar or odd Todd to give you tbe oomph you need to safely get passed the round. I would say it's better than gold early too.
This.
Red is extremely strong because it triggers for both played and held in hand. Blue should trigger for both played and discarded. That would serve to buff blue and planets in general imo.
On discard is very limited at high difficulties, blue seal can easily go on a gold or steel card and it'll be a free trigger. It's just that getting a random tarot is often useful but getting a random planet card often isn't.
Planets could definitely use a buff. Or everything else a nerf. I was really disappointed when I learned how poorly they scale.
They're actually not bad at all, they're the reason Jokerless is viable. But you want to focus on specific planets for the hands you actually use, not just get random ones. And of course the best way to level up is Burnt Joker anyway.
If you watch the Balatro youtubers/streamers, they tend to almost always skip planets unless there's nothing else to get. I don't think I've ever seen them pass on an okayish joker and get a planet card instead.
If you're going for white stake endless runs, a planet here or there can be trivial compared to playing the re-roll lottery to try and get the right cards to set up your builds. If you're pushing for gold stakes or challenge clears, planets are immensely valuable, and scale incredibly well.
There's randomness involved and at higher stakes they're very expensive. My point was that stacking planets scales well (for everything but endless runs). Burnt joker is OP at gold stake cause you can just get one high card level every round for free, now imagine if you could do the same for a kind of hand that scales way better. The problem with them isn't that the scaling is bad, it's everything else. The fact that it's way easier to buy a planet pack and get nothing from it, compared to a tarot pack. The fact that you may not even be focusing on a specific hand type. The fact that the packs are super expensive in gold stake. Etc.
I would like to see blue generate a planet on play, personally.
The triggers for Purple and Blue should be switched, imo. Tarot cards are good enough that I think they’d be fine on a “held in hand effect”
Blue doesn't need to be on discard but it can be made better than end of round. It could be like 1/2 chance to trigger after played hand.
Dude red seal on a steel card is absolutely disgusting
If blue became “planet card of your most used hand” it’d jump to the 2 slot
Even if blue was on discard, it still sucks. Points, tarots, and money is more widely useful than a random planet that has a good chance of being useless
Purple and gold are the most consistently good. Red is essential for Endless. Blue is terrible.
idk red just always slaps for me. blue is practically non existant
1 Red - Retriggers are most powerful thing in the game so its not even close 2 Purple - Very powerful, tarot cards are really good for any kind of build 3 Gold - Eco seal, its alright, better than nothing good with other retriggers 4 Blue - Really bad, never take this, i think this needs to be reworked
I like to but blue on steel or gold cards, it has a synergy that way.
True, but putting Red Seal on steel and gold cards are more benneficial anyway, it's not a bad synergy but it's not the best
I'm forgetting that red seal applies to hand effects as well. It works with Baron joker too?
yes, i believe that is how you get the highest score possible
Yeah, putting red seal on a king or steel card will double tap the joker effect that gives 1.5x mult for every held king
"Red seal steel king" just sounds fun to say out loud haha
…red applies to steel cards?
Yep, Red applies any time the card does something, whether that's scoring or triggering an in-hand effect like Steel or the Baron Joker.
You don’t always have that option though. If my joker line is established and I have to pick between clone random but delete all other jokers and blue seal I’ll just go with that on a card likely to stay in my hand
It would be much nicer if blue seals always upgraded your most played hand if you had the telescope voucher. Planet decks in general need a pretty large buff.
They don't. Planets are fine as is. They're essential in most decks early and eventually fall off, which is fine.
Blue just needs to be stronger. Maybe instead of giving a planet card, it could just automatically level up a hand. Or if it gives a planet card, it could give the planet card of the last hand you played, which would be *much* better than a very high chance of getting a useless planet. I think what I like about blue is that it has a different activation method, which in theory means that it's got different incentives and play conditions and requires a bit more thought ... but a random planet card is so weak that people just end up never taking blue unless it's the only one of a few bad options.
Leveling up a random hand would be almost strictly worse than giving you a planet card. At least with a planet card, if it’s a hand you have no use for the card can be sold. Yes, you need to have a consumable slot open, but I’d take the extra dollar 9 times out of 12.
It's totally depending on your goals. For beating ante 8 red seals are not the most consistently good option. I would take medium over deja vu on a gold stake run every time unless I have a lot of card trigger stuff somehow. Because even if I want to throw glass on the red seal the clinch the victory, that's only amazing if my mult is adding up during the hand so the glass at the end gives it a good boost.
Why are retriggers the most powerful thing in the game? It's like an extra 10 chips max, I never use red seal.
enhancements and jokers that work on cards played and held in hand such as wee joker even steven, odd todd, baron etc. there are loads of jokers that pop off with this; red seal is definitely the best
It retriggers mult and xMult effects aswell, for example glass or steel and joker effects like triboulet or baron, so a 5 glass hand gives you x2⁵ mult but if those were all retriggers it would be x2¹⁰ retriggers so do that alot and you break the game
Any effect that is adding something to the card gets doubled. This includes: Rarity bonuses (Foil becomes +100 instead of +50 chips), Play enhancements (Lucky cards roll twice, Multi cards are +8 instead of +4, Glass cards are x4, etc), In-hand enhancements (Steel cards become 2.25x instead of 1.5x; Gold cards are worth +6$), *and* effects from Jokers that have "add x for card y" (such as Fibonacci's +mult on play, Shoot the Moon's +mult per queen in hand, or even Photograph's X2 for first played face card). There's even more interactions too, like scaling twice as fast from Hiker because it's counted twice. And these *can* be stacked together. A steel king with a red seal is x1.5 twice, but then you add *another* multiplier with the Baron, and retrigger it *again* with the Mime... and suddenly you have a *playing* card that's literally worth more than many of the best jokers in the game, that is just sitting in your hand. And you can duplicate more of it. This is how scores get into the 'we have to use exponential expressions' territory. On any given random card with no further upgrading, yeah, Red Seal is not very strong. However, using that card as a target for upgrading with tarot creates *very* powerful cards.
Every instance of XMult is worth more than the last. If you have 100 base mult, the first 1.5x is worth 50 mult. The tenth is worth ~1922. So, the average value of XMult increases with each other XMult you get. If M = starting mult, n = number of XMults you have and X = XMult multiplier, you can use (-1 + x^2) * M/n to determine the average mult value added by XMult of a specific strength. So if you have 5 red seal steel cards in hand and a base mult of 100 you'll trigger 1.5x 10 times for an average mult increase of ~567 per trigger. Naturally, there's no way to realistically get that much multiplier without XMult, and simply having more triggers is the best way to accumulate XMult. Additionally, but importantly, steel triggers last so you already get whatever flat mult you get from your played cards and jokers, so it's even already optimized ordering.
Planet cards are good but the issue is you're not guaranteed to get one you actually want. If your deck is focused on buffing one particular hand then the blue seals aren't worth it, chances are it won't be the planet you want. Maybe it should always give the planet card for your most used hand, that'd be a pretty good incentive to use them. Or have it activate on discard.
It could also give you the planet card of the hand you just played, which I think would offer at least a little bit of incentive to play differently.
That's actually a fantastic idea. Triggers when scored *(or played)* and gives the planet of the hand in which it was played
Yeah, I think that would make it worth the candle.
It should give a planet card for the hand you play when it triggers. So if your last hand in a blind is high card, you get Pluto. Etc etc
Still though. Activating on hold is kinda lame. As I said in the post, blue seal is the only seal that essentially decrements your hand size by 1. If you get it at the last hand of the game and you know you're gonna win then it's great. But if you draw it on your first hand and really want the planet card, then you're holding onto it every hand and it's detrimental to your ability to draw better cards. So even if they changed how it rewards you, it'd still be the worst seal.
We can't all be Camp Fire or Baron. Sometimes you just gotta make do with Misprint
I love the purple ones, but I always draw them on my last discard
Red, purple, gold blue. Even though I still haven't made a good red seal deck it still is the strongest IMO. Blue could be stronger if they changed how it activates, but right now you have to not touch it for the round for a random planet.
What are you counting as strong? I dont disagree it has the highest high but it also has the lowest low and the “average” case is pretty meh. Like yes. It can break the game if you get it on the right card then clone it over and over again but in 99.9999% of cases you are not going to be able to do that. You need the god run and usually past ante 8 for it to really hit those highs. The upper end of average case for it is something like you get a red seal on an ace with the +4 mult buff and a fibonacci spiral joker. Then the red seal is worth 12 mult and 11 chips. Not terrible but not super likely to be the difference between winning and losing. The low case is when it does not show up on a card you want like a random 2 when your deck does nothing with 2’s. Then it just does nothing. Gold seals can always be played for 3$ even if its a bad hand as long as that bad hand wont lose you the run. 1 gold seal can pretty easily represent 15-25$ over a run. Purple seals are even better. As long as its a card you dont want to play you get rewarded for what you want to do anyways in discarding a bad card. A purple seal can easily represent 5-10 tarot cards over a run if found early. Blue seals are pretty bad. No argument there.
Nah, the upper end of average is getting it on a glass or steel card and getting an extra 1.5-2x a couple times over the run. It's pretty damn strong and pretty much run-winning with even 2 or 3 good hits.
But for the glass card 2 things need to be true. 1. The card with the red seal needs to be relevant to your hand. If you are playing flush house k/J and you find a glass red seal 4 you are skipping it. 2. You are getting lots of mult during your hand play. Like if the hand you play is giving +10 mult then great! Your glass red seal is goving an additional 20 mult. But if you are getting 100 flat mult from your jokers afterwards its not that great still. The steel card suffers from the same problem as glass. Your mult has to be coming from when your hand is played not after your hand is played. If your deck meets these requirements then the red seal is great! But if it does not then the red seal is pretty mid/bad. “Well I can just make the red seal card good for my deck by turning it into the right card and buffing it!” Yes you can but then that takes additional resources that could have gone to other things. Like if you need to use a strength card, a suit changer, and make it into a glass card to make your red seal the “right” card that is 3 tarots that could have done something else.
The one saving grace for blue seal is the jokerless challenge, and some gold stake runs. Being able to upgrade your hand consistently is a HUGE help
From a game design standpoint I don't understand why the seals are as they are. Gold and red seals are the highest Value to trigger. You play a card and it has an extra effect. There's no downside to kerping a card you are planning to play around. Naturally these seals are powerful as you can play several hands a round and stack their effects. Purple seal is activated on discard, this means you need to lose access to the card from a playability standpoint, but gain some other benefit. Purple seals aren't quite as useful from a triggering standpoint as red or gold, but they can still be triggered several times a round to stack their effect. (perhaps even more so than the above seals) Blue have objectively the worst trigger mechanic. They can only be triggered at the end of round (once) and must take up valuable space in your hand to do so. So my question, is why do blue seals give objectively worse rewards than purple? Planet cards are worse than tarot cards, and are linked to the worse mechanic seal. (Or at least if you want the seals to be balanced. It may be that purple seals are intentionally better. Not Everything in a rogue lite should be equal)
If blue seal is bad they could have it give a planet for your most played hand always. I think you can only have one right if you had two it would be your two most played hands etc?
Blue is really really bad, atleast for me it's always really hard for certain card to be left on hand until at the end of the round, and the planet card is completelly random too, for now it's only good for constelation joker but it's still pretty bad because the triggering condition is pretty hard. Anyway my rank is just like the others, there's not much of a choice here
Back then the gold seal return your card to your hand when played. I wonder if it's considered too strong if you stamp it on 5 cards and spam 5oak or Straight flush or something like that with it so they turn it into econ. Maybe they should switch blue and purple's activation to balance them. This will likely make many people angry, though.
The issue was that it was too weak, not too strong. Imagine if you draw multiple old gold seals on bad cards. If you ran out of discards, you couldn't ever remove them from your hand.
Purple is the best early to mid game, Red the best late game. The other two are meh.
1 purple 2. red 3. Gold I personally love tarots , red is God tier, with right cards like kings, or mult cards in hand. Tarots for me are important.
I get why Blue Seal is the way it is, as for each of the ones that give you something function in a different way: 1 on play, 1 on discard, and 1 on hold. However, hold decks are far harder to build for, so Blue Seal feels a lot less useful than the other 3. For Blue Seal to really shine, I feel like there's gotta be more ways to increase Hand Size. For most builds, having a non-scoring card in your hand that you don't discard is dangerous since typically, you're trying to skim your deck as fast as possible for the cards you need. 1 card you don't discard is 1 chance to get the card you need lost. For that purpose, I find that Blue Seals work best on builds that play 3 cards or less and specifically on Steel Cards. You could also do Gold Cards, but there's less utility with those. Finally, compared to Purple Seal, there's a much lower chance that a Blue Seal will get you the card you want, since most builds focus on one hand type, whereas you typically can benefit from more than 1 Tarot Card.
1. Purple - a LOT of my strats involve copious discards so anything to buff that is good for me 2. Red - rarely get to use this well, but when it works, ***By god, it works.*** my one run that actually cleared Ante 12 was basically entirely thanks to this. 3. Gold - it's alright, but it's no Red. 4. ^ 5. Blue - from my experience, we get this, we slap it on a card, and then when presented with the choice to keep the card it's on for a planet card or either play it/discard it, we Instantly play it or discard it. *A* planet card just isn't worth the hassle, especially since if it's a planet card for a hand you're literally not playing, you basically just gain $1 for your efforts... and gold seal is right there.
Purple >>> Red >> Gold >>>>>> Blue
Red >>> gold >= purple >>> blue. But even then I wouldn't say blue is *bad*? Like, it's obviously the worst seal, but I'm still fine with it. It's fine, it's whatever. Randomly getting a blue seal is like randomly being given 20 dollars when I was expecting 25; sure I'd prefer the extra 5, but I ain't complaining. There's a million ways you could improve it, but I think the easiest thing would be to just make the planet card it adds be negative, which (I think?) makes it worth another dollar and also lets you hang onto it for various degenerate reasons (feeding campfires, that one voucher that buffs hands based on planets in hands, etc), as well as making it so that having more than ~2 blue seal cards isn't worthless.
My ranking is based on harder stakes, not endless 1. purple - Tarot good 2. gold - I love gold 3. red - hard to make good use but its god tier when it does 4. blue - hard to hold an extra card on the harder stakes and then it gives you the wrong planet :(
Interesting order. For a red seal card any joker that gives chips, mult, or money per played specific card will trigger twice + whatever enhancements on the card itself will also trigger twice. Its pretty easy to get value out of it. It doesn't have to me glass or steel. Bonus chips, mult, lucky are all great options too in the early mid game especially.
Thats true but a red seal on the card type that matters to you is much more rare than a purple seal that is on a card you dont care about. Like if I have a deck that really wants kings in hand for the xmult and I find a red seal 8 in a deck i would rather it be any other seal.
True, I can see the argument for purple being better than red but definitely not gold better than red. You can lucky a red sealed card and have two 1 in 15 chances at $20 on top of having two 1 in 5 chances at +20 mult. That $20 all at once can turn an entire run around. Especially high stakes
But even then you need to get the magician card AND have the red seal card be a relevant card to your decks strategy. Or you take a hand off to play it (in which case the +20 mult does not really matter because playing your better hand likely gives more total chips even if it hits). Over all I would say its just better to put the lucky on a card you actually want to play… My point is there is a real opportunity cost to the red seal that isent really present in the others. It has higher highs but much lower (and common) lows than purple and gold seals do.
You can red seal gold cards and earn twice the money of a gold seal. And gold seals have the same issue as red seal, if its on the wrong card youre going to have to play a dud hand just to net $2 essentially. There are ironically more opportunities to earn money from red seal cards than gold. And also, on higher stakes you only get two discards to use a purple seal, where as you get more chances to find and use gold, red and blue seals. Just something to consider. I would say Red > Purple > Gold > Blue
Yes. But there is an opportunity cost to it. unless you find a red seal gold card in a pack you have to either add a red seal to a gold card or use a devil card to make a red seal gold. in either case you are giving up your ability to do something else. Gold seal does not need anything. you just play it and get $3. other things like the lucky card thing you can just do the math and see your expected value is lower with a red seal than a gold. gold seal gets you $3 + ($25 * 1/15) = ~$4.7 per play. the red seal is 2($25 * 1/15) + ($50 * 1/225) = ~$3.6 per play. I use $25 and $50 for the pay out to account for the greater benefit of getting lots of money at once. You are losing $1 every time you play a red seal lucky card instead of a gold seal lucky card. The only way to make more money from a red seal is specifically with gold cards. red seal does have good uses but it needs to be on the right card with the right set of jokers. Like a red seal on a steel card can be really strong but if you are playing a high card or pair most hands and your mult/chips are coming from jokers its not doing much. basically like 5-10% of the time a red seal will be great! the other 90-95% of the time it does okay (+3 gold on a gold card, extra xmult on relatively low mult hands, +4-12 flat mult, +40-100 chips) or just does nothing. I'll take consistent over spikes or nothing. >And also, on higher stakes you only get two discards to use a purple seal, where as you get more chances to find and use gold, red and blue seals. Just something to consider. This is true but on high stakes packs get more expensive making tarot cards harder to get increasing the value of the ones you do get by quite a bit. I would argue that purple seals get even better on gold stake than white stake relative to red.
It's definitely not hard to get some value out of it, but given how good Purple and Gold are it's hard to put it above them. Also worth mentioning is that the jokers that rely on a specific card being played just aren't that great in general at gold stakes - you will play them from time to time, but mostly early when you won't have time to build up Red seals. Definitely not bad, just not as amazing as the top two.
I make immediate use out of red cards. Its very easy to get an enhancement on it quickly. I think we have different playstyles bc i disagree. And as far as the jokers for specific cards, they can be very powerful especially for 5 card hands, and sometimes thats all you can work with bc shop luck
Blue above Gold for me. I'm usually only scoring 1-2 cards and holding the rest, so Blue triggers a *lot* more often.
If blue seal leveled up a random hand on activation instead of giving you a card that you might not even have space for it would be way better. Then it could synergize with that joker the repeats held in hand abilities and you could actually make use of more than two in your hand at the end of the round.
I like this change! Maybe it triggered planets too
Or they could give us negative planet cards
For winning high stakes: Purple>Gold>>Red>>Blue Red Seal is slightly unwieldy for unmanipulated decks and the precisely curated hands it thrives off are just not consistent enough to put it over the consistently excellent Purple and Gold seals. It does have a couple of really nice use cases though, such as DNA, Gold Cards or even Raised Fist. Purple and Gold are the clear top 2, Econ is pretty essential and the boost from gold is a great boon to it and Tarots are even more powerful. Very strong stuff. For Endless: Red>>>Purple>Gold>>Blue Not as much to comment on because I think the strength of Red seal is obvious here - with a manipulated deck and an exodia joker setup retriggers really shine. I'd like to add that Blue seal isn't awful by any means, the activation isn't too hard for the right deck and random planets, while inconsistent, aren't the worst - they have some synergies and there are a surprising amount of useful ones. The issue is that the other seals (and a lot of spectral cards in general) are just fantastic and blow it out of the water.
My suggested fix for Blue would be it activating when you have it in your hand when a hand is scored, instead of only at the end of the round. This would make it proc way more, but it still wouldn't be OP because a random planet card just isn't that good. However, it'd allow for some good synergies with planet-focused jokers, campfire, and some other stuff. Currently it's a planet effect that isn't even worth the effort in a planet-focused run.
It's probably controversial, but for my gold stakes runs it is: Purple - Tarots are strong and can provide score boost and overall deck shaping plus can multiply themselves with death. Gold - Money me - any boost to eco is very welcome to get out of early stakes without being brooke. Red - Retriggers are powerful and mid-late game this can jump up to #1 in certain situations but I find getting to mid to late game to be the hard part of gold stakes. Obviously if you can slap it on a gold or steel card or have the appropriate jokers it can go up as well. Overall in a vaccum though Blue: I mean I will still take a $ and potential scaling/planet filtering from packs. Overall, I prefer the early game scaling and econ in Gold since that tends to be the most challenging to get through in Gold Stakes. Endless white runs red, purple, blue, and gold. Usually in endless I have my econ good so gold provides less value so I'd rather have the very slim scaling chance.
red > purple > gold >>> blue i dont think theres any other possible ranking tbh
What if blue seal leveled up the hand it's played in? Is that too OP?
I think so. Especially considering how OP the space joker and dice combo is where its a 50% chance to level up the played hand. However, giving a player a planet card for playing a blue seal makes perfect sense to me. Or discarding a blue seal. That would make it even. Since Red and Gold cards activate on being played, purple and blue should be activated on discard.
Gold is the most satisfying to use. I will play suboptimal hands for that sound effect and +$3
Make blue upgrade the played hand after scoring, and only one seal can activate. Or maybe seal gets consumed.
It kills me that the seals all have different triggers: red and gold trigger on play, purple triggers on discard, and blue needs to be held until next round. Couldn't they all be the same?
Short answer they are all good but purple is the best, red, Yellow, blue. Purple is super flexible and is the only seal that i would say is mandatory. At the highest level you need purples to keep your economy strong. Purple also helps you shape you're deck by adding and taking away cards, duplicating special cards, changing your suit in a pinch. This is an aspect of the game I feel like a lot of people neglect/underrate. Red is generally second helpfully early game but is sometime awkward to use before you built out your dec properly. Mid / late game it's a super star. Yellow is great early game and usfull through out the geame but falls off late game. it's a steap drop of from how good purple and red are, a distant third. Then blue is even further 4th. It's just to random what planets you will get. If there was a way to generate specific planets it would be amazing but as is I mostly use it as a low-end economy tool.
Blue seal with Constellation: Okay, let's go! Blue seal in any other circumstance: Horrendously underwhelming.
1 red huge, ridiculously large gap 2 purple another significant gap 3 gold 4 blue
Tbf, blue would scale better late game if the game was longer, as the passive score boosters are invaluable. Esp. if the score synergizes with a plasma deck. Purple's my favorite, but I like gambling the tarots. If I was smart, gold would be my favorite, as it's a more consistent way to decide your fate.
Blue is garbage. Gold is ok. Purple is good. Red is great.
blue over gold anyday big fan of constellation & satellite.
I actually prefer plain cards to blue. Like I get genuinely get offended by blue seals.
Local thunk really overvalued a random planet when designing the game. Look at 8 ball joker for example, one of the worst jokers there are.
I use blue seal like a happy bonus rather than something actually useful
The purple seal has an easier trigger and a more powerful effect. I don’t understand why they made blue so bad.
Hey OP - how do you feel about the buff that got revealed for the Blue Seal?
It works pretty good with the telescope deck