Summary
As you can expect from a game categorized as a roguelike,Balatrois very difficult. Many beginning players find the game hard enough on the default settings, but the pain doesn’t stop there. Balatro has many ways to adjust its difficulty, such as its unlockable decks and challenges, but the biggest bump in difficulty by far comes from the game’s eight stake modes.
Stakes are, like in poker, ways to increase the amount of money necessary to win the game. But in Balatro, each stake stacks its own unique modifier on top of the last, making each successive difficulty spike harder and harder. For those who are curious over what to expect in the coming modes, here are all eight stakes ranked.
8White Stake
The white stake is the base standard difficulty that is available from the very beginning of Balatro. It can be played with any deck, and it can be assumed that this is the base stake difficulty applied to challenge modes, concerning hand and discard count or other Balatro factors.
Though heavy RNG is still present in this normal difficulty mode, it is still very likely for players to get far on this mode and beat ante 8 even with bad luck, as long as theyknow the basics of the gameinside and out.
7Red Stake
The red stake difficulty is exactly like the white stake difficulty but with one added characteristic: the small blind no longer provides a cash reward upon victory. This applies to all antes in the run and it cannot ever be removed by any joker or voucher effects.
This doesn’t mean that the small blind is always worth skipping or that you can never acquire money, however. You still receive interest and rewards for unplayed hands, and you can still use econ jokers to boost your cash inflow.
6Green Stake
The green stake is where Balatro sees its first real difficulty spike. Here, each ante will have its blind score requirements scale faster than previous stake modes. That means that you will need to build stronger decks faster and earlier than before.
Keep in mind that each stake stacks with the previous one, which means that you will still be dealing with the red stake modifier from before on top of the faster-rising antes. Another thing to make note of is that all rising ante scores do not apply to ante 1; the boss blind for this ante will still always be 600, giving you a chance to prepare for the rising scores later on.
5Black Stake
Black stake is where Balatro starts to introduce an entirely new mechanic that hasn’t been seen before, and now, the shop can sell jokers that come with an eternal sticker on them. This means that once purchased, the eternal Joker card can never be destroyed and can never be sold, so once you buy it, you own it for life.
Whilst Balatro is a game that’s usually about dealing with what the game hands you and adapting or pivoting as necessary, the black stake difficulty twists that on its head a little bit. Now you have to really focus on building your deck around a specific joker card or two, so make sure you buy a joker card that you know can carry you to at least ante 8.
4Blue Stake
Once you earn your first win with thePlasma Deck, you will unlock the blue stake mode which throws a wrench in your plans by reducing your discard attempts by one. This can be a challenge for builds built around four or five-card plays like flushes or full houses, as these poker hands typically require having as many discards as possible to search for all the valid card types.
For some players, the blue stake modifier won’t be as bad as previous ones. Powerful Balatro builds often don’t need many discards to survive, and at this point, the raised antes from green stake will be more of a problem.
3Purple Stake
Now the game is starting to get truly hard, and with the purple stake unlocked and selected, the antes have been raised yet again. This is indeed a repeat of the Green Stake rules, but much harder and faster this time, so staying alive just past ante 2 will be a lot tougher, even when playing on the easy decks like the blue deck or plasma deck.
Now is the time to learn how to reallygrind out those high scores. This will involve being extremely selective with when you buy packs or when to skip blinds.
2Orange Stake
For many Balatro players, this is the biggest difficulty spike of all the stakes, as Orange Stake now introduces an all-new joker card type: perishable jokers. Unlike eternal jokers, perishable jokers will expire after 5 rounds, even if their effect was not triggered.
This forces players to stay on their toes and always be on the lookout for newer joker cards. Keep in mind that perishable jokers do not disappear from your inventory once they expire; they can be sold for some cash, which can come in handy during early antes for building interest.
1Gold Stake
The final stake in Balatro is the infamous gold stake, and it introduces yet another joker card variant: the rental jokers. These jokers cost money to own each round and are designed to drain your wallet dry.
Managing your money is one of the most important aspects of getting good in Balatro, and gold stake will test your econ skills to the limit. If you can survive at least eight antes on this mode, you can confidently consider yourself a Balatro pro; just remember that the previous stake difficulty modifiers apply here too!
