If you're struggling to win, it's probably because you're undervaluing scaling jokers.

We've had a lot of new players join the sub the last couple months, which is awesome. I always enjoy reading people's posts when they get their first win. I've also seen lots of posts from people struggling to get their first win. Almost ever single time, I see the same thing... they don't have any scaling mult jokers. Scaling jokers are the key to winning this game consistently.

As a case in point, one combo that I see lots of new players using is Pareidolia and Smiley Face. This may seem like a good strategy. If you play a five card hand, you get +20 Mult. While +20 Mult is good enough to get you through the early antes, it's not going to carry you across the finish line. For that, you need scaling jokers.

When you start a new game, you have three orders of business that you need to get taken care of. First, you just need to get a joker that will carry you through the first couple antes. Many of the commons, like Gros Michel or Mystic Summit are perfect for this. Then, you need to be looking for a scaling Mult joker so that you can start building it up as soon as possible. Then you need to get and stay above $20-25 for max Hermit/interest value. Once you get those pieces in order, you can start looking for some xMult which will really increase the scaling factor of your scaling +Mult and settle into an endgame strategy.

I included the screenshot from the last game I just played, not because there's anything remarkable about it, but because of how boring of a run it was. I found a Ride the Bus early, and just started playing a bunch of hands (mostly just pairs) without face cards to build it up. Found a Red Card, then started buying and skipping almost every single booster pack. I was able to copy the bus with an Invisible Joker, then picked up Burglar and Ramen in the later antes. By ante 8 boss bline, Red card was at +99 Mult and both Buses were at +43. That's 370 Mult with the x2 from Ramen. Easily enough to beat the boss blind in 3 hands even with my cards being debuffed.

My point in writing this is just to try to advise people who are new to the game that you don't need big hands like flushes, full houses, or 5oak to win. You don't need to turn your entire deck into one suit or have 15 of one rank to win. You just need to get good scaling jokers and let them do the work for you. At low stakes especially, you can win almost every single game doing this. And it makes higher stakes much easier to keep up with. Hope someone finds this helpful.

Note: Scaling chip jokers can be good too, but I find a lot of them are too slow or fall off too quickly. Wee Jokers and Runner can carry a run, but most of the others I find myself replacing by the late game.