Highlights
- Tarots in Balatro are crucial for altering the game, enhancing combos, shifting cards, and even deleting unwanted cards from the deck.
- The Fool creates a copy of existing cards, The Empress enhances cards to Mult cards, and The Hermit doubles money up to $20, but can be a gamble.
- Strength increases the rank of selected cards, Death converts cards into perfect copies, and The Hanged Man destroys up to 2 selected cards.
Tarots have a very specific place in the balance of Balatro, a deck-builder roguelike inspired by Poker. Planets are the boring but effective buffs, while Jokers promise a chance at completely breaking the game, at least until the wrong boss blind breaks the player. Tarots are instead the main way of altering the game, besides adding cards from Standard Card booster packs.
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That said, Tarots have an extremely important function in Balatro. They allow for better and more common combos, shifting the Suit of some cards or turning a handful of them into powerful Mult cards. They can even delete some cards from the deck, either destroying two cards or turning one into a copy of another.
1 The Fool
Creates The Last Tarot Or Planet Card Used
The Fool is a classic of deck-builder games. It’s the kind of card that reinforces the deck by creating a copy of an existing card. In the case of The Fool, this happens either by copying a planet (which levels up a scoring hand twice in a row) or by recreating a deck-enhancing Tarot.
The Fool doesn’t replicate the effect of another Tarot or Planet card, but it creates a copy of that card instead. This means that to use The Fool’s ability, players need free space in their consumable slot. It also means that using The Fool to its full extent consumes not one but two Tarots, triggering some cards’ abilities twice.
2 The Empress
Enhances 2 Selected Cards To Mult Cards
Mult cards are a great way to buff a deck focusing on a specific strategy, hand, or ability. This is because the enhancement given by The Empress amounts to a +4 on the multiplier of a scored card. This is a useful ability for any build, as long as the card gets played.
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+4 Mult might not sound like much, but compared to Chips, multiplier numbers tend to be lower. Mult cards’ usefulness starts going down the longer the game becomes. It’s not rare for the multiplier score to reach 100 or more during the last few rounds of each run. In this condition, a +4 is unlikely to do much good.
3 The Hermit
Doubles Money (Max +$20)
Money is king in Balatro. The not-quite-unique currency of dollars rarely goes above a dozen or two, and one of the best Jokers in the game even adds the ability to go significantly below zero. It’s no surprise, then, if The Hermit is often one of the most useful Tarots in the game.
But playing The Hermit is also a bit of a gamble. There’s no guarantee that the money will actually be useful in the next shop, but that’s not all. Playing a Hermit at the wrong time can grant less money than the card’s cost in the shop.
4 Strength
Increases Rank Of Up To 2 Selected Cards By 1
By itself, increasing the Suit of a given card isn’t very good. But getting as many cards as possible to fit in the same Rank is at the core of many runs’ strategies. If used correctly, Strength can turn all the members of a certain rank, let’s say Kings, into Aces. This greatly increases the chance of getting Pairs, Three of a Kind, and Four of a Kind.
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Strength is one of the best cards for shaping the deck according to one’s strategy, and similar cards exist in pretty much all the best deck builders. Together with Death and The Fool, this is one of the most important Tarots in the game.
5 Death
Converts One Card Into Another
Death is a weird name for this card and would probably make more sense for something like The Hanged Man, which destroys a card. Instead, Death allows the player to turn a useless card into a perfect copy of another. This means the same Rank, and same Suit, but also the same special properties, like Glass or Mult.
Copying a card with Death is certainly a useful way to stock up on enhanced cards, but it can also boost a player’s chance to find matching Ranks and Suits. Flushes and Four of a Kind are made significantly easier by playing a bunch of Death cards first, and reaching the elusive Five of a Kind Flush is almost impossible without them.
6 The Hanged Man
Destroys Up To 2 Selected Cards
The Hanged Man has a similar problem to the Death Tarot. Its name doesn’t make sense. It should be called Hanged Men instead. Besides this slight issue, the Hanged Man is a great card for focusing a deck on what really matters by eliminating a pair of bad, bad cards.
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Players unfamiliar with recent deck-building games might be unfamiliar with this now-common mechanic. Removing cards instinctively sounds bad: players want new powers and strong abilities, not fewer cards. But as the deck grows, the only way to draw the important cards is to remove the less useful ones.
7 The Star, Moon, Sun, And World
Converts Up To 3 Selected Cards Into A Predetermined Suit
Those four cards, The Star, Moon, Sun, and World, have pretty much the same effect. They can switch up to 3 selected cards’ Suits into Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts, and Spades, respectively. While turning three cards at a time is quite slow, especially compared to something like the Spectral Card Sigil, those cards can also be turned mid-game, creating a Flush right before it’s played.
Those cards’ ability is essential to make a Flush-focused strategy viable. Once most of the deck has been turned into just one or two Suits, more complex hands like Straight Flush, Full House Flush, and even Five of a Kind Flush become reliable ways to rack up plenty of points.
8 The Emperor
Creates Up To 2 Random Tarot Cards
The Emperor isn’t a great Tarot card, but it has a good chance of creating one or two. Plus, The Emperor has a chance to create another copy of itself, thus bringing the count of non-Emperor Tarots to three.
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This topic of best Tarot cards contains ten entries, while the game as a whole contains 22 Tarots, plus a hidden one that is worth keeping secret. The Emperor has well over a 50% chance to create at least one of the cards included in this list, meaning it’s probably worth the cost.
9 Justice
Enhances 1 Selected Card Into A Glass Card
Justice is a great little card that’s quite tricky to play correctly. This is because Glass cards are potentially some of the best in the game, boosting the multiplier by x2. Activating this card at the end of a hand means doubling the hand’s base multiplier score, the bonus levels gained by using the right Planet, and any Mult card.
While a Glass card activates before the Jokers, a Mult x2 is still incredibly good. And because multiplications don’t change their behavior when their order is inverted, the Jokers that multiply the Mults score do stack with this. But don’t catch the Glass bug! Playing Justice too much is dangerous, as Glass cards have a 25% chance of breaking once used.
10 The Hierophant
Enhances 2 Selected Cards To Bonus Cards
The Hierophant isn’t quite as good as Justice, but it’s almost there. And in some cases, although rarely, Bonus cards can lead to a better score than Glass cards. Bonus cards, which are given by The Hierophant, boost the card’s value by 30 Chips, while Glass works on the multiplier.
Boosting the multiplier value is usually better than adding to the Chips, but only because it’s usually the lower of the two. At the end of the day, a hand’s score is equal to chips x multiplier. Therefore, the best move is to always boost the lower number by as much as possible. Who would have guessed that this roguelike Poker could be such a number-driven game? Besides Poker players, that is…
Balatro
- Released
- February 20, 2024
- Developer(s)
- LocalThunk
- Genre(s)
- Strategy , Digital Card Game , Roguelike
