Flush stacks poorly via planet cards and later on with low discards any 5 card hand is a stretch, you also touched on the boss issue

Flush can work, heck Jupiter is STILL my top planet, and it is easy mode, and yes can work for many runs, and can be 'easy' but not the best

Flushes are easy to make, but don't scale as well as other 5-card hands like straights and flush fives. So while they're relatively reliable, they're generally not going to be as powerful as other hands.

Using 5 cards for each hand also has its own downsides, like less ability to use blue seals, gold cards, and steel cards. Steel cards in particular can be very powerful in scaling your score.

And then hands like high card and pair are going to be even easier to make than flushes, in addition to having more cards held in hand.

Originally posted by MrEntity:

They inherently score pretty high

Well no, they inherently score pretty low and scale very bad, but are very easy to build and draw. There's nothing strictly wrong with building flushes if you roll strong flush synergies in the shop, but more commonly you would pivot out of flushes mid to late to secure a win. Ancient is pretty much a default win, Bloodstone trolls you in the worst moments and anything else scores higher with anything but flushes.

That said though, gold stake is a relatively low bar that lets you get by with mostly anything.

Originally posted by ulia:

Originally posted by MrEntity:

They inherently score pretty high

Well no, they inherently score pretty low and scale very bad, but are very easy to build and draw. There's nothing strictly wrong with building flushes if you roll strong flush synergies in the shop, but more commonly you would pivot out of flushes mid to late to secure a win. Ancient is pretty much a default win, Bloodstone trolls you in the worst moments and anything else scores higher with anything but flushes.

That said though, gold stake is a relatively low bar that lets you get by with mostly anything.

By "inherently score pretty high" I mean A) the base chips and multiplier are higher than most other things that aren't ridiculous to pull for, and B) you also get to score 5 cards.
I've almost never started a run with even the vaguest skew towards flushes that didn't easily get past ante 8. At least not since I started to actually understand the game.

I've tried many times to make pairs or 3 of a kind work, and those always seem to fizzle out due to their weak inherent chips and multipliers. I'm sure they're doable, but flushes and straights always seem like the easy solution.

Another major negative of flushes is significant anti-synergy with some of the strongest jokers:

- Arrowhead gives a massive +250 chips, but doesn't work alongside Ancient 3/4ths of the time
- You can mitigate this with Smeared but with the obvious downside of having one less scoring jokers
- Blackboard is difficult to trigger
- Card Sharp is usable, but it's very possible to miss drawing in to a second flush on gold stake
- Stone Joker destroys your flush draws
- Seeing Double is worthless
- Duo/Trio/Family is worthless
- Stuntman kills your flush draws

Notably most of these are broad scope and game winning xmult or high chip jokers, but are all dead when forcing flushes.

By all means enjoy the game with flushes if you're having a good time doing it, but they really aren't strong, hardly scale and lock you out of loads of alternative pivot options that score significantly higher.

Originally posted by MrEntity:

I've tried many times to make pairs or 3 of a kind work, and those always seem to fizzle out due to their weak inherent chips and multipliers. I'm sure they're doable, but flushes and straights always seem like the easy solution.

Supernova/Fortune Teller/Flash Card/Half Joker + all the xmult and chips you can find. Card Sharp/Blackboard/Seeing Double are commons that work for high cards, pairs and triples. Even Hologram is really strong and adding cards doesn't particularly hurt high card/pair unless you're specifically playing Baron.

If you are playing at low-mid stakes, say blue and lower, you should be able to pull a win once in a while no matter what hand you pick. Including Flush, of course.

If you are a bit more selective about what hand you play, like no straight flush or flush house, you should always win with good play. At low-mid stakes that is.

If your goal is to play only flushes in all runs (not counting hands played used as a discard), then you can still win at any stake. But your win rate will suffer a bit, for never adapting to the situation or the opportunities you'll get.

In the same way, at any stake, if your goal is to play only high card, you'll have big problems. High card does not score high enough at ante 1-2, typically. So you'll either lose on the spot or damage your economy so much that the run is ruined, most likely. That does not mean high card is bad. It means that you should start by playing Flushes/straights, for example, and switch to high card as soon as it won't hurt you or if it simply becomes the best option.

The main perk of playing high card or pair is that it makes a lot of things more valuable. For jokers, a simple example is Stuntman. Not good when playing 5 card hands including Flush, S tier -near guaranteed win- when playing high card or pair. Same for Green joker. Not good when you need your discards, fantastic when you don't need any. Blackboard, same thing. It also makes some other things more powerful. Blue seals, gold cards, steel cards.

In summary, you can win at any stake playing Flushes. Truth be told, Flushes are fantastic at the start of a run, always. Then, around ante 2 or 3, you have 2 options. 1) Force Flushes until the end of the run, to sometimes get a win. 2) Start with flushes, see what happens, adapt and sometimes win. The overall win rate will be better with 2) than with 1) after you have enough practice with 2).

Also, always forcing Flushes, on top of hurting the win rate, will become boring sooner or later. When a specific joker is never good, the 47th time you see it at the shop, it's boring, if not annoying.

They are great for the early antes while you're fleshing out your build, they have poor scaling and their synergies is not that great.

At the higher stakes, once you get to purple and above, you wanna start looking for the more powerful hands and synergies.

Flushes are very strong early on at lower stakes especially with checkered deck, but it's hard to utilize them at higher stakes and with other decks.

For the first Ante, flush/full house is definitely the easiest way to consistently beat small blind (300+) with 1 hand and pretty comfortably beating 2nd blind and first boss with 2 hands each which should always be the minimum goal.

After Ante 1 I pretty much stray away immeadiatly from those. But for anyone really struggling with beating white stake for the first time/times it's not bad at all to try to build for a flush or full house deck.

The biggest "problem" with them is playing 5 cards which leaves less room in hand for steel, gold and blue seal. And ofc. harder to draw using up discards, so any five card hand you'd want it strong enough to win every blind with one hand played, otherwise you might have to waste hands(money) on high card hands to draw the second flush to beat a blind.

So when you really want to swing for the moon, flush house, five of a kind, flush five are WAAAY stronger hands if you get a good start to alter the deck and will scale much faster with just a few planets. In a way that negates the downside of not being able to "hold many cards" depending on your jokers.

I pivoted to Two-Pair at higher difficulties 'cause of the Discard issue, 2Pair is very likely to show up even without discards and has some good jokers tied to it that you can rank up (Spare trousers & Square)