Balatro: The best way to get Completionist++

Completionist++ is the last achievement you should be getting. It requires getting a gold sticker on all 150 jokers.

A joker gets a gold sticker when you beat ante 8 on gold stake with it in your possession. In order to count, the joker has to be in your inventory when you beat the ante 8 boss. If a joker is debuffed (by running out of time due to a Perishable sticker), it will still count.

You can see the stickers that your jokers have in your collection. Note that the orange and gold stickers look pretty similar, so you may need to hover over the joker to be sure which one you have.

Yes, that means you need to have beaten runs with every joker in your inventory at gold stake. Even the ones that are bad or useless at the end of the game, like Seance and Sixth Sense. Even the ones that disappear on their own, like Popcorn and Gros Michel.

In the Stats page (inside the Options menu), there is a section labelled “Joker Stickers”. This shows your progress out of 1200.

This doesn’t give you the number of jokers that you still need gold stickers on, though – each of the 8 stakes is counted individually (8 stakes X 150 jokers = 1200) rather than only counting gold stickers. So a joker that you have an orange sticker for will count for 7 in that total, as orange stake is the 7th highest stake.

In order to figure out the number of jokers you have gold stickers on, you need to actually go into your Collection and look at all of the jokers to see which ones have gold stickers. It’s a pain to look them up in the collection, so the best way to track which jokers you still need gold stickers on is to go through the collection and make a list yourself.

The fastest way to get gold stickers is to simply have more jokers. That might sound obvious, but there is a big advantage to having a lot of jokers: You need gold stickers on bad jokers, and it’s easier to hold on to a bad joker for the entire run if you have more jokers.

The deck that will have the most jokers on average is the Anaglyph deck. This deck gives you a double tag after each boss fight.

The reason that the Anaglyph deck is better than, for example, the Black deck, is the existence of the Negative Tag. The Negative Tag makes the next base edition joker in the shop become Negative and free. Negative jokers don’t take up a joker slot, which makes them free to pick up and hold on to until the end of the run.

On top of that, the Anaglyph deck is just good. Maybe not the best deck, but it’s one of the best for sure. Double tags are incredibly powerful and versatile.

This strategy won’t have the highest win rate – saving as many of your double tags as possible for negative jokers means you won’t be spending as many on money or other useful tags, so you’ll lose a bit more often. Other decks like the Checkered deck or Plasma deck are likely to have higher win rates for you. The reason this strategy is the best is because it gives you the most jokers possible, and that’s the best way to get new gold stickers. Getting 10+ jokers is somewhat common in a run, so while you won’t win as often you’ll get more gold stickers with each winning run.

In an ideal world, you want to hold on to as many double tags as possible and only ever use them on Negative tags. This won’t always be possible – sometimes you’ll need to use double tags on something else in order to win the run.

Remember – you can’t get gold stickers unless you win the run. Winning the run is more important than getting the maximum possible negative jokers each run.

I’m not going to give a step-by-step guide on how to win the run – if you’re going for Completionist++, you should know enough about how to build a run. But here’s some advice on using your double tags and making this run as successful that may not be obvious:

When to skip blinds

• On ante 1, skip the small blind if it has a high-value tag. Investment ($25 after beating the boss), Holographic (next base edition joker in the shop is free and has holographic edition [+10 mult]), and Coupon (next shop has free items) are all worth skipping the small blind for. Other blinds (like the ante 1 big blind, ante 2 small blind, etc.) might be worth skipping for those same tags, but that first blind is the best time to skip. If you want to maximize your chances of winning, you could even restart until the first tag is one of these.
• Early on (antes 2-5 or so), it may be worth cashing in double tags for Economy tags (double your money, up to $40) to make the run much easier. Earlier is better – getting an extra $50 in ante 2 makes more of a difference than $200 in ante 7.
• If you get good flat mult (Ride the Bus, Green Joker, Supernova, etc.) then cashing in double tags for Polychrome jokers (1.5x mult) can be worth it.
• Some other tags have powerful use cases. Juggle tags (+3 hand size for the next round) can help with a tough ante 8 boss (just be sure you skip directly to the boss, so you don’t use it up on the big blind). Orbital (+3 levels to a random poker hand) can give you a big boost in power – just make sure you can make that hand easily. Handy (+$1 per hand played this run) and Garbage (+$1 per unused discard this run) can give a significant amount of money, though usually not as much as Economy.

If you have a build that doesn’t need hand size, be sure to check Spectral packs for Ectoplasm. That will open up more slots for jokers. If you see a Spectral tag late in the run, it may be worth spending double tags on that. Ectoplasm doesn’t always show up, but can still be very effective – if all of your jokers are scoring enough points for you to win, then turning one of them negative gives you a free inventory slot to include any random junk joker for a free gold sticker.

Just remember the hand size penalty! The first Ectoplasm gives you -1 hand size, and the second one -2 hand size. While minus hand size might not matter much for a High Card build, it can still cause you to lose if you run into the Psychic (requires 5 cards to be played) and your hand size is lower than 5. If you ever have a hand size of 0, you will lose.

If you’re reliant on hands more complicated than Pair (for example, you’re using Two Pair to scale the Spare Trousers), minus hand size can cause you to lose the run. As I said before, winning the run is the most important thing – don’t imperil the run on a whim!

If you get to ante 8 and none of the jokers you have are ones you need gold stickers for… go get one! Even though winning is the most important thing, the goal is to get gold stickers – if none of the jokers you currently have need gold stickers, then winning the run won’t give you any progress! But don’t worry about this until ante 8 – there’s always time to pick up Negatives you still need gold stickers for before then.

Making the most of your negatives

• You almost always want to take Negative tags when you see them. Negative tags are relatively rare, so you may not see one later in the run. Grab the negative jokers while you can.
• If a negative joker is a rental and isn’t useful to the run, check if you have a gold sticker on it already. Just because it’s negative doesn’t mean you need to pick it up if it’s going to hurt the run.
• If you get useful negatives, that might free up some space to sell some of your non-negative jokers and pick up jokers that you need gold stickers on. Once you get to ante 8, judge your scoring to see if you can see any non-negatives you already have gold stickers on and pick up some extra gold stickers.

Useful vouchers

• Hieroglyph/Petroglyph each move you back 1 ante, giving you extra time to build up and hopefully find a Negative tag to spend your double tags on. Keep the -1 hand and -1 discard penalty in mind, as they can have a significant negative impact on your ability to win.
• Antimatter gives +1 joker slot, though it requires getting the Blank voucher and then getting lucky that Antimatter shows up. It’s worth spending $10 on the Blank voucher for the chance at an extra joker slot, except on ante 8 of course.
• Vouchers that make it easier to find good jokers or even more negatives in the shop, like Reroll Surplus and Overstock, are almost always worth purchasing. These are very valuable jokers on the runs when you have a strong build going into ante 8 and want to reroll the shop a bunch to try and find jokers you need gold stickers on.

Rerolling

Rerolling is something you’ll end up doing a lot in ante 8. This is your last chance to spent your money to try and maximize your gold stickers (or to maximize your odds of winning the run, in some cases). Unless you have a joker that scales off of money like Bootstraps or Bull, you’ll want to spend all of your money before the ante 8 boss.

The cost of rerolling is $5 + $1 for each previous reroll in this shop. Because the cost increases each time you reroll, you want to spread out your rerolls, rather than doing all of them in a single shop.

In general, you’ll want to spend roughly 1/(X + 1) of your money, where X is the number of shops you have left to visit in the run. So in the shop after the ante 7 boss, you have 2 more shops to come. That means you should spend around 1/3 of your money on this shop, 1/2 of your remaining money after beating the ante 8 small blind, and all of your money after beating the big blind.

The math changes some depending on your income, any hermit/temperance cards that show up, and blinds you may skip. Don’t get too caught up in it, though, in the end it’s a pretty small benefit to try and maximize your rerolls. Just focus on spreading them out a bit.

Once you only need a couple more gold stickers, the best strategy will shift. Spamming negative jokers is really effective at getting stickers on lots of common jokers, but it won’t help you get stickers on Legendary jokers for example.

• Negative tags become a lot less important when you have only a couple jokers left to get – the chances of getting negatives that are either good or still need a gold sticker isn’t super high. Free negatives are still good, but they’re better when you need more gold stickers. You can focus more on getting money or free polychromes with your tags instead. If you have a better build, it’s easier to score enough to win with only 4 jokers, leaving open an inventory slot for a joker you need a gold sticker on.
• You’ll want to make a list of all the jokers you still need gold stickers for. I wouldn’t do this until you’re getting somewhat close to the end – I did it at around 20 gold stickers remaining. This will make it a lot easier to know which jokers to buy/sell at the end of a winning run, since finding gold-less jokers in the collection is a pain.
• Uncommon and Rare tags become more valuable if you mostly or only need gold stickers on jokers of those rarities. Note the rarities of the jokers you need, and if you have a lot of uncommon/rare jokers you can use double tags to force jokers of the needed rarity.
• Charm tags (free Mega Arcana pack) and to a lesser extent Ethereal tags (free Spectral pack) can help you find Legendary jokers. On gold stake, the first legendary joker of each run is guaranteed to be one you don’t have a gold sticker on.
• If all else fails Buffoon tags can give you a bunch of rolls at jokers you might still need a gold sticker on. If you’re really lucky, negatives can show up in these as well.

There will be failures. Gold stake isn’t free, there will be losses. Sometimes you won’t get any gold stickers because you get unlucky. Sometimes the Negative tag just doesn’t show up at all. Sometimes none of your Spectral packs have Ectoplasm. That will happen.