My Plasma Deck is cursed. Every time I try to play it, the game’s RNG dunks on me every chance it gets. I’ll be starved for either chips or mult with no way out. I can’t even win White Stake. Got Bootstrap? My arcana packs will never have Temperance. Got Photograph? I’ll never see Hanging Chad and I probably won’t even have any face cards in my standard packs. Lucky cards almost never trigger. Wheel of Fortune is a 95% “Nope!”, of course.
This isn’t a problem if I play Red Deck or Painted Deck. Chance-based cards actually work sometimes, and lucky cards have a knack for hitting +20 mult if I would die without it.
I think the game’s RNG does calculations for how much a certain effect would help your current run, and puts a thumb on the scale one way or another. The game attempts to keep each run viable but not brokenly good. I think Plasma Deck and maybe Ghost Deck result in the game thinking I’m always overpowered and due for some bad luck, permanently.
I have to be careful when considering this, but I’m trying to rule out confirmation bias. Is there any such mechanic mentioned in LocalThunk’s posts or the game’s LUA scripts? Am I just on tilt and making up superstitions?
It’s a common thing with every game that has a significant element of random chance: Humans are just bad at understanding probabilities.
I think a lot of game design philosophy actually suggest that you should fudge probabilities to “feel” right. Gsmes like Fire Emblem and (I think) xcom actually lie about the probabilities and skew them to the extremes because that’s just how people “feel” is correct.
Anyway, Balatro doesn’t do any of that. The cards you are offered are entirely deterministic based on the seed, and don’t depend on what cards you buy or skip. In each ante, rewards are in a specific order which isn’t changed by anything in game.
I think the only luck manipulation it does is, if you are playing on gold stake, it will reroll the seed until the first legendary Joker is one you don’t have a gold seal on.