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?
The code of Balatro is open source. Unzip your exe file and see that it’s a bunch of lua source files in a trenchcoat.
The code is terribly written, so it’ll probably take a while to find what you’re looking for, but I once read through it check to see if Wheel of Fortune was actually a 1 in 4 chance. It is.
I doubt there is anything checking which deck you’re using. Actual RNG is incredibly far from what our intuition about randomness is and it’s made worse by many popular games having hidden pity systems to prevent streaks of bad luck. Balatro has no pity system. The game doesn’t track if you missed Wheel of Fortune 6 times in a row. The next check is still 1 in 4.
