Balatro’s Brainstorm Joker card is one of the best in the game—period. It’s a Rare card that doesn’t have the most instinctive unlock requirement, but acquiring and using Brainstorm is a surefire tactic for a successful run.
The Shop and the contents of its Jokers are luck of the draw. More so when you’ve sunk countless hours into the card roguelike entry as I have. Balatro’s 150-plus Jokers can appear to mess with your run, scramble your head and strategies, or provide a godsend. If I see Brainstorm in the Shop, I buy it—ironically, it’s a no-brainer.
Brainstorm can take a while to unlock if you don’t check how to unlock it, so let’s give you a rundown of this jovial Joker in the award-winning Balatro.
How to Get Brainstorm Joker in Baltro
You need to discard a Royal Flush hand in Balatro to automatically unlock Brainstorm.
On one hand, a Royal Flush is the best hand you can get in Poker, making this tricky. On the other hand, RNG or manipulation of your cards can get you a Royal Flush quicker than you think.
To start, a Royal Flush is when you have a 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace in the same suit. Having the five highest-scoring cards in the same suit constitutes a Royal Flush hand. With a traditional base deck of 52 cards, getting this is rather difficult.
Balatro doesn’t play like conventional poker though, so there are a few nifty techniques we can use to obtain one:
- Unlock and use the Checkered Deck as the 52 cards are split into 26 Spades and 26 Hearts—vastly increasing your odds of getting cards in the same suit, which you can add more Face Cards and adjust card point values.
- Add extra cards to your deck: Primarily focusing on adding 10s, Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces. Be mindful of the suit though.
- Turn your 10s, Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces into Wild Cards. Doing so foregoes a card’s natural suit and it can be used as a Spade, Club, Diamond, or Heart.
- Focus on Tarot cards:
- The Lovers turns one card into a Wild Card.
- Strength increases the rank of up to 2 selected cards by 1.
- The Hanged Man destroys two cards (get rid of other cards to give you more chance of pulling the five cards you need).
- Death lets you change one card into another, so you can turn a 2 of Spades into a Queen of Hearts, for example.
- The Star, The Moon, The Sun, and The World turn three cards of your choosing into the applicable suit of the Tarot card.
There are many ways you can tinker with your deck to get a Royal Flush. You should eventually get one, and when you do, select the five cards, check it counts as a Royal Flush, and discard them.
What Does Brainstorm Joker do in Balatro?
The Brainstorm Joker “Copies the ability of leftmost Joker” in Balatro.
Let’s say you have the basic Joker card which gives +4 Mult, and you have Brainstorm to the right of it when you play a hand; the type of hand is registered first, then the value of each card is added, then we get a +4 Mult for the Joker card, and Brainstorm copies the previous Joker and adds another +4.
When all is said and done, you’ve added +8 Mult.
Brainstorm copies the ability of the Joker you have on the left side of your Joker set—if it’s applicable—and gives you the ability twice.
Should You Get Brainstorm in Balatro?
Brainstorm is one of the best Jokers in Balatro, and if you can purchase it, you should do so under any circumstance.
I’m not kidding, Brainstorm can take even the lousiest runs into easy winners. The example I mentioned above doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of its potential. I’ve had runs where Hanging Chad (Retrigger first played card used in scoring 2 additional times) is my left-most Joker, I’ve played a Glass Card, and Brainstorm has allowed me to play the Glass Card four times!
Scaling Jokers combine excellently with high-value +mult and xmult cards. If you can somehow get the Blueprint Joker to copy Brainstorm, you’ve got a ridiculous chain of Jokers all working in tandem with each other to create a game-breaking broken mess of a hand—and we want this!
You can become the boss of Balatro if you get multiple Brainstorms.
Let me know if you were able to unlock Brainstorm with my tips. If so, please comment below with your most broken Balatro Brainstorm barrages.
For more Balatro guides, please check out what the Blank Voucher does.
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