Never go for four of a kind or straight flushes.

-Tarot cards are your best friend starting out. They help you push towards higher consistency

-Try to stay at least at $25 for max interest, so you can actually afford tarot cards

-Planet Cards are deceptively one of the strongest cards in the game, if you can consistently boost and draw into that poker hand

Get a good source of chips, flat mult, and X mult. You earn $1 of interest for each $5 at the end of each round, capped at $5, so you should aim to be at 25$ for free money. All hand types are very viable, though high card, straight, and three/four/five of a kind are the best. Don't ever force a single strategy (ex. I got a flush synergy, so I should commit to flushes/I really like flushes so I'm going to make every run a flush run), the strongest strategy is always to adapt to what you are given. Most importantly, experiment with the various playstyles and challenge your biases.

Keep playing. No matter what advice you get, you need to build some "muscle memory" to be consistent. For most people, that takes around 20 hours.

Personally, I like Two Pair, Flush, Full House, and Straight in that order. Others will feel differently, and it's up to you to decide.

EDIT: I will add - there are more things that are clickable and draggable than just the cards. Some of them are kind of fun, but don't really do anything. The cards you can re-arrange using the buttons, or you can arrange them manually. Some scoring combos depend on the left-to-right order of the jokers and the cards. This is not explained well, but you will figure it out through gameplay!

Knowing Common Poker Hand Likelihood Percentages actually helps. You are more likely to get a 2 Pair that'll play in a hand than a Four of a Kind, or a Straight Flush for example. This can help you determine where to put Jokers, what kinds of Planet cards to invest in, ect.

As the others above have said, every $5 unspent you get $1 at the end of beating a blind, up to a certain limit. There are Vouchers that will remove the $5/$25 cap that is imposed on the amount of interest you can gain. Most Jokers, Booster Packs, etc are around the $5 mark in the store, so having this maxed out at the end of a round will pay for packs in later shops.

Early game, base and specific multipliers and large amount of chip cards help in about equal measure, but in later antes, the specific multi cards along with any hands you have powered up using Planet cards start pulling away as the most helpful to score really high chips for the later rounds in the higher antes.

Some combos/cards rely on card order, and you can drag cards to rearrange them as the default sort by chips scored will place the Aces and Face cards to the left of everything else. This is especially important when playing the Death Tarot card, as the order matters and you might accidentally create a copy of the wrong card. There are Jokers that either copy other Jokers you have's abilities or re-triggers scored cards you play where the order they are in your hand and which one was played first matters.

There are different combos to try that have the best odds of beating an ante or run. There are too many varieties out there to list, and there's enough RNG to make a build work in one ante, but not in another; but generally, the more times you can trigger card that scores, where the card adds both chips and to the multi for the round, the better scores you can get. Some cards synergy well with boss blinds, such as the 'Must Play 5 Cards' boss blind and having the Joker that makes every card you play score, so you can just focus on making the best hand you can to score, and having any cards that don't fit with the hand still add to the chip total.

Something else about strategy, is that there's nothing stopping you from playing a 2 Pair (so playing 4 cards that score) and adding an additional card that may not score that you don't want to have in your hand anymore. This is an important strategy when playing the '-1 discards' deck, or other times where you have little discards available to you. I call this the 'score and discard' play. Same goes when you have the boss blind debuff cards in your deck. You don't have to waste a discard when you have maybe 1 or 2 cards you want to remove, you can adjust the scoring hand you want to accommodate cycling those cards out for the round.

When a Boss Blind debuffs cards you have in your hand, they still make the Hand type you can score, they just don't add their chip value to your total for that play, but they also don't trigger any Joker or in-hand card abilities (e.g. If you have a Joker that gives you +3 multi when playing Diamonds and you played a hand with a debuffed diamond card in it, it won't score the multi).

Once you are more familiar with the game, you get a general sense of when to skip a blind, and when to not skip a blind. If you have a decent amount of Jokers to add chips/multi with some interesting combos, you might feel better skipping the lower ante (the first 4 ante) blinds. Skipping a blind nets you a specific benefit. If you think you can swing not having a chance to buy/enhance more cards before the next blind you play, go for it. IMO, the benefits worth skipping the most are the ones where all initial packs/cards are free in the next shop, getting $25 when defeating the boss blind, or immediately getting to open a Mega Pack that allows you to draw two Tarot cards are usually worth it. Sometimes skipping blinds has unintended side affects, such as skipping the small and medium blind, and the boss blind of that ante is the one that debuffs all previous cards played that round. If you don't play any cards in that round and skip straight to the boss, it's basically like a normal round!

Originally posted by Kirbz:

Unlike some playing card games where Aces can score either as the highest card or lowest card, Aces don't 'wrap' around to count as 1 by default (I don't have all the Jokers yet, so not sure if there's one that allows this). That means you can't form a straight/straight flush with A, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Small correction, but aces can wrap around for an A 2 3 4 5 straight naturally without need for anything special. They are both considered as the next rank above king and the one below two.

Originally posted by RazzberryMocha:

Originally posted by Kirbz:

Unlike some playing card games where Aces can score either as the highest card or lowest card, Aces don't 'wrap' around to count as 1 by default (I don't have all the Jokers yet, so not sure if there's one that allows this). That means you can't form a straight/straight flush with A, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Small correction, but aces can wrap around for an A 2 3 4 5 straight naturally without need for anything special. They are both considered as the next rank above king and the one below two.

Good to note, I could have sworn I tried this out, but I may have missed having a card needed to make it happen. I'll correct that.

In addition to the advice about good economy management, I have only one tip:
Don't rely on flushes. I don't know what it is about flushes that so many new players are drawn to them like moths to a flame but they're not as relatively powerful as other builds and they aren't as reliable without a ton of deck fixing. Half the negative reviews of this game and half the people whining in the forums are because they got betrayed one too many times by flush builds and never drew that 5th card. Don't be like them. Don't insist on playing flushes.

Imagine that every run, you started with a per round revenue of $15 and the ability to visit 2 shops per round. Would the game be easier? Yes. You'd see a lot more items for sale in the shops and you could afford to buy anything you wanted when you saw it.

So what you want is to have a lot of money and visit as many shops as possible.

Meaning economy is very important (jokers, interest, playing few hands, having gold cards and golden seals) and that skipping blinds hurts your economy but also skips a shop, which is bad. On top of skipping an opportunity to scale jokers.

Keep those principles in mind and your runs will be a lot easier.
Good luck.

-obey the joker. if your joker says "do two pair", just do two pair. not the straight.

-hit the buttons. game has some buttons like "sort hand" "reroll" and "run info". hit it and look how they work.

-avoid missed clicks. no need to always pop deadly "sell" button. keep deselect joker.

-watch how your jokers do. they twitching when triggered, and display it's effect. it might be weaker/stronger than your first thought.

-also watch the boss. you can see the boss before actually fight for, it makes more time for fix your plan.

-get the money, then spend well. as many says economy is important, but it's for use more money to become more stronger. not hoarding and die in rich.

it's sounds less wisely than other posts, but when I see many newbies running into game over at ante 5, with 2 or 3 jokers, and have 60$, I think it's better to somebody post this level of advice.

Originally posted by CMDR Shven:

II don't know what it is about flushes that so many new players are drawn to them like moths to a flame

It's basically because it's really easy to find in ante 1 and really powerful in ante 1, but yeah I don't honestly feel like flush remains good after you've got some jokers under your belt. You can make it more consistent but you spend more time improving it's consistency than chip/mult.

Originally posted by AnonTwo:

Originally posted by CMDR Shven:

II don't know what it is about flushes that so many new players are drawn to them like moths to a flame

It's basically because it's really easy to find in ante 1 and really powerful in ante 1, but yeah I don't honestly feel like flush remains good after you've got some jokers under your belt. You can make it more consistent but you spend more time improving it's consistency than chip/mult.

Exception: Checkered Deck can obviously do flushes a lot more easily. Literally any hand size increase and you're 100% consistent.

Originally posted by Moray Eel:

Never go for four of a kind or straight flushes.

Disclaimer: if you luck into enough deck manipulation, 5 of a kind becomes reasonable.

Further note: regular straights don't really work beyond the early game either, as they're uniquely impossible to guarantee on the deckbuilding level.

Get it refunded if you are still under 2 hours playing time

Originally posted by Dildo STONKS:

Get it refunded if you are still under 2 hours playing time

The best tip you can get is not to listen to this person, who literally thinks high level players are cheaters because they themselves don't know how to play effectively.

Originally posted by AnonTwo:

Originally posted by CMDR Shven:

II don't know what it is about flushes that so many new players are drawn to them like moths to a flame

It's basically because it's really easy to find in ante 1 and really powerful in ante 1, but yeah I don't honestly feel like flush remains good after you've got some jokers under your belt. You can make it more consistent but you spend more time improving it's consistency than chip/mult.

I think the main appeal of flushes is that many newer players may understand the low risk of building towards flush but not realize that it in turn has very low reward to match (Similar to two pair with exception of building towards ancient joker or the unlockable suit stone jokers, where the reward level becomes a bit weaker than 4/5 of a kind). Even then, many assume there is 0 risk in flushes and won't understand why their strategy isn't consistent enough.