Your strategy should be playing ace pairs with the rest of your hand being as many kings as possible. I focused on
- increasing my number of Aces and getting mult, gold seal, and/or bonus on them. In retrospec, I think that lucky Aces would be really good :)
- Increasing number of Kings and turning them steel
- looking to get red seals on the Kings
- boosting Pair with the Mercury planet card
- Destroying low number cards to thin the deck
- Don't be afraid to play a King Pair if the only thing you're drawing is Kings. With enough Kings in hand, any pair can win most blinds until much later in the game.
Ante 1
Skip first two blinds of ante 1 for a rare joker and $25 after beating the first boss- The Club. You will immediaterly draw a 4 of a kind with Jack which will win even with one Jack being debuffed.
The rare joker in the shop will be Baron and the other joker will be Scholar. Take the Baron and either take the Scholar, or open the Buffoon pack and take Riff-Raff, which will give you both Scholar and Jolly Joker on the Ante 2 small blind.
Ante 2
For the ante 2 small blind play the drawn straight (Q, J, 10, 9, 8) which will be boosted by the 2 held kings with Baron. Then play the drawn Ace pair.
For ante 2 Big blind, Riff-Raff will give you Hallucination which will help through the next few antes with the stretegy below. It will also give you Even Steven, which you can hold for the blind, but will want to sell to obtain Hanging Chad in the shop (Or sell Riff-Raff)
Ante 3
- Holographic Swashbuckler shows up after the small blind which can provide some good flat mult for a good few antes
- Constellation shows up after the big blind as well. I'd recommend selling Jolly Joker for this. Make sure to grab any planet cards/packs you see if you do get this joker.
Ante 4
- Steel Joker in the shop. I'd recommend selling Hallucination for it
Ante 5
- The Plant shows up for the boss blind, but the score requirement can be reached by playing any Pairs, especially Ace pairs.
- Baseball Card shows up after the small blind which could be a nice addition since you may have 2 uncommon jokers (I didn't take Baseball Card to be clear, but I considered it)
Ante 6
- I recommend taking the small blind skip for the spectral pack, especially if you're playing on red stake difficulty of higher. This pack gives you a Cryptid card and a Steel King to duplicate twice!
Ante 8
- Maga Spectral Pack in shop after big blind which contains another Cryptid which you can use to duplicate a Steel King (If you draw one, I did) Unfortunately, the other 3 spectral cards aren't helpful here, so you probably just want to skip taking a second one.
Problems I ran into:
- Plant will show up in ante 5 but you can brute force the score requirement with just playing pairs, assuming that you've been leveling up pair. Honestly, I really appreciated The Plant showing up so early in the run while my deck still had more flexibility.
- Not having enough Aces because I had focused a bit too much on making Kings. Make sure to do a bit of both :)
