Common jokers cost $4-6 and show up constantly. Easy to ignore, but the r/balatro community disagrees. A thread asking for favorite common combos pulled 133 comments, and the answers kept coming back to the same handful of pairings. Here are seven that stood out.
1. Square Joker + Green Joker
546 upvotes and multiple comments landed on this pair. The pitch from u/swifty_ark_server: "It isn't particularly fun, or flashy, but boy does it get the job done in Gold Stake."
Square Joker gains +4 Chips every time you play exactly 4 cards. Green Joker gains +1 Mult every hand you play (loses 1 per discard). Together they snowball chips and mult at the same time without asking you to build around any specific hand type.
How to play it. Play 4-card hands: Two Pair, Four of a Kind, or just drop four cards as a High Card if needed. Avoid discarding when possible so Green Joker keeps climbing. By Ante 3, Square Joker sits around +60 Chips and Green Joker around +8 Mult, enough to clear most blinds without help.
2. Egg + Swashbuckler
188 upvotes. u/mar21182 laid it out: "If you get an egg early and just hold onto it, you can get Swashbuckler up near 100 mult."
Egg gains $3 sell value every round. Swashbuckler adds all your other jokers' sell values as flat mult. After 10 rounds the Egg alone is feeding +30 Mult through Swashbuckler. And since Egg has a high sell value, Temperance (a tarot card that gives money equal to your joker sell values, capped at $50) becomes huge.
How to play it. Buy Egg as early as possible and never sell it. Pick up Swashbuckler whenever it appears. The longer you hold Egg, the harder Swashbuckler hits. If you find a second Egg, even better.
3. Runner + Ride the Bus
101 upvotes. u/NoPieceGB: "Playing Straights without Face cards opens up lots of fun avenues and it scales easily, don't have to worry about The Plant."
Runner gains +15 Chips per straight played. Ride the Bus gains +1 Mult for every consecutive hand without scoring a face card. Build straights from number cards (A-2-3-4-5 through 6-7-8-9-10) and both jokers scale at the same time. Bonus: The Plant blind (which turns all face cards face-down) does not bother you at all.
How to play it. Strip face cards from your deck when you can. Focus on number-card straights. Ride the Bus mult resets to zero the moment you score a face card, so keep them out of your played hands entirely. On Abandoned Deck (no face cards at all), this combo is practically free Gold Stake.
4. Hanging Chad + Everything
31 upvotes, but Hanging Chad appeared in at least a dozen different comments with different partners. The community treats it as a universal connector.
Hanging Chad retriggers the first scored card 2 extra times. Whatever that card does, it happens three times. Pair it with:
- Business Card. Face cards have 1 in 2 chance to pay $2 when scored. Three triggers means three coin flips on the first face card.
- Golden Ticket. Gold cards pay $4 per trigger. Three triggers on a Gold card is $12 from one card.
- Scholar. Aces give +20 Chips and +4 Mult. Retrigger an Ace and you get +60 Chips, +12 Mult from a single card.
How to play it. Put the card you want retriggered first in your hand (leftmost position). Order matters.
5. Scholar + Aces
38 upvotes. u/LuxamolLane: "Get chips, get mult, you just need planets and x mult but everything's in Scholar."
Scholar gives +20 Chips and +4 Mult every time an Ace scores. Unlike most common jokers that give you one or the other, Scholar gives both. Aces are also the easiest rank to duplicate: the Spectral card Familiar specifically creates Aces, unlike face-card spectrals that split across three ranks.
How to play it. Convert cards to Aces whenever you can. Play hands that score multiple Aces: Four of a Kind (Aces) or Flush with several Aces in it. Add Glass cards for a X2 on top of the flat mult Scholar provides.
6. Odd Todd + Even Steven
22 upvotes. u/Calmdat: "do work together on flush and straight builds, carries you through the first couple antes without breaking much of a sweat."
Odd Todd gives +31 Chips per odd number card scored (A, 3, 5, 7, 9). Even Steven gives +4 Mult per even number card scored (2, 4, 6, 8, 10). Together they cover every number rank in the deck. Play any hand and something is getting a bonus.
How to play it. Works with anything, but Flush and Straight builds get the most out of it since you score all five cards. No deck manipulation needed. Buy both when you see them and play normally.
7. Delayed Gratification + Green Joker
10 upvotes but a clean mechanical fit. Both jokers punish discarding and reward not discarding.
Delayed Gratification gives $2 per unused discard at the end of the round. Green Joker loses 1 Mult per discard. Running both means you have a strong reason to never touch the discard button: you keep your mult growing and collect bonus cash on top.
How to play it. Pair with hand types that do not need much hand-fixing: Pairs, High Card, or pre-built Flushes. The money from Delayed Gratification helps you buy more jokers faster, and Green Joker's mult stays high because you never spend it down.
Combos sourced from this r/balatro thread (156 upvotes, 133 comments). Card data and strategy context added by Balatro HQ.