Balatro Trophy Guide

You will essentially unlock the “Ante Up!” trophy for completing half of a run for the first time. Considering a run contains 8 Ante Levels and you unlock the trophy at Ante Level 4, you’ll unavoidably receive it when working on your first win for Heads Up.

As explained above, the game consists of beating the Small Blind, the Big Blind, and then the Boss Blind in an Ante to increase the Ante by 1.

There are 8 Ante Levels in a run, so you will unlock the “Ante Upper!” trophy after beating the Boss Blind in Ante 7 of a run for the first time.

If you proceed to beat the final three Blinds in Ante 8, you’ll receive the Heads Up trophy.

To unlock the “Heads Up” trophy, you basically need to beat the game for the first time. You do this by beating the Boss Blind 8 times without losing a Blind once.

This will take a lot of practice, but it’ll only be the first of many runs you’ll complete in pursuit of the Balatro Platinum Trophy.

After you beat the game on White Stake Difficulty (default) you will unlock Red Stake Difficulty, which applies the following effect to your runs:

• On this difficulty, you receive no reward money on the Small Blind.

This isn’t too bad, as you can mostly just use this as an opportunity to start skipping the Small Blinds and getting used to the skip tags and what they can do for you.

In that sense, you’re not being asked to do too much more than to just beat the game a second time. I’ll admit that’s not such a small feat in itself, though.

After you beat the game on Red Stake Difficulty (Low Stakes) and the Green Stake Difficulty you unlock after that, you will unlock Black Stake Difficulty, which applies the following effects to your runs:

• Red Stake | On this difficulty, you receive no reward money on the Small Blind.
• Green Stake | On this difficulty, the Red Stake’s effects are active and the score required for each blind goes up more per Ante.
• Black Stake | On this difficulty, the effects of all previous difficulties are active and you can find Eternal Jokers in the shop, these cannot be sold or destroyed and so are permanently applied to your run.

Things will really start to heat up now, and you’ll start to really feel a significant difference from the base game. All you can do is keep testing your luck, run after run. There’s a lot more work ahead, yet.

If Heads Up, Low Stakes, and Mid Stakes were challenging for you, then you’re really going to hate what the High Stakes Trophy has in store for you.

Not only will you need to beat the game again on Blue, Purple, and Orange Stake Difficulty, but the final challenge lies in Gold Stake Difficulty. Here are all of the effects you’ll be contending with on your final run:

1. Red Stake | On this difficulty, you receive no reward money on the Small Blind.
2. Green Stake | On this difficulty, the Red Stake’s effects are active and the score required for each blind goes up more per Ante.
3. Black Stake | On this difficulty, the effects of all previous difficulties are active and you can find Eternal Jokers in the shop, these cannot be sold or destroyed and so are permanently applied to your run.
4. Blue Stake | On this difficulty, the effects of all previous difficulties are active and you have one less discard.
5. Purple Stake | On this difficulty, the effects of all previous difficulties are active and the score required for each blind goes up even more per Ante.
6. Orange Stake | On this difficulty, the effects of all previous difficulties are active and the price for all Booster Packs goes up by $1 each time the Ante increases.
7. Gold Stake | On this difficulty, the effects of all previous difficulties are active and your hand size is decreased by 1.

Good luck. You’ll need it.

I wish I could say it was the last challenge that Balatro has in store, but this isn’t even the last time you’ll have to beat Gold Stake Difficulty. Far from it…

The Rule Bender Trophy is all yours as soon as you complete any of the 20 Challenge Mode runs for the first time. See [/tr]Rule Breaker[/tr].

To unlock the intimidating Rule Breaker Trophy, you need to beat all 20 runs in Challenge Mode, which doesn’t unlock until you’ve beat 5 regular runs with 5 unique decks. Since beating a stake difficulty with a deck locks you into using it for the next level of difficulty, you will essentially need to start from white stake difficulty with 5 unique decks.

Once that significant challenge is in your rear-view mirror, you’ve got a much more significant challenge on the horizon; beating all 20 challenges.

To help you, I’ve broken down each challenge in the table below. It provides useful information regarding the rules and banned cards of each challenge and also the cards you’ll be made to use.

In your quest to Discover 100% of the cards in the Collection for the Completionist Trophy, you will inevitably Discover a Legendary Joker cards at some point.

Whether you do that as a purchase directly within the store, as a tag item for skipping a blind, or as a result of a Tarot Card like the “Soul” Tarot Card is irrelevant; when you receive a Legendary Joker for the first time via any means, the Legendary trophy will unlock.

You will receive the Astronomy trophy once you’ve added every single Planet Card to your collection.

There are 12 Planet Cards to find and collect in Balatro. The first 9 are available from the beginning of the game, and you’ll just need to find them in a run:

The remaining three cards power up rare hands that are really difficult to play because they require you to modify your deck in some way.

Here’s how you achieve those hands:

• Five of a Kind — Five cards in a single hand which are of the same rank; i.e. ♦4, ♥4, ♦4, ♣4, ♠4
• Flush House — Basically a Full House, but all cards must be the same suit; i.e. ♦4, ♦4, ♦4, ♦10, ♦10
• Flush Five — Five of a kind, but also the same suit; i.e. ♦4, ♦4, ♦4, ♦4, ♦4

The “Cartomancy” trophy is one of the easier Card Collection Trophies to acquire. This is because all 22 Tarot cards are present in any round from the start of the game, they also appear frequently in stores, booster packs, and from card abilities.

Simply find and use all 22 Tarot Cards to unlock the trophy. Don’t forget that the game marks new cards as “Undiscovered” if you haven’t used them yet.

The “Clairvoyance” trophy is also one of the easier Card Collection Trophies to acquire because all 18 Spectral Cards can be found in any run from the beginning of the game. However, Spectral Cards are incredibly rare and you’d typically only find one or two in a full run, usually from Booster Packs.

Simply find and use all 18 Spectral Cards to unlock the trophy. Don’t forget that the game marks new cards as “Undiscovered” if you haven’t used them yet.

To unlock the “Extreme Couponer” trophy, you need to find and purchase all 32 of the Vouchers in the game. Around two thirds of these vouchers are available from the start of the game, but there’s a fair few that have unlock requirements.

You can see what these are by looking in the “Vouchers” section of the Collection menu and looking for cards with a padlock on them. These cards need unlocking, but the requirements are clearly written next to each card when you highlight them.

Complete the conditions to unlock all 32 Vouchers and then find and purchase them all in subsequent runs to eventually fill the 322 Voucher slots in your collection and take home this trophy!

Discovering 100% of your collection is no small task. You will need to unlock, find, and acquire:

• 150 unique Joker Cards
• 15 Unique Decks
• 32 Unique Vouchers
• 22 Unique Tarot Cards
• 12 Unique Planet Cards
• 18 Unique Spectral Cards
• 5 Editions (Base, Foil, Holographic, Polychrome, Negative — acquire any one card of each type)
• 32 Booster Packs
• 24 Skip Tags
• 30 Blinds

Most cards can be found while you’re playing, in booster packs and the like. However, you will find that a good chunk of the cards are also locked at the beginning. You can see which ones by going to “Collection” from the Main Menu and browsing the comprehensive catalogue there.

Locked cards have a padlock on them, but you can actually see their unlock requirements by simply highlighting them. Note that the last 5 Jokers with “???” unlock requirements can only be attained via use of the “Soul” Spectral Card.

Simply use a cumulative total of 2500 Playing Cards in Poker Hands throughout the game. This is going to unlock naturally while you work on the other challenges at hand.

Simply discard a cumulative total of 2500 Playing Cards in rounds throughout the game. This is going to unlock naturally while you work on the other challenges at hand.

One of the core resources in Balatro is the money you earn throughout the game to then spend on cards, vouchers, and booster packs.

To unlock the “Nest Egg” trophy, you need to be holding $400 at one time. Quite a phenomenal amount of money in Balatro, for sure.

There are many ways to achieve this, all of which involve making great use of the Jokers, Vouchers, and other useful items in Balatro while completing runs to build up your money. Obviously, you won’t have too much control over which items you actually come across in a run, but hopefully—while armed with the information below—you should be able to cobble together just enough of the right items to make your financial dreams come true.

Keep an eye out for these items and make use of them when you can:

To unlock the “Flushed” trophy, you first need to know two things:

• A “Flush” is when you play 5 cards of the same suit. They do not need to be sequential in rank—i.e. you can play 2, 5, 7, 9, and Q together as long as they’re the same suit.
• A “Wild Card” is a card without a suit. Instead of a suit, a red and black smudge is displayed where their suit would be. You can upgrade cards to Wild Cards via Tarot Cards, or you can get Wild Cards out of Standard Card Booster Packs.

You will need to have at least 5 Wild Cards in your deck, which is already tricky enough to achieve, but then you also need to have all five of those cards in your hand at once so that you can play them together. There’s a lot of RNG involved in pulling this off.

The best items to look out for would be the “Lovers” Tarot Card (with which you can convert standard cards into Wild Cards) and the Familiar, Grim, or Incantation Spectral Cards.

The “Speedrunner” trophy asks you to complete all 8 Antes but only play 12 of the 24 rounds. To do this, you’ll need to skip most Small and Big blinds. This, unfortunately, means you skip a lot of opportunities for money and many trips to the in-game shop, leaving you with an underpowered and understocked deck.

You’ll basically need to get lucky with a really powerful set of Joker cards. One in particular which makes this trophy a breeze is the “Throwback” Joker. This card adds x0.25 Multiplier to every hand for every blind that you skip. So once you’ve skipped the 12 you need to skip, you would have a 3x multiplier on every hand you play.

I’d recommend skipping the first 12 Small and Big Blinds in your run so that you can still rely on cash from them in Ante 7 and Ante 8.

After beating the game on Black Stake Difficulty, you will receive the “Anaglyph” deck. This trophy is considerably easier with that deck equipped.

Each time you visit the store, in the bottom-left, there will be a Voucher for sale. One per Ante. These cost $10 but usually apply a very useful passive effect to your current run.

To unlock the “ROI” trophy, you need to have purchased at least 5 Vouchers before you reach Ante 5 (before beating the Ante 4 Boss Blind). You’d need to buy every Voucher you see in the shop immediately (the Green Deck helps bankroll this) and also make sure you skip any Blinds that have the “Voucher” tag on them, as these add extra vouchers to the store!

You can also make use of the “Hieroglyph” voucher should you happen to see it, which will reduce the Ante by 1, giving you more time to collect the vouchers you need.

Given that there’s one Voucher per Ante, you’ll just need to source one extra Voucher before Ante 4’s Boss Blind.

The “Shattered” trophy is unique in that it asks you to get UNlucky. First, you will need at least two glass cards in your deck. This trophy is considerably easier the more glass cards you acquire, though.

The easiest way to load up on Glass Cards is by using the “Justice” tarot card. You can also find Glass Cards in Standard Booster Packs though.

Then, once you have your glass cards, you need to be lucky enough to have them both in your hand at the same time during a round. So, keep playing blinds and stocking up on Glass Cards until you finally have what you need at the right time.

With glass cards in your hand, put together a Poker Hand that uses at least two of your Glass Cards at the same time.

When played, Glass Cards have a small chance to smash as they’re placed down. You still get the score for playing them, but they’re permanently removed from your deck.

You need to get lucky (or unlucky) enough that when you play two (or more) Glass Cards in the same hand, at least two of them break. That’s when the Shattered trophy will unlock.

The Royal Flush is the hardest Poker hand to play, hence why it gives so much score and offers its very own trophy. Upon playing a Royal Flush for the very first time, the Royale trophy is yours.

A Royal Flush is essentially a Straight, but all of the cards need to also be the same suit and it needs to be a hand consisting of a 10 and all four face cards, like so:

• ♠A, ♠K, ♠Q, ♠J, ♠10

You can technically make this trophy easier to earn by using Tarot cards and Booster Packs to acquire more cards of a particular suit, but you’ll still be very much at the mercy of RNG. One good way to make things much easier is by acquiring the “Four Fingers” Joker.

This card allows you to make any kind of straight or flush with a hand of just 4 cards instead of 5.

In Balatro, there are Planet Cards you can get as well as Jokers, Playing Cards, and Tarot Cards. The Planet Cards in particular, when used, will upgrade their corresponding Poker Hand. You can see from the table below how this works:

There are also some rare planet cards that require you to play some rare hands before you’ll even find them:

Basically, though, all you need to do for this “Retrograde” trophy is to try and level up any of your Poker Hands via Planet Cards until they reach Level 10. Obviously, the levels of your hands will reset with each new run, so you’ll have to try and achieve this in a single run, which is what makes it most tricky.

Your best bet is to purchase every Planet Card Booster Pack you see in stores and try to pick the same card every time (if it’s available). You could get additional Planet Cards per run by skipping some blinds too, so always check the blind’s skip tag.

To unlock the “10K” trophy, you simply need to score 10,000 chips in a single hand. This may seem impossible, but during a good run in which you have plenty of effective Joker cards and have levelled up at least one Poker Hand a few times, you can easily achieve well over 10,000 chips in a single hand.

Your bigger challenges are the 1,000K and 100,000K trophies. I’ll give you three guesses what you need to do for those…

To achieve the “1,000K” trophy, you must score at least one million points from a single Poker Hand played in any round. This is incredibly difficult to do, I won’t lie. You’ll essentially need to beat a run, then keep playing.

Ante 8 is the end of a run, but it is not the end of the game, and you’re given the opportunity to keep playing even after beating the final Boss Blind. Accepting to do so will put you into an endless version of the game, where the score is incrementally multiplied.

If you have a deck good enough to score high enough that you beat Ante 8, then there’s a good chance it scores highly enough for you to keep going and keep building on it until, inevitably, you start playing absolutely insane hands capable of unlocking this trophy or even 100,000K.

The 100,000K trophy is absolutely insane. You’re going to need to score one hundred million points in a single hand. Ludicrous, I know.

There’s nothing more to it than surviving endless mode with one of the luckiest decks you can build until you score enough points to earn the trophy. See 1,000K.

To unlock the “Tiny Hand” trophy, you essentially need to repeatedly remove cards from your deck until you have only 20 cards available. It’s recommended that while you do this, you only remove low-scoring cards, like 2, 3, 4, etc. and try to keep as many high-scoring and face cards as you can.

The most effective tool for earning this trophy is the Hanged Man Tarot. Each time you get this, you can use it to permanently destroy up to two cards in your deck. Given that you start with 52 cards, though, you’ll be looking to find and use 16 Hanged Man Tarot Cards.

You can significantly speed this process up if you use the “Abandoned Deck,” as it has no Face Cards so you start with just 40 cards and only need 10 Hanged Man Tarot Cards. However, you’ll struggle to survive so long without a good strategy to compensate for the lack of Face Cards.

Other cards which might be useful include:

To unlock the “Big Hands” trophy, you need to be holding 80 cards in a deck at one time. To do so, you essentially want to buy Booster Packs as much as you can to add at least 28 extra cards to your deck (without removing any).

There are a few jokers that can help out:

You should also note that the “Magic Trick” voucher makes it possible to purchase standard playing cards from the Shop. I’d recommend buying this if you see it.

When you’re in the shop, you’ll see the option to re-roll the offering for $5 by pressing . Some Skip Tags and Jokers even make the re-roll free.

That said, in order to unlock the “You Get What You Get” trophy, you will need to beat the game on any difficulty without using the re-roll feature once at all in your entire run.

I’m sorry to say that this trophy may be where you trophy journey comes to an end, if you have even made it this far. The amount dedication that you’d need to unlock this trophy is astronomical, and it’s not even the worst one in this list (See Completionist++).

There are a whopping 15 Decks that you can play with in Balatro and—to unlock “Completionist+”—you’ll have to win a run on the excruciating Gold Stake difficulty with each and every deck. Basically, you remember how hard it was to unlock High Stakes? Do that again 14 more times.

It gets worse, of course. As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, you can’t skip to Gold Stake Difficulty with a deck that hasn’t beat the prior Stake Difficulty. That means, brutally, you will need to make your way up from White Stake to Gold Stake for each and every Deck.

If the requirements for the Completionist+ trophy didn’t put you off completing your trophy journey, then surely Completionist++ will. This ridiculous trophy asks that you earn a gold sticker on every single one of the 150 Joker Cards in the game. How do you earn a gold sticker, you ask?

Why, beat Gold Stake difficulty of course! That’s right, many more hours of Gold Stake’s brutal conditions to try and achieve this feat. Just how long will it take? Well…

If, hypothetically, you were so good at Balatro that you won the game every time and you were also so lucky that you got five unique (and useful in combination) Joker Cards, you would have to complete 30 Gold Stake Difficulty Playthroughs. Now, knowing that it’s much more likely that you’ll only complete a Gold Stake run every 10-20 attempts, and most likely not with five perfectly unique Joker Cards, you’re probably looking at around 50 Complete Gold Stake Difficulty Playthroughs and an uncountable number of failed Gold Stake Difficulty Playthroughs.

Best of luck to you if you choose to attempt this incredible feat. I’m already impressed that anyone made it this far.