Poker roguelike Balatro is one of the most engrossing games released in the last generation of video games, and most people who play it end up losing sleep or otherwise disassociating from reality for long periods of time. To wit, the deck-building game was crowned Polygon’s 2024 Game of the Year. Some hands are just hard to pass up, especially when you’ve got a good rotation of Jokers pumping up your score. Such was the case for a couple on TikTok recently who detailed a type of run that’s got Balatro fans in such disbelief, the video’s racked up 1.7M views — and plenty of debate.
Prolific TikToker Avery Stoddard was thrown a curveball in July, when she was set to attend a cousin’s wedding. Her boyfriend was in the throes of Balatro, and… he wanted to keep playing. He didn’t, though, which prompted Stoddard to post a video where she asked her audience how they thought she should reward her boyfriend for keeping his addiction under control.
Midway through, the boyfriend pulls the camera and reveals why Balatro threatened to derail the festivities in the first place.
“Fellas, have you ever gotten nat negative Blueprint ante 2?” asked the bearded fellow. “Let me know in the comments. I wanna see something.”
To translate that gobbledygook for anyone who hasn’t spent 300 hours playing the game: Balatro has a Joker card called Blueprint, which copies the abilities of Jokers placed on its right side. While the game disallows a specific set of cards from being replicated, for the most part, it’s a powerful addition to any slate of Jokers. You can easily multiply a score into sky-high territory if you pair it with something good, like a card that scales your score based on the hard you play.
Negative refers to a modifier that can apply to any card; it will allow you to hold one extra Joker while also adding some kind of bonus to your score. With a negative Blueprint, you’ve got yourself a killer combination.
Negatives are also pretty rare, with a pull rate of only 0.3% for any given card. While it’s random, you tend to get negative cards farther into a run, when the odds play out long enough to eventually go in your favor or, alternatively, if you have enough money to buy them in your shop.
What the boyfriend is describing here is getting one of the best cards in a rare form in the second round of the game. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten a negative that soon, much less a card as good as Blueprint right after the first round. Hell, half the time I don’t even have a single Joker of any kind that early on.
There are 150 different Jokers, but they all have different rarities. And according to Balatro number-crunchers, there’s only a 5% chance of getting a rare Joker like Blueprint on a randomly generated draw. And since there are 20 types of rare Jokers, and the variants make the percentages even more minuscule, grabbing the extremely unlikely combination on the second round is an even rarer stroke of luck.
You could force the game to give you the Joker via seeding, which allows you to plug in a code that generates a specific type of game that someone else has already played. But getting a natural negative so early on is buck wild.
You’d think that a story where a woman is describing a man who was tempted to play a video game rather than be present at a wedding would inspire side-eyeing and widespread cries to break up with him. Instead, most of the comments on the video are supportive of the boyfriend.
“That’s a once in a lifetime pull,” one viewer says. “Statistically your cousin is probably going to have another wedding.”
“Nat negative blueprint on ante 2 would have me running out the door to buy a lottery ticket,” another said.
The most upvoted comment emphasizes how ridiculous the boyfriend’s pull is by declaring that they “would have played at my own wedding for that.”
Image: LocalThunk/Playstack
Beyond the freakish statistical wonder of it, part of why people are reacting this way to the Balatro hand is because it’s actually a positive story. The boyfriend did not, in fact, ignore everything just to keep playing a video game during a special occasion. Hence silly comments like “Is she bothering you king?”
As for the reward, well, the boyfriend is getting some much-needed uninterrupted Balatro playtime based on a more recent post. The run in the video does not appear to have the mythical nat negative Blueprint, but I’m sure he’s having a good time regardless.
Meanwhile, Stoddard’s gained hundreds of new followers. She seems happy, albeit a bit conflicted that the attention is the aftereffect of her boyfriend talking about a game he plays on his phone. Typically, her content isn’t about games at all, though her partner features in a decent number of her posts. Stoddard’s taking it in stride, though. “They know you are a cool girlfriend,” one commenter replied to the video noting the increase in followers. “And that’s what I am telling myself,” Stoddard replied.
“ur boyfriend is the goat,” one top comment on the original Balatro video reads. “exactly correct,” Stoddard says.
