Having a strong economy gives you more opportunities to develop a strong consistent deck. You gain $1 of interest for every $5 on hand before beating the blind. If you were to maintain at least >$25 after beating Ante 1, you would receive at least $100 dollars in interest alone before beating the game. This is roughly 12-20 packs over your run which can be the key to beating this challenge.

Here are some tips to help scale your economy:

• In the early game try to refrain from buying in the shop. You can consistently score 600 points to beat the ante 1 boss blind without buying anything at all. The earned interest will help you buy more from the shop as the game progresses.
  
  
• Aim to keep >$20 dollars on you after beating Ante 2. Having less than $20 hurts you on interest but also reduces the max payout of hermit (doubles your money up to $20)
  
  
• Do not sit on money if you are well over the max interest payout. If your consumable slots are full, you can keep rerolling to find better consumables/planet cards.
  
  
• Do not buy the boss blind voucher right away. Unless you are way above the interest cap its cheaper to wait until the second blind to buy the voucher.
  
  
• Do not automatically buy and use hermit if you are under $20. Try and beat the next blind or sell useless consumable items first.
  
  
• Cheese skip tags. I would often retry the challenge until I got a skip tag which made everything in the first or second shop free or I get the voucher, clearance sale, that discounts the shop 25%.

As mentioned above you can keep spamming retry for this challenge to either find a good skip tag or to find an excellent voucher. Here is the list of vouchers or tags I would look for in Ante 1.

• Vouchers: Clearance sale (25% discount) > telescope (planet cards) > hieroglyph (-1 ante) > Paintbrush (hand size) > Tarot merchant (more tarot in shop) > Grabber (+1 hand)
  
• Tags: Coupon (free shop) > Charm (mega arcana pack) > Orbital (if it’s the hand type you’re using)

Here are the first 3 voucher I got in my winning game: clearance sale -> hieroglyph -> Petroglyph. This gave me extra time and money to build up my deck’s strategy.

Flushes are very easy to draw and earn a decent number of points. Here is a reddit post that goes into more detail. It will take you many attempts to beat this challenge, so it makes the most sense to use a consistent hand type

The problem with planet cards is that they only scale linearly while the antes scale exponentially. Strategies that rely solely on planet cards can consistently take you to the mid game but, I find they struggle after Ante 4.

I recommend to never take the planet merchant voucher (we want more tarot in shops not planets).

There are other winning strategies but, this worked for me. Using a strong economy will have a snowball effect allowing you to build more glass and red seals. By the end game I was reliably 1-2 shotting blinds.

Here are the ways to get or copy glass cards:

• Tarot cards: Justice, death, and fool
  
• Booster packs: Standard or mega standard packs
  
• Spectral packs: Cryptid, Familiar, Grim, Incantation
  
• Illusion voucher (I don’t recommend this as this requires you buy the magic trick Voucher. This adds non enhanced cards and less tarot cards in the shop). For red seals, Use the same list above except Justice is for glass only and you can get red seals from spectral packs.

This strategy relies on stacking glass + red seals. The most reliable way to get these cards are through shops. Skipping also deprives you of interest payments which help pay for packs. In my runs I would usually skip during Ante 1 or for extra vouchers.

If you are struggling in the early-mid game, you will be relying on more and more luck to get you through blinds instead of a strong deck. It’s better to quit and get a luckier start than to frustrate yourself relying on lucky draws.

Here are two signs you can use to help you decide whether it’s worth quitting:

• If you are struggling maintaining >$20 dollars after Ante 2. There are exceptions to this. i.e. you know you have a strong deck but are facing a particularly strong boss blind.
  
• If you are beating blinds only on your last hand past Ante 3. A strong deck will be able to consistently score points. If you find yourself having to use your hands to dig for the right cards all the time, it may be time to start over.

As stated earlier, planet cards can carry you to the mid game but, not the end game. Knowing when to pivot can be tricky but here are some things that may help:

• You can increase the number of a particular card value in your deck using tarot and spectral cards (death, fool, grim, Ouija, cryptid, etc). If you find yourself with 8+ of a particular card you may consider transitioning to full houses/flush houses or 4-5 of a kinds.
  
• You should buy planet cards of hand types that you can potentially pivot to in advance if you have cash to burn.
  
• I would not pivot if you do not have any enhanced cards of that hand type or built up a similar amount of planet cards. Just because you can consistently play flush houses does not automatically make them higher scoring then what you have been building up all game.

This is obvious for people who have played deck builders before. If you are new to this, thinning your deck will make your deck more consistent. Ways to thin your deck:

• Tarot cards: Hanged man or using Justice to create a glass card to break it (don’t do this)
  
• Spectral packs: Immolate (destroy 5 random cards and gain $20)

I recommend that you open standard packs as they can be a great source of enhanced cards. Even so, you should not add cards that don’t directly benefit your strategy. For example, I added a diamond glass card mid game hoping I could convert it to a spade. I was never able to, and it was essentially a dead draw the rest of the game.

Spectral cards look cool and can heavily impact your run but are an absolute trap. 3/16 of the unrestricted spectral cards only affect jokers which are essentially dead draws. Another 3/16 of the spectral cards will add random enhanced cards to your deck. Adding random cards with random enhancements will make your deck less consistent.

Ouija, the spectral card that turns all drawn cards into a random rank also decreases your hand size by one. This can absolutely make or break your run. If you are in the mid game, it will be very hard to take advantage of this. Having less hand size makes it harder to play your hands and means less steel multipliers as well. Even if you get a good spectral card like cryptid, which creates 2 copies of a specific card, there is no guarantee that you will get a good card to copy in your draw.

For these reasons I recommend buying spectral card packs last, unless it is early game and you can pivot easily. I also do not recommend taking omen globe, the voucher thats adds spectral cards to arcane packs.

I don’t see a lot of people talk about this tarot card but, it is a great way to add mult to your hands. Empress early game can help you clear antes on its own. Being able to enhance two cards allows you to quickly enhance most of the scoring cards you will play.

Steel is great but, it is not a standalone strategy to beat this challenge. For a while I would try to stack as many steel cards as possible with red seals. Red sealed steel cards only add 2.25x mult (1.5*1.5) this is much worse than the 4x mult from a red sealed glass card. Steel cards also take up a valuable slot in your hand that may prevent you from drawing the scoring cards you want. Focus on adding mult using enhanced and planet cards before worrying about adding steel.

Some of the bosses in this game can completely counter your strategy or they are just plain difficult to beat. Always pay attention to the boss blind when starting the next ante.

These are ways to help against the boss blind:

• Voucher: Director’s cut/Retcon allow you to reroll the boss blind for $10 (highly recommended this voucher saved my run)
  
• Tags: The boss tag will reroll the boss blind and the Juggle tag will add +3 hand size to the next round which can give you an upper hand

Here is my final scoring run of $1.9 million

https://youtu.be/Yv6AOy_eulk?si=Y3_Ind5a5xotoO5h








Good luck, please let me know if this guide has helped you complete this challenge!

Antimatter, the voucher that gives you +1 joker slot, is not restricted for this challenge. In my opinion all cards that act on jokers should be disabled to make this challenge more fair.