Skipping Stone Joker

[vagrant stirrup]

This would be for very specific cases, and it wouldn't be very useful outside of those cases, which is why this would be a common. The only blinds it wouldn't let you skip are the ante 8, 16, 24, and 32 blinds.

[drowsy hinge]

If this was common. Your mad

You can get everything you need out of buffoon and charm tags

And have a decent chance of winning the showdown

Make this rare

[sharp herald]

Ain’t this just a stronger Mr Bones or Luchador

[drowsy hinge]

No this is basically chicot but ten times better

[urban mist]

Nah, unlike Mr Bones it can't bail you out if you miss your draw

[sharp herald]

Ah true

Regardless of strength (I think this is very strong), I don’t think it’s a good idea to allow skipping boss blinds in any way

[neon coral]

No???

This would be ass

[urban mist]

Ehh, being able to skip bosses that'd kill you is decent

Its a safety net; and a decent one at that. I dont think its better than chicot tho

[neon coral]

Okay actually yeah it would be better than luchador

And bones

[urban mist]

Its a different kind of net than Mr Bones

[neon coral]

Actually maybe not, losing out on a shop/joker scaling ain’t good

[vagrant stirrup]

Yeah thinking about it again it might be uncommon but probably rare

[urban mist]

Mr Bones is for runs you're not confident in consistency

[vagrant stirrup]

And this was the main idea

[urban mist]

This would be better for avoiding Lethal bosses

[urban mist]

Yeah, but I think that's balanced since bosses usually are the bulk of a runs challenge

[neon coral]

They are, however not nullifying the final boss blind is bad and if your struggling score wise skipping won’t help you much

Like if you need to skip the arm cause the hand level decrease could kill you then you aren’t scoring super well

I’d say it’s around luchador in terms of strength

[sharp herald]

Final boss blind is almost always easy though

That’s not a downside

[neon coral]

Kinda true? both violet vessel and crimson heart are pretty hard

Crimson heart is easier but can kill you

[urban mist]

Thats also a bad comparison to something like the plant, the suit bosses, or The Wall

There are bosses that punish all general play and bosses that shut down specific play

[urban mist]

(Arm vs Plant, The Wheel vs The Eye)

None of the finisher boss blinds do that, completely shut down an avenue of play

They will all make it harder, forcing you to optimize deckfixing (Bell, Heart) or maximize joker value (Leaf, Acorn somewhat) but they will not completely prevent a playstyle; some regular bosses will

[spare tendon]

Throwbacks gonna go crazy

[neon coral]

The suit bosses are really hard to die to

[sharp herald]

Usually yeah but it hypothetically might kill you at some point

[neon coral]

Like you need to be playing flushes, with one of the few suit specific jokers (which are all mid as hell except seeing double) or have deck fixed everything into one suit

[sharp herald]

Still more likely than dieing to plant smh

[neon coral]

I’m of the opinion that it’s a highly avoidable death

[neon coral]

TRUE

[urban mist]

It is, but it's an entirely different style of difficulty than the one yku mentioned

This allows you to avoid needing to pivot

[torn sphinx]

giving this a cooldown or making it self destruct upon skipping could maybe make it more balanced but the latter would probably just be mr bones 2.0

[heady fox]

I honestly think this is fine

There are not many times you would wanna skip a boss
But when you do you really do

I can only imagine this being used once or twice in an ante 8 run

Being super skip happy isn't usually very effective
Plus the fact you don't get tags from boss blinds

[sharp herald]

@vagrant stirrup would you get a skip tag from skipping the boss?

[torn sphinx]

this would definitely need to be unlockable also (assuming it is infinite-use no cooldown)

[sharp herald]

Cause I could totally see it give a tag

[torn sphinx]

a new player could just skip every blind until ante 8 in order to unlock some jokers

i guess erratic deck allows you to cheese a lot of joker unlocks but at least that requires beating orange stake iirc?

[sharp herald]

If this were in the game yeah it’d probably be unlocked

[heady fox]

Joker unlocks are all stupid easy
Even the "difficult" ones get cheesed really easily
(Satelite > anaglyph eco tag
Brainstorm > checkered deck
any of the suit stones > erratic/checkered)
I feel like joker unlocks are kind of irrelevant when discussing how this joker functions

[heady fox]

But yeah this joker is weird enough it needs to be an unlock

Honestly a lot of the usefulness for this joker comes down to whether or not it gives a skip tag

Because if it doesn't its really underwhelming in most cases
If it does then it's probably quite powerful, especially for speedrunning

[torn sphinx]

maybe it could let you skip the boss and give two skip tags but be a one time use ?

that seems like it'd make it even more overpowered actually 😭 idk

[heady fox]

Actually that would be really interesting

It would set it aside from luchador and chicot

And make it decent enough to be desirable for most runs

[sharp herald]

Compare this to Director’s Cut, where instead of spending $10-$20 to reroll a bad boss, you instead skip it entirely with no worries at the cost of -1 shop, some money, etc. The fact that this is common and reusable is what makes it strong

Consider this: if Luchador was a common, would the game be in a better or worse state? I’d say worse because you could fairly consistently ignore boss blinds, which are pretty important for shaking up gameplay. This Joker is kinda similar to that imo

[vagrant stirrup]

Depends on if it'd be too broken if it did. It's hard to tell how it'd play right now.

So it'd need like playtesting or something

[vagrant stirrup]

Also, the rarity is flexible. I assumed it'd be a common in the first place because of how bad losing money and a shop was.

[urban mist]

It wouldn't be at all