Half Joker is a Common Joker. It is a conditional Additive Mult Joker that adds +20 Mult to played hands containing 3 or fewer cards. Not all cards in the hand need to score in order for the effect to be triggered. Note that playing 4 or 5 cards will not trigger this Joker's effect, even if the poker hand only has 3 or fewer scoring cards.
Synergies[]
This Joker is very good in the earliest of Antes, with most Pairs and Three of a Kinds able to clear the first one on their own, and is one of the strongest flat Additive Mult Jokers in the game. However, due to the weak base power of the hands it enables, it is usually best replaced by other Additive Mult Jokers in later Antes.
Decks[]
Blue Deck: This Joker works best when repeatedly playing the hands it enables. Therefore, this Deck provides natural synergy, since the small size of all three valid poker hands warrant fewer discards to consistently find and score them.- Nebula Deck: Since this Deck emphasizes the quick scaling of a single poker hand, it can greatly balloon the power of Half Joker, which already rewards the player for playing the same few hands, with its built-in Telescope Voucher guaranteeing that each Celestial Pack gives a much needed Pluto, Mercury, or Venus, as the three hands this Joker empowers are very weak at base. However, the -1 consumable slot malus can prevent the player from capitalizing on strong consumables like The Chariot Tarot Card, or, if somehow generated by Séance or Sixth Sense in the same run, the Deja Vu, Ouija, and Trance Spectral Cards.
- Ghost Deck: The aforementioned Spectral Cards (Deja Vu, Ouija, and Trance) all become more accessible by becoming potential Shop presences. Moreover, the starting Hex card can also give Half Joker a noteworthy X1.5 Mult bonus, making it much more feasible to hold later into the run.
Poker Hands[]
Any hands that can be formed with three or fewer cards:
This Joker has very poor synergy with all other hands, as it cannot trigger if 4 or more cards are played or scored.
Jokers[]
Half Joker uniquely encourages the user to go big with small hands. As a result, many of the Jokers it synergizes with will ideally play into this trait:
- Blue Joker: Giving +2 Chips to all hands played for each card remaining in your Deck, this one is ideal in the early-to-mid-game for empowering the hands this Joker already enables, as their low card count and lessened dependency on discards means its power is not dampened as much as it is by the 5-card hands.
- Green Joker and Supernova: These Additive Mult Jokers will give even more score for playing repeated hands, which is something this Joker already encourages. Their downsides (-Mult on discard and single-hand focus, respectively) matter very little, as discards are less crucial, and only a small number of hands benefit in the first place.
- Juggler, Troubadour, and Turtle Bean: All three of these provide passive bonuses to hand size, allowing for easier assembly of Three of a Kinds, and most importantly, more opportunity to trigger 'held in hand' abilities, which scale particularly well with this Joker.
- Raised Fist, Shoot the Moon, and Baron: These Jokers provide Mult bonuses based on the cards held in your hand (singular variable + Mult, multiple flat + Mult, and multiple flat X Mult, respectively), which meshes very well with the need to play fewer cards.
- Reserved Parking: The one true economy Joker this one synergizes with. By repeatedly scoring numbered cards and Aces in small hands, while keeping face cards in hand, a large amount of money can potentially be earned.
- Sly Joker and Wily Joker: These both provide a flat number of Chips for hands containing a Pair or a Three of a Kind, respectively. Since Three of a Kind also contains a Pair, it can benefit from both of these Jokers simultaneously to reap a near-universal +150 Chips.
- Card Sharp: A flat Multiplicative Mult Joker that gives X3 Mult if the played poker hand has been played previously in the round. Since all of the hands this Joker enables are easy to score, this suave fellow is nearly guaranteed to give his impressive bonus on all subsequently played hands.
- Certificate: A unique utility Joker that gives a technical hand size bonus by adding a playing card with a random Seal to the hand at the start of a round (it is added to the full deck at the end). Red Seals (retriggering the card's scoring and abilities) are nice to eventually Enhance into Steel Cards, but of even greater importance are Blue Seals, which create the Planet Card of the final played poker hand if held in hand. This allows for even greater scaling of the hands this card enables. It also works particularly well with the aforementioned Blue Joker.
- Mime: Allowing all 'held in hand' abilities to trigger an additional time, it gives a huge boost to the power ceiling of this Joker by allowing additional scoring from Steel Cards and 'held in hand' Mult Jokers, money generation from Reserved Parking and Gold Cards, and Planet Card generation from Blue Seals.
- Ramen: Similarly to Green Joker, this card is essentially a free X2 Mult boost for a Half Joker build, as discards are less necessary in the first place.
- Space Joker and Burnt Joker: These both allow for easy poker hand level scaling, as they can easily be assembled and thus repeatedly played or discarded, respectively.
- Steel Joker: Since this Joker already benefits greatly from a large number of Steel Cards due to the lesser number of played cards, the bonus it gives just by adding Steel Cards to the build makes it a natural choice.
- Stuntman: One of the strongest Chip Jokers in the game, providing an astounding +250 Chips to all played hands, at the cost of a passive -2 hand size penalty. While its drawback detracts from one of this Joker's primary strengths - holding onto more cards to activate 'held in hand' abilities - oftentimes the sheer power it provides will be more than enough to compensate.
- The Duo and/or The Trio: These are the strongest Multiplicative Mult Jokers to pair with this one, as only High Card is excluded from their effects (which is only suboptimal in the Endless Antes). Much like the hand-specific Chip Jokers, Three of a Kinds can benefit from both simultaneously to pump out a staggering X6 Mult.
The following Jokers could potentially have synergy with this Joker, but have noticeable downsides:
- Splash: This Joker allows all played cards to count in scoring. It lets High Cards and Pairs benefit from makeshift discards in the form of otherwise non-scoring cards that could have a nice Card Modifier to help with scoring, or another trait to mesh with unique Joker synergy. However, Three of a Kind is completely incapable of benefitting if Half Joker is being emphasized, and in the event that it is the focused hand, Splash would do nothing (a dilemma Pokémon players would be all too familiar with).
- Marble Joker: Adding a Stone Card to the Deck at the start of a round can sound enticing, and is especially so if the hands being scaled are High Card or Pair due to allowing more cards to be scored than usual, but the shot of Chips they provide usually is not enough to outweigh the large amassment of Jokers that provide score based on rank or suit - Stones lack both of these. On top of that, more cards in Deck means less of a chance of finding crucial Steel Cards or Blue Seals. With a large number of Stones, Stone Joker can form a very potent Chip engine with it, but one should carefully consider all their options before picking this up.
The following Jokers have anti-synergy with this Joker:
- Jokers oriented towards larger hands will contribute nothing to a Half Joker build. Some of the numerous examples include not being able to get its benefit while also scaling Square Joker, and being unable to capitalize on The Family, which is one of the strongest flat Multiplicative Mult Jokers in the game, which would stack with the aforementioned ones, and would otherwise be easy to pivot into from a Three of a Kind build.
- Blackboard: While its Multiplicative Mult bonus is impressive, it is extremely difficult to trigger by only scoring 3 cards at a time without extreme suit fixing.
- Merry Andy: The +3 discards it provides are nice for most other builds, but for Half Joker builds, they are largely irrelevant for the reasons stated multiple times before. The -1 hand size penalty it provides can make it just hard enough to find Pairs and Three of a Kinds to be a severe detriment, as well as making Steel Cards and Blue Seals harder to find.
Vouchers[]
- The Grabber Voucher, and its upgraded counterpart Nacho Tong, allows for the three hands Half Joker enables to be played more and more often, making a potential Telescope more valuable, and further increasing the power of cards like Green Joker and Supernova.
- The Paint Brush Voucher, and its upgraded counterpart Palette, provide passive hand size bonuses without necessitating the consumption of a Joker slot, allowing for easier capitalization on 'held in hand' effects.
- For the same reason that the Nebula Deck is a good choice, the Telescope Voucher is a wonderful pickup in a build featuring this Joker.
Boss Blinds[]
There is 1 Boss Blind that counters Half Joker, and a few others that can provide a noticeable challenge but do not directly counter it:
- The Psychic: Hands with no more than 5 played cards will not score at all. Unless the player has scaled their build well enough, this is a definite run-ender for a Half Joker build.
- The Eye: Hands that have been played previously this Blind will not score at all. Half Joker only empowers 3 of the 12 hands in the game, so once these options are exhausted, it will not assist in scoring whatsoever. This can potentially cause a guaranteed run loss, but is less detrimental when encountered earlier.
- The Ox: Playing the poker hand that was the most played at the start of the same Ante will set the player's money to $0. This Joker struggles with it especially, as it encourages focusing on a small number of hands. Since the Jokers and Card Modifiers Half Joker bounces off of best are hard to come by consistently, this Boss Blind can potentially cause irreversible damage to the run by making them virtually inaccessible.
- The Wall and Violet Vessel: With their doubled and tripled Boss Blind size, respectively, they prove an extreme challenge to a Half Joker build without extreme amounts of scaling, as all three hands it enables have very low base Chips and Mult.
Trivia[]
- Since Half Joker's model is abnormal, the effect of the Amber Acorn Boss Blind is useless on it. It shares this distinction with Wee Joker, Square Joker, and Photograph.
In other languages[]
| Language | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese (Simplified) | 半张小丑 | |
| Chinese (Traditional) | 半個小丑 | |
| Dutch | Halve Joker | |
| French | Demi-joker | |
| German | Halber Joker | |
| Indonesian | Half Joker | |
| Italian | Mezzo Jolly | |
| Japanese | ハーフジョーカー | |
| Korean | 반쪽 조커 | |
| Polish | Pół-Joker | |
| Portuguese (Brazilian) | Meio Curinga | |
| Russian | Полуджокер | |
| Spanish (Spain) | Medio comodín | |
| Spanish (Latin America) | Medio comodín |
