Pareidolia is an Uncommon Joker which makes all playing cards count as face cards. This effect applies to Blinds' and other Jokers' effects. All cards retain their rank and suit.
Synergies[]
Decks[]
- The
Black Deck's extra Joker slot makes it easier to make a higher-scoring Pareidolia build, as it can be included alongside five scoring Jokers - including a few that leverage the power of face cards. - The Abandoned Deck can potentially benefit from Pareidolia by allowing non-face cards to interact with Jokers that bolster face cards.
- Avoid the Painted Deck, as its inherent -1 Joker slot makes Pareidolia virtually unusable without going out of your way to hold more Jokers or scale certain poker hands with Planet Cards.
Poker Hands[]
Any poker hand can benefit from this Joker. However, larger hands with more scoring cards will always trigger more benefits from Jokers that buff played face cards.
The type of hand played will not change, since this is only based on rank and suit, not whether a card is "face" or not.
Jokers[]
Because Pareidolia doesn't change the rank of card (rather, it just makes all playing cards count as face cards), it does not interfere with the effects of Jokers like 
Fibonacci which trigger on specific ranks.
Pareidolia has synergy with the following Jokers:
- Business Card: All cards scored have a 1 in 2 chance to generate $2. This means a played hand with 5 scoring cards will generate an average of $5, as much as Rough Gem when playing a Diamonds Flush.
- Faceless Joker: Gives $5 for every discard that has at least 3 cards.
- Reserved Parking: All cards held in hand will have a 1 in 2 chance to generate $1. This translates to an average of $0.5 per held card on every played hand, and becomes stronger as the player's hand size increases or their played hands begin containing fewer cards.
- Smiley Face: All scored cards get +5 Mult each (up to +25 Mult with no other effects).
- Scary Face: All scored cards get +30 Chips each (up to +150 Chips with no other effects).
- Sock and Buskin: All scored cards trigger twice. Pairing this with the aforementioned Business Card, Smiley Face, and/or Scary Face means twice as much money, +Mult, and Chips, respectively.
- Midas Mask: All scoring cards become Gold Cards when played, which allows for huge amounts of money generation as the run progresses and the player's hand size increases (as much as $21 with the base hand size of 8 and a round-ending High Card). These two and Vampire can combine to boost Vampire by X0.5 extra Mult per hand played, as long as each hand has 5 scoring cards.
- Canio: Destroying any card gives it X1 Mult. Since only playing cards count as face cards and not Jokers or consumables, the effects of Ceremonial Dagger and Madness, or the 'food' Jokers that can destroy themselves (such as Popcorn) will not trigger Canio's scaling.
- Splash: All played cards trigger any Jokers that apply to scored face cards.
- Photograph: Despite it buffing face cards, combining it with this Joker typically has somewhat limited effectiveness, as it gives its X2 Mult when the first card in the played poker hand is scored, meaning it happens before any of the other scored cards have a chance to activate their own 'when scored' effects. However, pairing it with the aforementioned Smiley Face and/or Sock and Buskin makes it a bit stronger, and it also allows for far easier ballooning of the power of Glass Cards, cards with a Red Seal, and/or Polychrome playing cards.
- Luchador, Mr. Bones, and Chicot: In the absence of another way to circumvent select Boss Blinds, any of these Jokers will let the player avoid almost certain death when faced with The Mark or The Plant. Investing in an Ectoplasm Spectral Card, a Negative Tag, or the Blank Voucher (leading to Antimatter) can all be worth considering in these cases, as being down two scoring Jokers can make a run incredibly dangerous, much more so than just one would.
Pareidolia has anti-synergy with the following Jokers:
- Ride the Bus will reset back to +0 Mult on every hand played when Pareidolia is present.
Vouchers[]
- Pareidolia is one of the few Jokers in the game that almost necessitates the use of a specific Voucher(s). Director's Cut and its upgraded counterpart Retcon are one of the only ways to boost a Pareidolia build's stability, by allowing the near-guaranteed avoidance of two run-enders (discussed below) so long as the player has money.
Blinds[]
There is one Boss Blind that counters Pareidolia, and another that hard counters it:
- The Mark: All cards are drawn face-down, making it far more difficult to assemble a sufficiently-scoring hand. This can be somewhat remedied by carrying Enhancing or Suit-changing Tarot Cards into this Boss Blind, allowing a few cards to be identified at a time. Similarly, and more effectively, albeit much rarer, the Ouija and Sigil Spectral Cards can completely negate the power of this Boss Blind, by guaranteeing that a potentially lethal hand can be scored (Five of a Kind/Flush Five and Flush/Straight Flush/Flush House, respectively).
- The Plant: All cards are debuffed, meaning they cannot provide 'when scored' or 'held in hand' effects at all and utterly crippling the player's score. This is an almost guaranteed run-ender against a Pareidolia build unless the player's other Jokers and poker hand levels provide enough raw scoring independent of it (in which case replacing it may be a better move than keeping it).
Depending on a player's strategy, selling Pareidolia before entering these Boss Blinds may be beneficial (selling Pareidolia after The Mark has begun does not flip over non-face cards). At other times, however, encountering either of these can mean certain death, which makes means of rerolling or disabling the Boss Blind imperative to keeping a build like this stable.
Trivia[]
- Pareidolia can be defined as "the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines", which can include faces. This plays into its ability making all cards count as face cards; it makes the Blinds the player is up against perceive face cards where there may otherwise be none.
In other languages[]
| Language | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese (Simplified) | å¹»č§ | |
| Chinese (Traditional) | čæ·å¹»éÆč¦ŗ | |
| Dutch | Pareidolie | |
| French | ParƩidolie | |
| German | Pareidolie | |
| Indonesian | Pareidolia | |
| Italian | Pareidolia | |
| Japanese | ćć¬ć¤ććŖć¢ | |
| Korean | ė³ģģ¦ | |
| Polish | Pareidolia | |
| Portuguese (Brazilian) | Pareidolia | |
| Russian | ŠŠ°ŃŠµŠ¹Š“Š¾Š»ŠøŃ | |
| Spanish (Spain) | Pareidolia | |
| Spanish (Latin America) | Pareidolia |
