Cryptid - TV Tropes

Cryptid is a self-described "unbalanced" Game Mod of Balatro released in 2024. Created by MathIsFun0 and members of the Cryptid Discord server, it adds several Jokers, decks, and other cards, with many being Purposefully Overpowered. This includes higher Joker rarities of Epic and Exotic, consumable Code cards with a variety of uses, even more powerful third tiers for all Vouchers, and much more. The mod also features new Boss Blinds, challenges, and stakes to go up against in a run.

The official Github page and download can be found here. It comes bundled with Talisman, another mod by the same creator that tweaks the game's Overflow Error to allow for massively higher scores.

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The mod contains examples of:

• 420, Blaze It: The "Nice" Joker gives 420 chips if the played hand contains a 6 and a 9.
• Achievement Mockery: Using ://CRASH grants an achievement named "We Told You Not To".
• Adjustable Censorship: The "Family Friendly Mode" config option renames some secret hands and related items to remove the word "fuck".
• Alliterative Name: All of the mod's new Finisher Boss Blinds (Vermillion Virus, Lavender Loop, Sapphire Stamp, Obsidian Orb, and Turquoise Tornado).
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • The Antimatter Deck has the abilities of all other decks at once.
  • Obsidian Orb has the abilities of all previous Boss Blinds defeated in a run at once.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The Talisman mod allows you to disable scoring animations when playing hands, to help cut down on time when using a retrigger-heavy strategy.
  • Turquoise Tornado won't spawn if you have an Eternal Oops! All 6s; that Joker would increase its chance of rejecting your hand to 4 in 3, and if it's Eternal you can't get rid of it.
• Ascended Meme: Notebook was commonly called "Motebook", as it was part of the M Joker set and most other Jokers in the set had names starting with M even if that meant clumsily pasting the M onto the beginning of some other word. Patch 0.5.4 renamed Notebook to "The Motebook".
• Awesome, but Impractical: Happy House gives an incredible ^4 Mult — but only after you've played 114 hands with it, something that takes nearly all the hands available in a typical 8-Ante game. It appears in Meme Packs because it's a "meme strategy", and it's so unlikely that you'll activate it before endless mode that doing so just once unlocks an achievement.
• Awesome, but Temporary: Old Blueprint copies the Joker to its right, just like the vanilla Blueprint, an ability that was already highly powerful in vanilla, with Cryptid's Power Creep only making it even more coveted. As a Common Joker, it's much easier to find, but unlike the original Blueprint, it also has a 1 in 4 chance to expire each round.
• Background Music Override:
  • Jimball changes the background music to be a compressed version of "Funky Town" by Lipps Inc. while you're using it.
  • Attaining a score greater than 1e308 (the vanilla score cap) changes the background music to Final Boss [For Your Computer] by AlexZGreat, an alternate version of the main Balatro theme composed for the mod.
  • Acquiring any Exotic Joker changes the background music to Joker in Latin by AlexZGreat, another alternate version of the Balatro theme.
• Bilingual Bonus: Some of the Latin names for the Exotic Jokers connect to what they do:
  • Tredecim means "thirteen", and it focuses on the thirteenth letter of the alphabet through M Jokers.
  • Effarcire is "to stuff", and it "stuffs" your hand with your entire deck at once.
  • Stella Mortis, which destroys Planet cards to gain power, is a translation of "Death Star".
• Boss Rush: One of the new challenges turns all Blinds into Boss Blinds and disables skipping or nullifying them.
• Cap:
  • The Tax is a Boss Blind that caps each hand at 40% of the score required to beat it.
  • While there are mechanics to increase the values of Jokers, Cryptid enforces a cap on most of them at 1e300 — except for retriggers, which are capped at a much lower 40, due to retriggers massively increasing calculation time (risking making the game unplayable).
• Critical Failure: The Critical Deck has a 1 in 8 chance of giving ^0.5 Mult on any played hand.
• Critical Hit: The Critical Deck has a 1 in 4 chance of giving ^2 Mult on any played hand.
• Cursed Item: Cursed Jokers are a new rarity of Jokers that have negative effects and are usually equipped against the player's will. For example, Blacklist nullifies your hand's score if you're holding or playing a certain rank.
• Cyber Green: The computer-themed Code Cards and most Program Packs you get them through are black and green colored.
• Developer's Foresight: Since you can play more than 5 cards at once in some cases, Cryptid adds more powerful "ascended hands" for when you play a hand with extra cards that still fit it (for example, a Flush with 7 different ranked cards of the same suit).
• Exact Words: Several cards don't have the text saying they "must have room" to create a new joker or consumable that base-game ones do. This isn't an oversight, as they can overflow your inventory.
• Geodesic Cast: Played straight with several Jokers which extend the base game's pattern of "for each hand there is a smart-named Joker that gives +Chips, a Laughing Mad-named joker that gives +Mult, and a group-named Joker that gives xMult", and then parodied with Absurd Joker, Dubious Joker, and The Filler, which give +4 Mult, +20 Chips, and X1 Mult respectively if your hand contains a High Card. At first glance this looks like more extension of the base game, until you notice — every hand contains a High Card, Absurd Joker's bonus is identical to the basic Joker, +20 Chips is worse than almost any other source of Chips, and X1 Mult is literally nothing.
• Glitch Entity: "ERROR" is a Joker with nothing but question marks for a description and what looks like a missing texture for a background. It adds the Glitched edition to all newly-created cards while possessed, then after a random number of rounds you can sell it to duplicate all your other Jokers.
• I Am Big Boned: Huge, a Joker that's far larger in size than the rest, has flavor text saying it's "not fat, just big boned".
• Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: The Conveyor Deck adds an (invisible) one in its Joker slots. Jokers can't be moved by the player, but are instead pushed along it to the left and destroyed if they reach the edge.
• In-Joke: The mod features a heavy focus on Jolly Joker and the letter M, which goes completely unexplained in-game — it's a reference to an incident in the Balatro Discord server where a user spammed "m" in several channels and then, when asked their least favorite Joker, said it was Jolly Joker.
• I Warned You: The ://CRASH card's description is just "Don't." If you use one in spite of this blatant Schmuck Bait, you unlock an achievement named "We Told You Not To" while your game crashes.
• Joke Item:
  • Absurd Joker gives you +4 Mult if your hand contains a High Card. Because every hand will contain a High Card, it's functionally a re-skin of the basic Joker.
  • In a similar sense, The Filler gives x1 Mult if your hand contains a High Card. Every hand contains a High Card, and x1 Mult doesn't change your score at all.
  • Dubious Joker gives +20 Chips if your hand contains a High Card. In other words, it gives +20 Chips. It's a rare source of unconditional flat chips, but it's worse than most chip sources and, like The Filler, clearly exists solely to complete the Geodesic Cast of hand-based Jokers.
  • The Cat Tag stays in your inventory forever and plays a meowing sound when you mouse over it. You can "level up" the cat by getting more Cat Tags and clicking to merge them together, but no matter what it never does anything useful.
• Lethal Joke Item: The "Crash" code card just crashes your game, making it useless for actual play. But 1 in 6 times, instead of a crash, it opens up a prompt to let you execute arbitrary code. A googol joker slots? Free xMult? Win instantly? The game is your oyster, at least as long as you know just a little bit of Lua.
• LOL, 69: The joker "Nice" gives +420 Chips if you play a hand with both a 6 and a 9 in it.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The appropriately-named challenge "RNG" replaces all Jokers with the RNJoker, which changes to a new random ability each ante.
  • Turquoise Tornado is a Finisher Boss Blind with a 2/3 chance of not scoring your played hand at all.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Adds a few new cards that act as this.
  • The "://SEED" code card can set any Joker or card as "Rigged" and guarantee all of its random chances hit.
  • "://DELETE" is a code card that permanently removes a card from the shop for the rest of a run.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The challenge "Joker Poker" is named after one of LocalThunk's Working Titles for Balatro.
  • The Nostalgic boss blinds are all remakes of boss blinds that appeared in beta builds of Balatro.
  • The Nostalgic Deck combining Joker and consumable slots into a single inventory is a recreation of beta Balatro mechanics.
  • The Blank and Antimatter Decks reference vanilla's Blank and Antimatter Vouchers in their mechanics; vanilla's Blank Voucher must be redeemed ten times to unlock Antimatter (and then again on each run to find it), while Cryptid's Blank Deck must be won on Gold Stake to unlock its Antimatter Deck. The decks' art is also a minimally-edited version of the vouchers' art.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: The description of the "://CRASH" Code Card is simply "Don't."
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • "POINTER://", a Spectral card that can create any card in the game, explicitly forbids you from making Exotic Jokers with it.
  • The Chambered Spectral card, which normally creates 3 Negative copies of a random held consumable, will only create 1 if it's created by CTRL+V or POINTER://. Even Cryptid won't let you go infinite that easy.
• Precision F-Strike: The only time the mod uses profanity is when referring to a couple new secret hands, to emphasize how over-the-top they are:
  • The Clusterfuck is a hand of eight or more cards without a Pair, Flush, or Straight. The Fucked-Up Joker gives +37 Mult when you play it, while The Fuck!? is a joker that grants x10 Mult instead.
  • The Entire Fucking Deck is a hand of all 52 cards in a standard Poker deck played at once. The Universe In Its Fucking Entirety is the Planet card used to upgrade it, which is also labeled as being "The Actual Fucking Universe"
• Punny Name:
  • Jimball is a rolling ball that looks like Jimbo.
  • The Googol Play Card has a small chance of giving X1.0e100, or one googol, to Mult.
• Purposely Overpowered: The entire mod is designed around having zero balance at all, resulting in several cards and decks far stronger than the rest. For example, the Antimatter Deck has all of the benefits of every other deck with none of their drawbacks.
• Schmuck Bait: The description of the "Crash" code card is simply "Don't." Between that and the name, you can imagine that using it won't do anything good. Using it plays one of several crash-esque animations, and then unlocks an achievement.
• Shoehorned First Letter: As part of the "m" In-Joke, Jokers with the Jolly edition will have their names edited to begin with M (Jolly Joker -> Molly Moker, etc).
• Shout-Out:
  • The Bus Driver is the Battle Bus from Fortnite.
  • Chad is a Joker with the Roblox "Man Face".
  • Clicked Cookie is a Joker that loses Chips every time you click on the screen.
  • One of the possible results from using a Crash card is the entire script of Bee Movie.
  • The joker Digital Hallucinations has artwork of Caine from The Amazing Digital Circus looking up.
  • One of the challenges is titled Enter the Gungeon, which forces you to play a Boss Bonanza with an Eternal AP Joker.
  • The Exploit card is captioned "Is this a straight?" and doing the pose from The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird.
  • The Fast Food M is a joker resembling the McDonald's logo.
  • The Gambler's Tag has a drawing of the Gambler from raxdflipnote's animations, but with a Balatro game open on the slot machine instead.
  • Gourmand Tag is based off of a Slugcat of the same name.
  • Cards that spawn with the Jolly edition emit the laugh from Deez Nuts.
  • Krusty the Clown appears as a joker, though only in its name. The artwork is instead a copyright symbol.
  • Loss is a tag with art of the memetic "simplified" version of the page from Ctrl+Alt+Del.
  • The Nostalgic Candy's artwork is the candy from Cut the Rope.
  • The joker One For All adds one Joker slot, Booster Pack slot, hand size, consumable slot, and card in the shop.
  • The final upgrade for the Pairing voucher is called Pairamount Plus.
  • Pot of Jokes gradually increases your hand size each round.
  • Primus, an Exotic Joker that becomes more powerful with each prime number played, has artwork of Optimus Prime as a Visual Pun.
  • Reverse Card is a joker styled after the UNO card but with the letter M in place of numbers.
  • The Scrabble Tile is a joker with artwork of a single "M" tile from the tabletop game.
  • Spy, a removed Cursed Joker that disguised itself as another Joker while in the Shop, is the Spy from Team Fortress 2.
  • Stella Mortis is an Exotic Joker of the Death Star, and it destroys held Planet cards to gain power.
  • The joker Supercell has artwork with the word "LocalThunk" styled like the logo for the company.
  • Wario and Waluigi appear as Legendary Jokers. Mario and Luigi used to be Legendaries as well, though they were removed for not being interesting enough.
  • A plethora of references to ULTRAKILL:
    • A series of four jokers Referencing all four levels of Violence, Including Garden of Forking Paths^note , Light up the night^note , No sound, no memory^note , and ...Like Antennas to Heaven^note 
    • The Flesh Panopticon appears as a Joker that makes the next boss require 20 times as many chips to beat, in exchange for a Gateway card to create an Exotic Joker after beating it.
• Streamer-Friendly Mode: Jimball's Background Music Override is the copyrighted track "Funky Town" by Lipps Inc., which can be disabled like all of the mod's new songs. Getting Jimball for the first time shows a pop-up recommending you disable it if streaming.
• Theme Naming: All of the new Exotic Jokers have a Latin word as their name.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The AP Joker gives x4 Mult when up against a Boss Blind.

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