If you are not playing the Heart deck, it can seem awful at first to play without any healing sources. One of your priorities when building your deck is to try to look for ways you can mitigate damage. Any Heart and Spade card can help with this. If you see a decently high heart card and your other options don’t fit your deck, maybe it’s a good pick to consider.



Monterey Jack: High heart card that allows you to remove it in case it busts you.
Queen of Drag: High heart card that sets up an easy blackjack.
Valentines Card: Massive heal for both players.
Pi of Hearts: Helps getting blackjacks and has a lower risk of causing busts.
Loyalty Card: Potentially massive heal when you perform the guaranteed Blackjack since it fills all of your missing points with Hearts. Very exploitable if you have a way to get a bunch of Advantage to keep triggering it.
Suit Yourself: It allows you to change the suit of any card in your deck into any suit you want, such as Hearts if you lack healing.



Jack and the Beanstalk: Adds 10 Spades, and massively increases your chance of doing a blackjack even if you bust with it.
Jack of All Trades: If you Blackjack with this card, it gives the effect of all suits at once including 10 health and 10 shield.
Report card: Decent low card that gives guaranteed 4 shield when played and gives you free aces if you specialize further into shields.

Getting the opponent to go over the Blackjack limit to force them to take all of your damage is key. Here are a few cards that allow you to force your opponent to bust easily:



Four Mana Seven Seven: When this card is played it adds a 7 to their pile and everytime you click Hit after. In many cases, that first 7 is enough to make them bust. The 7's being generated are also added to their deck so it disrupts alot of the strategies the NPCs use. Be mindful that if your deck runs alot of high cards there is a big probability to bust yourself. If you can play it from the hand be mindful that it adds 6 points to your board when played to avoid busting yourself.

Queen of Chess + Jumping Jack: These cards allow you to manipulate their position on the board and force your opponent to get 10 points which in many cases is more than enough to bust them.

Sweep the Leg: It manipulates the enemy’s Blackjack to only work with 20 points. On some NPC’s it makes their gameplan harder and on some NPC’s that like to play alot of 10’s it makes their gameplan easier. It isn’t a problem if your deck can go to 21 and 22 consistantly though.

Rules Card: Like Sweep the Leg, it allows your to manipulate the rules of the game. If used when the opponent is sitting on a 21 Blackjack it forces them to bust and gives you a free opportunity to deal damage.

+2 Card: It forces your opponent to play 2 cards. Beware that it goes into the opponent’s deck after you play it so it can become a bit of a curse after a while.

There are many NPC’s that rely on a few key cards for their strategies to work and the game gives you a lot of options to deal with them. Are the NPC’s constantly getting shield and chipping away at your health with their annoying Tarot cards? Just steal them or get rid of them. These types of cards are always good to consider adding to your deck despite looking useless at first glance.



Gerald from Riviera: Burns a card in play but only once per game.

Yellow Card: Marks a card and then allows you to burn it with a Red card. It allows you to burn multiple cards per game unlike Gerald. It's much more effective to get rid of cards that lock themselves when they are played.

Dis-card: Forces your opponent to instantly discard a card in play.

Business card: Straight up steals an enemy card that is in play and makes it yours for the rest of the game.

Lock picking card and Key card: A lot of problematic enemy tarot cards lock themselves to stay on the board. These two cards allow you to unlock those problematic cards by forcing them to get discarded at the end of the round.

To reduce the luck of the draw there are cards that allow to remove a lot if not all of the luck involved in Blackjack. Of note there are the cards with the Flexible and Rounds-up keywords, which means the card will automatically change it’s rank to climb the score towards the Blackjack score and disables that effect if it would cause you to bust. And then there are the cards that straight up win you the blackjack on command.



All Aces: The aces in this game are played as 1 if it would cause you to bust or 11 if not.

The “PI” cards: A series of 4 cards with a rank of 3 that adjusts to a 4 if needed.

The “Half” cards: A series of cards with a rank of 0 that adjusts to a 1 if needed.

Dark Flower: Card that creates 3 “Half” cards of any color you choose at the cost of 1 advantage, giving you a margin of error of 3.

Jack and the Beanstalk: This card rounds up 4 ranks and ranks down by 5 if you bust while this card is in play, allowing you to greatly increase the odds of giving you the Blackjack.



Official Trump card: Allows you play the card with any rank you want on command from the hand at the cost of some chips. It helps tremendously when you get an opportunity to do big damage and when you are at the risk of taking big damage.

Trump Card: Instantly guarantees the blackjack when played from the hand at the cost of deleting itself from the deck when it discarded. If you can win the game before it gets discarded it avoids getting removed from the deck.

Loyalty Card: Once you clear all of the 10 stamps by either playing it over the course of the run and/or spending Advantage to fill the stamps, you get an instant Blackjack.

Here are some card recommendations that don’t fit the categories above that I believe are good in many situations.



Cue card: Allows you to bring cards back from the discard pile, allowing you to play your good cards more frequently.

Diamond in the Rough: A lot of enemies in the later stages of the game can get annoying amounts of shield and this card just destroys a good chunk of it without messing with your strategy by being a 0 rank card.

The Wild Card: This is like a weaker version of the Trump cards as it allows you to morph it into a card of the same rank as the card on the top of your discard pile and it stays on your hand until you decide that it’s the right opportunity.

Transit Card: By paying advantage you can use this card to put cards you don’t want in your opponent’s deck essentially thinning your deck and making their deck worse.

Hall Pass: Allows you to see the next 3 cards in your deck giving you more choices and allows you to play a bit more safely.

High Negative Cards: Negative cards, specially the higher ones, can be thought of as ways to cycle through your deck since it is potentially canceling out the basic cards that have no useful effects and help you get to the good ones.