Baron

What Baron rewards

Baron gives ×1.5 Mult per King held in hand at scoring. Held — not played. Played Kings don't count; they have to still be in your hand when the scoring hand fires.

The base curve:

A typical 8-card hand size will rarely hold more than 4 Kings without help. Baron's ceiling is what your hand-size and card-filter jokers allow.

The card discipline Baron actually demands

Baron asks you to not play the Kings you'd usually play. That's the core change to your decision-making:

• When you draw a King, hold it. Discard non-Kings to dig deeper.
• Play other hand types (Pair, Two Pair, Three of a Kind on non-Kings) while Kings sit in hand.
• This breaks naturally if your deck is thin on Kings — Baron wants a King-heavy deck.

Cards that help feed Kings into the hand:

• Strength tarot: rank +1. Use on Queens to convert them into Kings.
• Death tarot: copies the rank of one card onto another — copy a King onto a low card you don't care about.
• Family / The Sigil / Sceptre: deck reshape that nudges toward Kings.
• Marble Joker + Erratic Deck: high variance, but a King-heavy roll is what every Baron run hopes for.

The Mime stack

Mime retriggers all held-in-hand abilities. Baron + Mime is the Baron equivalent of Blueprint + Triboulet — Mime makes Baron fire twice on every held King.

• 4 Kings + Baron alone: ×1.5⁴ = ×5.0625
• 4 Kings + Baron + Mime: ×1.5⁴ × ×1.5⁴ = ×25.6
• 4 Kings + Baron + Mime + Sock and Buskin (retriggers face cards once more): face cards in the played hand also retrigger, compounding any other face-card jokers stacked alongside.

Some builds stack Mime + Hanging Chad (retriggers first scored card) for a triple-trigger frontline alongside Baron.

Hand size matters more than mult here

Baron's payoff scales with how many Kings you can physically hold. Investments that grow hand size pay double:

• Stuntman: +2 cards held in hand, -1 hand played per round. Pure Baron upgrade.
• Antimatter / Magic / Painted Deck: starting +1 hand size.
• Throwback (×0.25 mult per skipped Blind) plays nicely with Baron because both reward a long, controlled run.

When to take, when to skip

Take Baron:

• Early-mid run with a deck that's already King-friendly or with Strength/Death access.
• Once you have Mime, Baron's value triples — grab both whenever the second one shows.
• Plasma Deck or any high-hand-size start.

Skip Baron:

• You're already invested in a face-card scoring build with Triboulet — Baron rewards holding, Triboulet rewards playing. Picking both forces awkward decisions every round.
• Your deck has been thinned away from Kings (heavy Erratic conversion, anti-face challenges).
• Past Ante 6 with no Mime and no hand-size upgrades — the ceiling is too low.

Related Jokers

Same rarity or category as Baron.