Far Far West Jokers Explained: Rarities, Slot Costs and What Actually Carries a Run

Frostburn landed on 27 August and rewrote the deck. If you are running a build from a July guide, at least four of its jokers no longer do what that guide says: one changed rarity, one gained a hard cap, one moved to diminishing returns, and the undisputed damage king lost a third of its ceiling. Worse, the rule that priced every unique joker is gone.

This is what the rarities are worth now, what slot costs mean after the change, and which cards still carry a run.

Start with the structural change, because it re-prices every build you have. Unique jokers no longer cost a mandatory five slots. Each one now takes an amount based on how strong it is, and that number is printed on the card.

Three uniques got cheaper in the same patch: Fanning Ace and Mark Ace both dropped from five slots to three, and Rush Blast from five to four. Fanning Ace also had its spread angle cut from 5 to 2.5, which the patch notes describe as a 3.5× accuracy improvement. A unique that used to eat a whole weapon is now something you can build around.

Jokers come in six tiers, and the patch notes label them Common, Fine, Prime, Mythic, Legendary and Unique. The Frostburn notes call the lowest tier Common; the current in-game and service naming uses Normal — the same tier under two names. The tier is not a quality score — it is a rough measure of how far a card bends the run.

• Common (Normal) — flat, small, always useful. Bracing is +5% attack and reload speed; Spare Bullets is +10% ammo bag. The design intent is stated openly in the notes: as the list grows, so does the pile of cards you do not want, so basic jokers exist to keep the draw pool from turning into noise.
• Fine — conditional but cheap. Crackshot (+7% damage), Fast Hands (+20% reload speed), Lunge (+15% melee range and hitbox).
• Prime — build-defining stats. Pew Pew Pew (+20% attack speed), Sharp Shooter (+20% weakspot damage), Avalanche (+15% damage while shielded).
• Mythic — rules changes rather than numbers. Execute kills anything under 20% HP outside elites and bosses; Riposte turns a blocked hit into +100% damage on your next attack.
• Legendary — run-defining, and priced accordingly. All Mighty converts shield into damage at +1% per shield point up to 80%; Vampire is flat 4% lifesteal on the weapon.
• Unique — weapon-specific, and since Frostburn no longer a flat five-slot tax.

Four nerfs matter enough to invalidate a build sheet.

Speedster was, in the developer’s own words, the undisputed king of damage jokers. It converted bonus move speed into damage and attack speed at +1% per 2% speed, capped at +55%. It now converts at +1% per 3% speed, capped at +40%. Both halves got worse: you need half again as much speed to feed it, and the ceiling is 15 points lower. Evil Raptor put a figure on it in the notes — “about a -28% loss in efficiency overall”, deliberately leaving it strong but no longer automatic.

Battlemage moved up from Mythic to Legendary — the tier went up, which in this game means it costs you more to run — and its effect was halved, from 1% to 0.5% spell-cooldown reduction per kill. The notes are explicit that Battlemage, Wisp and Rain together formed a horde-clearing trifecta that outclassed every other spell build.

Stonks is the interesting one, because it was buffed and nerfed in the same line: chest-joker chance up from +15% to +20%, but now on diminishing returns. The reason given is Uranium — stacking Stonks through the Copy Press used to be limited by the Gold it cost, and Gold is no longer the in-mission currency.

Cheapskate kept its rate of +1 HP per 20 Gold carried, and gained a hard cap of +15 HP. Same logic: with nothing to spend Gold on during a mission, the joker would otherwise pay out at full value every run.

Every row below is quoted from the Frostburn patch notes. Where the notes do not state a number, the row is not here.

Frostburn added melee weapons, and with them a shield system: Shield Points sit above your HP bar, take damage first, decay when you stop gaining them, and cap at 100. That single mechanic is what most of the new jokers are built around, and it is where the current carries live.

The damage line is All Mighty (Legendary): +1% damage per shield point, up to +80%. Feeding it is Double Down (Legendary, +30% shield from all sources), Last Bastion (Prime, +50 shield at 25% HP on a 60-second cooldown) and Tin Man (Mythic, overheal converts to shield up to +15 SP). Death’s Dance (Mythic) slows the decay by 30%, which is what keeps the stack alive between fights.

On the melee side, Berserker scales up to +50% melee damage as your HP drops and Bloodlust stacks +5% melee speed per kill up to +50%. Cold Blooded (Mythic) freezes on melee hits at a cost of 3 shield points per enemy — it converts the shield pool into crowd control rather than damage, so it competes with All Mighty rather than supporting it.

Before Frostburn, jokers that touched HP each did their own arithmetic. The patch notes are blunt about why that ended: “We previously had different calculations for different jokers affecting HP, which was a mess both for you and for us.”

Every HP joker now runs one formula:

The order is the whole point. Flat bonuses are summed before the multipliers apply, which means a flat +HP joker is worth more the more multipliers you are already running — and worth least on a build with none. Multipliers, in turn, compound against each other rather than being averaged.

Practically: a survivability build wants its flats first and its multipliers last, and mixing one weak flat into a stack of multipliers now pays better than it looks on the card. It also means two builds that used to reach the same HP by different routes no longer do.

Buying, copying and refining jokers no longer costs Gold. That happens in Uranium now — a currency that exists only inside a mission, so spending it never competes with your lobby unlocks. Leftover Uranium converts to hero and weapon XP at the end of the run.

The part that changes how you farm: you can break a joker you do not want and get Uranium for it, and the Frostburn notes add punching as a way to do it. The payout scales with the broken joker’s rarity, and dropped jokers give nothing. Uranium also comes from elite kills, secondary objectives, quests, secrets, lighthouses and the flying balloons.

Lighthouses are the other half. They spawn in every mission, are marked on the mini-map, and completing the minigame at the top reveals the map along with its unique locations — including the Copy Press, which is what you need if you are stacking a specific card.

If you would rather not grind a rarity tier at all, that is what our Far Far West joker services are for: the tiers are sold as they exist in game, from Normal through Unique.

• Primary source. Every number in this article — slot costs, rarity moves, the HP formula, Uranium rules, Shield Point behaviour and the balance table — comes from the Frostburn v0.2.0.2 announcement published by Evil Raptor on 27 August 2026.
• Also checked, and not used for the mechanics above. Hotfix 0.2.0.4 of the same day fixed promo codes and frozen Marauders only. The Uranium and joker-breaking rules are from the main patch.
• Not claimed here. The total number of jokers in the game. The developer publishes only the cards that changed; the “30+ new jokers” figure circulating on aggregator sites has no source at Evil Raptor, so we do not repeat it.
• Not stated by the developer. What Mark Ace’s buff actually is. It is listed as improved with no numbers attached.
• Naming. The patch notes say Common for the lowest tier; the game and our service pages call it Normal.
• Subject to change. Far Far West is in early access and the developer has said the joker list will keep growing. Figures here describe the game as of Frostburn v0.2.0.2.