yep this is sick
the game jam strategy of turning anything and everything into a roguelike genuinely has no limits, this is awesome
a lot of the time when making a roguelike with these kinds of choice based mechanics that require the player to think about synergies and whatnot, it's easy to make a lot of stuff that sounds interesting on paper and the player ends up barely reading anything and picking the easiest thing to understand, but I think here it's done very beautifully, the random events are giving you a reason to use all the different upgrades, the UI is very readable which is unbelievably important for a balatro-like, honestly this is stellar
and on top of that it fits the theme perfectly, and the design variety is crazy, every single time I read a new item I was like oooohhh that's sick, that's well designed
just a random thought, imagine an item that allows you to write 6's and 9's without the overhang and only using 5 sticks? I'm especially used to 9's being like that in 7-segment displays so I just thought that could be cool
anyway this is a fantastic jam entry, ++