The best strategy games like Balatro are Slay the Spire, Luck be a Landlord and Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to strategy costs you.
Filtering to strategy means you want to be making decisions rather than executing them. It is the right filter when what you liked was the planning.
What you get: Losing that teaches you something. A good strategy game makes the reason you lost legible, so the next attempt is different rather than just longer.
What made Balatro worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the strategy part of that answer, and only the strategy part.
The deckbuilding roguelike everything since is measured against.
A slot machine as a synergy engine — the closest structural cousin.
Blackjack rebuilt as a roguelike, and very funny.
Deckbuilding with more moving parts and huge combo ceilings.
Pachinko plus deckbuilding, and the same one-more-run pull.
A card game that keeps changing what kind of card game it is.
Inventory as the build, and the synergies are the whole game.
The free content updates, if you have not played the newer jokers.
Pace and immediacy. Strategy games are slow by design, and the good ones expect you to sit with a screen for a while before anything happens.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Balatro that are not strategy games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Balatro — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Slay the Spire. The deckbuilding roguelike everything since is measured against.
No. Balatro released on the PC & Modern Multi-Platform, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Scale. Tactics is one battle, unit by unit. Strategy is the campaign around it — economy, territory, and which battles to fight at all.
Turn-based ones, yes; the genre started on consoles. Real-time strategy is genuinely worse without a mouse, with a handful of exceptions built for the pad.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Balatro list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is strategy — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the strategy guide for where to start in the genre generally.