#save freebies and skip a ton of banners

[crehador]

How do you budget for gatchas? I ended up pulling for both Arknights Zuo Le and ARBs Nemu but failed both after 120 and 75 pulls respectively. Arknights was kind enough to give me the Shu and a Ling dupe, but ARB I got nothing and I have nothing left lol

I actually semi ragequit ARB after my Nemu incident , bc I was trying to save for Samatokis ultimate card. Now that the card is out with this timing, I'm taking it as a sign to take a long break lol. So I respect your grind for the back to back smic cards!

unfortunately it's either swipe swipe swipe or be very diligent about saving free currency + get lucky as well

the advice i have is for the diligent + lucky f2p approach because i don't recommend the swipe swipe swipe route like. at all lmao

for me, in arknights specifically, saving is often about making some extremely less than optimal resource/sanity choices lol

like i'm at 250 pulls on the current arknights banner (AND STILL NO ZUO LE SOMEHOW) and i'm going for 300 to spark nian (originally was going to spark chongyue but he just... came home like a good boy lol, so now out of the sui siblings i'm only missing nian)

so even though technically the best use of sanity is to farm the event stages (there's even rocks... delicious rocks......) i'm using my sanity to clear stages i haven't cleared before (in side story/record restoration) for more originite prime and therefore more pulls

i switched my factories and trading posts over to produce orundum instead of lmd too, which is definitely not smart because i always need lmd lol, and i e2'd some units i never use just to do their paradox simulations (also not smart because... again, i don't have the lmd to be messing around like this lmao)

also, personally i think the smartest use of gold certs is to save 180 for an operator of your choice, but i... have literally never done that orz i have no self-restraint and always buy the pulls with gold certs, so that helps too (and is why even after many years of playing I STILL DON'T HAVE SCHWARZ)

i happened to have a lot saved up when this shu banner started, so that helped too. i wasn't planning to go all in like this (logos... i need logos...) but zuo le is being such a fucking problem that i guess i may as well go all the way for nian now

as for arb, it's a lot of self-restraint

tl;dr i have to skip a lot of banners even if there's a card i really want

if you do all dailies and don't get super unlucky, as in going to full pity every time, i think it's possible to get every* event** card of at least 2 characters without spending at all. and it's definitely possible if you're only targeting every event card of 1 character

but tragically that does mean skipping a lot of things you want. like i would love to get nemu's ultimate card. i did actually throw some pulls into her banner when she first released, but alas. she did not want to come home

i knew samatoki was coming eventually (brutal that they put him right after nemu though) so after pulling ichiro's ultimate card, i didn't do any ultimate pulls whatsoever. i had about 50 pulls stocked up, plus some leftover gems from ichiro's bday savings

basically events with ichiro and/or samatoki plus their birthday banners are the only things i ever pull on, unless i have a lot of gems stocked up (then i try to go for anniversary events)

*more specifically, i should say every event card except one per year. i always pick one samatoki or ichiro event card to skip per year, and then grab it from the revival banner during anniversary events. being able to skip even one banner per year helps a ton with saving free resources

**and when i say every event card, i specifically mean the event cards attached to story-type events. i usually skip the monthly banner series (such as waftage) since there are other opportunities to get those cards throughout the year (now more than ever, with the new battle pass, i recommend skipping these since you can just outright buy them with the battle pass rewards, even from the free tier of the battle pass)

okay sorry this got very long and rambly lol but the real tl;dr is just

do all dailies, buy all free pulls, and skip a ton of banners