Advanced Shrine Use

This post covers “advanced” shrine techniques. I will not go over how the various shrines work- please check existing guides here or here for the basics.

Beauty vs. Success

After the update, there are now two shrine based methods of increasing quality: Beauty and Success. These two shrines have very different uses in my opinion.

• Until at least Epic rarity, only the Beauty shrine should be used to increase quality; over the long run, due to the high base chance, you are favored to always go up.

• At Epic rarity, you reach a 50/50, and so you may find it difficult to reach Q10 with beauty alone. I would recommend using Beauty until you get an 8, 9, or 10 and finishing with the Success shrine, otherwise you might be in for a long grind.

• Above Epic rarity, expect most of your quality boosting to be via Success shrine. Starting with Legendary, you are unfavored to see an increase. Typically I look for a decent beauty roll (5+ ideally) and success the rest of the way. Alternatively, you can use the new Nesting feature to increase the quality of these cards guaranteed over several days.

Using the new Power Shrine with Charges

The new Power shrine is very strong, particularly with the micropatch restoring 100% success for same card and quality. Using the new charge system, it is possible to “make” the power card relatively easily while it is active even from scratch in a short amount of time through the following steps:

1. Use Health to get the right tier.

2. Use Fame to get the right group (you can skip this part if you feel lucky).

3. Use Love to get the right idol. Note you can use Love again if you get the wrong card (ex. if you need Seoyeon 001 instead of 101) and get the group bonus.

4. Use Beauty/Success to match quality. If you need to decrease quality, it’s a bit trickier but still possible. It might be worth it to take the +70% for exact card at that point depending on how much of a decrease is needed. If you need to raise quality, you typically have more time since high quality cards tend to last longer in the power slots.

At most this should use 4 charges (especially if using Success), but typically I find myself able to skip the Health step. Charges, group bonus, and the new rotation system made this a lot easier than before, although it was admittedly more important when beauty had the much higher demotion chances.

Exclusion

Also included in the update is the ability to exclude various collections. Now, you can be normal and remove groups you aren’t really interested in, but if you want to “get something” out of it, then you have two options.

The first option is to remove the largest groups. This makes your random drops marginally more likely to be groups that you do like, assuming you aren’t as interested in these larger groups. However, a group with more cards is likely to appear more in the power shrine, so it may be more difficult to use that. An example exclusion list for this strategy would be:

• tripleS 1st Edition (23)

• tripleS 2nd Edition (63)

• LOONA 1st Edition (42)

• LOONA 2nd Edition (58)

• IOI 2nd Edition (36)

The second option is to remove the smallest groups. Groups with less cards are less likely to be featured in the power shrine, and so you may find it harder to use their cards for something other than Health. Soloists are also difficult to get group bonuses for (obviously). An example exclusion list would be:

• QWER 2nd Edition

• KiiKii 2nd Edition

• izna 2nd Edition

• LATENCY 1st Edition

• Soloist 1st Edition

LATENCY and Soloist 1st edition are also notable because some of the members changed affiliation for Summer- IU got her own collection, the former IZ* soloists are now under IZ*ONE, etc. Despite being the same people, you won’t qualify for same group if you sacrifice one of the cards from the old collection when one from the new one is in the power shrine, and vice versa.

You may also adopt a strategy in the middle by removing medium-size groups you’re just not that interested in.

In general, due to same group bonuses, I believe you should remove all of a group instead of one of their collections only. Even if you are only interested in, for example, Aespa 2nd Edition, getting a drop of 1st Edition means it has same group bonus for Fame/Love and you can get a 2nd edition that way.

Wisdom Solving

The most important thing about this iteration of wisdom from a theory perspective is that gaining information on the last digit is the most expensive. To know anything about digit 4, I must always submit digits 1-3.

This means two things immediately:

• You should always start by guessing 4 digits instead of 3 in a completely new game. Let’s assume you guess with 3 cards and find out it is 3 slots on the 4th guess. Great, we saved 4 cards. However, if it turns out to be a 4 digit combination, having to do even one more 4 card guess later down the line has erased our savings.

• If you don’t know the 4th digit, you should always submit 4 digits (and up to the furthest unknown digit in general). While it may be tempting to submit 1 card to get cheap information on the 1st digit, having that information does not reduce the cost of guessing the 4th digit- you still must submit something in the 1st slot to guess the 4th.

What happens once I get something right?

Let us assume we input 3142 and got 2 digits correct (50%). The best way to gain further information is the following:

1. Input 3. Let’s assume this is correct and the shrine says 25%; we now know the 1st digit is 3.

2. Input X1. Since we know the 1st digit is 3, we can now put anything there (signified by X). If we see 25% here and X is anything other than 3, we know the 2nd digit is 1 because X is known to be wrong. For the sake of the demonstration, let’s say we get a 0% which means the 2nd digit is not 1. If X was 3, then we just subtract 25% from what we see and apply the same logic.

3. Input X14. We retain freedom in slot 1, but slot 2 is forced to be a 1. This is because 1 is the only number we know is wrong in that slot. If we change both, it is impossible to know if the new number we chose in slot 2 or the 4 we are currently testing is correct. Again assuming X is not 3, then 25% means the second 3 is correct and 0% means it is not. Let’s say we again see 0% here.

4. We do not need to guess the 4th digit anymore. We know 3142 had 2 correct digits and the 1 and 4 were incorrect. Therefore, the 3 and 2 must be correct.

5. From here, you only have to guess 3 digits at a time. Say that I guess X22 where X is not 3 and get 25%. I know one of the 2s is correct, and I can figure out which one by inputting X2. If I see 25%, then the 2nd digit is 2; if I see 0%, the 3rd digit is 2.

6. Then you will be left with a list of possible options for the last digit. At this point you have to just brute force it. Pray that your last digit is not #4 in this scenario.

Since it is a PVE game this season, you have unlimited time (it doesn’t even take shrine charges anymore). Just keep track of your guesses and narrow it down slowly. A successful solve will likely be somewhere around 20-40 cards.