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.

You can use Success more aggressively than this if you are not poor on cards like I am (T_T).

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

edit: after the latest update, you can actually remove groups entirely. the suggested lists below have been updated accordingly. it is also optimal to remove groups instead of specific collections as this removes both collections for one exclusion slot. the reasoning for this is included below.

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

• LOONA

• TWICE

• fromis_9

• SNSD

This particular config removes 378 cards from the pool.

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

• KiiKii

• izna

• LATENCY

• Soloist

LATENCY and Soloist 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.

Nesting

The other new feature is Nesting. This feature can be maximized by taking your cards out once you promote and only using Q6 cards as a base. Ideally, you should place your Q6 Legendary/Ethereals since they will promote to Ethereal/Cosmic for free without having to mess with power. Get Q6 via Beauty/Success as normal. I'm not too concerned by this as the time to increase is measured in days; it is always going to be faster to pull the cards out and roll them in beauty/success a few times if you are really interested in that, but passive income is passive income.

However, Nesting can bring you high value through duo nesting, which gives you a duo card automatically if you level up both halves of the duo to the appropriate rarity through nesting, essentially giving you a free limited card. This is also not time constrained; as long as your two duo cards were nested together, you will receive the duo once both cards upgrade, regardless of the time difference. This is however a Fan+ exclusive feature, as the membership is necessary to nest two cards in a treehouse.

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) if not locating a correct digit as described below. 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 (this is a great use for cards of Infinite rarity).

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

Infinite Cards

Infinite cards are rare and quite powerful. They have two properties I think are useful:

• When used as a booster, Infinity cards will push the target card into an Infinity card. You can use this to make your favorite card Infinity which is nice for looking cool.

• When used in Wisdom, an Infinity card is an automatic correct digit. Good for autosolving if you know all but the 4th digit in a Wisdom puzzle, as finding that digit might take a lot of cards.

Their other benefits (guaranteed 100% power, beauty upgrade, and fame/love success) are relatively easily replicated through other methods, so I don’t recommend them.