Before I get into this, a quick disclaimer: I have terrible luck with card pulls, so your experience might be better than mine. I am also doing only basic statistics because I don't have my expensive calculator on me to do the nitty gritty numbers, and bore you with those I’m also going to compare this system to other collectibles I participate in to put the numbers in context.
There are roughly 640 cards in the current pool. On an average day, I get about 3 pulls, which gives me a 0.2% chance of getting any specific card I want. If all cards are weighted evenly.
To put that in perspective:
Destiny 2’s Root of Nightmares raid gives a 2.5–5% chance at the raid exotic weapon
A single ZZZ banner pull is 0.6% for the limited S rank
One Magic: The Gathering booster pack has a 12.5% chance of containing a mythic card
All of those also have pity systems or secondary markets. This system has neither.
With Poca sets also allegedly being time-limited to roughly 3 months, my 3 daily pulls give me only a 34% chance of getting any one card I want before it’s gone.
Your odds also depend heavily on which idol you collect. Karina has around 7–8 cards in the pool, which bumps your chance of pulling a Karina card up to about 1.25%. Meanwhile, fans of idols like Jihyo or Momo — who only have 3 cards — are stuck at a much lower rate with fewer chances to get what they want.
The system quietly favors collectors of popular idols.
The shrine isn't much help either. As of my current data analysis period, the shrine has taken in over 34,000 cards and paid out fewer than 6,821 — that’s a 20% success rate at best. If you’re trying to use the shrine to complete your collection, you’re burning a lot of cards for long odds. (I subtracted the beauty wisdom and the success shrine)
Which would be fine if the drop rates weren't random themselves, to remedy that is the beauty shrine, which I get, but the beauty shrine makes up nearly 60% of all shrine activity, meaning most players are converting common cards into rarer ones rather than losing cards to other shrines. Over time, card libraries will keep growing because nothing is really leaving circulation.
That also kills trading. Why negotiate with 15 other fans for a card when you can just grind commons and upgrade them yourself?
Until reprints are confirmed, older cards become rarer than newer ones, which means they’ll only go up in trade value. The smart move is to hoard and upgrade, which is the opposite of an active, social collecting community.
The system’s randomness and scarcity sound like good incentives on paper, but in practice, the math makes it frustrating, unequal, and pushes players toward hoarding over engaging.
I will say this as a positive, I love the wisdom, success, and duplication shrine because of this, and while I'm not personally a gambler like that, I love seeing people rip it and give their all for the super rare cards.
This next part is specific to my situation, but I think it’s worth mentioning.
Right now, a significant portion of the stories on the site are reposts. I have nothing but love for new readers and authors finding these stories for the first time — that’s genuinely great. But for readers who are already deep into the community’s libraries, it’s a real problem. When you’ve read certain fics two, three, or four times already, it’s hard to stay motivated to keep reading just to earn pulls. That should improve over time as more original content gets added, but right now it makes the already-low drop rates feel even worse.
Pocas are a genuinely cool idea. Done right, they could help the site grow into something special. My concerns are about where things are heading, not where they are right now. If nothing gets worse, great — we’re all Momo.
The reason I even brought any of this up is that every time someone raises a concern about the system, the response is basically “if you don’t like it, don’t use it.”
That’s not a real answer. It shuts down conversation and assumes everyone will or should love every decision made forever. The moment you have a complaint, people act like you’re being unreasonable.
So instead of keeping talking about it — I’m giving away all my pocas, disabling them on my end, and letting anyone who wants to farm me for them go right ahead. I’ll go back to writing my stories and leave the poca hunting to everyone else.