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Non-shrineable cards
Hi! Let's talk about a point of great contention, grievance, frustration and (in some very rare cases) elation. Let's talk non-shrineable cards, Celestials, and their rumored to join us cousins, Mythical and Divine cards.
I'm not going to beat around the bush, I think the current iteration of Celestial cards and their mechanics is easily the worst system this site is persistent in keeping. Only attainable through random happen-stance (where before they were attainable through the shrine of fortune which had its own host of problems), and a perceived rarity and value so high that they have become basically untradeable.
The current situation is one where if you do not win the lottery by getting a randomly dropped Celestial (for which the percentages are unknown, leaving us to pure speculation), you are ineligible to even discuss obtaining a celestial through other means. They are so comically hard to obtain, that they have become basically untradeable for anything but another celestial on this site, nothing is comparable. People have been joking about writing commissions for Celestial cards, and even that has been broadly unsuccessful. Neither the existence or failure of it is a healthy indicator.
But alright, let's imagine hypothetically that you do win a celestial. Congratulations, you are one of the few lucky ones! What's that, you only collect AESPA but you happened to get an Seulgi celestial that nobody wants to trade for the shiny Winter celestial? Well, you're just shit out of luck! Because of the high rarity of Celestials, trading for the one you want also becomes borderline impossible with the perceived imbalance of worth of different idols and their extreme rarity.
We are halfway through the season, and so far only one Chaewon, Asa and Winter Celestial cards have been achieved. That alone should make the idea of completing a collection of an idol feel impossible to you.
I understand Celestials need to be rare or they're just becoming another flavor of Cosmic. I don't hate the idea of super ultra mega rare cards. But their current implementation is frustration incarnate. If there are more types of cards like them on the horizon, I can only imagine my and people sharing my sentiments frustration multiplying with the addition of Divine cards that are just a slightly less bitter flavor of Celestials. If Mythicals are objective cards as is rumored, then no complaints here (yet).
So what do I propose then? A pity system. Just like in gacha games (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero (I only know hoyoverse gacha games well enough LMFAO sorry)). If every time you rolled a card through interactions, prayer, passively through readers you failed to get a Celestial, your chances of getting one would go slightly up. If you still haven't by a certain amount, say for example the first time you hit 200 rolls without a Celestial in a season you still haven't gotten one, your 200th roll is a guaranteed Celestial. After that, your chances of getting a Celestial drops to 0 or near 0.
I believe this would help with the trading economy of Celestials, boosting the social element of this site, as well as limiting which Celestials you would go for since you're only getting one drop per season if you're active enough, making them retain their rare value.
If Divine cards are indeed similar to Celestials in that regard, you could even use the same system but without a drop to 0 percent chance after getting one, and setting the cap for a guarantee lower. It's a tried and true system, used by the richest and most lucrative companies dealing in users acquiring stuff through random chance. Please consider this, or at least give us a reason we can get behind why the system is the way it is.
Replies (25)
We understand this frustration of Celestials feeling unobtainable, and that is unfortunately a byproduct of the nature of their existence. There are a lot of comparisons of Celestials to other apex level artifacts in other gacha-systems, and that may be the root of confusion—while the Shrine acts as a gachapon, Fanprose itself is not entirely gacha based, borrowing elements from traditional card collecting (Pokemon, sports, and obviously, real kpop pocas), where pity systems do not exist. These two perspectives are contradictory to each other in certain ways, and while the system slowly gravitated towards being more gacha-like in Summer than Spring, we’d like to keep Celestials as a remnant of the original vision so that it can cater to both types of users. In the same way that buying $10,000 worth of Pokemon packs will not guarantee you a Charizard, or that grinding grass patches for your entire life will not guarantee you a Shiny, Celestials are intended to be extraordinarily rare. This is the reason behind the decision to remove them from the Fortune shrine—to make this event truly highly luck based without allowing any other opportunistic methods of obtaining them. From a value-balance perspective, Cosmics are incredibly easy to obtain in Summer compared to ever before, thus drastically reducing their value. Without nerfing the Beauty shrine (which will inevitably cause more distress than not), it is now impossible to bring their value back. Summer is now quantity over quality in terms of card collection. This is the reason for the introduction of Divine cards, which will essentially replace both the roles of the old Cosmics and Celestials as the middle ground. They will not be impossibly difficult to obtain, but they will not be 5 power cards away from popping out of the Beauty shrine. This, of course, will not change the fact that users still will want Celestials as long as they exist. Our goal is to prevent Celestials from feeling like a blocker in completing a collection, but there needs to be more than one definition of ‘complete’. Fanprose is not a video game, and we don’t believe users should expect to reach “100% completion” so long as they have the time to do so, just as how Labubu collectors aren’t guaranteed a Secret pull even if they buy out an entire store. Of course, we appreciate all your suggestions and are open to further discussions with everyone as the season is far from over. But this is our perspective (as you’ve requested): Fanprose has over 3,000 active users and will continue to grow. To near-guarantee one Celestial per user per season will dilute their value without fail. If there are 20 Celestial frames total, this would mean that each Celestial will have 150 owners. Even if we increase the total frames to 50, that is still 60 owners per card. We believe that this level of scarcity is better suited for Divine cards than Celestials. Having said this, our question would be: how can we get you to “forget” about Celestials without being unhappy about them? What is it about Qinfinities that don’t bother you guys as much?
@Fanprose Thank you for sharing your perspective. It is helpful to understand and I think we should continue to have a discussion and figure out a way to make this more workable. As a preview, ultimately this is your vision and I respect that, but I just wanted to offer a different perspective from a user who cherishes and appreciates this community and what the devs/mods do for it. To start off with, I think my end goal is simply to make the average user happier and enjoy using the platform. I think, this season has done wonders in that regards as dedicated users can for the most part get every Poca they could reasonably want (while experience the fun frustrations that RNG throws in their way) with consistent long term engagement on this platform. More casual users probably can at least get their favs. So now we have the pure RNG super rare Celestial and soon to be minted Divine card. These cards will cause inevitable frustration for all the various reasons that have been discussed. So what is the benefit that we are getting for this frustration? That we are protecting the value of the poca and I suppose some people will be experience a brief sense of immense joy when they receive them. My dumb simple brain cannot really understand this part. For example, if my celestial Yuna was received by more people in Spring, I would still highly value the card and not resent others for it as it is the only one I have for the season. I do not take this position on any card I have received. I am actually quite happy to see so ppl obtaining cosmic Nagyung or Secret Norangz etc. It is difficult for me to understand why so much importance is being placed in the scarcity-first/value mindset as it leads to conclusions that potentially adding 10-20 additional Celestials into FP from the shrine would somehow unbalance a poca economy that barely exists (as others have noted there is no true liquid tradeable market for the celestials). I actually agree with removing celestials from the fortune shrine, but mainly because of the sniping concerns that doomed prior iterations of the wisdom shrine. Also one celestial per user is also not as horrible as it sounds as I am not sure all 3000+ plus users here are extremely active. The extreme rarity of the celestial has caused other issues as well as people are also ironically not as invested in them at all, which some have argued have led to the decline in their quality. This is subjective, so I don’t want to dwell on this point too much, but the disengagement with them is a real thing. The other reason, why I am having difficulty understanding the goal here is the examples don’t seem to be on point. In the card games/pocas you mentioned, you can actually get a specific card if you want. For the physical versions of these example, you just buy it directly instead of buying random packs. There are certainly a limited amount in production, but the key difference is there are enough in production for there to be an actual market for the cards/pocas. As others have mentioned, for a variety of reasons there is no tradeable market for celestials. Also when these card games systems have electronic counterparts (e.g. MTGA), you are able to craft extremely rare cards using the systems that have been described elsewhere as those games systems know the frustration of not being to get a card you really want and because it is all digital the artificial scarcity of the card seems misplaced. As a digital platform I feel these are more apt comparisons. Even in the Shiny example for Pokemon Go the average active community player has 150-500 Shiny Pokemon and grinders can have over 1000. Even if we are talking about the other games, the example still isn’t comparable because there is no daily cap on its drop (i.e. you don’t see 10 pokemon and no more pokemon spawn). I think the spawn rate can go as high as 1/100 in certain generations if you have specific charms/events. Now, I obviously am not saying we should create a terrible grind system, but in each of these systems there is way to get what you want with persistent effort or there are more of them. While these systems do indeed have RNG, the rarest cards tend to be farmable. I know this is a lot and at the end of the day if the celestial system remained the same, I am not to bothered by it (contrary to this giant message) as I can just choose to ignore it as its a small part of FP, but I would prefer you do not expand this system to more tiers of cards so it creeps up in more areas and becomes harder to ignore (as appears to be the intention with Divine). I just want to see be able to mint a card and just enjoy the well-written stories on this site knowing that I will one day, with effort, obtain the card.
Yes, I agree with the suggestion that Woolly posted. As I mentioned in my posts, I think the fact that some treehouses actively refuse to mint these cards is an indication, people do not really like the system (this is coming from someone who owns a celestial). I of course agree that they should be rare, but I think sometimes we focus too much on making sure cards are extremely rare at the detriment of enjoyment of the users (as evidenced by how poorly the initial secret wisdom shrine mechanics for the summer were received). If one person can only generally get 1 or 2 celestial max a season I think that is rare enough as a single person can get like 20+ cosmics a season. Anywho, thank you for considering the proposal, I am glad the site is open to reviewing the change!
The question that I feel like needs to be answered first by the devs is how rare is too rare, because I feel like that will directly set our expectations and we can make a more in depth pitch based around how rare they want various cards to be.
@Urban Mecha Maybe its meant to be this rare, maybe its not meant for everyone. IDK know myself though, its the dev’s decision.
@Guardian of Thunder If they are meant to be that rare great if not then talks need to be had
@Urban Mecha To answer this question: we don’t believe that 1-5 owners per Celestials per season is “too rare”.
@Fanprose Works for me have a nice day
Just brainstorming here but maybe you could still use the Fortune shrine with some tweaks? Start by making it a solo game like Wisdom and then make it only accept high tier or high quality cards so that it still functions as a resource sink for the poca economy.
I wonder if some sort of login system could be implemented? Maybe everyone gets a random poca a day (premium users could get this in addition to the current daily), and say maybe on your 30th cumulative day of login you get an Ethereal, 50th a cosmic, and 100th you get a Celestial? That would be a Celestial every 3ish months, meaning 1 every season. Of course, maybe the premium one stays the same, without the above milestones, if that makes sense. The exact milestones could be tweaked to keep the rarity of Celestials, of course.
@YesorYesnt Not a bad idea, but I dread the rush that would happen on the 100th day of a season where suddenly thousands of people all get a celestial at the same time
@Woolly Yea, economy did not cross my mind at the time of posting…
reusing most of my comments from the other day i still think it is fine to have an apex and extremely limited rarity (god knows what divine is) but i now believe that the problem we just had with the fortune shrine was not the fortune shrine’s fault. the reason everyone wants to game the fortune shrine is because it is the only “reliable” way to get a celestial, and so rationally as people who want a card limited to like 3 copies on the site you should find out how to get as many points as easily as possible. if i want to have the best odds, i should get cosmics easily, and why should i choose wonyoungs over kaede lynn if they are seen the same by the system? there is also an extremely high chance that i sac all that for nothing and so if i used 5 days of shrine charges to get that im gonna hate my life. with all that in mind it is no wonder things ended up the way they did and both of these systems (fortune and tier skips) got changes largely because of how celestial distribution is handled. while fortune had other problems (favoring those with more cards and timezone stuff) the main incentive to interact with it (at least for a majority of people) was the opportunity to get a celestial so that is why i am assigning so much blame there. in terms of solutions, i just don’t believe in “pvp” ways of making celestials available. the incentive structure it creates is just not good and in this setting there are issues with pvp structures as a whole, which i think has become more and more apparent with time. i also believe it is clearly established that most people would never part with a celestial they own for anything other than a different celestial, there is simply not anything close to comparable in obtainability. and they still have their own intrinsic value so if you get one you don’t really like good luck getting another one, the stars basically have to align. you can either further restrict them by making them exclusive to drops and continue to have people cope about not counting celestials as a collectible item (note how many people, myself included, do count secrets as part of collections but not celestials) so that it truly is an equal system (even then not necessarily considering that paid users literally just get more drops) or create a singleplayer system that distributes an extremely limited amount on a repeatable or one time basis. gate it behind some ridiculous condition or make it a site event or whatever. realistically it is not super important to me what this system is as long as it functions well because they should all ultimately give out a celestial but i think it should have some choice element. im sure people have their one choice in mind if they were only allowed one and would also be satisfied with that choice. also there is not really a problem with non shrineable cards besides celestials imo, assuming you’re playing wisdom as described by the guides the top end is like 40-50, and i think it’s good that it encourages you to do something other than beauty everything. the only other non shrineable cards are spring26 and in that case we just have to acknowledge that chance is gone it is what it is
@anananji I don’t count secrets as non-shrineable cards, since you can get them through the wisdom shrine. I meant non-shrineable cards as in card rarities (not specific cards) that can not be obtained through any shrine, namely Celestials and the rumored Divine cards.
@Woolly oh sure yeah
@anananji I know it's irrelevant now but what you mean about the timezones? Did celestials card only appeared at certain time? Never noticed.
@YoRHa no it was literally just like if you happened to be asleep at the time you were SOL bc they’re usually gone in sub 30 mins, i think some people never even saw one in shrine bc they were just sleeping at a normal time for their timezone
I agree with your solution and I’m hoping the devs would consider it. Apex Legends has this (sorry I don’t play many gacha games to have an example that’s close to yours) where after 500 Apex Packs, you are guaranteed Heirloom Shards. To add to your suggestion, maybe we can have it connected to the Prayer Shrine wherein after a certain amount of Prayers you are guaranteed a Celestial (still can be randomized or biased to your favorite idols/groups). I think what the devs could determine though is what the amount of Prayers should be to classify someone who is active throughout the season without also requiring them to spend an unhealthy amount of time on the site (promote a healthy balance still, you know). Thank you by the way for this writeup!
@Guardian of Peace Yeah I mean the 200 number was not meant as a serious balance suggestion, more of just a “high sounding number“ to be slot in for demonstration purposes. I fully trust the devs to find a balanced number to make this system work if they decide to go this route, they earned that much trust with all the stellar updates the shrine has gotten over this season. I do like the idea of it being connected to the prayer shrine since I only pray for Peace, but I wonder what this would mean for people that use the prayers for different buffs…
@Woolly It has to be extremely high though or else Celestial value will plummet (especially if connects with the prayer shrine, which is still a luck-based game), but yes I agree, I believe the Devs would have the data if this is a good idea or not and what the numbers can be.
@Guardian of Peace I personally don’t think the value will plummet to a point that it would be a detriment to the system if this pity system only works on Celestials once per season. But that’s pure speculation, of course.
@Guardian of Peace worth saying that probably changes would only hit in fall season or later so it could be totally realistic that spring summer celestials retain higher value while fall ones are lower which i think is acceptable, certainly secrets are not what they used to be on the market and the spring ones do command a higher price imo. same is true to a lesser extent for spring high rarities since it was objectively much harder back then although it is hard to separate how much of that is due to them being unobtainable now
@anananji It’s just my opinion but I think one factor for the lower value of the current secrets is actually because the Summer ‘26 selection is quite small and not the best (older groups or less popular members) so the supply/demand is a bit wonky.
@Woolly As for your concern about people having to balance between other Prayer Buffs then, well, I think it’s a risk they have to take, right? Would they prioritize getting a Celestial eventually or do something else with their prayer/s for the day.
I'm agree with you bro
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