[EMS] Mystic Frontier is a mistake

It's the spooky season, and nothing is more terrifying than waking up to another episode of exploit o'clock.

Mystic Frontier is a blessing and a curse. It perfectly encapsulates the worst aspects of Inkwell's design philosophy, where it's designed to be as frustrating and manipulative as possible. It's predatory in such a way that customers are fooled into thinking that spending money gives them an advantage, but in practice it's a zero sum game. However, his carelessness is an advantage: Mystic Frontier's highly exploitable, to the degree where it's the second most important weekly content (after ghetto muling) as they both substitute the Potential revamp and are arguably more effective at it.

This blogpost assumes you understand the basics of Mystic Frontier, and that you're familiar with ghetto muling. Right now, progress is gated by the quantity of characters. The more you have, the faster progression becomes. For ghetto muling you need 6th Job, but Mystic Frontier only requires 5th Job. The other thing you'll need is something the EMS market has plenty of: a sheer quantity of common familiar cards with blue Potential. They're cheap, abundant and an one-time purchase. It requires a few billion mesos, but you'll then have a weekly supply of Additional Potential cubes. At this point, the Potential revamp is worse since each roll costs a fortune, whereas Frontier only has the initial cost and once set up, becomes profitable in a few months. You might as well make the most out of it, while you still can...

 

Every day, you can open Mystic Frontier to roll for three random expeditions. You can do this on every character that has unlocked Mystic Frontier. Each week, you can only enter up to 15 expeditions, but this limit is shared across the same world. With enough attempts, you can brute-force fifteen 24 hour (Legendary) expeditions. For the presets, we have a nearly infinite supply of familiar cards. Expect to require between 500 and 1000 cards per character to build a preset that's good enough. Mystic Frontier's deliberately designed to fail rounds, but we offset by improving our odds. Now that you understand the idea behind this exploit, let's discuss how all of it works and what rewards to expect.

It took me longer to write this damn blogpost than to set-up and research this exploit.

The preset you ought to aim for when running this strategy is one that exclusively uses the following lines:

• If all Familiars on your active lineup have the same type, Dice Total +2, Final Multiplier: 1.2x
• If all Familiars on your active lineup have the same element, Dice Total +2, Final Multiplier: 1.2x

It doesn't matter which or how many you have; the lines are interchangeable. Always run three of the same monster.

It doesn't take long to create a preset from scratch. You can add up to one hundred familiar cards at a time and reveal their potential all at once. You skim through the results and lock the familiars you want to keep. You then extract all of the unwanted familiars and repeat this process until you have a preset. When starting from scratch, I'd recommend to start rolling for 24 hour expeditions first and then create presets for these characters, rather than creating presets for 60 characters before doing anything. You do not need more than one preset per character, but out of convenience it's worthwhile to build additional presets whenever a character finds more than one 24 hour expedition on the same day.

The Dice Total +2 lines are crucial for this strategy, as multipliers are additive and far more common from round ends. Dice Total also compensate for bad rolls and it's guaranteed to roll enough to win round 1 Green pouches on neutral difficulty (I'll discuss this later). Of course, it'd be better if we ran higher ranked potentials on each character, but that's not worth it. This strategy is the sweet spot for obtaining crucial resources while keeping the cost and time spent low.

The pouches we're after are Orange and Green. They are not guaranteed every expedition. Each week* has given me Additional Potential cubes, but not every week won Orange/Green pouches. Despite that you have 15 expeditions with 5 rounds each, it's still beholden to luck. At minimum I've always seen two Orange pouch rounds every week. At best, I've won two Orange pouches and three Greens for 33 Additional Potential cubes in the same week. You shouldn't be worried about losing a few Orange/Green pouches because there's so many of them and there's always next week.

*See images. Forgive the inconsistencies; I mainly kept track of cubes from Orange/Green pouches. I left out almost all Meisters. Hindsight is 20/20.

Blue pouches can yield a Meister cube, Purple can give you one Additional Potential cube. Orange can give you three or six, Green can give you ten. Each individual pouch has a chance to rank up. There's no limit to how often this can happen. I've seen Purple ranking up to Green and Orange ranking up to Diamond. It's worth picking up any pouch, but if you haven't scored any Orange/Green pouches before the fifth round, always prioritize reaching it to make sure you didn't miss any. You always need two rounds to replenish Action Points. Clear two whenever possible or else you'll risk having to skip rounds. Always save rerolls for Orange/Green/Pitched Box and CoR*; settle for rolls of at least 3 each.

*You can bank the CoR voucher and equips from Pitched Box, but you cannot bank the CoR totem or Pitched Box itself, or any Familiar Ring (Box).

Before we wrap up, I'll mention the ways how Mystic Frontier forces rounds to fail. Every round has a chance to add a yellow/purple border and/or to change the space from blue to purple, increasing the required roll to succeed. It stacks. Round ends add extra dice multipliers, but some will reduce your Dice Total or become a clock (worthless). These are all the more reason to opt for mules, seeing as a single character rarely finds an Orange/Green pouch every month, let alone Legendary expeditions every week, or find anything useful on a regular basis. Suffice to say, I'll assume you're familiar enough with how shit Mystic Frontier is as a system and thus can understand the appeal of this dumb exploit.

But what about the rates on Pitched Box? Familiar Rings? Chains of Resentment? I don't care, really. I'm mainly doing this for the Additional Potential cubes, as everything else is already covered by ghetto muling. Now leave me alone.