Introduction

“I love all these massive grinding festivals like SDKH and Mystics!” said no one ever.

Well, guess what? Welcome to GungHo’s third iteration of this event type, officially known as the Star-Twined Fairies. Despite YamaP tweeting to the contrary, it’s still another grinding festival, with the same package of super busted top rarity cards, interesting mid rarity cards, and a whole new set of powerful farmable assists. Thankfully, GungHo removed the trash bottom rarity cards that normally occupy a huge portion of the lineup and stuffed in some Godfest Exclusives instead, so at least there’s some changes for the better.

Overall, I still think that the farmables alone make the event a net positive for the players, and it’ll only get more exciting as the top rarity cards dominate the meta for months to come. Who knew plants and boats would be the defining leaders in 2021? That being said, because it is a grinding festival, it’s probably a good idea to know why you’re spending tens of hours farming seeds and watering cans. Welcome to my guide on the new Fairystone Bottles , in which I give my take on the value and application of each bottle evolution.

Couple things to note before I dive in. Each bottle evolution corresponds to an actual event card, which means there are eleven bottle variants. Furthermore, the trades are all five to one, and since there are four tiers of token exchanges, the farming required to procure the evolution materials needed for each bottle variant will be quite intensive. As always, be mindful of your mental stamina; this is a game we play for our own entertainment, so don’t play if you feel like it’s too much of a chore. That said, let’s get right into the evolutions!

Spirit Stone Bottle Evolutions

Bottled Hibiscus

Though the awakenings are quite nice as a secondary recovery and damage augmentation equip, the main value of this bottle is its perfect bicolor active for ranking dungeons; the inclusion of hearts helps reduce ping and allows you to take advantage of , a major source of style points. It also doesn’t carry any extra animation, which means the active doesn’t waste any extra time with unnecessary effects.

Unfortunately, there has been a huge influx of new equips, which substantially dampens this bottle’s value in endgame play. In particular, PAD Academy has given players plenty of great options such as Hera-Ur-Senpai’s ID or Pet Caretaking Club, Red Riding Hood’s ID . Orb enhance awakenings are also useless for farming because of their random nature, though the active could possibly be used to overcome otherwise impassable combo shields.

Bottled Hydrangea

There’s no other way to put it; this equip is broken.

This is the first farmable equip to have 3 and also carries the newly buffed for big damage. In terms of farming, this has amazing synergy with Base Machine Noah in terms of both awakenings and active, as the full heal will be extremely handy when swiping the full board after a preemptive.

As for endgame, I could see it being used on future teams leading Natsuru and Velkhana just for the awakenings, as the active itself is deadweight. The long cooldown becomes a benefit in this case, since you don’t want the active coming up.

Bottled Dahlia

This bottle simply has 4 and a heavy skyfall boost active that won’t make much of an impact on most aspects of gameplay. The main value of this equip is that it’s pretty inexpensive compared to other similar options. In fact, the only other equips with four or more are Archery Club’s Ray of Hope, Apollo’s ID , Fasca’s Magical Winged Broom, Dezan , and Zvolta Annihilator .

Unfortunately, Light is looking like the worst attribute for the foreseeable future, with its best leaders such as Miya and Academy Kio falling well short of the power that other leads such as Nautilus , Royal Oak , Rosalyn , and Natsuru bring to the table. Maybe Phyllis can represent Light Att. in the meta, but crosses are pretty awkward for most players to work with.

Bottled Saxifrage

I don’t know if you noticed, but transform cards have been dominating the game for almost two years now ever since the release of Yugi. Since transformation is achieved via active skill, an emphasis on mustering enough to transform quickly has greatly affected both team building and egg machines. Thus, equips that provided large amounts of effective skill boosts (via haste, delay, or some other method) became extremely popular; some early examples include Demon’s Blood Talismans and Dark Magician Card .

Even now, powerful equips such as Harvest Lute and Dream Dimension Detective, Shelling Ford Card continue to garner serious mileage as elite skill boost equip options, which is why this bottle evolution is amazing as a farmable equip option that boasts a tremendous three effective skill boosts. Though it is easy to nitpick the inferiority of this equip compared to similar options such as Harvest Lute, Demon’s Blood Talismans, and Shinji&Rei Keychains , the main advantage of the bottle is in its accessibility compared to its top rarity contemporaries.

Though this bottle evolution may not be as groundbreaking as an equip with three effective skill boosts due to the earlier debut of Wicked Key of Lust , it still has great merit since the bottle doesn’t gimp a card’s damage output; in fact, the bottle gives a card an optional power boost via .

While the accompanying board change might be awkward to deal with for some teams when tackling endgame dungeons, the bicolor and two-turn haste combination can be immensely valuable for ranking, as evidenced by the popularity of Christmas Sonia builds for ranking dungeons in years prior. In fact, this bottle evolution is the only two-turn haste and bicolor board active that generates , which may be the difference maker in a future ranking. 

Bottled Dionaea

Hunting Bigfoot ? This is the equip to use.

Though the and will undoubtedly turn some people away, the killer selection here is absolutely ridiculous. I previously said that Usui’s Binding Seal was the greatest thing ever for Training Arena 2, and GungHo decided to prove me wrong with this monstrosity. Personally, I think it’s a superior equip for two reasons.

1. The spawns are significantly more troublesome to kill than the spawns. Winter Plum Virtue, Xin Hua and Elemental of Gold Glimmer, Genie feel like half of the build process for Training Arena 2, while Awoken Spica usually gets bulldozed without much thought. (Depends on the build, of course. Try making some dumb water-based builds; Spica is a nightmare.)
2. The killer selection is much more forgiving when taking into account various seasonal event invades, such as New Year Reeche and Beach Veroah . This is only a minor consideration, but a consideration nonetheless.

While the debut of Training Arena 3 may have felt like Training Arena 2 was pushed into obsolescence, many players will not have the builds to efficiently farm the latest and greatest normal dungeon. Thus, this equip is still valuable for many players whose most practical option is build for Training Arena 2, which is becoming increasingly more accessible by the day. After all, builds have already reached the “farmable” level. 🙂

Bottled Aconite

First farmable equip with ? First farmable equip with ? First equip to have both?

Killers will always be situationally useful at best because of their activation requirements. However, compared to the expensive top rarity alternatives, this is unbelievably accessible. I can’t really think of a particular dungeon this would absolutely amazing for, but the killer coverage will definitely be valuable for both farming and ranking.

Bottled Amanita

At first glance, this seems like an inferior equip compared to Furaku’s Binding Seal , and thus I initially dismissed it as trash. However, did you know that this equip is the only other equip besides Eris’s Golden Apple to have 2 ?

Now, might seem like an absolutely terrible awakening in an endgame oriented around ridiculous damage output, but someone on the PDX Discord Server mentioned how this equip could be useful for those challenges where you try to limit damage as much as possible, such as in the Exploration Dungeon. While most teams rely on an automatic follow-up attack for those dungeons, which neutralizes the value of the , it may be potentially useful for something. The equip could also be decent on pure utility subs such as Pattie and Christmas Polowne , although these subs are mostly being phased out in the latest endgame builds due to rapidly increasing damage requirements. (One notable exception is GH Belial .)

Bottled Ipomoea

The only farmable inheritable multi-turn fujin active in the game that’s also tied for the second lowest cooldown amongst all options, farmable or not? I’ll take one of these, despite the mostly unwanted locked skyfall effect neutralizing some of its value for swipe farming and endgame teams based around other attributes.

It also provides 1.6x RCV with all the , which is pretty amazing for a farmable considering only four other cards have the same amount of Team RCV, all from egg machines. However, this feels like an equip that looks nice but won’t see any real use. We’ll see.

Bottled Pansy

At first glance, this seems like an unremarkable equip with a nice active and what looks like a mishmash of awakenings. However, the leader that currently stands above all others could actually make real use of this bottle evolution.

(Yes, I’m talking about Nautilus .)

How would this work? Remember that Nautilus’s final form active converts on an extremely short cooldown. However, orb enhance awakenings only enhance newly dropped orbs of their respective attributes, which means that only enhances newly skyfalled and will not enhance . Thus, loses a lot of value on Nautilus because all of the converted orbs aren’t enhanced. With this bottle evolution, however, both and serve to enhance both and , which means that there will be significantly more after using Nautilus’s active.

I’m not saying this is some kind of optimal equip for Nautilus. It’s just more of a shower thought. The is also nice damage, especially with the lowered threshold buff making the awakening much better in terms of consistency.

Bottled Daffodil

This is probably the least valuable equip form among all the bottle evolutions, but still has some niche value. At the cost of -2500 HP and -1000 ATK, the equipped card gains +1000 RCV. The best use for this is to attach it on a pure recovery stick that has a low recovery stat but a ton of .

Hello, Mel .

Yeah, otherwise, I don’t really see much use for this. The active is somewhat interesting in that the orb generation guarantees activation of and on a pretty low cooldown. I suppose you could use it to tech against enemy full board generation (which has become more popular recently), but most of the time, you also take a lot of pre-emptive damage and want to heal but can’t since the active doesn’t generate .

Bottled Rafflesia

Another equip that trades HP and RCV for massive damage, this one is a little different in that it packs a brutal punch versus one type with and instead of packing two killers like Usui’s Binding Seal . While the damage is definitely valuable for farming and ranking, I think the true value lies in the fast inheritable void void active; though the farmable Mystic Miasma Stone Armlet provides a two-turn void void effect and has a shorter cooldown, it also comes with a self-inflicted skill bind, which is probably worse than this bottle evolution’s lock effect. That being said, the lock is still something to deal with, so don’t forget about it when using this in your build.

Which Bottles Should I Make?

The answer is that it depends on your box, your priorities as a player, and your monster point budget. In general, making one of every bottle is a good idea, but not everyone needs Bottled Daffodil or can afford to spend 900K MP. Therefore, I will try to take a couple of relatable perspectives that you may be able to draw insight from.

New Players

Assuming you are new and have no MP to buy additional bottles, I would prioritize making the Bottled Saxifrage and the Bottled Ipomoea. The Bottled Saxifrage is a great effective equip that will probably be a staple for most new players’ transform teams as amassing is very difficult with a limited box. Meanwhile, I had a hard time choosing the second option, but the Bottled Ipomoea stood out to me as an inheritable multi-turn fujin active, which is pretty difficult to obtain considering that most inheritable multi-turn fujin actives are locked behind extremely expensive top rarity cards from various different machines. The next best option after Bottled Ipomoea is a bottom rarity collab card (Enmu from Demon Slayer), which players could only roll for during a limited two-week window.

Of course, you should ideally farm the evolution materials and then hold off on evolving the bottles until you need to make a particular assist evolution form for a specific purpose. However, if you can’t hold out until then…

• Free Bottle 1  Bottled Saxifrage
• Free Bottle 2  Bottled Ipomoea

Budget-Restricted Players

For experienced but budget-restricted players (basically poor players who have played for a long time), it is also good to save the mats until you actually need to make a certain bottle form. (Most players probably won’t fit in this perspective, because MP has been so plentiful lately.) However, if you can only buy a limited amount of bottles and wish to evolve them right away, then I would prioritize the evolutions in this order:

• Free Bottle 1  Bottled Hydrangea
• Free Bottle 2  Bottled Hibiscus
• Bottle 1 (100K MP) Bottled Ipomoea
• Bottle 2 (200K MP) Bottled Dionaea
• Bottle 3 (300K MP) Bottled Aconite
• Bottle 4 (400K MP) Bottled Rafflesia
• Bottle 5 (500K MP) Bottled Saxifrage
• Bottle 6 (600K MP) Bottled Dahlia
• Bottle 7 (700K MP) Bottled Pansy
• Bottle 8 (800K MP) Bottled Amanita
• Bottle 9 (900K MP) Bottled Daffodil

This list is pretty subjective regardless of how objective I want to be, so take this suggestion with a grain of salt and make your own priority list based on your personal needs. For example, if you only care for ranking, I can see Bottled Hibiscus replacing the first five slots on this list.

Farmers + Rankers + Endgame Players

At this point, you should be able to figure out exactly what you need/want. However, if you want to see my personal checklist…

• 6 Bottled Hibiscus
• 5 Bottled Hydrangea
• 1 Bottled Ipomoea
• 2 Bottled Dionaea
• 2 Bottled Aconite
• 2 Bottled Rafflesia
• 6 Bottled Saxifrage
• 1 Bottled Dahlia
• 1 Bottled Amanita
• 1 Bottled Pansy
• 1 Bottled Daffodil

Final Note + Most Important Requirement

While Star-Twined Fairies is extremely exciting, farming the evolution materials will be much more arduous than you think. Therefore, the most important requirement for players farming the event will probably be the resolve to keep going, day in and day out, to grind for the assist evolutions. My advice is to make a schedule/daily routine. For example, I just don’t farm at all. Pretty easy, right? 🙂

With all that said, I wish each and every one of you the best of luck in rolling and grinding this event!