Cavaets abound: I have never been an EF and therefore cannot test how this works on the 10 card deck, and given the behavior it may act oddly . I have also never used the mobile app for this purpose.
With some planning, anyone can refresh the deck in 8 actions. I’ve been using this for about a week but given the season of mad card drawing, I’ve been convinced by my dear Sir Joseph to release this information into the wild.
For we ordinary folk:
Begin with 3 cards remaining in your deck. I also prefer to have a 4 card lodging for this, as you’ll see later.
Go to Spite - Alleys of Spite -Pickpocket’s Promenade - The Tenterhooks
4 actions to enter, draw cards (if you’ve a 4 card lodging, that’s 4 cards out, leaving 2)
2-3 actions to complete the walk (there’s 1 card which allows you 2 progress toward your destination but it seems to be a bit rare)
0 actions to trade in your trophies
1 action to return.
Now, where it’s behaving somewhat unexpectedly is that if you return to Spite with only 2 cards left in the deck you still refresh to a full 6 cards.
Questions for interested people
Check the behavior if you have a 10-card deck - how many cards do you need to populate the whole deck while in the Promenade?
How many do you need to have remaining to refill after you leave for EF?
is it a modified doubling effect (is, 2 cards to 4 to 6 for ordinary players ) or a straight deck refresh (any number of cards to full?)? If the former we would expect to have a 4 card deck after leaving with 1 card. edited by Parelle on 10/27/2017
You can refresh your deck in 2 actions if you have a Cider. Does require some carnival tickets to kill yourself with the mirror though, and getting those bumps it up to ~3 actions if you don’t have some already.
Any time you exchange the main London deck for another one you multiply your number of undrawn cards. Usually it doubles, but there are some places (like Pickpocket’s Promenade) that have higher multipliers.
This has been the case long enough that I doubt it’s suddenly going to get patched out.
The death Cider refresh is three actions not counting tickets - you need Wounds to gaze into the Mirror, so unless you’re doing something that gives Wounds anyway, gotta spend an action to gain some.
[quote=Parelle]
Now, where it’s behaving somewhat unexpectedly is that if you return to Spite with only 2 cards left in the deck you still refresh to a full 6 cards.
Questions for interested people
Check the behavior if you have a 10-card deck - how many cards do you need to populate the whole deck while in the Promenade?
How many do you need to have remaining to refill after you leave for EF?
is it a modified doubling effect (is, 2 cards to 4 to 6 for ordinary players ) or a straight deck refresh (any number of cards to full?)? If the former we would expect to have a 4 card deck after leaving with 1 card.[/quote]
If you’re leaving with under three cards and end up with six cards after moving, it sounds like you’re getting a full deck refresh similar to returning from zee. As such I’d expect it to refill a ten-card deck entirely.
One thing to be aware of: At least on Android, syncing after refreshing your deck through movement will cause you to lose any cards gained from the refresh (including, at least sometimes, all your cards after returning from Zee, even if you should have had some before returning). Therefore, prior to doing anything like this, it is useful to sync (so as to have the maximum possible time until an automatic sync), and then to run through all 10 cards immediately afterwards.
Note that parties double cards on entry and double again on exit, so the optimal number of cards to enter with is:
5 for a five-card (or four-card) lodging, if filling your hand at the party (what I generally do),
So let’s prioritize by card gain, then actions, then cash yield (since spending actions to refresh cards is the unusual feature here), to get a best case scenario:
Spend 7 actions.
Gain 7 cards.
Gain 15 trophies.
Cash trophies in for 3.05 echoes.
For late-game PoSI, an action is worth at least 1.77 echoes on the margin (via grinding Dramatic Tension into a Collection of Curiosities, and cashing that in on the Tomb-Colonists card, rather than getting an additional Favour and cashing the two Favours in in the Forgotten Quarter).
So for this to be equal in value to a mindless grind, the value of a draw would have to be at least (7 * 1.77 - 3.05)/7 = 1.33 echoes. According to some calculations that I’m still refining, it’s worth more like 0.8 echoes. This might go up as I refine my analysis further, but I’d be really surprised if it hits 1.33. And if it does, it will almost certainly be in part because CoC-grinding has been replaced as the lowest-value part of an optimal grind (including card-flipping), meaning that card value would actually need to be even higher.
For non-PoSI, and maybe even newly-minted PoSI, this might well be a great trick. Congratulations to OP for discovering it.
Even for late-game PoSI, it may be useful in limited circumstances. I might well use it myself (or a Heist variant – will have to run some numbers to see which costs less) to effectively burn echoes to flip cards faster during Hallowmas, in order to burn banked-up Scheme for Notability faster, to get more Confessions. But something that’s kinda useful for facilitating more efficient burning of other resources for collectibles 2 weeks out of the year and isn’t worth playing otherwise is not even close to being broken. And late-game is where the real concerns about brokenness come in, because if you’re going for Cider or a Heptagoat, or even just for Paramount Presence, that’s the phase of the game that you’re going to be spending the vast majority of your time in. edited by osberend on 10/28/2017