• Sinning Jenny's Finishing School. This is a huge engine for both card draw and favors, which will be crucial for your production of Pails and Tears.
• The Soul Trade, if you're willing to side with the Shepherds (you should! we're nice!), for Church favours generation.
• The fate-locked boosts to your BDR. Peculiar Rubbery Enhancement from Flute Street, the Golden Spiked Rosary and Tanned Mask from the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, the Ratwork Velocipede, the Bifurcated Owl. Your ability to rapidly generate and regenerate 7 Notability over and over again, whether on command or via cards drawn from your deck, will be a major determinant of how quickly you can produce Tears.
• Some extra fate for expeditions to the Gallery of Serpents, if you're far short of your Tears goals and Sacksmas is right around the corner. $20 worth of Fate will on average get you about four Tears, and tons of additional rewards besides; it's the best exchange of real money for Tears that you'll get.
• If I remember correctly, several of the Exceptional Stories offer Tears as a possible end reward (or was it one of the Seasons?) -- that might be a last-ditch way to get a few more on short notice. I don't remember which ones, but someone else here will.

• Strangling Willow Absinthe (probably from The Affair Of The Box, though if you have a lot of Casing it could make sense to do some Thefts of Particular Character into Tales of Terror and side-convert some into SWA from there)
• Church Favors, which are now required for the up-conversion; if you have high BDR, this is likely to be your biggest chokepoint, since you'll be getting the Presumptuous Opportunity card
• A five-card lodging (for the Nadir once a week, to maximize your odds of drawing End of Battles for more Airag)
• Membership in God's Editors, as another source of Church favors.
• A lot of echoes, if you're a Shepherd, so you can generate huge numbers of Church favours whenever you draw the CVE card.

• Night Whispers, which are simple enough to obtain -- Casing in the Flit --> Thefts of Particular Character --> Tales of Terror --> Fidgeting Writer --> exit with Night Whisper.
  
• Storm Threnodies, which are more complex to produce, and which drive all the other needs below.
• An Overgoat, which you'll use to rob the Bazaar for 8 actions every time you draw the card, using a second chance each time (which doesn't require an additional 8 actions, don't worry) to give yourself a functional 75% success rate.
• Tons and tons of Urchin favors. An incredible number, honestly.
• A Winsome Dispossessed Urchin, as another source of Urchin favors.
• A Gang of Hoodlums, in order to best accumulate Casing in the Flit.
• Access to Flute Street and Monster Breeding in the Labyrinth of Tigers, so that you can start your day by getting a Rubbery Hound from Flute Street. Ordinarily, the 39 actions it takes to go to Flute Street, get a Rubbery Hound, and come back will mean you miss out on a ton of card draw, so it's far from optimal. But if you do the 39 action part in Flute Street when you first wake up in the morning and have 40 actions in your candle, you don't have that problem... each morning, I now flip cards until I get enough useless ones that I'm at 39 or 40 actions and 5 cards remaining in my deck. I then dip down to Flute Street, grab myself a Rubbery Hound, and come back up immediately, resetting my deck to 10 cards. Breed it throughout the rest of the day by Pulling Out All The Stops, and you'll save a lot of effort acquiring Urchins Favours.

• Until I'm where I need to be on Storm Threnodies, I'm taking advantage of the 40 action build-up overnight by starting my morning with the Flute Street carousel, spending 39 actions and 100 foxfire candles to get a Rubbery Hound that I'll then breed into Storm Threnodies with spare actions throughout my day.
• I'm drawing all my cards in a location that doesn't add cards to my deck (though if you were really desperate for Church favors, you could draw in Spite, which gives a card with a very inconvenient way of getting another favor)
  
• Each day my actions are split between Sinning Jenny's to draw more cards and thus favours, Affair of the Box to get more Strangling Willow Absinthe, and Casing in the Flit to get more Journals of Infamy which I convert to correspondence plaques and then onward to Aeolian Screams and Storm Threnodies. If my progress on one front starts to pull way ahead of the others (tons of wine or plaques piling up, or favours count nearing 7), I shift my focus accordingly.

Long Story Short: The Favours conversion spoiled a lot of Sacksmas for many people.

• Sinning Jenny's Finishing School. This is a huge engine for both card draw and favors, which will be crucial for your production of Pails and Tears.

• ...the Golden Spiked Rosary...
  

• Strangling Willow Absinthe (probably from The Affair Of The Box, though if you have a lot of Casing it could make sense to do some Thefts of Particular Character into Tales of Terror and side-convert some into SWA from there)

Is upconverting from Absinthe really the best way to get Cellars? I always thought the side-streets option worked out cheaper.

Re: Getting Cellars, after some discussion on reddit to confirm my idea, there's also hunting a Plated Seal, Breeding it into a Hound of Heaven and handing it to the Bishop. The cycle should take around 40-42 actions (depending on how quickly one gets Troubled Waters 10 at zee), and gives out 3 cellers and 6 broken giants. Comes out quicker, and you'll never lack for Church favours, however few are needed with this method, since the cycle also gives three of them.
edited by alekth on 10/8/2017
edited by alekth on 10/8/2017

I remember a discussion some time ago about this, and I think it came out to either 4 or 5 actions of Making It Up as You Go, setting you, on average around 80% of the time or so, around 7 AJE and some odd CP, with a chance of going as high as 8+AJE. Zeal-hunting takes like 2 actions if I remember correctly, and then depending on your luck with cards it takes another 5-10 actions to reach London without any extremely poor luck.

So optimistically, given 23 actions to breed the Zeal (and turn in the Hound for the wine), it could be possible to complete the cycle in 35 actions on a very good run (I think I've done that before actually), but 40 is a more conservative estimate, and the average is likely around 38-40ish.
edited by Dudebro Pyro on 10/9/2017

- Where exactly does the Notability grind come into the whole thing? Is it for summoning the Portly Sommelier's card via Favourable Circumstance?

- The Echo Bazaar Wiki entry for Time the Healer states that the range of Noman's Friend drop is 101-150. The entry for Giving sustenance to the Noman via the Tears gives an increase in the range of 1-25; the Pails give 5 if given directly, or up to 9 per pail if converted via the Semiotic Monocle. Now, I am not sure how many hits of TtH you need to take to make it for the tatoo - 4? 5?
But even if I go with 4, considering a drop of up to 150 Noman's friend per TtH would require you to burn through as much as 600 Noman's Friend over the month or so.
Either I'm unaware of something crucial, or this math would indicate that 15 Tears and 20 pails would provide some 370 Noman's friend considering an average gain per Tears. Add the first 100 you get when you obtain the Noman, and you're still at 470, 130 short of 600. Even if you get a bit more lucky than that, the amount of material you stated seems nowhere near a "comfortable" amount, unless you could somehow count for all RNG to provide max numbers by sheer luck...

- Do we expect this to keep getting more challenging by an order of magnitude every year? I currently have quite few Threnodies and not much material for Tears either, so should I just focus on grinding these exclusively because next year will likely double the requirements again, or is it hopeless to start planning this late into the year anyway?

So, you need to draw "A presumptuous little opportunity" 8 times per Tear. For 15 Tears its 120 cards.
And for conversion (from Strangling Willow Absinthe) you need 24.5 Church favours per Tear. For 15 tears its 367.5 Favours.
For 3 mounths you need 5 Favourable Circumstance per day. Not sure how much it costs in actions, probably a lot even with 30+ BDR.

875 Bottle of Strangling Willow Absinthe per Tear. 13125 for 15 Tears.
A Boxful of Intrigue reward is 35 Absinthe for 14 actions, so its 5250 Actions. Or ~45 days grind.
edited by Waterpls on 9/29/2017

Harlocke wrote:

To realistically have a shot of grinding it in time for this year, what's the minimum number of tears/night whispers/threnodies you need to have already amassed?

2/3 of the way, i guess. 10 Tears, 100+ Threnodies, 10+ Nightwispers.
Slighly less if you can grind Threnodies in Foreign Office, Broken Giant with Velocipede Squad, have materials for Fidgeting.
edited by Waterpls on 9/30/2017