The Miser’s Strategy Guide to Collection Events in Ikemen Villains
Welcome, F2P, goldfish, dolphins, and whales. This guide will walk you through on how to get the most out of collection events (CEs) with the least amount of resources. Some of the strategies require more effort than others; you do not have to follow all of them. This guide assumes that you have read the game tutorial for the CE.
About CEs
CEs can broadly be separated into 3 categories with different degrees of competition in the rankings. CEs not associated with any route release and featuring 1 character with a 4* card are the least competitive. Route Release CEs that come out at the same time as a character’s route release and feature the said character are more competitive due to people wanting to read the character’s backstory in the event and read ahead on the character’s route. CEs that have all 12 character cards tend to be the most competitive of all CEs. These only happen 3 or 4 times a year.
The EN server resets at 12am Pacific Standard Time (PST), which resets your story tickets, ad rewards, and any daily limits in the shop.
You have to send your hearts to get the reward. 100 hearts are needed to do 1 send, which makes the numbers big and a little confusing, so I'm going to use the unit 1 heart send instead of 100 hearts in this guide.
Ways to Earn Hearts
Note that to get hearts for reading the main story, you have to finish the entire chapters, including passing the mission.
General Tips
Prep work
Low effort: Pay attention to when the collection event will be released. The official IkeVil EN X account and the in-game news usually announce the event 2 or 3 days ahead of the release.
Don't use your daily story tickets before the event starts. Use the tickets once the event starts. EN CEs historically start with 3x Story Lucky Time. However, it's okay to go ahead to login and send your daily likes before the event starts. You will get the heart reward for both logging in and sending 30 likes when you enter the event.
High effort: Park as many routes as you can to prepare for CEs. More on parking below.
During the event
Low effort: Send 30 likes everyday. Log in twice a day, once between 12am PST-12pm PST, and once between 12pm PDT-12am PDT to get the 2 login hearts sent. Do as many escorts as you can, especially during lucky times. Use all your daily tickets and pass challenges, if there are any.
Medium effort: Watch all 10 AP ads and the 1 story ticket ad every day. Clear your AP before it caps at 100 during your waking hours. Maximize your AP for escort lucky times by clearing it and saving it 5 hours prior to lucky time or doing single escorts so that you will have close to 100/100 AP when the lucky time starts. If there is an escort lucky time that day, save your 10 ads and do them during the lucky time.
High effort: Maximize your story tickets by only harvesting the hearts during story lucky time as much as possible. Check the lucky time schedule to see if there are any more story lucky times. Use this strategy if there are. If the chapter doesn't have a mission at the end, read ⅘ parts, then switch routes. If the chapter has a mission, read 5/5 parts, without passing the mission, then switch routes. See the section on parking for more details. Repeat this until the next story lucky time. When the story lucky time starts, go back to the parked route to read the last part/pass the mission. This will let you “harvest” 10 heart sends from finishing a chapter (14 from a mission) during a 2x lucky time instead of 5 heart sends (7 from a mission) during non-lucky time. Once the last story lucky time ends, you can go back to reading normally.
Using gold and items from your inventory
You can buy up to 10 heart sends per day during the event from the shop>item shop with up to 22k gold at 2.2k gold/heart sent. If you plan on getting CE rewards regularly and you have limited gold, I recommend spending gold on hearts rather than the gold gacha.
Only use story tickets and cocktails during their respective 3x lucky time, unless there is an Early Clear Bonus you want that you will not otherwise reach.
Before the event ends
Send in all your hearts for ranking. If you are a few hearts away from the reward you want, you can calculate whether it's worth spending inventory resources to reach it. For example, if I am 2 hearts away from a full cocktail (+100 AP), I have already spent my gold, it's 3x escort time so I can get 1.2 heart sent/escort, and I won't be able to do another escort before the event ends, I can spend a +50 AP half cocktail to do 2 or 3 more escorts, getting 2.4 or 3.6 sends to receive the full cocktail (+100 AP).
Once the event ends the rankings will be tallied and you won't be able to earn anymore hearts. However, if you have any hearts left you can still send them to get heart sent rewards by going to the event page until it is removed from the list of events, unless there is another CE running immediately after. Hearts do not carry over to the next CE.
Advanced strategies
Parking Routes
This is a strategy where you leave your chapter progress at the ⅘ parts read or right before passing a mission prior to the start of the CE. This can be done on multiple routes to harvest a lot of hearts. To be able to utilize this strategy on missions you do need to be able to pass intimacy and attire missions with ease.
CEs in EN historically start with 24 hr of 3x story lucky time, with a story ticket reset in between that. That means you can read 12 parts or at least 2 chapters at 3x lucky time. CEs in EN also historically end with 24 hr of 3x escort time.
Pros of parking: If you park on missions, you can get many hearts for free. If you have 8 routes parked on missions and harvest them during 3x lucky time, you can get 7x8x3=168 heart sends without spending a single ticket. This is equivalent to 28 full cocktails spent during 3x escort! If you have 8 routes parked on ⅘ parts read, with the 6 free tickets before and after the first reset you can harvest all 8 chapters for 5x8x3=120 heart sends. Either way it's an enormous amount of hearts and can make you competitive for the ranking.
Cons of parking: Having to switch between routes before finishing them so often can take away the enjoyment of the story in causing confusion and mix-ups of the routes. This may not matter to older players who have already read all the routes from beginning to end. For players who have not read the routes (including me), it amounts to essentially sacrificing the enjoyment of the main story to obtain limited event rewards. One can mitigate this by reading the route uninterrupted on YT, but it's certainly still less enjoyable than being able to read at your own pace.
Tips for parking on missions
Make sure you have the intimacy/attire/gold/closets needed to pass the missions!
Intimacy is usually not a problem for long-time active players. If that is not your case, check out this post for tips on making sure that you can pass intimacy missions.
The best way to be prepared for attire missions is by buying the attire in advance (and don't delete it), as this will ensure that you have the closet space beforehand and won't be short on gold. I keep a list of what attire items and how much gold I still need for the missions to make sure I can meet them if I am parking there.
How to park routes and harvest hearts for CEs
When you are reading the main story with your free daily tickets, check if there is a mission at the end. If there is no mission, finish ⅘ parts, then click out of the story page by going to Home. If there is one, read all 5 parts, but do not complete the mission. The missions are completed when you click on ‘Challenge” for attire missions and “Check” for intimacy missions. Next, click on the menu to change route. See more on route changing here. When you run out of free daily tickets, wait for the next day to get more tickets to repeat this process. You can repeat this for as many routes as you want until you run out of routes to park on. On the event day, save your free daily tickets until the event starts to harvest all your hearts. You can park during the event too to time your harvesting with later story lucky times.
Getting the Most out of Story Tickets
While the amount of hearts you get from escorts is consistent (.4 heart sent/escort), the amount you get from using story tickets vary based on the chapter you are reading. The end of a route (ch 25) gives the most heart sends because you get 5 heart sends for completing an end on top of the regular 5 heart sends for finishing the chapter. Passing missions give the next most heart sends– 2 for passing the mission, 5 for finishing the chapter. The ratio for heart sends earned per story ticket used depends on where the story progress is and how many chapters are read. If you can clear an end during the 3x lucky time you get the best ratio.
Here is a chart I made of where the missions are at.
If you can read 1 chapter (5 parts) to clear an end, the ratio is 2 during non-lucky (10 sends/5 tickets). If you can read 2 chapters (10 parts) to clear an end (passing ch 24 mission on the way), the ratio is 1.7 (17 sends/10 tickets). The more chapters you need to read to clear an end, the smaller the ratio is. If you start from the top of the first chapter to complete an end, the ratio is 1.2 (150 sends/125 tickets). So if you need to earn a lot of hearts and you have a route parked close to an end that you can finish, that is going to give you the most hearts. The closer the route to the end, the better the ratio when you complete it.
If you don't need that many hearts or you don't have enough tickets to finish an end, you should prioritize using tickets on routes that are close to a mission. There's a mission every 2 or 3 chapters of the story. If you need to read 1 ch (5 parts) to pass the mission, the ratio of heart sends/story ticket is 1.4. If you need to read 2 chapters (10 parts) to pass the mission, the ratio of heart sends/story ticket is 1.2.
Resetting routes
If you need to read 3 chapters (15 parts) to pass the mission, the ratio of sends/story ticket is 1.13, at which point it may not be worth it, because you can always reset a route so that you always have 1 mission every 2 ch, which gives you the ratio of 1.2. Just like in parking, you can abuse the route change function to get more hearts. If all of your routes are 3 ch away from a mission and far from finishing an end, you are better off resetting a route if you are gunning for maximum number of hearts per story ticket. This is also a decent strategy for new players who cannot pass missions with costly attires or high intimacy benchmarks. You can reset a route by choosing to start from chapter one when you switch to it. Then you can read to either ch 2 (intimacy mission) or ch 4 (attire mission) if you have the attire, and reset the route again.
There is a downside to resetting. Every time you complete an end, you are rewarded 5 story tickets and 300 diamonds, not to mention the attire rewards along the route. These can be crucial income for f2ps and goldfish. If you reset your progress then the story tickets you spent won't help you reach them.
All in all, there are a variety of ways to maximize resources. You can choose whichever ones work best for you. If you have any tips you would like to share, feel free to comment below!
Guides Masterlist
