Who to Pull — A Principle-Based Guide by Role, Afflatus & Tier
How to decide who deserves your pulls without chasing every shiny banner — the durable logic, not this month's names.
Pull to fill a role gap first, not to collect a name. A healthy Reverse: 1999 account needs a reliable DPS, a Survival Arcanist (heal or shield), and a Support that buffs or debuffs — build that spine before anything else. Weigh Afflatus coverage and long-term value (Insight investment, Portray, Euphoria) over hype, and treat "I want it" as a signal to wait a day, not to spend.
Start with role, then damage type — the team spine comes first
Every serious team in Reverse: 1999 is built on the same three pillars, so decide which pillar you are missing before you spend a single pull:
- DPS — your damage engine. Note whether they deal Reality or Mental damage; a team that can only threaten one of those two is easy to wall.
- Survival — a healer or shielder that keeps the team standing through longer, attrition-style fights.
- Support — an Arcanist who raises your damage (buffs, Moxie generation to fire Ultimates sooner) or lowers the enemy's (debuffs, control).
If you already own a solid DPS but keep dying, your next pull is a Survival unit, not a second DPS — no matter how loud the promotion is. Coverage across both Reality and Mental damage over time is what keeps future content from hard-countering you.
Read Afflatus like rock-paper-scissors, not like a stat
Reverse: 1999 has six Afflatus, but only one cycle, not two triangles. The arrow means "beats" — the attacker of a different, favorable Afflatus lands extra damage:
- Beast → Plant → Star → Mineral → Beast
- Spirit and Intellect stand outside this cycle entirely — they beat nothing and are beaten by nothing.
Afflatus is not a power level — a Star Arcanist is not stronger than a Beast one. It decides matchups. The practical rule for pulling: aim for breadth, not a stack of one Afflatus. If your best carries are, say, all Plant, any content leaning on Star pressure will punish you. When two units tempt you equally, the one that fills an Afflatus hole in your roster is usually the better pull, because it opens fights the rest of your box cannot answer.
Judge tier by fit and investment cost, not by a letter
Tier lists rank raw ceiling, but your account cares about fit and upkeep. Before committing, ask what the unit actually costs to make good:
- Insight leveling burns materials — a highly-rated 6-star you cannot afford to raise is worse today than a 5-star you can max now.
- Psychube availability: does the unit need a specific equip to shine, and do you have it?
- Portray and Euphoria: some 6-stars are functional at base but leap forward with copies (Portray) or an unlocked Euphoria. If you cannot invest, judge the base version, not the showcase.
- Resonance tuning and Incantation (spell-merging to raise cast tier) reward focused investment on a few characters over spreading thin.
A strong general principle: a slightly lower-tier unit that slots cleanly into the team you already run beats a top-tier one that demands a whole new supporting cast you do not own.
Beat the impulse pull — a simple discipline
Most regret comes from spending on emotion, not need. Use a short checklist and a cooldown:
- Name the gap. Say out loud which of DPS / Survival / Support this unit fills. If you can't, that's your answer.
- Check the overlap. Do you already own someone who does this job at 80%? If yes, the upgrade is a want, not a need.
- Sleep on it. Give any "must-pull" urge 24 hours. Banners you feel desperate about tonight usually look optional tomorrow.
- Save through the noise. Pulling on every banner guarantees a shallow, unfinished account. Skipping to build a stockpile lets you fully commit — and complete Portray/Euphoria — when a unit truly matches your gap.
Beginners should prioritize a clean three-role core; veterans should protect their savings for the units that deepen an existing plan rather than starting new ones.
Where to actually spend: shared pity, rate-up only, and the Pawnshop shortcut
Knowing who to pull for means nothing if you're spending pulls on the wrong banner. Reverse: 1999's pity system has a few counter-intuitive rules that decide where your Unilogs should actually go.
- Pity is shared and carries over between the Limited banner and the Rate-Up banner — switching which featured banner you pull on never resets your progress toward the guarantee. This is the single most important thing to understand before you touch a banner.
- The numbers, matched to GameVika's live banner data: base 6★ rate is 1.5% per pull, the overall rate including the guarantee works out to 2.36%, soft pity starts at pull 60 (rate jumps to 4%, then +2.5% per further miss), and hard pity guarantees a 6★ at pull 70.
- A limited 6★ re-enters the permanent standard pool roughly 3 patches after its debut. That means not every featured Arcanist needs to be chased the moment they appear — if you miss one, it eventually becomes pullable again on the standard banner (at standard-banner odds), or tradeable through the Pawnshop rotation below.
- Pull only on rate-up banners. Skip the permanent/standard banner (currently "Amongst the Lake," previously "Amid the Water") unless you specifically need a character who has already rotated into it. Pulling there with a save meant for a featured banner wastes the guarantee logic above — your pity carries over regardless, but your Unilogs don't multiply by spending them on the wrong pool.
- Two paths to a specific 6★ you want: pull their rate-up banner while it's live, or skip the gacha entirely and trade 240 Album of the Lost for them at the Pawnshop's Treble Counter once they rotate into that month's list. If a character you're chasing happens to be in this month's Pawnshop rotation and you already have the Album stockpiled from duplicate pulls, that's a guaranteed pickup with zero pull-luck involved.
Put together, the efficient F2P route looks like: save through the banners of characters that don't fill a gap in your team → commit fully to the rate-up banner of the one that does → if you narrowly miss and the same unit later rotates into the Pawnshop, finish the job with Album instead of gambling more pulls.
A worked example: say you're holding 45 pulls and eyeing a rate-up banner. That's short of the 70-pull hard pity, but soft pity already starts climbing at pull 60, so the back half of your run has a real shot at landing before hard pity even matters. If you whiff completely and end the banner at 70 without your target, remember the 50/50 guarantee logic from the section above still protects your very next 6★ on that same banner type — it isn't wasted, it's carried. Compare that to spending those same 45 pulls on the permanent banner instead: no rate-up, no guarantee working in your favour, and a Unilog spent there does nothing to protect a future push for the character you actually want. The lesson holds regardless of your exact pull count: idle Unilogs protect nothing, only spending them on the right pool does.