Back after a long hiatus!

What is this?

This guide aims to cover general carnival strategy to help you acquire SSS (Gold Trophy) and some additional advice for people looking to optimize their SSS booths to rank for the rainbow trophy.

Just like last time we'll cover

• How to get from SS to SSS
• How to make the most out of your collection in SSS to challenge the voltage rankings
• Choice of songs for various booths
• Team/Build suggestion for booths

In order to do this effectively and cater to a larger group of people the guide will be split into information relevant to 3 different skill levels

• Low: Comfortable with FCing mostly 26s with some 27s
• Medium: Comfortable with FCing 28s and low 29s, can grind out harder 29s
• High: This is the ideal solution for each booth, assuming skill is no limitation.

Notable Changes

Everything from A1 is harder now. A1 to S is now 100,500 cutoff up from 98,500 (+2,000). S to SS is a 155,000 cutoff up from 145,000 (+10,000) and finally SS to SSS is a 207,500 cutoff up from 185,000 (+22,500). This makes achieving SSS harder than ever.

General Tips

• Don't forget to abuse acts! They can make your song score one or sometimes even two levels higher than it's rated for! SR acts which you can get from events may be even better than running another SSR.
• SR Tricolor Leads are very underrated. An 80% lead skill is weaker than the stock 90% of a generic SSR, but the added flexibility of being able to select across multiple types instead of being limited to one generally outweighs the 10% stat penalty, considering most of these booths literally give you several hundred percent stat anyway. These SRs also generally come with Life Sparkle, so they're a combo bonus source for people sitting on decks of Permanent SSRs with no combo bonus. Just throw in some form of life recovery or life potential and it can work even better.
• 40% lead perm SSRs are good! With each booth giving you so much stat, the 10% difference in bonus (or 15% bonus from unison) isn't as big as you think! This can give you a good lead skill to help you build off for a typed booth.
• In general you want to be renting Refrain, Symphony, Unison, Mutual and Alternate for your guests, but depending on what you're missing from getting a team to work its possible that you would want to rent something else. This is still a good starting point though.
• Try to have at least 1 skill boost effect (Symphony/Ensemble or even the basic SSR skill boost) per booth as the benefits from having one is significant enough to consider renting every booth that you don't have one in.
• Don't use SR skill boosts. 10% potency + loss in stats from SR is bad. Bad enough that you're losing score in general.
• In general you probably don't want to rent Magic because its better only as a center which you can't set for guests
• Speaking of magic, its really bad in the potential and star rank booth, even if you have a 20*, 35 potential one, you're likely better off running some other composition if you have a decent choice
• If you have a Magic, it allows you to "Loan" center effects like Resonance and Mutual via the guest feature.
• You can use the guest feature to loan MyStyle SSRs, but in general you would not do this outside of GRAND and you have to really know what you're doing to benefit from it.
• There's a difference between Type restricted Cu/Co/Pa booths, and Song restricted booths. In Song restricted booths, any SSR type will get the massive stat bonus, allowing you to run powerful teams like tricolor reso!
• Using reso on Type/Song restricted booths is very powerful as the reso is only -100% to the non-main stat instead of "setting to 0" like the stat restricted booths are. Since these booths often give 290% bonus on high carnival ranks, the reso penalty is laughably small for the stacking effect bonus you gain.

Carnival SS -> SSS

SS to SSS is harder than ever. Have fun

SS Booth 1: Specific Songs, 350% Appeal

• メモリーブロッサム

This is the event song booth. You have no choice here. The master is a 25 and the MASTER+ is a 28. This should be pretty comfy for most people to tackle. The slide and flick act options are not very good here as the percentage in the songs are quite low. However, on MASTER difficulty and lower, the hold percentage is >40% introducing the possibility of running Long Act on this song.

This is the only cute booth in the entire rank so it is reasonable to go all out here.

SS Booth 2: Specific Songs, 300% Appeal

• 14平米にスーベニア
• PANDEMIC ALONE
• スパイスパラダイス
• トロピカルガール
• 気持ちいいよね 一等賞！

This is your passion booth and the only passion booth in this entire rank. There are no cool booths.

• Low: There are no stand out act songs, unless you want to try PANDEMIC ALONE with hold acts as its a pretty easy 28.
• Med: Yuki's solo 気持ちいいよね 一等賞！has very high flick % on MASTER+ if you're looking for a flick act option. Otherwise I'd pick anything that you'd find comfortable.
• High: PANDEMIC ALONE is a pretty easy 30, but Yuki's solo can still be better depending on composition.

SS Booth 3-8: Stat booths!

This is generally the main killer for SS as its where bad collections will suffer the most. Here are some pointers

• If you have resonance cards, put them on the booths that force ONLY that appeal (3,4,7)
• Try not to put all your Tricolor Synergy cards into one booth. Overall score matters way more than being able to score high in one booth only.
• Try populating the booths from strongest to weakest, it's usually a good starting point
• Magic has changed the ballgame for stat booths, it is now possible to "borrow" a resonance card effect if you own a Magic center. Because of this I recommend putting resonances that you own in the center, and moving your magics to booths you lack resonance for and renting those there. This still requires having enough of the same timer to work, so the simpler strategy is to still borrow as many Symphonies as you can to make sure you have a good skill boost effect in each team
• This is where your SR Tricolor leads will shine the most in helping you cover the gap in your collections
• Ideally, these booths are where you are spending your rentals

Oh and here are my favorite Act songs for alltype if you happen to have a spare act to throw

• Treasure M+ (Flick)
• Star!! M+ (Flick)
• Illusionista M+ (Slide)
• Kimisoba M+ (Slide)
• Aikurushii M+ (Slide)
• Near to you Remix (Hold)
• Little Riddle M (Flick)
• Connecting Happy M (Flick)
• Great Journey M (Flick)

Song selections:

Pick the easiest highest level rating song you can FC for each. If you absolutely have to min max, pick a song that works well for the specific timer you're using.

SS Booth 9: Potential Booth

You are free to dump some reso superteam into this booth if you have spare resonances. It is recommended to spend the Vocal resos here as there is only 1 vocal booth which should have lower priority than this booth.

Another option is to spend your best cool team on this booth here, because there is no other cool booth on this floor.

Potential booths will always score really well even with a full team of potential 35 SRs. It's all about having high potential and less about having insane cards. Having a good build is a nice bonus, but the other stat booths have likely already stretched you thin.

SS Booth 10: Grand Booth

One of the points for teambuilding grand is that you can pretty much do it last because a full team of SRs will score respectably around 2m for a forte FC as long as all cards get the 70% bonus.

Also auto build is pretty good for grand, just make sure all your other teams are already set up and then smack the auto when setting up the grand team in the booth team selection.

You get a choice of grand this time, so you can pick a song you're comfortable FCing. I recommend giving some popular easy songs like Starry Go Round Piano and Stage Bye Stage Forte a try, they're pretty easy for their level rating.

SSS Min Maxing Guide

Alright now for the real content, you want to squeeze out every single point you can so that you can get the rainbow trophy and slack harder next carnival probably. Better get to work!

SSS Booth 1: Specific Songs 380% Appeal

• メモリーブロッサム

This is the event song booth. You have no choice here. Due to the first booth having a massive bonus, you may want to use your stronger team here instead of on booth 2

SSS Booth 2: Specific songs 330% Appeal

• Claw My Heart
• HARURUNRUN
• Home Sweet Home
• Secret Mirage
• かぼちゃ姫
• ニャンと☆スペクタクル
• 凸凹スピードスター
• メルヘンデビュー！
• ラビューダ♡トライアングル
• 満願成就♪巫女の神頼み！

You have a lot of choices here for the 2nd cute booth. Note that ラビューダ♡トライアングル MASTER+ is not available.

• Low: Good MASTER flick act options includes Home Sweet Home or メルヘンデビュー！ The most ideal flick act song in the batch is Home Sweet Home MASTER+, but that chart is a very technical 28. At that point, playing Secret Mirage MASTER+ might be a much easier option.
• Med: Excluding all the 30s, I would look at Slide act on かぼちゃ姫 MASTER+. Otherwise the majority of 29s are not very act friendly and I would pick whichever is the easiest.
• High: 凸凹スピードスター MASTER+. Claw My Heart MASTER+ is slide act compatible but doesn't have much else going for it otherwise.

SSS Booth 3: Specific songs 290% Appeal

• AnemoneStar
• Drastic Melody
• Gaze and Gaze
• こいかぜ
• さよならアンドロメダ
• エチュードは1曲だけ
• ストリート・ランウェイ
• 君のステージ衣装、本当は…
• 泡沫のアイオーン
• 青の一番星

This is the only cool booth. There are also a lot of options here. ストリート・ランウェイ does not have its MASTER+ available.

• Low: The best flick act option is Koikaze MASTER, but considering that song is quite hard to FC for its 28 rating, it may be worth attempting another song instead.
• Med: エチュードは1曲だけ and さよならアンドロメダ are just barely high enough percent to be slide viable. Considering that it may be preferable to choose an easy to FC 29 from the choices available.
• High: Your 30 options are 泡沫のアイオーン and Gaze and Gaze. The song you choose ultimately depends on which timer you end up running. 泡沫のアイオーン may be preferred by some high end players.

SSS Booth 4: Specific songs 320% Appeal

• Flip Flop
• TAKAMARI☆CLIMAXXX！！！！！
• Twin☆くるっ★テール
• 熱血乙女A
• 絶対特権主張しますっ！

This is the first passion booth. Interestingly all songs have 0% slides, including MASTER+. These songs are all very tap heavy and scale terribly with acts.

Song recommendations

• Low: 絶対特権主張しますっ！ MASTER is the only flick act-able chart in the entire set. Otherwise something like TAKAMARI☆CLIMAXXX！！！！！ may be easier to FC based on skillset.
• Med: If you're incapable of FCing 30s, Flip Flop is literally your only 29 choice.
• High: The correct lv30 here is dependent on which timer you're running. 9s timers will favor Twin☆くるっ★テール and 絶対特権主張しますっ！ over TAKAMARI☆CLIMAXXX！！！！！

SSS Booth 5: Specific Songs 290% Appeal

• CoCo夏夏夏 Holiday
• Demolish
• O-Ku-Ri-Mo-No Sunday！
• Orange Sapphire
• Rockin’ Emotion
• Shinobi 4.0 忍者のすゝめ
• おんなの道は星の道
• きみにいっぱい☆
• 世界滅亡 or KISS
• 思い出じゃない今日を

This booth appears to have a lot of options, but really because it contains the best scoring song in the game, there really isn't that much of an option if you want score and nothing else.

• Low: Outside of O-Ku-Ri-Mo-No Sunday! MASTER I don't think there is any other song that is worth running an act on, and even that is not really great. Trying a 27 might be more ideal.
• Med/High: Run おんなの道は星の道 with slide act and win game.

SSS Booth 6 & 7: Visual only 590% appeal

This is the throw-your-resonance booth. A couple pointers

• There are three refrains now for visual. This means you have a choice of what you want to run here.
• Magic is a very nice clutch to help you "loan" resonance effects for this booth. Paired with a SR center and it could literally be the difference between scoring nothing and scoring well.

SSS Booth 8: Star rank

Okay so I believe star rank is probably one of the worst optimized booths for most people for several reasons. Let's go over what there is to know

• Leaving star rank for last is actually okay, because you can throw together a team of 15* SRs and still expect to score about 160 on a lv29 FC. This allows you to spend your more valuable pieces on maximizing other booths.
• SR Acts really shine in this booth, there are a lot of songs that can be exploited. These event SRs can be 15*ed just by getting top 10,000 finishes on events which makes it accessible compared to high star rank act SSRs. For example, aiko slide act SR on Tomoe's M+ will score disgustingly high for a lv28 as it has over 60% Slide
• It is very unlikely that a 20* SSR is worth the rent unless you really had nowhere else that needed the rent.
• The scaling for SSRs is not linear! It's +30% per star rank for the first 3 stars, then +10% until 20*. This means that a 3* SSR is likely to break even just by having a much better skill, and a 4* SSR is better than a 15* SR
• Renting 20* magic is pretty bad here due to stats not scaling well when the base stats is so low.

SSS Booth 9: Potential Booth

We've reached the point where there are plenty of refrains to go around if you had all of them. This booth is generally the easiest booth to score over 3 million if you have a high potential team. The most ideal is running a resonance team here.

• If you do not have 305+ Life, it is better to run a Coordinate instead of Life Sparkle.

Because we have so many reso + refrain choices here now it really depends on the timer chosen to determine which song is the best.

If you're stuck with more conventional builds there's still a few pointers you can take note of

• Remember that having potential is huge bonus, a stack of random Potential 35 cards can outscore a proper team at average pot 27
• The stat bonuses from having potential is so high that in a pinch simply grabbing all your high potential cards is a viable alternative
• Potential booth scores the highest amongst all the booths, so it is optimal to try and maximize it's score over all other booths first, the consider cutting corners if the card choices are hurting your other booths too hard
• Because potential affects the card's stat individually, slapping a low potential magic card together with other high potential cards is not the worst thing ever, although magic isn't a very good choice to begin with for the same reason.

SSS Booth 10: Grand Live

Pointers from SS largely apply. Few other pointers for min maxing score

• Try all 6 permutations of your teams. ABC ACB BAC BCA CAB CBA and try to find the combination that scores the highest
• You can select any song for the grand booth, this means that if you have a good existing grand team and won't lose too many pieces in the process, this can be a good place. Teams running 5+ encores generally max out at around 4.8 million, while the best possible team to run at the moment is about 8 million but costs way more to put together
• I would not rent My Style SSRs for GRAND booth unless you literally need nothing else. Yes, the gains for one card is huge but it also hinges on having the exact team to benefit from it and also not bringing the rest of your booths down because of it.

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And that concludes the contents of this guide! Hopefully some of the information was helpful in deciding what teams to use for each task.