I recently updated my MCOC Unit guide:
How Where to get units in MCOC. In that guide I mention that with sufficient grinding a F2P player could get as much as 115,000 units in a single year. Granted, that would require a substantial (but not super human) amount of time, but still, that's a lot of units even for someone who only gets a fraction of them.
Coincidentally, during this past banquet I decided to go basically all-in on banquet crystals. I spent virtually all of my units (I was down to just a few hundred left) and essentially all of my Battlechips (I reached one million towards the end of banquet and traded them in for arena crystals). So I essentially started 2026 with practically no units and essentially zero battlechips. In fact, I bought 1000 units worth of collector crystals soon after banquet as soon as my units got above 1k, so I am in a sense starting 2026 below zero. Because I'm that guy.
Which means I have an opportunity to do something I've thought about doing for a while now. I have decided to set the goal of getting 100,000 units for banquet 2026, starting from basically scratch. Now, I am not a free to play player. I do spend on the game. So this is not a free to play challenge. It isn't really any sort of challenge except a personal one, but one I thought it would be worth doing publicly, just to put my guide to the test, as well as my discipline. What can a player actually sustain over the course of a year.
Here's how this will work. First of all, as I said I am not a F2P player. In particular, there are three things I spend on that will directly affect my units acquired this year. I sub the Sigil. I consistently buy the unit card. And I always buy the Platinum track for the double track events. A year of Sigil is about $120 USD ($10 x 12). A year of the unit card is about $60 ($5 x 12). And four Platinum passes is about $100 USD ($25 x 4). That is about $280 USD. The net unit benefit is 455 x 12 + 735 x 12 + 1140 x 4 =18,840 units. That is specifically the units due to spending on those things. To get to 100,000 units I will need to grind out 81,160 units before banquet 2026. That's doable, but will require substantial arena grinding, as well as making sure I get all the other sources of units that are available. Here's how I intend to do it.
First of all, there's one thing I'm not going to do, or at least not planning on doing. I do not plan on using the radiance store. That's just a choice on my part: I don't get a ton of radiance, so I need to manage that resource more carefully than other players might. That source of units is currently off the table.
As I said, I am not a free to play player. So I might spend on things during the year that contain units. However, to keep things fair here's the other constraint I intend to follow. If I buy anything other than the three things listed above - Sigil, Unit card, Platinum Pass - and it contains units, I will spend those units in the nearest special sale event. So if I buy offers during J4, say, any units I get will be spent in J4 offers. None will carry over. I could burn *more* units than I get from spending, putting me behind, but I will not burn less. To reach 100,000 units, besides the units I get from Sigil, Unit cards, and Platinum passes, I will have to grind for them.
In fact, in general, if I acquire units from *any* source other than what's generally available to all players in the game - lets say I win some drawing in 2026 that awards me 3000 units or something - those units will get dumped Into one of the unit sales prior to banquet, up to and including the Cyber sales.
My goal is to provide at least monthly updates on my progress, and I may do interim ones at noteworthy points, whatever that might be. I will try to mention noteable unit progress, things like opening arena crystals, but I don't intend to track every single crystal or unit drop. That would probably drive me crazy with all the tracking.
To that end, here's progress report #1. As I said, for all intents and purposes I started at zero at the start of the year. At this moment, I currently have 3710 units and 555756 BC (the other currently most directly related to units). As this is a very boring way of tracking progress, I will try to come up with something more interesting before my next update, which will be sometime in the first week of February.
Why do this? Is this some crazy flex? Of course it is. However, I thought even players not as crazy as I am might be inspired to try to see what they can do themselves. 100,000 units is a lot, and it will take a lot of time to get there, and I might fail, but half that would still be super useful to most players. A quarter of that would still be great for most casual players. For $280 USD spent my goal is to try to get to the equivalent of about $3200 worth of units. That's a ten times amplification of spending, and probably more than most spenders spend in a year.
Again, this is not an attempt to acquire 100,000 units in 2026. This is an attempt to acquire 100,000 units *for banquet* in 2026. I don't plan on necessarily abstaining from everything else in 2026, so that's what will make things challenging. I will need to net 100,000 by banquet, with everything else going on, and manage the rest of my year accordingly.
Gentlemen, and Ladies, and all Summoners alike: start your engines.
