My opinion on the Masters EX 5th Anniversary datamine

Some people are unlucky and won't get the Arc suits until maxing out the scout points. And the 25K gem count (and that's only obtainable if you have really strong characters that can finish all the difficult events and do everything everyday) is not enough to even get a single Pokéfair or Master Fair for some people, let alone the Arc Fairs. They want people to spend more money to get paid gems for the new characters and are doing everything they can to make people spend as much as possible (especially since they seem to be the most overpowered characters in the entire game that you'll need for specific types or regions that don't already have super OP characters. To make it worse, people have found some other currently unused Arc suit type rings in the files, and one of them is Bug, one of the weakest types in the game, which will definitely become a necessity for anything that needs Bug type characters once it gets a character). To make it even worse somehow, we have 5 Master Fairs (counting the much worse Arc Fairs) and last month had 4. All of which only have a 1% chance to be obtained because they're Master Fairs and/or Arc Fairs.

This is disgustingly greedy and we should not be encouraging it and saying it's ok and allowing the developers to make even greedier things in the future. If the game keeps its gem counts low and continues to add absurd amounts of Master Fair or Arc Fair characters every month, the game probably won't live much longer and will reach end of service.

Forgot to mention that Arc suits only use yellow 5☆ candy, the hardest to get in the game, if you want to increase their move level without wasting more gems to scout on them. Pretty sure it's also so more people get the daily gem bundle that gives 20 yellow 5☆ move coins, which is enough to get a candy.

And they have 5/5 sync grid things, some of which are really strong. Master Fairs don't have those, only Poké Fairs (and maybe normal pairs? Idk) do. Poké Fairs have double the chance to appear, can be upgraded with move coins that match their role, and need only 400 scout points if you're super unlucky.

So they're not even trying to hide how greedy they are now.

The October datamine just came out! My thoughts (I am not going to make this a whole discussion):

We are getting Lear in the Trainer Lodge! This means we are getting another Lear sync pair (4☆ Lear and Krookodile, obtained by raising Lear's friendship level to 100). This also means I can finally make a full team with just Lear. Honestly I was not expecting this since he's a Pasio character but I am so glad they added him to the lodge.

Halloween Iono / Flutter Mane and Halloween Shauntal / Frosslass seem interesting. I think it wasn't hard for people to predict them getting new Pokémon this October (especially Iono). Their outfits look pretty cool. Also, Iono has a new lodge photo.

Clavell / Quaquaval and Giacomo / Kingambit are arriving on Pasio soon! Both are limited time Sync Pairs… I feel bad for Paldea fans, the only F2P Paldea character is Damage challenge Nemona / Lycanroc. Why and how is Giacomo a Poké Fair though?

Gem count is ok for a normal month (pretty sure it was around 24K or 25K?). Weird how a random normal month's gem count is less than 1K away from giving us as much gems as this Anniversary did… (Anniversaries usually give you enough gems to guarantee one character. This year you could barely get half the scout points necessary...)

Just get a bunch of strong characters. Once you have a lot of good characters at Lv. 140+ it's really easy, I do it without caring about what type it's weak to now, sometimes even soloing a few fights. Once you have a good amount of decent characters, it's really easy, but it's pretty hard when you've just started the game, don't have that many good characters, and don't have the resources to upgrade things often.

Other than that, just read the advice/tips in the game for each fight. It gives you pretty good advice like levelling up your characters, to use sync grids, etc., and at the end it gives you specific advice on how to beat the specific stage you're looking at tips for. It does say you need some limited time characters sometimes but it also tells you what stats you should raise, what stats you should focus on lowering, etc., so you can make a F2P team that does something similar. Back when I struggled with the Champion stadium that helped a lot, although somehow the general advice was better than the specific advice.

Also this is only a little related but you need to do the Anniversary Lillie event if you haven't already, you get a free character from it (Anniversary 2024 Lillie) and she's REALLY good for a free character. I don't remember if the free Victor/Spectrier or Riley/Lucario events are still running but if they're still there (in the events page, there's a little thing saying reruns in the bottom right corner, and if you press that you might see them. Or maybe the events already finished, I can't remember), you should also get them. Get as many free event characters as you can.

Also, if you are struggling with getting items to upgrade characters you can get items for upgrading characters from events. If there's something specific you need, there's also the Training Area.