Hoarding Taco Tokens - Yea or Nay?

skittledaddy

Is there a point in one's roster progression at which it makes more sense to hoard taco tokens rather than to pull as you go?

I'm looking at tweeks I can make to my gameplay to keep my roster moving forward and right now the taco vault seems like a relatively underwhelming source of potential resources for me.

The taco vault used to serve my roster very well simply pulling as I earned them, but I'm wondering if I've now outgrown that approach.I understand the purpose/need of "beating RNG", but would it stunt my slow-steady growth too much by delaying taco pulls for 6 months?

My Vitals:
All chars rostered except GEDoom, Magik, and BagMan
All 3*s champed, none are max-champed (highest 261, lowest 177)
24 4*champs, many more are close.
2* Farm flowing strong
1.3MM iso
21,000HP
No reserves of CP or LLTs. I pull as I go.
394 Health Packs [**editted**]

Typical Ratings:
T100 PvE (SCL7)
Minimal PvP play, unless the stars align to provide enough time and the right event/boosteds


Looking for some advice. 
Any taco hoarders out there who can share some insight; good, bad, or otherwise?

GrimSkald

I've always hoarded tacos but not because I want something specific out of the vault - I hoard them so if I have a bad day in PVP I can have emergency health packs without spending HP.  I can definitely remember a few times they've really helped, though since I entered the 5* tier that almost never happens.  Now I generally draw them when I feel like it, but always make sure to leave at least 50 from each vault for when I need health packs.

skittledaddy

I didn't think of the Health pack angle to hoarding. Good idea, just not relevant to me, as I definitely am in no jeopardy of running out.

I'll add this to my Vitals:
Current Health Packs - 394

justsing

I also hoard them and only pull when I need health packs for PVP, but you may not need that since you say you don't play PVP much. 

Bruinsfan17

I’ve got a stash of about 350 of each Taco Token. I’ve got the majority of my 4* champed and about a dozen max champed and now have a 2nd one rostered. So I’m really just working towards 5* now. Not sure if there’s a real benefit to hoarding them or not. The only I started hoarding was because I had no real reason to open them when I got them. I figure this way I can pretty much guarantee myself a particular character that pops up in the vault or if it’s the feature 4*. Having 300 gets me whatever item I need.

Spudgutter

I sat on mine until i got to 300 in each, so that i could beat rng on a couple of 4* covers that were my white whales, a couple years ago. Ive maintained it that way ever since, just pulling the 3 per day out of habit.  Taking a few months off to hoard wont really slow you down in the long run.  It even helped me get the last cover i needed for taskmaster, just like the good old days.

Quebbster

If you have no other use for the tacos, you may as well hoard them until a limited character is featured in there. Some people I know busted their hoards to get extra Taskmaster covers at least...

skittledaddy

Waiting to pounce on a desired 4* in the vault would be my only obvious intent to hoard tokens. Other benefits (if any) are welcome, however.

I will admit that lately it seems the only 4*s in the vault (Crash-featured or not) have been covers of one of my already-champed 4*s (therefore only champ rewards) or covers I already have 5 of. So much so, it's almost to the point where I don't want to pull a 4* in the taco vault for (irrational) fear that I will "burn up" my 4* luck on something I don't need.

bbigler

I've never hoarded tacos because of the super long ROI.  Let's say you hoarded 300 tokens for each Taco vault, that would take 200 Days or 6.5 months.  If you then clear out both vaults, your reward for hoarding that long is 2 x LTs, 4 x 4*s, 8,000 HP plus a ton of ISO, Health Packs, 2* and 3* champ rewards.  For 6 months of hoarding, I would be disappointed.  But if you're not going to notice the slightly fewer rewards per day, then you could hoard just for fun.  Meaning you get a nice little present every 6 months.  But.......if all you really care about is the LT and 4* covers, then you could pull until you get them and then stop and hoard again.  That would probably take a lot less than 300 pulls, which means your hoarding cycle is a lot less than 6 months. 

I've heard of some players hoarding tacos in order to get health packs when they're in dire need during a PVP climb or PVE grind.  Opening 10 - 15 tokens should get you a health pack set of 5.  Of course, since you have excess HP, you could just buy a Health Pack Set of 5 for 200 HP when you're in dire need.  But it looks like you're not competitive in PVE or PVP, so I guess this doesn't matter. 

StevO-J

I've been hoarding Taco tokens for as long as they have been around and have only opened some of the hoard when there was a 4* cover in the Vault. I have all characrters rostered, all 3*s champed and duped at the moment and all 4*s champed except for Namor (10 covers) and Magik (not done SHIELD training yet). I have put exactly zero Iso into my 5*s, and unlikely will any time soon (thanks 5* pull rate RNG! ).

I started hoarding because I figured that the 2* and incidental 3* cover had almost no effect on roster progress when playing mainly with the boosted 4*s each week. Even though the chances of a useful 4* appearing in the Taco Vault is minimal, that cover would be more useful than any 3* cover could be.

The hoarding tactic has helped me with a few final 4* covers when I still needed them to finish off some characters, but that was partly due to having more than 300 tokens for either Vault. Taking that into account, I can't really say you should be hoarding them as of now because until the point where you get to 300 tokens (*) you can't really say it's a guaranteed cover you can get. And seeing I am now at 456 and 569 Tacos respectively, you can say I'm now at a point where very few useful 4* covers show up in the Taco Vaults for me. Mind you, the tokens are still useful to get some health packs whenever I need them, but so far those needs have been pretty slim as PVP is a 'up to 900 if possible and shield' kind of affair for me, and most times that is possible with 10 health packs or I just shield up at somewhere above 800 or so, whereever I get hit down to repeatedly.

If I were to give any advice when you are uncertain what to do with your Taco tokens, I'd say try to go a few weeks without opening any of them first. If you don't feel you are missing out on anything try keeping it up, but otherwise you can always just open them and keep on doing that every week.



(*) to illustrate needing 300 tokens: I'v had the sitauation where the needed 4* cover (X-23 red) was on token 298 out of 300. On the other hand there was one occaision where it was on token 1 out of 300 (4* Cage black).

Dormammu

There is no real benefit to hoarding Taco tokens because of one simple mitigating factor: vault sizes

If your purpose is to hoard for a particular guaranteed 4-star cover, you're better off setting that 4-star as your bonus hero. You'll get multiple covers that way long before you hoard long enough and then wait for a cover to appear in a Taco vault. If your goal is to nab a Legendary Token, RNG dictates you're as likely to score the LT just as often by pulling-as-you-go.

I can somewhat see the benefits of hoarding for health packs, but only if you're a heavy PvP player and want to min/max your health pack usage by using the free ones first and maintaining your inventory at 10 or under. Otherwise, you're better off just pulling as you go and hoarding health packs rather than tokens - that way you're not delaying your returns on other valuable Taco vault resources like ISO, HP, and covers.

skittledaddy

Dang it, @Dormammu ! After reading some of the previous posts (especially @StevO-J 's) I was leaning towards going for it (which was my initial inclination, anyway). But now after reading yours, I'm torn again.

Hoarding for a 4* could be used to supplement the BH mechanism, but is that worth it? I don't think it is.
I was never looking for it as a way to accelerate my LLT gains (for reasons you very concisely stated), simply for "that one" 4*, that white whale.
You're right, however, we already have a way method to get "that one" - it's the Bonus Hero.

Besides, I can't argue with the sound logic of a fellow Minnesotan.

I'll keep pulling tacos and see if I can't make some improvements somewhere else, instead.

Thank you, All!

Kahmon

At first I would pull as I got them because anything was useful to me.
Eventually, once I understood the benefits of hoarding, I began to save my tacos until needing the 4* in the vault.
Now I just save them for anniversary season in order to get the limited covers that are only featured then.

Dormammu

skittledaddy said:

I'll keep pulling tacos and see if I can't make some improvements somewhere else, instead.

@skittledaddy - you are in the hardest and longest stretch of building a roster with 24 champed 4-stars. At a third of the way through the tier, you've realized what a slog champing all the 4-stars is going to be... and they keep coming every 2-4 weeks. You start to feel stagnant because as you keep champing 4-stars, your roster starts to feel like it's only getting bigger, rather than better.

But keep on the slow, grinding path. What's happening (as you continue to champ 4-stars you feel like you'll rarely use), is that you are improving the number of boosted champs that you have each event. My guess is that with 24 champed 4s, you see PvP events where you don't have any boosted champs. Those are a slog, am I right? But those events will become few and far between as you keep going.

There's no real way to speed this up other than playing more and continue to seek higher placements (in both PvE and PvP). Keep gathering more resources, chipping away slowly, until you get to the point that your 4-star roster is robust and you're ready to start seriously focus on champing 5-stars.

At that point hoarding can help you. But not Taco tokens... LTs and CPs.

Hilk

I say pull....
the time value of getting the random 4* or Gold earlier is worth just pulling away, especially since you are primarily PvE 

also, you could randomly get more that just the one you hoard for

KGB

I'm a bit further along (40 champed 4*, the rest at 209 minus the latest few release and with enouth ISO to champ another 15 or so when I have enough covers saved that they get their 5* feeder).

Personally I hoard (over 450 tacos in each rotation). I only open when one of the newer 4*s is in the vault and I don't yet have 10 covers for them. That still tends to happen every 3-4 months because I still can't quite reliably cover them all to 10 as fast as they are released. That gives me a better shot at Shield Training (haven't missed being able to complete that in the last 3 months).

The other thing it gives as noted is a hoard of health packs for PvP which I occasionally need.

KGB

TPF Alexis

I started, not exactly hoarding, but just not bothering to open Taco Tokens a while ago. Didn't really notice much of a difference in my overall progress, since most of the stuff in there is relatively unimportant to me at this point. However, when I did go to open a bunch of them a week or so ago, two things became apparent, one positive, one negative. On the plus side, opening a bunch of Tokens at once is pretty fun. On the down side, it takes 4 taps per Token to open them, and that gets really tedious, and even physically uncomfortable after enough of them. I don't really have a conclusion here, just a couple more data points for you to consider.

jamesh

I found hoarding taco tokens useful for finishing off 4* characters.  Yes, I could use bonus heroes to do so, but prior to saved covers I'd usually want to focus on a character with less than 5 in each power, or with less than 10 covers total if I thought they'd be featured in SHIELD Training.

If I had a had a character sitting at 5/5/2 that I didn't actively want to play and saw that last cover in a DDQ vault, then it was nice to have enough tokens to grab it.

With that said, once you've got most 4* characters champed these situations come up quite rarely.  I did dip into my token hoard to let me get a 5* cover through champion rewards once, but it didn't really feel as satisfying as it used to.

jredd

the only 4* i don't have champed (aside from the limiteds) are namor and magik. so it's awfully rare a cover i can use comes up in the vault. i just dumped 220+ to pull a domino from the most recent vault. i am sitting on over 500 for the other.

they really need to start including one of the most recent 4* characters in every vault.

scottee

I hoard taco tokens.

The only thing in the entire taco vault that helps my progression is the Latest Legendary token. I have enough HP, health packs, 3*/4* covers.

So I hoard taco tokens because it doubles your chance of getting the Latest Legendary token, IF that's the only thing you're going for.

In order for it to work, you have to save till 300 tacos, then pull from a single vault until you pull the Legendary token, then immediately stop.

This method gives one Latest Legendary token for every 150.5 taco tokens. If you pulled the tacos one at a time from different vaults, you would get an expected value of one Latest Legendary every 300 tokens.

Painmonger

I don't have data to back it up so it's probably bias, but I feel like I get the lower end of the vault every time if I pull as I go, so I started hoarding. I only pull when there's a 4* I need the cover for, but I've only got 7 4* left to champ so that's pretty rare.

The other side for me is getting a big payout if I need iso or HP in a crunch. When I champed my first 5* it was easily worth it to cash out a taco hoard to get the iso I needed.