Contents
Introduction
This guide was written with these goals in mind:
- Assist the player in obtaining their first Hard S clears.
- Review the various ways one can build and improve their team.
Everyone’s cards will be different and you will have to play the cards that you are dealt (or reroll). Don’t be discouraged if your account lacks a particular meta card that everyone seems to rave about , or if you do/don’t pull duplicates to limit break. Just about all UR, event UR, and even some SR can fill an important role whether it be as a sub or attribute match. SIFAS is a team building game, and part of the fun is finding ways to make the cards that you pull work for you.
Team building can be divided up into 3 sections: Team layout, Accessories, and Inspirations. While deciding which 9 cards to bring will provide the greatest impact, the other areas of team building are very important and should not be neglected.
Should you be new to this game, I recommend first reading through Kach’s SIFAS Guide and stopping by their website which has lots of SIFAS info.
Section 1: Team Layout
You have 3 subunits of 3 cards each to build your team. The auto builder in game will create a Vo subunit, a Gd subunit, and a Sp subunit. While specialized subunits will come in handy later on, it is best to focus your resources on a single main subunit for now. A main subunit will typically consist of 1 healer and 2 scorers, and will be the active subunit for the entire song.
Focusing on 3 cards instead of 9 cards to start will allow you to focus your minimal mac reserves into fewer cards. You might also only have one good healer to begin with, or one good scorer. Only the 3 cards in the active subunit are being tapped at a time and contributing directly to your tap score. Cards not in your active subunit can only provide their stamina, passive, and active.
The Frontline
Also known as the main subunit, this is where most of the tapping will take place.
You can check the base stats and skills of your cards here: https://kachagain.com/sifas/cards.php
You will want high appeal cards for your scorers, preferably Vo type and 6000+ base appeal. You will also want a healer that can keep your stamina in green for close to the entirety of the song. Look for cards with a heal or shield ability (some Sp and Sk can heal or shield) and 4000+ base stamina with the more the better.
Normally you would want to select cards that fit the attribute of the song, but this won’t be required for Normal difficulty or your first Hard S clears.
Selecting the Healer
It is important to keep your stamina in green for as long as possible during a song. Once your stamina drops to yellow your tap score will be penalized. This will get even worse if your stamina drops to red.
Hopefully you have a UR healer, like a real healer and not just a UR that is type Gd. For the purpose of staying alive, shielding is just as good as healing. How good a healer is (if they have a heal/shield) will depend on their stamina. A strong healer allows you to be more aggressive in selecting scorers to include in your main subunit, like running 2 Vo cards. Look for healers that have 4000+ base stamina and a heal or shield ability as their main skill. You will eventually want to fill in all the nodes on your healer except for perhaps the voice node, but stamina will be your main focus.
Initial UR Ruby Sk is considered one of the best healers in the game because she has high stamina, a passive that increases subunit appeal, and an active that also increases appeal. You can pair her with two Vo scorers without worry.
You ideally want a healer with a heal/shield skill and 4000+ base stamina like these. After accessories and team buffs they should be able to keep your stamina in good condition for most songs.
Initial UR Eli Gd and Initial UR You Gd are considered half scorers half healers. They have high appeal and tech but low stamina so their healing is weak. If you have both of these UR then you can run them together in the same team with 1 good scorer. They can also be run by themselves with 2 scorers on the easier songs, though you will likely spend some time with your stamina in yellow. This can be balanced somewhat through limit breaks, good accessories, increasing your total stamina, and team stamina boosters.
These are some decent SR healers if you happened to pull any of them as they have around 4000 stamina. Other SRs could suffice as well if you are desperate for healing.
Damage reduction cards are not ideal. As your stamina will be constantly dropping you will be in a race against time to finish the song before you die or spend too much time in yellow/red stamina. This can be prolonged with stacking as much total stamina and team stamina buffers as you can.
Selecting the Scorers
How strong a healer you have will determine how aggressive you can be in your scorer selection. Vo cards make the best scorers as they provide 5% to subunit voltage (score), but also increase subunit damage with -5% Gd. Normally you would want to select scorers that match the attribute of the song for their 20% tap bonus. We will instead be going with our best scorers and selecting the attribute of the song that best matches our team comp.
That said, Pure songs will be out of the question because they are all difficult. Smile isn’t too bad. Cool, Natural, Active, and Elegant will be your best bets for starting off into Hard.
Start by figuring out your top scorer to pair with your healer. The third member of your main subunit can either be another Vo scorer (if your healer can handle it), an attribute match for the song you are trying to play, or a utility role (SP generation or skill activation). Ideally you will have a card that is both Vo type and with over 6000 appeal. You will eventually want to fill in all the nodes on your scorers except for perhaps the voice node. Stamina is a low priority compared to everything else.
Initial UR Kanan Vo is considered the best scorer (non FES) currently out as her stats, skill, passive, and active all contribute to a higher score. All of these choices are great to pair with your healer and build around.
Outside of the first batch any of the other UR Vo will suffice. Some will have high appeal or have multiple appeal boosting abilities. Initial UR Maki Sk although being an Sk which gives -5% to Vo, has the highest appeal for a non limited card along with an appeal boosting skill.
These cards offer high appeal or are the remaining Event Vo. If still lacking in scorers then look at which cards you do have and compare their appeal stats.
Hopefully it won’t come to this, but if it does, hopefully you have a Vo SR with decent appeal.
The Backline
Also known as the subs, the remaining 6 slots in your team will be dedicated to utility roles. There might come a time when you will want a SP subunit focused on generating SP as quick as possible, or a Gd subunit focused on tanking heavy amounts of damage or for quick recovery. For now, your 6 sub slots should be focused on improving the main subunit and team in general. Stamina and passive (if useful) are the main priorities for your skill tree if the subs aren’t being tapped and aren’t part of the center SP team. What follows is a list of priorities when selecting your subs.
Cleanse
Most of the songs give a debuff to cards that do not match the song attribute. Typically this is a -10% to -20% appeal debuff. This debuff can be removed for the ENTIRETY of the song with a single cleanse activation. Some songs are cleanse proof, like the -50% skill debuff for non natural cards on GZDDD. Other songs immune to cleanse are all the hards that came later starting with T1W and Music START. This would include all the PDP 2nd singles, Love U my friends, Borarara, Step 021, etc. These songs all have a recommended live power of 8550+.
Only two cards currently have cleanse. Initial UR Riko Gd has a 30% chance to cleanse when swapping between subunits. Fruits SR Nico Gd has a 50% chance to cleanse when activating SP. Initial UR Riko Gd is the preferred choice for cleanse as it might activate as soon as you swap subunits when the song starts. If you don’t have Initial UR Riko Gd then you can always bring one as a friend support. If you don’t want to bother with swapping, Fruits SR Nico Gd is a decent filler both for providing a decent amount of stamina and for buffing the stamina of other Gd cards like potentially your main healer.
The easiest Hard songs will lack a strong penalty for mismatch attributes, so cleanse is a low priority if you are looking for your first Hard S clear. On the more difficult songs (that aren’t resistant to cleanse) cleanse will be very useful.
Appeal Passives
Team appeal passives make some of the best subs. Appeal passives that only impact the subunit or self won’t help your frontline if they are sitting in the backline, but these 4 will.
If you run 2 or more Vo types in your frontline then you might want to consider subs with Vo appeal passives.
Some cards will also buff a specific attribute. If you run 2 or more cards with the same attribute then you can consider adding a sub that buffs that attribute.
There is even a SP appeal card out there. Not much choice for Sk and Gd teams unfortunately.
There are also R’s that can buff appeal based on school or official subunit. R’s generally have low stamina and are probably not worth investing much macs into, but if you are short on cards and have no stamina issues then they are an option if it fits your team.
Stamina Passives
I am mentioning stamina before tech because some teams WILL need extra stamina. A large stamina pool will help keep your stamina out of yellow. If you feel that your healing and stamina is sufficient already then you don’t have to worry about adding additional stamina. Harder songs tend to drain more stamina and might force you to bring stamina subs.
Some cards have high stamina but fulfill other roles like Initial UR Nozomi Sk (passive team tech) or Initial UR Nico Vo (passive appeal for only subunit, but decent active). Other stamina cards will buff the team’s stamina (improving your main healer) and possibly spot heal like Initial UR Honoka Gd. SRs can also be an option for loading up stamina should you still be lacking.
Tech Passives
Just like appeal, some tech passives will boost the entire team, or just their self, subunit, attribute, type, etc. These 4 cards will boost the entire team’s tech. More tech on your main subunit means more crits and more SP bar strength for those in the middle three.
Actives
Sometimes you might want to bring a sub specifically for their active (besides cleanse). Relying on actives will add another layer of RNG to your score. You will need to decide if a sub is worth bringing just for their active if their passive happens to be useless.
Arranging the Center
Once you have decided on your 9 cards, you will need to decide which cards are best for slotting in the center 3 spots for SP bar strength. Suyooo has a calculator that can be found here: https://suyo.be/sifas/calc/sppower.html
The basic formula is (tech x 1.2) + appeal for the 3 cards in center.
If a card in the center 3 spots matches the attribute of the song then the formula changes to (tech x 1.44) + appeal for that card, with a bonus 1.1x multiplier for the overall SP bar strength. This multiplier will increase to 1.15x and 1.2x with 2 or 3 matching attribute cards in center. Put simply, you ideally want at least 1 card in center that matches the attribute of the song for that 1.1x bonus.
Section 2: Accessories
Accessories provide additional stats for the subunit they are equipped with, along with skills that impact either the equipped subunit or the team. The raw stats that an accessory provides will improve your scores and survivability. You want to have at least 3 good accessories to equip on your main subunit.
As a general rule of thumb when selecting which accessory to use:
Rarity > Level > Attribute > Type
Rarity and Level
A UR (rainbow) accessory starts with a level cap of 30, and has higher stats than a max limit broken (abbreviated MLB) SR (gold) accessory which caps at 50. UR accessories also have better quality skills than SR accessories, which are better than R (silver) accessories.
UR accessories drop at a rate of about 0.5%-1.0% on Hard songs (if UR accessories are even in the pool). Your mileage may vary. Some players find their first by rank 20. Others might take as long as rank 30.
Attribute
If a card in the subunit matches the attribute of an accessory, they will receive 10% more base stats from the matching accessory. As all 3 accessories assigned to a subunit are shared with all 3 members of the subunit, a card may receive 10% more base stats from up to 3 accessories if they all happen to match their attribute. This can be best maximized by having a subunit of 3 cards all the same attribute, equipped with 3 accessories that are also the same attribute. Even so, you should adhere to the order of rarity > level > attribute > type. All things being equal, a subunit with 2 cool and 1 smile card for example, will best benefit from running 3 cool accessories instead of 2 cool and 1 smile.
Type
Each accessory type only comes in 3 attributes.
Brooches for example only exist in smile, cool, and natural attributes. Keychains (look very similar to brooches) only exist as pure, active, and elegant. All accessories of the same type have the same skill, with higher rarity accessories offering a stronger skill.
For your main subunit, the recommended accessory types are brooches, keychains, and hairpins.
Brooches provide additional appeal to the equipped subunit, and there’s not much point to have additional appeal on a sub that is not being tapped.
Keychains provide increased skill activation rate to the equipped subunit.
Hairpins provide increased crit score to the equipped subunit.
For your subs, the recommended accessory type is bracelets. Bracelets provide an effect where upon AC completion (right when the notes turn into star notes) a percent of the equipped subunit’s appeal is turned into a chunk of SP bar. The more AC’s a song has the more opportunities the bracelets will have at filling a chunk of your SP bar.
The extra appeal and technique that accessories offer on subs is often not a factor if the subs aren’t being tapped. The stamina on sub accessories will contribute to the total stamina which is nice, but sometimes you might want to choose additional bracelets to take advantage of a song with a lot of ACs.
Leveling your Accessories and Limit Breaks
Duplicates of an accessory can be fed to an accessory to limit break them, raising their max level cap. Early on your main focus should be getting the 3 accessories on your main subunit to be as strong as possible in raw stats.
It should be pointed out that you should be leveling your accessories with stickers instead of other accessories, unless you specifically want to level an accessories’ skill level. The attribute of a sticker doesn’t seem to provide any additional benefit. Gold stickers provide 6x as much exp as a silver sticker. You can great success and super success when feeding stickers, so you might want to just feed one at a time to conserve stickers, especially when feeding gold stickers.
As gold accessories are common enough, you shouldn’t bother limit breaking your silver accessories.
Rarity Upgrade and Disassembling
Don’t upgrade a silver rarity to gold. Just not worth it.
The drop rate of UR accessories is bad enough that sometimes you will obtain enough fodder to upgrade a SR accessory into a UR accessory. This is what’s required to upgrade a SR accessory into a UR:
Max limit broken and max level SR accessory
125 pearls of matching attribute
You get 1 pearl of the accessory attribute for disassembling 1 silver accessory. 5 for disassembling a gold accessory. 25 for disassembling a rainbow accessory.
No pearls are lost for disassembling limit broken accessories. If you limit break an accessory (original + dup) you can later disassemble it and receive all the pearls as if you disassembled them individually.
It is a lot of work to obtain 6 copies of a SR accessory and enough fodder in the same color, but it at least exists as a form of pity system with the huge advantage of being able to upgrade the accessory type that you desire rather than trust in RNG to drop the type you want. Your accessory skill levels are also transferred over with rarity upgrade.
Accessory Skill Levels
Separate from accessory levels are accessory skill levels. Accessory skill levels can be increased by feeding other accessories of any type, attribute, or rarity. The skill level cap of an accessory will increase with rarity and limit breaks.
If you try to use a silver accessory as exp fodder, you will see a 50% meaning that you have a 50% chance of raising your accessory skill level from 1 to 2. If you feed two silver accessories at once then it will show a 100% meaning you are guaranteed to level the skill from 1 to 2. This cost will increase with each skill level by 2. For example, an accessory at skill level 5 will receive 10% per silver accessory fed at once, for a total of 10 silver accessories if you want to guarantee raising the skill level from 5 to 6. This can quickly get expensive with fodder, and you might want to choose attributes that you don’t plan on using as pearls for rarity upgrades. It is not as efficient to use SR accessories for leveling skills. A SR accessory can be broken down into 5 pearls, but for leveling up skills a SR accessory is only equivalent to 4 silver accessories.
Section 3: Inspirations
Inspirations are the time gated dungeon that you run daily in hopes of bringing back rare end-game equipment, but most of the time it’s just junk.
Most of the inspirations in this game are bad, and the vast majority of these are active inspirations with RNG activations and weak buffs. There are; however, some very useful inspirations that aren’t too hard to get.
Collecting useful inspirations is a slow RNG process, but something that can power up your team to an amazing degree. Once you have your main team set up, send them off to training.
Passives and Actives
Inspirations can be divided into two types signified by a blue or red corner. Red corner means active, or RNG activation inspiration. Blue corner means passive or always being applied. Blue is better, and ironically passives for the most part only come in gray and bronze rarity. Just about all the silver, gold, and rainbow inspirations you get will be actives and unfortunately rubbish.
What inspirations and where?
The training room you run determines what kind of inspirations will drop. The best inspirations are passive appeals.
There are a lot of different passive appeal inspirations out there, but the one I highly recommend that you get started with is the “1% appeal to others” inspiration, which can be found in the Books/Meditation room. 1% appeal to others means that the holder of the inspiration doesn’t benefit, but all 8 members on the team do. As your team will consist of 3 cards in the main subunit and 6 cards as subs, it is beneficial to get your subs (and temporarily even your main) equipped with this inspiration as soon as possible. A card can hold 2 of these without limit breaks (remember to unlock the inspiration node). If your team has 6 subs equipped with 2 each, that’s 12% appeal stacked onto the main subunit. Even those in the main subunit can still benefit from being equipped with this, as they will at least buff the other members including the other two main members. This inspiration appears from the books/meditation room at a decent rate of around ~20% per AP for a triple books run. You can’t target who gets the random inspirations (unless lightbulb consumable), but if everyone in the room can use it then you can gradually rotate out cards as they gear up. This room also drops a rare version that gives 1% appeal to everyone including the holder of the inspiration. Another rare inspiration that can drop from this room is 2% appeal to official subunit, ie. Azalea, Printemps, etc. More powerful but more niche and might not fit your team.
There are other passive appeal inspirations out there that cater more towards a main subunit rather than subs such as 1-2% appeal to game subunit or 1-3% appeal to self. The Gold Coins/Jogging room can drop a wide variety of passive appeal inspirations such as these.
There is also a 2% appeal to others inspiration that can be found in the Green+Pink Macs/Pushups room, but it is very rare. I recommend not trying for this unless you are already satisfied with your inspirations or just really need green + pink macs.
Section 4: Let’s Play a Song
Depending on who is in your main subunit will determine which song attribute you’re most compatible with. These are some of the easiest Hard songs that aren’t dailies.
Cool – No Exit Orion
I consider No Exit Orion the easiest cool song with Starlight closely behind. Non-cool cards will experience 10% reduced skill activation on No Exit Orion, or 10% reduced appeal on Starlight.
Elegant – Torikoriko PLEASE!!
Non-elegant cards will build their SP gauge at a 25% reduced rate. Diamond is another easy elegant song, though it’s a little more difficult than Torikoriko PLEASE!! with 10% reduced appeal for non-elegant cards.
Natural – START:DASH!!
START:DASH!! and Doki Pipo☆Emotion are easy natural songs with 10% reduced appeal for non-natural cards.
Active – Meccha Going!!
Mechanically Meccha Going!! is a little easier than CHASE! You should be able to activate your SP bar 3 times during the 3rd AC of Meccha Going!!, so hopefully your SP activation is worth at least 35k. CHASE! requires careful utilization of your SP bar as there are many ACs and you will not be able to activate your SP on all of them. Both songs have 10% reduced appeal for non-active cards.
Smile – TOKIMEKI Runners
It’s not recommended to clear a smile song for your first Hard, but should you want to clear one for skip tickets and mac farming (or happen to have good smile cards), TOKIMEKI Runners is a good first pick. This does require that you have it unlocked deep in chapter 7 of the story. Yume e no Ippo is more accessible but a little more difficult. Both songs have 10% reduced appeal for non-smile cards.
Pure – Nemureru Mori ni Ikitai na
Pure songs range from sleepy death to very difficult. This is also compounded by a lack of good appeal pure cards. You will want extra healing for Nemureru Mori ni Ikitai na. Also 10% reduced appeal for non-pure cards
Friend Supports
If you use the support of someone not on your friends list, you will only receive their passive and active abilities. If you are friends with someone and use their friend support, their inspirations will also take effect. Hopefully you and your friends will fill their inspiration slots with passive appeals.
If you don’t have your own Riko, I would recommend a Riko friend for cleanse if the song has a -15-20% appeal penalty for mismatch attributes and you aren’t matching 2+ cards. Snow Halation by the way, is -15% appeal to ALL cards so that’s a Riko.
Assuming you don’t need to cleanse (or the song is immune to cleanse), the best friend support to help your score will be one of these. They all provide 5-7% passive appeal to the subunit with the highest total appeal. The subunit with the highest total appeal should be your main subunit unless you are doing special team comps. As an added bonus, Initial UR Nico Vo has an active with 30% chance to boost team appeal by 5% on AC start (limit 1 activation). UR Umi Vo and Initial UR Ruby Sk have actives with a 30% chance to boost team appeal on song start.
Change Log
Thanks to all the people on sifcord especially those that hang out in the #sifas_chat and #sifas_questions channel for their testing, translating, advice, and help in better understanding this game we love to autoplay.
1.2.0 2020-01-08 Minor updates and card additions.
1.1.0 2019-12-19 Draft v2
1.0.0 2019-12-13 Draft v1
