Anime Expeditions Beginner Guide: Banners, First Team and Early Progression

Anime Expeditions is a wave-defense summoner: you pull units from rotating banners, place them on ground and hill tiles, and push story acts, Infinite runs and raids as enemies scale. The wiki's structured data spells out the odds, the pity thresholds and where each unit comes from — so your first sessions can follow the numbers instead of habit.

The odds you are pulling against

The in-game Rates panel documents the pull ladder:

Rarity	Rate
Rare	74.68%
Epic	15.06%
Legendary	10%
Mythic	0.25%
Secret	0.01%

A Mythic is a 1-in-400 event and a Secret is 1-in-10,000, which is why the pity system matters more than luck. Pity thresholds by banner:

Banner	Legendary pity	Mythic pity	Secret pity
Standard / Mini	50	400	10,000
Beginner	20	50	not available

The Standard banner costs 50 gems per summon (500 for ten) and rotates three featured Mythics every hour — within a Mythic pull, the center unit carries a 50% share and each side unit 25%. The Mini banner has the same costs and pity but refreshes every 30 minutes with a single featured Mythic, so it is the cleaner way to chase one specific unit. Luck potions (+25% luck, +50% for Super, 10 minutes each) stack, but do not improve Secret odds.

The Beginner banner takes Beginner's Tickets instead of gems and fixes its Mythic pool to 8 units, each holding a 12.5% share of a Mythic pull: Cursed Student, Elf Mage, Flame Emperor, Hollow, Lady Giant, Puppet, Salmon Sorcerer, String Demon.

Two documented reasons to start here rather than on gem banners: pity comes at 20 summons for a Legendary and 50 for a Mythic — far below the 400-summon Mythic pity on gem banners, and every unit in the pool has a documented evolution, so nothing you pull there is a dead end.

Build around tile placement

Placement math shapes your team more than rarity does. 44 of the 46 documented units place on ground tiles; the exceptions are Elf Mage (Hill) and Elf Mage (Unleashed) (Hybrid). Each unit also carries a placement limit — how many copies you can field at once — ranging from 1 to 5 across the roster, with 3 the most common cap. A team that leans on one unit hits its copy cap fast; spreading across several units is how you fill a map.

Put a farm unit in the team

Ramen Guy (Legendary) deals no damage and instead earns gold each cycle — 425 at its first level, up to 11,500 at max. Stone Alchemist (Epic) deals no damage and instead earns gold each cycle — 550 at its first level, up to 3,500 at max. Both sit in the Standard, Mini and Beginner pools, so a farm unit is available from your first sessions. More gold per wave means faster upgrades for everyone else placed.

Units that come from playing, not pulling

The data lists 5 units whose source is gameplay rather than a banner:

8th Sword (Secret) — Spirit City Raid - Act 3
Crimson (Exclusive) — Season 1 Battlepass
Reaper (Legendary) — Spirit City Raid - Act 2
Toy Maker (Exclusive) — Release Tournament
True Saint (Exclusive) — Login Event - Release Calendar

The raid units matter early: they are earned inside Spirit City acts rather than pulled, so focused runs work toward them directly — no banner luck involved.

What upgrades cost

Upgrade paths are documented level by level. Full paths range from 3,375 gold (Kid Assassin) to 92,800 gold (8th Sword (Berserk)), so gold — not pulls — is the mid-game bottleneck. That is the practical case for the farm units above, and for clearing stages with wave gold rewards rather than re-rolling banners.

Your first long-term goal: an evolution

13 units have documented evolutions with exact material lists — including all 8 Beginner-banner Mythics. Materials come from a documented crafting chain (grey Sprites from Mastery-mode runs, crafted into colored Sprites, then into a Rainbow Sprite) plus unit-specific quest items. The full recipe list and farming routes are in the evolution materials guide.

Data from the Anime Expeditions Wiki (Summon page for rates and pity), CC BY-SA 4.0.