Just want to talk about the now-ongoing voting for the next round of outfit SR cards for Theater Days. Happy Christmas, New Years, and cheers to another day commemorating the late civil rights leader.

For background and recap, the mobile-rhythm-idol-gacha game IDOLM@STER MILLION LIVE: Theater Days (MLTD hence) has an election where players can earn ballots and vote for one of the 5 choices of outfits to be available (in gacha, but at least it’s not impossible to get for free) to be implemented in game later on. The second election has started today featuring the same 5 outfit choices from last election in 2019. Like last time, the voting is separated by each idol, but the choices are the same: a spring “one-piece” dress, a “china outfit” dress, some kind of swimsuit, a waitress or “maid” outfit, and whatever “sexy spy” meant. Spirited debate between players did occur in 2019 and will occur again, although every character now only as 4 choices as 1 of them have been implemented. Overall it took about a year for everyone’s Closet SR to be added to the game, although some were faster than others. It took about another year for the Closet cards to be added to the medal pool (free to play pool). There has been like 3 support tickets since in which you could have picked it up, so I don’t think it’s particularly egregious, given that the voting itself is part of the fun.

Unlike 2019’s election, we now actually know what the outfits look like and what the card art looks like, as well as the gist of the commu you get from pulling the card. This has further lowered the stakes of the Closet voting “game,” but the long wait time since 2019 means there’s still some significant incentive for Producers to rally up behind their ideal outfits. To me, a core aspect of IDOLM@STER game series is collecting the various outfits, so this event keeps being relevant to many players, yet still in a way that is “gloves on” versus, say, the annual Cinderella Elections. No P loses out on anything important in the end.

Thanks to Fleur from one of the MLTD discords I can read some tea leaves after the initial hours of voting, and give my own opinions on all of them. I will also highlight some meta undercurrents, as they say. This is super early impressions, so things will change!

The 2019 election breakdown was:
Spring One-Piece: 14
China Dress: 21
Swimsuit: 2
“Maid“: 10
Spy: 5

For one, there were some close battles from the first election that will leave the losing team seek re-election. I think most of them will end up winning, especially the second place outfits that were, as I put it, “on the right side of history.” Not every character’s Spring Dress or China Outfit looked good, I think that’s the big lesson learned. Only two idols selected the swimsuit, and waitress was significantly under-elected given people didn’t know what it really was. Both of those outfit categories can run a wide range, but now we know what they are. That being said, I’m still not sure if anyone else would look as good in that specific swimsuit as Karen.

To sum it up, though, the overall trend this year will be Maid versus One Piece. This would be the default template to break out of, whatever the P-hiveminds decide for each idol. Part of it is the aforementioned dynamics from 2019, but part of it is just math, as the possible choices are reduced.

I will walk the rest through one by one, with my favorite pick for each, plus what I project the eventual winner is using the very limited, unreliable, current data. Disclaimer: this is extremely preliminary data from less than a day’s worth of voting. Things will definitely change for some of these, especially ones projecting for One Piece dress.